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I Used to think Love was Something I Could Take or Leave Alone but Now I Could Not do without My Supply!
Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you should begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense. Though no one can go back and make a brand new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand new end. We should be lenient in our judgment, because often the mistakes of others would have been ours had we had the opportunity to make them. What is food to one being is bitter poison to others. Every negative development in a person is to be understood as the result of damaging influences in early childhood. This has led sometimes to irrational self-accusation on the part of parents who feel guilty for every undesirable or pathological trait that appears in a child after birth, and to a tendency of people in analysis to put the blame for all their trouble on their parents, and to avoid confronting themselves with the problem of their own responsibility. Good intentions mean noting if they cover up the unconscious intentions; “honest” dishonesty demonstrates that it is not enough to have “meant” well consciously. Forces operate in beings of which one is not aware and rationalization protects one from awareness; unconscious forces are integrated in a system to which we call character. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Character syndromes are rooted and nourished in the particular forms of relatedness of the individual to the outside World and oneself; furthermore, inasmuch as the social group shares a common character structure (“social character”) the socioeconomic conditions shared by all members of a group mold the social character. That is where the saying, “birds of a feather flock together” comes from. Love, tenderness, sadism, masochism, ambition, curiosity, anxiety, rivalry—these and many other drives are no longer each attributed to a special instinct, but to the influence of the environment (essentially the significant persons in early childhood) via the psyche. The description given thus far suggest that character determines, the character trait, whether loving or destroying, drives a person to behave in a certain way, and the person is acting according to one’s character feels satisfied. Indeed, the character traits tells us how a person would like to behave. However, we must add an important qualification: if one could. The conflict between what we would like to do and the demands of self-interest remains crucial. We cannot always behave as we are driven to by our passions, because we have to modify our behavior to some extent in order to remain alive. The average person tries to find a compromise between what one’s character would make one want to do and what one must do in order not to suffer more or less harmful consequences. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
The degree to which a person follows the dictates of self-preservation (ego interest) varies, of course. At one extreme the weight of the ego interest is zero; this holds true for the martyr and a certain type person who targets and terminates prominent people. At the other extreme is the opportunist for who self-interest includes everything that could make one more successful, popular, or comfortable. Between these two extremes all people can be arranged, characterized by a specific blend of self-interest and character-rooted passions. How much a person represses one’s passionate desires depends not only on factors within oneself but on the situations; if the situation changes, repressed desires become conscious and are acted out. This holds true, for instance, for the person with a sadistic-masochistic character. Everybody knows the type of person who is submissive to one’s boss and sadistically domineering to one’s wife and children. Another case in point is the change that occurs in character when the total social situation changes. The sadistic character who may have posed as a meek or even friendly individual may become a fiend in a terroristic society in which sadism is valued rather than deplored. Another may suppress sadistic behavior in all visible actions, while showing it in a subtle expression of the face or in seemingly harmless and marginal remarks. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
Repression of character traits also occurs with regard to the most noble impulses. In spite of the fact that the teachings of Jesus are still part of our moral ideology, a being acting in accordance with them is generally considered a fool or a neurotic; hence many people still rationalize their generous impulses as being motivated by self-interests. These considerations show that the motivating power of character traits is influenced by self-interest in varying degrees. They imply that character constitutes the main motivation of human behavior, but restricted and modified by the demands of self-interest under varying conditions. Here is possessed the fundamental difference between behaviorism and psychoanalytic characterology. Conditioning works through its appeal to self-interest, such as the desire for food, security, praise, avoidance of pain. In animals, self-interest proves to be so strong that by repeated and optimally spaced reinforcements that interest for self-preservation proves to be stronger than other instincts like pleasures of the flesh or aggression. Humans of course also behave in accordance with one’s self-interest; but not always, and not necessarily so. One often acts according to one’s passions, one’s meanest and one’s noblest, and is often willing—and able—to risk one’s self-interest, one’s fortune, one’s freedom, and one’s life in the pursuit of love, truth, and integrity—or for hate, greed, sadism, and destructiveness. In this very difference is possessed the reason conditioning cannot be a sufficient explanation for human behavior. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
The discovery of unconscious processes and of the dynamic concept of character were radical because they went to the roots of human behavior; they were disquieting because nobody can hide any longer behind one’s good intentions; they were dangerous, because if everybody were to know what one could know about oneself and others, society would be shaken to its very foundations. Psychoanalysts is essentially a theory of unconscious strivings, of resistance, of falsification of reality according to one’s subjective needs and expectations (transference), of character, and of conflicts between passionate strivings embodied in character traits and the demands for self-preservation. Thus far, feelings of inferiority have nothing to do with any factual inferiority, but have been discussed only as the effects of a tendency to recoil from competition. Do they then have nothing to do with existing shortcomings, with a realization of actual flaws? They are in fact the result of both actual and imagined inadequacies: feelings of inferiority are a combination of anxiety-motivated belittling tendencies and a realization of existing defects. As I have emphasized several times, we cannot ultimately fool ourselves, though we may be successful in shutting certain impulses out of awareness. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
And therefore a neurotic person of the character we have been discussing will know, deep down, that one has anti-social tendencies which one must conceal, that one is far from genuine in one’s attitudes, that one’s pretenses are quite different from the undercurrents below the surface. One’s registering of all these discrepancies is an important cause for one’s feelings of inferiority, even though one never recognizes clearly the source of the discrepancies because they arise from repressed drives. Not recognizing their source, one gives to oneself reasons for feeling inferior which are rarely the real reasons, but only a renationalization. There is another reason why one feels that one’s inferiority feelings are the direct expression of an existing deficiency. On the basis of one’s ambition one has built up fantastic notions of one’s own value and importance. One cannot help measuring one’s realistic accomplishments against one’s notions of being a genius or a perfect human being, and in this comparison one’s real acts or one’s real possibilities appear inferior. The total result of all these recoiling tendencies is that the neurotic incurs real failures, or at most does not get on as well as one should, considering one’s opportunities and one’s gifts. Others who started with one get ahead of one, have better careers, greater success. This lagging behind does not concern only external success. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
The older one becomes the more one feels the discrepancy between one’s potentialities and one’s achievements. One feels keenly that one’s gifts, whatever they may be, are going to waste, that one is blocked in the development of one’s personality, that one does not mature as time goes on. The problem of persons around the age of forty is that they become blocked in their development. However, one has not recognized the conditions leading up to such a situation, and therefore has not found any satisfactory solution. And one reacts to the realization of this discrepancy with a vague discontent, a discontent which is not masochistic but real and proportionate. A discrepancy between potentialities and achievement may be due, as I have already pointed out, to external circumstances. However, the discrepancy which develops in a neurotic person, and which is a never-failing character of neuroses, is due to one’s internal conflicts. One’s actual failures and the consequent increasing discrepancy between potentialities and achievements inevitably give even greater force to one’s existing inferiority feelings. Thus one not only believes oneself to be, but actually is inferior to what one might be. The impact of this development is all the greater since it puts the inferiority feelings on a realistic basis. Meanwhile the other discrepancy which I have mentioned—that between high-flown ambitions and the comparatively poor reality—becomes so unbearable that it demands a remedy. As such a remedy fantasy offer itself. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
More and more the neurotic substitutes grandiose ideas for attainable goals. The value they have for one is obvious: they cover up one’s unendurable feelings of nothingness; they allow one to feel important without entering into any competition and thus without incurring the risk of failure or success; they allow one to build up a fiction of grandeur far beyond attainable goal. It is this blind-alley value of grandiose fantasies that makes them dangerous, because the blind alley has a definite advantage for the neurotic when compared with the straightforward road. These neurotic ideas of grandeur should be distinguished from those of the normal person and those of the psychotic. Even the normal person will at times think oneself wonderful, attribute undue importance to what one is doing, or indulge in fantasies of what one might do. However, these fantasies and ideas remain decorative arabesques and one does not take them too seriously. They psychotic person with ideas of grandeur is at the other end of the line. One is convinced that one is a genius, the Emperor of Japan, Napoleon, Christ, and will reject all evidence of reality which tends to disprove one’s conviction; one will be wholly unable to comprehend any reminder that one is actually a less affluent doorman, or patient in an asylum or the object of disrespect and ridicule. If one become aware of the discrepancy at all one will decide in favor of one’s grandiose ideas, and will believe that the others do not know any better, or that they are deliberately treating one with disrespect in order to hurt one. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
However, if therapy enables the individual to reorient one’s pattern of life and to reduce the tension and anxiety one feels regarding one’s personal problems, then the reactions of one’s automatic nervous system in, for example, a situation of stress, should also be altered. Essentially, if a change in life pattern and in internal tension occurred in therapy, this should show up in organismic changes in autonomic functioning, an area over which the individual has no conscious control. Individual who have experienced therapy develop a higher frustration threshold during their series of therapeutic contacts, and are able to recover their homeostatic balance more rapidly following frustration. After therapy, the individual is able to meet, with more tolerance and less disturbance, situations of emotional stress and frustration or stress was never considered in therapy; the more effective meeting of frustration is not a surface phenomenon but is evident in autonomic reactions which the individual cannot consciously control and of which one is completely unaware. Thus, it is predicted that if therapy enabled the individual to better handle stress at the psychological level, then this should be evident also in one’s autonomic functioning. Therefore, do not major in the minors. Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes. Remember to breathe not weak, snatched gasps, but deep riveting drafts. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
Another point in which the impossibility of the theory of addition of love and justice becomes visible is the relation of love and justice to the concrete situation. Justice is expressed in principles and laws none of which can ever reach the uniqueness of the concrete situation. Every decision which is based on the abstract formulation of justice alone is essentially and inescapably unjust. Justice can be reached only if both the demand of the universal law and the demand of the particular situation are accepted and made effective for the concrete situation. However, it is love which created participation in the concrete situation. It would be completely wrong to say that love must be added to justice if the uniqueness of the situation is to be reached. For this would mean that justice as such is impossible. Actually the situation shows that justice is just because of the love which is implicit in it. However, this can e understood fully only in the context of an ontological analysis of the root meanings of both love and justice. The weight of the problems and the dangerous character of the confusions is equally obvious when we finally confront power and justice. It is in this realm of problems that the relation of law and order to justice and of all of them to power is discussed and more often confused than illuminated. The first questions is: Who gives the law in which justice is supposed to be expressed? #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
To give a law is the basic manifestation of power. However, if a group which has power gives laws, how are they related to justice? Are they not simply the expression of the will to power of this group? The Marxist theory of the State asserts that the laws of the State are tools which give social control to a ruling group. The origin of its power may be military invasion or it may be socioeconomic stratification. In both cases justice is possible only if the State has withered away and has been replaced by an administration without political power. The justice of the ruling class is injustice and, if defended, ideology. The laws it gives preserve a social order, and as long as there is no alternative social order, the laws of the ruling classes are better than chaos. The more cynical representatives of this theory interpret justice exclusively as a function of power and in no way as its judge. They accept the Marxist analysis without the Marxist expectation, and reduce justice completely to a function of power. In reaction against this removal of justice as an ultimate principle a theory has been developed which tries to separate justice from power and completely and to establish it as a self-contained system of valid judgements. Justice is an absolute, without any relation to structures of power. The absolute law, derived from the principles of the natural or rational law, does not express wat is, but it demands what should be. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
Irrespective of power it commands and expects obedience because of its intrinsic validity. It does not express but it judges power. The contrast of these two theories about the relation of power to justice reveals the difficulty of the problem and the necessity of an ontological research into the rot meanings of power and justice. As announced before, I have led you into a jungle of problems and confusions, and, at every point, I have indicated the way out; namely, the ontological analysis of love, power, and justice. When the God we love chose to reveal Himself, He did so in creation itself and in more specific, special ways—most importantly, in the Scriptures and Jesus Christ. When we affirm that the Bible is a revelation from God, we do not simply assert that God as a person is known in and through it. We also mean that God has revealed understandable, objectively true propositions. The Lord’s Word is not only practically useful, it is also theoretically true (John 17.17). God has revealed truth to us and not just Himself. This truth is addressed to our minds and requires an intellectual grasp to understand and then apply. Because of the Bible’s nature, serious study is needed to grasp what it says. Of course, the Scripture contains easily grasped portions that are fairly straightforward. However, some of it is very difficult, intellectually speaking. In fact, Peter one said that some of Paul’s writings were intellectually challenging, hard to understand, and easily distorted (that is, uneducated in Christian theology) and unstable people (2 Peter 3.16). #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
The more a person develops the mind and the understanding of hermeneutics (the science of interpreting the Scriptures), the more one will be able to understand the meaning and significance of the Scriptures. Unfortunately, many today apparently think that hard intellectual work is not needed to understand God’s propositional revelation to us. Instead, they believe that the Holy spirit will simply make know the meaning of a text if it is implored to do so. Tragically, this represents a misunderstanding of the Spirit’s role in understanding the Scriptures. In my view, the Spirit does not help the believer understand the meaning of Scripture. Rather, He speaks to the believer’s soul, convicting, comforting, opening up applications of His truths through His promptings. On the evening Christ gave Himself up for us, John 17 tells us, He prayed in succession for Himself, for His twelve disciples, and for all of us who would later believe. When He finished praying for His future bride, He went to the cross. Then came Hos death, His resurrection, His ascension, and His enthronement at the right hand of the Father, where He constantly makes intercession for us. Thus we understand that giving ourselves for our brides involves prayerful intercession. Men, do you pray for your wives with something more than, “Bless good Meghan in all she does”? If not, you are sinning against her and against God. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Most Christian men who claim to love their wives never offer more than a perfunctory nod to their wives’ needs before God. Men, you ought to have a list of her needs, spoken and unspoken, which you passionately hold up to God out of love for her. Praying is the material work of a Christian husband! The most basic command is, “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave up himself for her.” Men, we are divinely called to die for our brides, to take on her sufferings as our own, and to make intercession for her. You are supposed to be her ride or die man. When it is said that the readiness of the seeker determines the appearance of the master, this applies to the first fundamental initiation of one’s spiritual life. It does not mean that a master will come into one’s own town and seek one out, but that one will come into one’s life. And this may be brought about in various ways—as by the seeker oneself being led, either by Worldly circumstances or by one’s own seeking, out of one’s own town to the town or country where the master is living. The location of one’s spiritual guide will in part be the accident of one’s own geographical situation, for one will obviously be limited in one’s selection to possibilities and reputations in one’s own country or nation or race. The sheer physical and financial difficulties of traveling throughout the World—not to mention the obstacles of personal circumstance, family obligations, and ignorance of where to search and whom to approach in foreign lands, combine to set this limitation upon one’s inquiry and hence upon one’s opportunity. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
It is foolish to seek holiness geographically or holy beings in particular places. I have found that one being may live in a Himalayan abode and be a scoundrel and another being may live in a Bowery slum and be a saint. Wherever the live, people always carry their own thoughts and their own selves with them. The Soul, which is the object of our quest, is within us. The Master, who is to guide us upon our quest, will appear whenever we are ready for one and wherever we happen to live—or else we will be led to one. There are beings in the New World and the Old World, not less wise and noble than each other. If we have not met them, “the fault, Dear Brutus is…in ourselves,” primarily in our unworthiness, and secondarily in our incapacity to recognize what is beneath the surface. All speculation upon the motives and the methods of the illuminate will avail little. The light by which one works is denied to ordinary beings. We should not try to bind one down to qualities which fit only those who grope in the dark or move in twilight. We should trust where we cannot see and wait patiently for the day of revilement, when we will find all made clear and all riddle solved to our satisfaction. It is an old truism in the Old World that it takes an adept to understand an adept, but the New World will have to learn this truth by bitter experiences with pseudo-adepts. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
There are many signs of one’s spiritual status in the dignity and composure of one’s bearing, the deliberateness and truthfulness of one’s speech, and the impressiveness of one’s tension-free face. Helter Skelter is a phrase taken from a song performed by a well-known rock music group. Charles Manson used it to characterize that state of confusion in which he kept his followers, and himself as well. In the state of helter-skelter nothing makes sense, and everything makes as much sense as anything else. Manson was able to use this ideology to brainwash his followers and make them believe they were not responsible for their actions and they were not doing anything wrong when the ended the life of an individual. He taught them they if harm came to a person by means of his follower’s hands, then it was meant to be, it was in divine order and they did no really harm the individual and the individual was still alive on a different plane of existence. Aldous Huxley, in one of his retrospective writings, commented on how, among the associates of his youth, the endless talk of meaninglessness—the meaninglessness of life and therefore of everything in it—was merely an excuse to permit them to do whatever they wanted. Their life was organized (or, more properly, disorganized) around their feelings and wayward thoughts, with their will in two. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
However, resolute action for the good requires that things make sense. You would not want someone caught up in helter-skelter to work on your lawn mower, do your gastrointestinal examination, nor work on your computer. Life makes sense only if you understand its basic components and how they interrelate to form the whole. Evil, on the other hand, thrives on confusion. God is not the author of confusion (1 Corinthians 14.33). Frankly, our visible Christian World is not too far from helter-skelter with reference to its understanding of the makeup of the person and therefore of the spiritual life and spiritual formation. We need to access the fullness of biblical teachings on these matters. We suffer far too much from the influence of a surrounding culture that thrives on confusions. (And therefore its denial that human beings have a nature.) This may seem like a harsh thing to say about our “Christian World,” and I am sorry to day it; but the issues here are too important to mince words. Accordingly, much of what we do in Christian circles with very good intentions—hoping, we say, to see steady, significant growth in Christlikeness—simply makes no sense and lead nowhere so far as substantive spiritual formation is concerned. What a brutal thing to say! However, we need to recognize this, or show why it is not the case. I hope we have taken significant first steps toward a clarity that can serve as a foundation for the effectual practice of Christian spiritual formation. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
You live longer once you realize that any time spent being unhappy is wasted. “As far as the East is from the West, so far has he removed our transgression from us,” reports Psalm 103.12. How far is the East from the West? If you start due north at any point on Earth, you would eventually cross over the North Pole and start going south, but that is not true when you go East or West. If you start West and continue in that direction you will always be going West. North and South meet at the North Pole, but East and West never meet. In a sense, they are an infinite distance apart. So when God says He removes our transgressions from us as far as the East is from the West, He is saying they have been removed an infinite distance from us. However, how can we get a handle on this rather abstract truth in such a way that it becomes meaningful in our lives? When God uses this metaphorical expression describing the extent of His forgiveness of our sin, He is saying His forgiveness is total, complete, and unconditional. God is saying He is not keeping score with regard to our sins. “He does not treat us as our sins deserve or repay us according to our iniquities,” reports Psalm 103.10. Yes, God actually says that! I know it seems too good to be true. I confess I almost hesitate to write those words because they are so foreign to our innate concepts of reward and punishment. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
However, those gracious words are right in the Bible, and they are God’s words. How can God possibly do this? How can He so completely disregard our transgressions as to say He removes them an infinite distance from us? The answer is by His grace through Jesus Christ. God laid our sins on Christ and He bore the penalty we should have borne. Because of Christ’s death in our place, God’s justice is now completely satisfied. God can now, without violating His justice or His moral law, forgive us freely, completely and absolutely. He can now extend His grace to us; He can show favor to those who, in themselves, deserve only wrath. O Loving Wisdom of the living God, O living everlasting Word and everlasting Power of God the eternal Father—for everlasting is Thy birth, Who art the everlasting Son of God the everlasting Father, and art God; without Whom is nothing, by Whom are all things; in Whom consisteth whatever is; Who art God above us, and Man for our sakes; for Thou hast willed for us to be what we are: grant us what Thou hast promised; give to us, although unworthy, what Thou hast offered to all alike; that is, that Thy Passion may be our deliverance, and Thy Death our life, and Thy cross our redemption, and Thy Wound our healing; that being crucified with Thee, we may by Thy gift be lifted up on high to Thy Father, with Whom in bliss Thou livest and reignest. “And it is by faith that my fathers have obtained the promise that these things should come unto their brethren through the Gentiles; therefore the Lord hath commanded me, yea, even Jesus Christ,” reports Ether 12.22. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
O Source of All Good, what shall I render to three for the gift of gifts, then own dear Son, begotten, not created, my redeemer, proxy, surety, substitute, his self-emptying incomprehensible, his infinity of love beyond the heart’s grasp. Herein is wonder of wonders: he came below to rise me above, was born like me that I might become like him. Herein is love; when I cannot rise to him he draws near on wings of grace, to raise me to himself. Herein is power; when Deity and humanity were infinitely apart he untied them in indissoluble unity, the uncreated and the created. Herein is wisdom; when I was undone, with no will to return to him, and no intellect to devise recovery, he came, God-incarnate, to save me to the uttermost as man to die my death, to shed satisfying blood on my behalf, to work out a perfect righteousness for me. O God, take me in spirit to the watchful shepherds, and enlarge my mind; let me hear good tidings of great joy, and hearing, believe, rejoice, praise, adore, my conscience bathed in an ocean of repose, my eyes uplifted to reconcile Father; place me with ox, mule, camel, goat, to look with them upon my redeemer’s face, and in him account myself delivered from sin; let me with Simeon clasp the new-born child to my heart, embrace him with undying faith, exulting that he is mine and I am his. In him thou hast given me so much that Heaven can give no more. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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But I Never Forget Dear Your Sweet Memory—If You Really Love Me be Honest with Me!
Leadership is a potent combination of strategy and character. However, if you must be without one, be without the strategy. Patience is a virtue that carries a lot of wait. Therefore, be bold in what you stand for and careful in what you fall for. The need for superiority in the case of he detached person has certain superiority in the case of the detached person has certain specific features. Abhorring competitive struggle, one does not want to excel realistically through consistent effort. One feels rather that the treasures withing one should be recognized without any effort on one’s part; one hidden greatness should be felt without one’s having to make a move. In one’s dreams, for instance, one may picture stores of treasure hidden away in some remote village which connoisseurs come from far to see. Like all notions of superiority this contains an element of reality. The hidden treasure symbolizes one’s intellectual and emotional life which one guards within the magic circle. Another way one’s sense of superiority express itself is in one’s feeling of one’s own uniqueness. This is a direct outgrowth of one’s wanting to feel separate and distinct from others. One may liken oneself to a tree standing alone on a hilltop, while the trees in the forest below are stunted by those about them. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
Where the compliant type looks at one’s fellow humans with the silent question, “Will he or she like me?”—and the aggressive type wants to know, “How strong an adversary is he or she?” or “Can one be useful to me?”—the detached person’s first concern is, “Will he or she interfere with me?” Will one want to influence me or will one leave me alone?” The scene in which Peer Gynt meets the buttonmolder is a perfect symbolic representation of the terror the detached person feels at being thrown with others. One’s own room in hell would be all right, but to be tossed into a melting pot, to be molded or adapted to others, is a horrifying thought. One feels oneself akin to a rare Persian rug, unique in its pattern and combination of colors, forever unalterable. One takes extraordinary pride in having kept free of the leveling influences of environment and is determined to keep on doing so. In cherishing one’s unchangeableness one raises the rigidity inherent in all neuroses to the dignity of a sacred principle. Willing and even eager to elaborate one’s own pattern, to give it greater purity and lucidity, one insists that nothing extrinsic be injected. In all its simplicity and inadequacy the Peer Gynt maxim stands: “To thyself be enough.” The emotional life of the detached person does not follow as strict a patter as that of the other types detached. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
Individual variations are greater in one’s case, chiefly because in contradistinction to the other two, whose predominant trends are directed toward beneficial goals—affection, intimacy, love in the one; survival, domination, success in the other—one’s goals are negative: one wants not to be involved, not to need anybody, not to allow others to intrude on or influence one. Hence the emotional picture would be dependent on the particular desires that have developed or been allowed to stay alive within this negative framework, and only a limited number of tendencies intrinsic to detachment as such can be formulated. There is a general tendency to suppress all feeling, even to deny its existence. I should like to quote here a passage from an unpublished novel of the poet Anna Maria Armi, because it succinctly expresses not only this tendency but also other typical attitudes of the detached person. The main character, reminiscing about one’s adolescence, says: “I could visualize a strong physical tie (as I had with my father) and a strong spiritual tie (as I had with my heroes), but I could not see where or how feeling came into it; feelings simply did not exist—people lied about that as about so many other things. B. was horrified. ‘But how do you explain sacrifice?’ she said. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
“For a moment I was astounded by the truth in her remark; then I decided that sacrifice was just another of lies, and when it was not a lie it was either a physical or spiritual act. I dreamed at that time of living alone, of never marrying, of becoming strong and peaceful without talking too much, without asking for help. I wanted to work on myself, to be freer and freer, to give up dreams in order to see and live clearly. I thought morals had no meaning; being good or bad made no difference as long as you were absolutely true. The great sin was to look for sympathy or to expect help. Souls seemed to me temples that had to be guarded, and inside them there were always strange ceremonies going on, known only to their priests, their custodians.” The rejection of feeling pertains primarily to feelings toward other people and applies to both love and hate. It is a logical consequence of the need to keep at an emotional distance from others, in that strong love or hate, consciously experienced, would bring one either close to others or into conflict with them. The term, distance machinery, is appropriate here. It does not necessarily follow that feeling will be suppressed in areas outside human relationships and become active in the realm of books, animals, nature, art, food, and so on. However, there is considerable danger in this. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
For a person capable of deep and passionate emotion it may be impossible to suppress only one sector of one’s feelings—and that the most crucial—without going the whole length of suppressing feeling altogether. This is speculative reasoning, but certainly the following is true. Artists of the detached type, who have demonstrated in their creative periods that they can not only feel deeply but also give expression to it, have often gone through periods, usually in adolescence, of either complete emotional numbness or of vigorous denial of all feeling—as in the passage quoted. The creative periods seem to occur when, following some disastrous attempts at close relationships, they have either deliberately or spontaneously adapted their lives to detachment—that is, when they have consciously or unconsciously determined to keep at a distance from others, or have become resigned to a kind of isolated living. The fact that now, at a safe distance from others, they can release and express a host of feelings not directly connected with human relationships permits the interpretation that early denial of all feelings was necessary to the achievement of their detachment. Another reason why the suppression of feeling may go beyond the sphere of human relationships has already been suggested in our discussion of self-sufficiency. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
Any desire, interest, or enjoyment that might make the detached person dependent upon others is viewed as treachery from within and may be checked on that account. It is as if every situation had to be carefully tested from the standpoint of a possible loss of freedom before feeling could be allowed full play. Any threat of dependence will cause one to withdraw emotionally. However, when one finds a situation quite safe in this regard one can enjoy it to the full. Profound emotional experience is possible under these conditions. The lurking fear of either becoming too attached to a pleasure or of its infringing upon one’s freedom indirectly will sometimes make one verge on the ascetic. However, it is an asceticism of its own kind—not oriented toward self-denial or self-torture. We might rather call it a self-discipline which—accepting the premises—is not lacking in wisdom. It is of great important to physic balance that there be areas accessible to spontaneous emotional experience. Creative abilities, for instance, may be a kind of salvation. If their expression has been inhibited, and if then through analysis or some other experience it is liberated, the beneficent effect upon the detached person can be so great as to make it look like a miraculous cure. Caution is in order in evaluating such cures. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
In the first place it would be a mistake to make any generalization about their occurrence: what may mean salvation foe a detached person will not necessarily have any such meaning for others. And even for one it is not strictly a “cure” in the sense of a radical change in neurotic fundamentals. It merely allows one a more satisfactory and less disturbed way of living. The more the emotions are checked, the more likely it is that emphasis will be placed upon intelligence. The expectation then will be that everything can be solved by sheer power of reasoning, as if mere knowledge of one’s own problems would be sufficient to cure them. Or as if reasoning alone could cure all the troubles of the World! Acceptant of the person by loving individuals as a unique being rather than as an object, the more the individual will come to perceive oneself as a person of value rather than a material object to be used. The reputation of a thousand years may be determined by the conduct of one hour. In greater matters people show themselves as they wish to be seen; in small matters, as they are. Nearly all people can stand adversity, but if you want to test a person’s character, give one power. The foundations of character are built not by lecture, but by bricks of good example, laid day by day. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
In reviewing one’s own moral career, the stigmatized individual may single out and retrospectively elaborate experiences which serve for one to account for one’s coming to the beliefs and practices that one now has regarding one’s own kind and normals. A life event can thus have a double bearing on moral career, first as immediate objective grounds for an actual turning point, and later (and easier to demonstrate) as a means of accounting for a position currently taken. One experience often selected for this latter purpose is that through which the newly stigmatized individual learns that full-fledged members of the group are quite like ordinary human beings. A physically disabled man provides a statement: “If I had to choose one group of experiences that finally convinced me of the importance of this problem [of self-image] and that I had to fight my own battles of identification, it would be the incidents that made me realize with my heart that people who have physical limitations can be identified with characteristics other than their physical disability. I managed to see that people who have a physical disability could be comely, charming, well-built, masculine, neatly dressed, beautiful, ugly, lovely, stupid, brilliant—just like all other people, and I discovered that I was able to hate or love someone with a physical limitation in spite of one’s disability. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
It may be added that in looking back to the occasion of discovering that persons with one’s stigma are human beings like everyone else, the individual may bring to bear a later occasion when one’s pre-stigma friends imputed un-humanness to those one had by then learned to see as full-fledged persons like oneself. Thus, in reviewing one’s experience as a circus worker, a young girl sees first that she had learned her fellow-workers are not freaks, and send that her pre-circus friends fear for her having to travel in a bus along with other members of the troupe. Another turning point—retrospectively if not originally—is the isolating, incapacitating experience, often a period of hospitalization, which comes later to be seen as the time when the individual was able to think through one’s problem, learn about oneself, sort out one’s situation, and arrive at a new understanding of what is important and work seeking in life. It should be added that not only are personal experiences retrospectively identified as turning points, but experiences once removed may be employed in this way. It should be added that not only are personal experiences retrospectively identified as turning points, but experiences once removed may be employed in this way. Good character is more to be praised than outstanding talent. Most talents are, to some extent, a gift. Good character, by contrast, is not given to us. We have to build it piece by piece—by thought, choice, courage, and determination. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
There is nothing ambiguous about “abundance” and “superfluity,” even though there is little difference in their root meanings. “Abundance” comes to us from the Latin word una (wave), which English still retains in its basic meaning in words like “undulate” and “undulant.” Abundance, too, means an “overflowing,” yet it has acquired an altogether beneficial meaning in our language. An abundant land provides us with more than just the basic necessities. It is a land of plenty what the Old Testament describes as “a land flowing with milk and honey.” Or suppose you have been to a party where there was no scarcity of refreshments. You might say, “The wine flowed in abundance,” and you would mean something beneficial by that. There was no shortage of good things, no rationing, no need to worry about overdoing today and going without tomorrow. However, if we want to suggest the negative aspects of an “overflowing,” the word that some to mind is “superfluous.” That word, like “affluent,” goes back to the Latin verb fluere, and a superfluity is therefore a “super-flowing.” Here, however, the overflow is seen in a strictly negative light. It is pointless, wasteful. If you say to someone, “Your presence here is superfluous,” you are really saying, “Why do you not go away?” You are not saying, “How nice that you are here,” which is what you do mean, more of less, if you speak of wine being present in abundance. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
So whenever we speak of affluence, we have to ask ourselves whether we mean a beneficial, enlivening abundance or a negative, deadening superfluity. Turning now to “ennui,” we find that its basic meaning is stronger than our current definition of boredom or a feeling of dissatisfaction and weariness. Ennui and the English word “annoy” both derive from the Latin inodiare, “to make loathsome or hateful.” We might ask ourselves now, taking our clues from these words we have just examined, whether superfluity does not lead to boredom, disgust, and hatred. If so, then we should ask ourselves some hard questions about our affluent society. By “we” I mean modern industrial society as it has developed in the United States of America, Canada, and Western Europe. Do we live in affluence? Who in our society lives in affluence, and what kind of affluence is it, an affluence of abundance or an affluence of superfluity? To put the question more simply yet: Is it good affluence or bad affluence? Does affluence necessarily produce ennui? And what would a good, abundant, ebullient kind of affluence look like, and affluence that does not produce ennui? There are two possibilities, two approaches to the psychological study of the human psyche. At the moment academic psychology studies human beings primarily from the standpoint of behaviorism. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
Behaviorism is limited exclusively to what can be directly seen and observed, to what is visible and what can therefore be measured and weighed, for whatever cannot be directly seen and observed cannot be measures or weighted either, at least not with sufficient precision. Depth psychology, the psychoanalytical method, proceeds differently. It has different goals. It does not limit its study of human actions and behavior solely to what can be seen. It inquires instead into the nature of behavior, into the motives underlying behavior. You can describe, for instance, a person’s smile. That is an action that can be photographed, that can be described in terms of the musculature of the face, and so on. However, you know very well, that there are differences among the smile of a salesgirl in a shop, the smile of someone who is antagonistic toward you but wants to hide one’s antagonism, and the smile of a friend who is happy to see you. You are able to distinguish among hundreds of kinds of smiles that take rise from different psychic states. They are all smiles, but the things they express can be Worlds apart. No machine can measure or even perceive those differences. Only a human being who is not a machine—you, for example—can do that. You observe not only with your mind but also, if I may be allowed such an old-fashioned expression, with your heart. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Your whole being comprehends what transpires before it. You can sense what kind of smile you are seeing. And if you cannot sense things like that, then you will be in for a lot of disappointments in your life. Or take a very different kind of behavior: the way someone eats. All right, so someone eats. However, how does one eat? One person wolfs one’s food down. Another person’s manner at table reveals that one is pedantic and attaches great importance to doing things in an orderly fashion and cleaning up one’s plate. Still another eats without haste, without greediness. One enjoys one’s food. One simply eats and takes pleasure in eating. Or take still another example. Someone bellows and turns red in the face. You conclude one is angry. Surely one is angry. However, then you take a little closer look at one and ask yourself what it is the person is feeling (perhaps you know one fairly well), and suddenly you realize that he or she is afraid. One is frightened, and one’s rage is simply a reaction to one’s own fear. And then you may look even deeper still and realize that this is a human being who feels thoroughly helpless and powerless, someone who is afraid of everything, of life itself. So you have made three observations: that one is angry, that one is afraid, and that one feels a profound sense of helplessness. All three observations are correct. However, they relate to different levels of one’s psychic structure. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
The observation that takes on one’s sense of powerlessness is the one that registers most profoundly what is going on inside one. The observation that takes in nothing but rage is the most superficial. In other words, if you react by flying into a rage as well and see nothing but an angry person in the other individual, then you have failed to see one at all. However, if you can look being the façade of the angry person and see the frightened one, the one who feels helpless, then you will approach one differently, and it may happen that one’s anger will subside because one no longer feels threatened. From a psychoanalytical point of view, what interests us is not human behavior viewed from the outside but rather what motivates a person has, what one’s intentions are, whether one is conscious of them or not. We are interested in the quality of one’s behavior. The analyst listens with a third ear. Or, one reads between the lines. One sees not only what is offered one directly but perceives something more in what is offered and observable. One sees into the heart of the personality whose every action is merely an expression, a manifestation, yet one that is always colored by the entire personality. Every last bit of behavior is a gesture originating in one specific human individual and in no other, and that is why there are no two human actions that are identical, any more than there are two identical human beings. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
They may resemble each other; they may be related; but they are never the same. There are no two people who raise a hand in exactly the same way, who walk the same way, who tilt their heads in the same way. That is why you can sometimes recognize a person by one’s gait even though you have not seen one’s face. A gait can be as characteristic for a person as one’s face, sometimes even more so, for it is more difficult to alter a gait than the expression of the face. We can lie with our faces. That is a capability we have that animals do not. It is more difficult to lie with one’s body, though that too can be learned. It is not that some of us become sinful because of an unfortunate childhood environment, while others are blessed with a highly moral upbringing. Rather we are all born sinners with a corrupt nature, a natural inclination to go out own way. As David wrote, “Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me,” reports Psalm 51.5. Here is an amazing statement from David that he was sinful while still in his mother’s womb, even during the period of pregnancy when as yet he had performed no actions, either good or bad. Because of Adam’s rebellion, we are all born with a sinful perverse nature, an inclination to go our own way. Whether it is the way of the decent individual or the way of the obvious transgressor, it makes no difference. We were all born in a state of rebellion against God. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
The Bible says we have all sinned, and almost everyone would agree with the statement. Descriptive synonyms for sin—rebellion, despising, defying—and God takes a far more serious view of sin than the being on the street or even most Christians. Sin, in the final analysis, is rebellion against the sovereign Creator, Ruler, and Judge of the Universe. It resists the rightful prerogative of a sovereign Ruler to command obedience from His subjects. It says to an absolutely holy and righteous God that His moral laws, which are a reflection of His own nature, are not worthy of our wholehearted obedience. Sin is not only a series of actions, it is also an attitude that ignores the law of God. However, it is even more than a rebellious attitude. Sin is a state of heart, a condition of our inmost being. It is a state of corruption, of vileness, yes, even of filthiness in God’s sight. This view of sin as corrupt, vileness, and filth is symbolically when Joshua the high priest—the person holding the highest religious office in Israel is shown dressed in filthy clothes, a pictorial representation of both his sins and the sins of the people he represented as high priest. The filthiness of his garments depicts not the guilt of his sin but its pollution. Like Joshua, all of us are, in a spiritual sense, dressed in filthy clothes. We are not justly guilty before God; we are also corrupted in our natures, polluted and vile before Him. We need forgiveness and cleansing. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
For this reason the Bible never speaks of God’s grace as simply making up our deficiencies—as if salvation consists in so much good works (even a variable amount) plus so much of God’s grace. Rather the Bible speaks of “a God who justifies the wicked,” who is found by those who do not seek Him, who reveals Himself to those who do not ask for Him, reports Romans 4.5, 10.20. However, the seeker should resolve to appeal directly by constant aspiration and prayer to one’s own higher self, in the knowledge that it alone can help one if one is to work without a teacher. On the other hand, if one’s soul has decreed that one is to have a guide, God will bring before one the mental image or intuitive thought of the Master. If this happens, one will not need to seek out the Master’s physical person; the inner picture brings results. Cicero wrote nearly two thousand years ago that the ideally perfect person is nowhere to be found at all. Who, except wishful thinkers and pious sentimentalists, can gainsay him? Those who seek absolute perfection, whether in someone else or for themselves, seek what is unattainable in this World. It is not possible to find human perfection. Travel, contact, and experience with them reveal that not one is always infallible, not one failed to commit errors of judgment. We do not just need God’s grace to make up for our deficiencies; we need His grace to provide a remedy for our guilt, a cleansing for out pollution. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
We need God’s grace to provide a satisfaction of His justice, to cancel a debt we cannot pay. It may seem that I am belaboring the point of our guilt and vileness before God. However, we can never rightly understand God’s grace until we understand our plight as those who need His grace. The first and possibly most fundamental characteristic of divine grace is that it presupposes sin and guilt. Grace has meaning only when beings are seen as fallen, unworthy of salvation, and liable to eternal wrath. Grace does not contemplate sinners merely as undeserving but as ill-deserving. It is not simply that we do not deserve hell. The discipline of the mind is, of course, the greatest of challenges. And Scripture regularly presents its discipline as a discipline of the eyes. Humans, if you are a television-watching, fake news consuming couch bacon cheese burger with medium fries and a diet coke and a slice of cherry pie, it is impossible for you to maintain a pure mind. In one week you will watch more murders, adulteries, and perversions than our grandfathers read about in their entire lives. Things are getting so bad that people are even acting out scripts in their daily lives because they have become slaves to sin and inequity. “Can a human scoop fire into one’s lap without one’s clothes being burned?” reports Proverbs 6.27. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
This also means treating all women with dignity—looking at them respectfully. If their dress or demeanor is distracting, look them in the eyes, and nowhere else, and get away as quickly as you can! The mind also encompasses the tongue. “For out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks,” reports Matthew 12.34. “But among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immortality, or any kind of impurity, or of greed, because these are improper for God’s holy people. Nor should there be obscenity, foolish talk, or coarse joking, which are out of place, but rather thanksgiving,” reports Ephesians 5.3. There must be no sexual humor, urbane vulgarities, and coarseness, as so many Christians are so prone to do to prove they are not “slow” or “out of it.” The human self requires rootedness in others. This is primarily an ontological matter—a matter of being what we are. It is not just a moral matter, a matter of what ought to be. And the moral aspect of it grows out of the ontological. The most fundamental “other” for the human is, of course, God himself. God is the ultimate social fact for the human being. That is why people in general think more often about God than about any other thing, even pleasures of the flesh and death. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
However, because all are to be rooted in God—and really are, whether they want it or not—our ties to one another cannot be isolated from our shared relationship to God, nor our relationship to him from our ties to one another. Our relations to others cannot be right unless we see those others in their relation to God. Though others God comes to us and we only really find others when we see them in God. When scripture speaks of God’s arm, the literal sense is not that God has such a member, but only what is signified by this member, namely operative power. Hence, it is plain that nothing false can ever underlie the literal sense of Holy Writ. Appetite is the power of receiving and giving. The appetite that is in all things to receive and to give part of God’s plan. Things receive what is attractive and reject what is repugnant, and the preference of the receiver determines the action of the giver. Giving and receiving, furthermore, are motions the one motion affecting preservation and the other multiplication. Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom. O God, beneath Whose eyes every heart trembles, and all consciences are afraid; be merciful to the groanings of all, and heal the wounds of all; that as not one of us is free from fault, so not one may be shut out from pardon; through Jesus Christ our Lord. “He hath filled me with his love, even unto the consuming of my flesh. He hath confounded mine enemies, unto the causing of them to quake before me,” reports 2 Nephi 4.21-22. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Almighty and merciful God, Who willest not the souls of sinners to perish, but their faults; restrain the anger which we deserve, and pour our upon us the clemency which we entreat, that through Thy mercy we may pass from mourning into joy; through Jesus Christ our Lord. O fountain of all good, destroy in me every lofty thought, break pride to pieces and scatter it to the winds, annihilate each clinging shred of self-righteousness, implant in me true lowliness of spirit, abase me to self-loathing and self-abhorrence, open in me a fount of penitential tears, break me, then bind me up; thus will my heart be a prepared dwelling for my God; then can the Father take up his abode in me, then can the blessed Jesus come with healing in his touch, then can the Holy Spirit descend in sanctifying grace; O Holy Trinity, three Persons and one God, inhabit me, a temple consecrated to thy glory. When thou art present, evil cannot abide; in thy fellowship is fullness of joy, beneath thy smile is peace of conscience, by thy side no fears disturb, no apprehensions banish rest of mind, with thee my heart shall bloom with fragrance; make me meet, through repentance, for thine indwelling. Nothing is too great for thee to do, nothing is too good for thee to give. Infinite is thy might, boundless thy love, limitless thy grace, glorious thy saving name. Let Angels sing for sinners repenting, prodigals restored backsliders reclaimed, Satan’s captives released, blind eyes opened, broken hearts bound up, the despondent cheered, the self-righteous stripped, the formalist driven from a refuge of lies, the ignorant enlightened, and saints built up in their holy faith. I ask great things of a great God. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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Rancho Cordova, CA |
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You Are Here in My Arms, but Where is Your Heart?
If we do not model what we teach, we are teaching something else. Reading helps us grow, head and heart. It gets people ready for school and helps them to do better once they get there. We know that libraries, without education, we cannot have an educated people who will carry on successfully our form of government. Likewise, without a soul that comes from a loving place, people think they are worthless. A caring soul can provide astonishing revelation. A good soul can give a person a chance to feel. If someone believes you think they are worth something, they may start to believe it, too. Good souls put snags in the river of humans passing by, and over the years, they redirect hundreds of lives to God. Those who are frightened away from the Quest by these notes of its dangers are better separated from it. The aspirant who lacks balance is liable to take a misstep at more than one point of one’s path. If an unbalanced dreamer is not brought to actuality and reality by experience, one had better leave the quest alone. This is not to say that one cannot get mystical experiences in plenty, but that they will have little true worth for insight. The uncertainties of the Quest may lead, especially in the neurotic temperament, to a variety of unhappy moods and unhealthy emotions as the years pass by. The student may at such times turn against oneself in morbid masochism, or against the teaching one has been following, or against the personal instructor if one has one. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
The novice too often lives under the delusion that one is following the Quest when one has yet to find the entrance to it. The importance of right direction is such that if the angel of deflection covers a long period, then area of error stretches a wide distance. A self-protective need of the quester is to find and keep both an apparent and a real sanity. The first is needed in defense against the Word, the second against oneself. Sometimes when people apply theory improperly or are over-practised, one of the harmful results will be a gradual slackening of interest in the common activities of humankind. The unfortunate being develops a blurred and vague character. One becomes increasingly unfit to fulfill social obligations or business duties, and tends to become bred with responsibilities. One treats the fate of others with indifference. One does what is inescapable, but one does it in a casual, detached, and uninterested manner. In short, one becomes unfit for everyday practical life. Keep away from psychic practices and occult explorations. They are filled with dangers and pitfalls. First devote your energies to the foundational work of learning philosophy, improving character, disciplining emotion, and cultivating calmness. Only after this work has been well advanced will it ever be safe for you to consider other taboos endeavors. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
A discrepancy may exist between an individual’s virtual and actual identity. This discrepancy, when known about or apparent, spoils one’s social identity; it has the effect of cutting one off from society and from oneself so that one stands a discredited person facing an unaccepting World. In some case, one may continue through life to find that one is the only one of one’s kind and that the World is against one. In most cases, however, one will find that there are sympathetic others who are ready to adopt one’s standpoint in the World and to share with one the feelings that one is human and essentially normal in spite of appearances and in spite of one’s own self-doubt. The first set of sympathetic others is of course those who share one’s stigma. Knowing from their own experience what it is like to have this particular stigma, some of them can provide the individual with instructions in the tricks of the trade and with a circle of lament to which one can withdraw for moral support and for the comfort of feeling at home, at ease, accepted as a person who really is like any other normal person. The existence of a different value system among these persons is evinced by the communality behavior which occurs when people who are not part of the majority group interact amongst themselves. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
Not only when people are with their peer group do they change from unexpressive and confused individuals, as they frequently may appear in larger society, to expressive and understanding persons within their own group, but moreover they express themselves in institutional terms. Among themselves they have a Universe of response. They form and recognize symbols of prestige and disgrace; evaluate relevant situations in terms of their own norms and in their own idiom: and in their interrelations with one another, the mask of accommodative adjustment drops. Among one’s own, an individual can use one’s perceived disadvantage as a basis for organizing life, but one must resign oneself to a half-World to do so. Here on may develop to its fullest one’s endearing tale accounting for one’s possession of this supposed stigma. Once again must a warning be given against the dangers of falling into mere psychism and seeking for phenomena, vision, miracles and other things which are still in the realm of a kind of subtle materialism and are always connected with the personal ego. One may find that the tales of one’s fellow suffers bore one, and that the whole matter of focusing on atrocity tales, on group superiority, on trickster stories, in short, on the problem, is one of the large penalties for having one. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Behind this focus on the problem is, of course, a perspective not so much different from that of the normal as it is specializes in one sector: We all seem to be inclined to identity people with characteristics which are of importance to us, or which we think must be of general importance. If you asked a person who the late Franklin D. Roosevelt was, one would probably answer that Mr. Roosevelt was the 32nd president of the Untied States of America, not that he was a man suffering from polio, and when he asked for an invitation to the Winchester mansion, he was refused. Although many persons, of course, would have mentioned his polio as supplementary information, considering it an interesting fact that a man with a physical disability managed to fight his way to the White House. When they hear his named mentioned, people who are disabled, however, would probably think of Mr. Roosevelt’s polio. The true spiritual experience is higher than that, purer than that, and will leave one absolutely calm, whereas the physical phenomena leaves one excited. Every kind of such phenomena involves thought or emotion, whereas the deepest spiritual experience goes beneath thought and emotion and especially beneath the personal ego. Only then does one come in contact with the Infinite life power which is behind everything and which is the true goal of this Quest. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
Those who imagine the Quest to be a spiritual joyride know only a limited phase of it. For along with the joys there are glooms, difficulties, struggles, conflicts, and vacillations. That a proportion of those who are attracted to these subjects are psychopaths, is unfortunately true. They would be far better employed in getting proper treatment for their disordered minds, imaginations, and feelings. Certain studies may easily exaggerate their condition and increase their imbalance. It is the serious duty of every responsible expounder to warn them off this field and to bid them engage in the quest of psychic and bodily healthy before attempting to pursue things they may not understand. We have seen that the driving force behind evil in human affairs stems from human’s paradoxical nature: in the flesh and doomed with it, out of the flesh in the World of symbols and trying to continue on a Heavenly flight. The thing that makes the human the most devastating being that ever stuck one’s neck up into the sky is that one wants a stature and a destiny that is impossible for other beings; one wants an Earth that is not an Earth but a Heaven, and the price for this kind of fantastic ambition is to make the Earth an even more eager graveyard than it naturally is. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
Our great wistfulness about the World of primitive beings is that they managed willy-nilly to blunt the terrible potential destructiveness of the drama of heroism and expiation. One did not have the size, the technological means, or the World view for running amok heroically. Heroism was small scale and more easily controlled: each person, as a contributor to the generative ritual, could be a true cosmic hero who added to the powers of creation. Allied to this cosmic heroism was a kind of warfare that always made military people chuckle. Among the Plains Indians it was a kind of athletic contest in which one scored points by touching the enemy; often it was a kind of disorganized, childish, almost hysterical game in which one went into rapture if one brought back a trophy or a single enemy for torture. Anyone was liable to be snatched out of one’s hut at daybreak, and on mountainous islands like those of Polynesia groups lived in continual fear of those just over the ridge or across the lagoon; no one was every safe from capture and sacrificial slaughter. This is hardly the ideal of altruism, and there are very few today who have a romantic image of primitive human’s peaceful nature; one look at the blunt stone sacrificial slave-killing knives of the Northwest Coast Indians is enough to set the record straight. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
Since we do not experience the terror of the occasional victims of primitive raids, we can look back nostalgically at the small numbers consumed at random, and compare them with those who died in one on 11 September 2001 in New York, Dresden, or one flash at Hiroshima. Wistfully one can observe the comparatively low toll of life that primitive warfare took. Today, the picture looks something like this: that once humankind got the means for large-scale manipulation of the World, the lust for power began to take devastating tolls. This can be seen strikingly at the rise of the great civilizations based on divine kingship. These new states were structures of domination which absorbed the tribal life around them and built up empires. Masses of beings were forged into obedient tools for really large-scale power operations directed by a powerful, exploitative class. It was at this time that people who were used as slaves were firmly compartmentalized into various special skills which the plied monotonously; they become automaton objects of the tyrannical rulers. We still see this degradation of tribal peoples today, when they hire themselves out for money to work monotonously in the mines. Primitive beings could be transformed, in one small step, from a rich creator of meaning in a society of equals to a mechanical thing. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
Something was accomplished by this new organization of labor that primitive beings never dreamed of, a tremendous increase in the size of human operations: huge walled cities, colossal monuments, pyramids, irrigation projects, unprecedented wars of booty and plunder. It was a megamachine. The amalgam of kingship with sacred power, human sacrifice, and military organization unleashed a nightmare megamachine on the World—a nightmare that began at Sumer and that still haunts us today, with our recent history of megamachines in Warsaw, Hiroshima, Pearl Harbor, Germany, and Vietnam. This is the colossus of power gone mad, a colossus based on the dehumanization of beings that began, not with the Newtonian materialism, Enlightenment rationalism, or nineteenth-century commercialism, but with the first massive exploitation of beings in the great divine kingship of the ancient World. It was then that beings were thrown out of the mutualities of tribalism into the cauldron of historic alienation. We are still stewing there today because we have not seen that the worship of the demonic megamachine has been our fate, and we have willingly perpetuated it and even aggravated it until it threatens to destroy the very World. This perspective on history attack social evil at its most obvious point. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
From the very beginning the ravages of large-scale warfare were partly a function of the new structure of domination called the state; the state was an instrument of dictatorship that had come into being artificially through the conquest, and with it began humankind’s real woes. The new class society of conquerors and slaves right away had its own internal frictions; what better way to siphon them off than by directing the energies of the masses outward toward an alien enemy? The state had its own built-in wisdom: it solved its ponderous internal problems of social justice by making justice a matter of triumph over an external enemy. This was the start of the large-scale scapegoating that has consumed such mountains of lives down through history and continues to do so today, right up to Vietnam and Bangladesh: what better way forge a nation into unity, to take everyone’s eyes off the frightening state of domestic affairs, than by focusing on a heroic foreign cause? Here is the psychology of this new scapegoating of the state: Hence the sense of joyful release that so often has accompanied the outbreak of war…popular hatred for the ruling classes was cleverly diverted into a happy occasion to mutilate or terminate foreign enemies. In short, the oppressor and the oppressed, instead of fighting it out within the [ancient] city, directed their aggression toward a common goal—and attack on the rival city. Thus, the greater the tensions and the harsher the daily repressions of civilization, the more useful war became as a safety valve. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
The new structure of the conquest state forced an increased butchery of war. The invention of the military machine made way necessary, and even desirable. With the advent of the megamachines, power simply got out of hand—or rather, got pressed into service of a few hands—and instead of isolated and random sacrifices on behalf of a fearful tribe, ever larger numbers of people were deliberately and methodically drawn into a dreadful ceremony on behalf of the few. So that the ability to wage war and to impose collective human sacrifice had remained the identifying mark of all sovereign power throughout history. Little does it matter that modern public relations and the appearance of bureaucratic neutrality and efficiency disguise better than ever both the sacrifice and the blatant central power of the state; the chief of the U.S. Selective Service (the public relations euphemism) may sit around and logically explain one’s function and the fairness of the selective process to young high school students, but the bare fact is that they are obliged by the state’s power to offer their lives for its own diversionary ceremony, just as were the ancient Egyptians who were enslaved. If there is anything new in all this, it is that the young are beginning to understand what is really happening. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
Why has humankind remained locked into such a demonism of power all through history? It is not simply because enslaved beings have not had the power to throw off their chains; or, simply because being have forgotten how it was in the beginning before the state stepped on their necks. The demonism remains because it was fed by its own irrationality. It is based on a continuation of the anxiety of primitive beings in the face of one’s overwhelming World; the megamachine tries to generate enough power to overcome basic human helplessness. However, now we see the costs of the lie: the users of the megamachine are led into a megalomaniac and paranoid distortion of reality. Once you start an arms race, you are consumed by it. This is the tragic fatality of power, that it leads to a fundamental distortion of the reality of human’s relationship to nature—and so can undermine one’s own well-being. To protect oneself with one’s megamachines, beings are willing to sacrifice almost everything. This is why the megamachine represents the major historical challenge facing western and others around the globe; to see through it and get control of it is the focal problem of human survival in our time. The wise being will not be an adherent of martyristic ideology. One will make no pretense and set up no pose of exaggerated altruism. One will do what needs to be done for one’s own self. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
However, at the same time one will also do what needs to be done for others. It is not altruistic folly but altruistic wisdom that one seeks to practise. Hence, one prefers to be a live servant of the good in humankind than a dead martyr to the evil in humankind. One will not swing from the extreme of utter selfishness to the extreme of unbalanced selfishness. One will not ignore one’s own needs or fail to work for one’s own betterment event while one is attending to the needs of others and working for their betterment. One can well serve individual ends alongside one’s service of social ones. One does not dwell in one’s own heart on one’s spiritual usefulness to other people. If ever one were to do so that would only be the ego wallowing in its vanity. And it is precisely because one’s ego has been cast down that one has such usefulness. If others do not care for one’s own road but set their feet on other roads to the soul’s finding, one will feel no disappointment and express no criticism. Rather will one rejoice that they have entered on the quest, even though it be in a different way from one’s. One is too large in mind and heart to wish that it were otherwise. One does not need to ask others for help of any kind for they usually offer it spontaneously and unasked. There is some quality in one which arouses in them the strong desire to serve one. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
One will not seek any public acknowledgement for one’s services. If it does come, one will not be unduly elated; if it does not come, one will not be particularly discontented. When such a being hears from time to time of the far-reaching results of his or her work, the individual feels afresh the need of a great humility. For if it has achieved anything at all, it has not been achieved by any other power than that of Grace—which moves so mysteriously and so silently and so effectively. One’s is a disciplined freedom, without hardness of the rigid moralist or the license of the flabby hedonist. Whatever sin is committed against one, or wrong done to one, one’s forgiveness is available to the sinner immediately and completely. This is not an attitude one has to being oneself to create but ne which is natural and easy. The master is free, totally free, from the greeds and lusts of ordinary beings. In this one is a forerunner of the beings who are to appear later. One need to assume no oracular air, no conceited manner. The simple expression of what one is suffices to impress others of its own accord. In one, perception and volition are fused and not, as in ordinary beings, separated and discordant. That which one sees ought to be done, is accepted and executed by the will. Such a being will spontaneously love the Ideal, practise virtue, and promote the spread of Truth. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
Nothing can replace that special relationship that gifted beings develop with others. Popular culture has long celebrated other heroes—the athlete, the adventurer, the statesman—spiritual healers have not been celebrated in the same way. And the soul has rarely been identified as the place where the greatest of human dramas unfold—the drama of igniting the human spirit, ennobling the human heart, and enriching the human experience. The glowing warmth of an enlightened individual’s goodwill is natural, sincere. The practise of goodness is as natural with such a being as the act of breathing. A heart filled with peace and love will be felt through a radiant countenance and poised bearing. One will always show forth a curtesy that comes from the dictates of formality. If the adepts appear to stand aloof, it is not because they feel proudly superior but because they feel humbly incapable of bettering the work being done on humanity by Nature (God) in her long-range evolutionary plan. If they had held illusions of personal grandeur, they could never have become what they are. One makes no pretense of omniscience. He simple and modest outward bearing of an illuminate frequently belies the infinite subtlety of one’s intelligence. Through the presence of his kingdom, Jesus answers the deepest needs of personality for righteousness, provision, and purpose. If we set him aside, we still face the unavoidable questions: What makes our lives go as they do? #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
What could make our lives go as they ought? Inability to find adequate answers leaves us rudderless in the flood of events around us and at the mercy of whatever ideas and forces come to bear upon us. And that, basically, is the human situation. You can see it day by day all around you. However, thoughtful people through the ages have tried to answer these questions, and they have with one accord found, as already stated, that what matters most for how life goes and out to go is what we are on the inside. Things good and bad will happen to us, of course. But what our life amounts to, at least for these who reach full age, is largely, if not entirely, a matter of what we become within. Within is the arena of spiritual formation and, later, transformation. When people pay no heed to the warnings of prophets and the counsel of elders, and are still too ungrown to pick one’s steps correctly, one inevitable loses one’s ways. He awakening of inner forces ought not be attempted without an accompanying attempt to fortify character and guard against weakness. In the case of mentally disturbed or emotionally unbalanced persons, trust in their own ego may easily be misread as trust in God—with correspondingly lamentable results. The danger is that one may get lost in the mazes of one’s own mind. Those who suffer from such psychic maladjustments cannot find trust but only its distortions. They have fallen into a mental quagmire. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
Let one not deceive oneself. Few have ever really entered that exquisite awareness and remained there. Others seem to have done so but the fact is that they merely touched its outer most fringe for a few moments and then passed into an egoistic conceited state which has trapped them. Certain psychic experiences may arise, the pattern of which is familiar, having been observed in both the writer’s own experience and numerous other cases. Between the ordinary state of undeveloped humanity and the truly spiritual state attained by highly advanced individuals, there is a psychic region conducive to mediumship and other pitfalls and dangers which have to be crossed. One is indeed fortunate to come through this safely within our thoughts, feelings, intentions—and their deeper sources, whatever those may be. The life we live out in our moments, hours, days, and years wells up from a hidden depth. The illuminate being is at peace within oneself, able to stand emotionally aside from one’s affairs but unable to surrender to transient defeats. One knows when one is defeated; one never knows such a thing as failure. One’s life is a consecrated one. It has an impressive value. There is a timeless flavour about it. That is why one can work quietly not only for the immediate moment but even for results which one knows one will not live to witness. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
What is in our heart matters more than anything else for who we become and what becomes of us. “You are here in my arms,” the old song says, “but where is your heart?” That is what really matters, not just for individual relationships, but also for life as a whole. The flamelike material of the spirits accounts in part for motion that is imperceptible to us. The spirit literally swelled and pushed out the particles of natural things into the shapes and figures we see, to form a particular person, a tree, a flower, a stone. Incline, O Lord Thy merciful ears to our voice, and illuminate the darkness of our hearts by the light of Thy visitations; Who livest and reignest with the Father and the Holy Ghost, one God, World without end. Make us, O Lord, to abhor our own evils with our whole heart; that at the Coming of Thy Son our Lord, we may be enabled to receive His good things, through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Mercifully hear, O Lord, the prayers of Thy people; that as they rejoice in the Advent of Thine only-begotten Son according to the flesh, so when He cometh a second time in His Majesty, they may receive the reward of eternal life; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. “Know ye not that ye are in the hands of God? Know ye not that he hath all power, and at his great command the Earth shall be rolled together like a scroll? Therefore, repent ye, and humble yourselves before him, lest he shall come out in justice against you,” reports Mormon 5.23-23. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
Home is where the heart is. Like paintings and sculptures, buildings can be beautiful works of art. Welcome to Mills Station at Cresleigh Ranch a selection of stunning, modern, and beautifully crafted homes. Residence 4 is the largest home at Mills Station in the Cresleigh Ranch community, it is 2,692 square feet and has many options, like a built-in quartz table, which connects to the island in the kitchen and other wonderful options to discover. Enjoy a virtual tour with Mrs. Abby Johnson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7YTiF0JjQg&feature=emb_title
The Heart is Like a Frosty Glass of Milk for the Soul—Tasty, Wholesome, Mother-Approved and More Importantly, a Necessary Part of a Healthy Intellectual Life
The best of my education has come from my soul…my tuition fee is a meditative prayer and once in a while, fasting. You do not need to know very much to start with, if you know the way to your heart. What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals. It is sufficient for one to know that one needs God; and that behind this Universe God simply is and will be forever, and will in some way hear one’s call. In the practical assurance of these empirical facts, in the blessedness of their mere acknowledgement as given, is possessed all the peace and power one craves. The floodgates of the religious life are opened, and the full currents can pour through. Get that peace of God which passes understanding, and the questions of the understanding will cease from puzzling and pedantic scruples be at rest. Surely, if the Universe is reasonable (and we must believe that it is so), it must be susceptible, potentially at least, of being reasoned out to the last drop without residuum. The aim is to shadow forth a sort of process by which spirit, emerging from its beginnings and exhausting the whole circle of finite experience in its sweep, shall at last return and possess itself as its own object at the climax of its career. This climax is the religious consciousness. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
It is essential to make a clear that none should take to this Quest in order to follow or depend on some particular being, or to gain certain mystic experiences, for if one is disappointed in the being or frustrated in reaching the experiences, one will be inclined to abandon the Quest. No!—one should take to it for its own sake, because it is immeasurably worthwhile and because its rewards in improved character and developed understanding are sufficient in themselves to pay for one’s effort. If the Quest helps one to become aware of, and to eradicate, bad faults in oneself, in one’s outlook on life and in one’s approach to others, it has justified itself. Even if the spiritual consciousness fails to show itself, or to show itself often enough to please one, one has still had one’s money’s worth. The time will come when values will change, when ambitions, powers, possessions, and acquisitions will be put back into their proper places, when their tyranny over the will and the feelings will be put to an end. The is the character of the cognitive element in all the mental life we know, and we have no reason to suppose that the character will ever change. On the contrary, it is more than probable that to the end of time our power of moral and volitional response to the nature of things will be the deepest organ of communication therewith we shall ever possess. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
In every being that is real there is something external to, and sacred from, the grasp of every other. God’s being is sacred from ours. To co-operate with one’s creation by the best and rightest response seems all he wants of us. In such co-operation with his purposes, not in any chimerical speculative conquest of him, not in any theoretic drinking of him up, must possess the real meaning of our destiny. This is nothing new. All beings know it at those rare moments when the soul sobers herself, and leaves off her chattering and protesting and insisting about this formula or that. In the silence of our theories we then seem to listen, and to hear something like the pulse of Being beat; and it is borne in upon us that the mere turning of the character, the dumb willingness to suffer and to serve this Universe, is more than all theories about it put together. When this inner work is sufficiently advanced, certain traits of character will either advance in strength or appear for the first time. Among them are patience, goodwill, stability, self-control, peacefulness, and equableness. Those who are willing to practise the philosophic discipline may realize their spiritual nature for themselves and not have to depend upon hearsay for the knowledge of its existence. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
It can be shown that the disciplines of philosophy offer much in return, that to the person who seriously feels one’s life needs not mere amendment but raising to a finer level there are encouraging experiences and beautiful intuitions awaiting one. It is a new and different, a superior and fuller, a self-fulfilling kind of experience. A life so full of exalted purpose, so inspired by a tremendous ideal, cannot be a dull or unhappy one. The toil of the quest is hard and long. If it deters anyone from starting on it, let one remember that the rewards along the way, even apart from the grand one at the end, are sufficiently worthwhile to repay one for all one is likely to do. Shoot for the Moon. Even if you miss, you will land among the stars. The reward of all the years of long arduous striving will be their happy justification; the rich blessing of an infinite strength within one will pay off the failures and weaknesses of a past self which had to be fought and conquered. Your job gives your authority. Your behavior earns you respect. During times of war and suffering, the spiritual Quest demonstrates its value by the inner support which it gives and the unquenchable faith it bestows. The forces of evil will be checked; the good will triumph in the end, as always. God’s love for all remains what it ever shall be—the best thing in life. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
Nonetheless, the ways of obtaining power, prestige and possessions differ in different cultures. They may come by right of inheritance or they may come from the individual’s possession of certain qualities appreciated by one’s cultural group, such as courage, cunning, capacity to cure the unwell or communicate with supernatural powers, mental instability, and the like. They may be acquired also by extraordinary or successful activities, achieved on the basis of given qualities or through the favor of fortuitous circumstances. In our culture inheritance of position and wealth certainly plays a role. If, however, power, prestige and possession have to be acquired by the individual’s own efforts one is compelled to enter into competitive struggles with others. From its economic center competition radiates into all other activities and permeates love, social relations and play. Therefore competition is a problem for everyone in our culture, and it is not at all surprising to find it an unfailing center of neurotic conflicts. In our culture neurotic competitiveness differs from the normal in three respects. First, the neurotic constantly measures oneself against others, even in situations which do not call for it. Although striving to surpass others is essential in all competitive situations, the neurotic measures oneself against person who are in no way potential competitors and who have no goal in common with one. The question as to who is the more intelligent, attractive, popular, is indiscriminately applied to everyone. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
One’s feelings toward life can be compared to that of a jockey in a race, for whom only one thing matters—whether one is ahead of the others. This attitude leads necessarily to a loss or impairment of real interest in any cause. It is not the content of what one is doing that matters so much as the question of how much success, impression, prestige will be gained by it. The neurotic may be aware of this attitude of measuring oneself against others, or one may do it automatically without being aware of doing it. One is scarcely ever fully aware of the role it plays for one. The second difference from normal competitiveness is that neurotic’s ambition is not only to accomplish more than others, or to have greater success than they, but to be unique and exceptional. While one may think in the comparative one’s aim is always in the superlative. One may be perfectly aware of being driven by relentless ambition. More frequently, however, one either represses one’s ambition entirely or partly covers it. In the latter cases one may believe, for example, that one cares not for success, but only for the cause one is working for; or one may believe that one does not want to be in the limelight, but only wants to pull the strings behind the scene. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
Or one may admit that one was once ambitions, as some period in one’s life—that as a boy one had fantasies of being Christ or a second Napoleon, or saving the World from war, that as a girl she wanted to marry the Duke of Sussex—but will declare that since then one’s ambition has subsided altogether. One may even complain that it has receded too much, and that it would be desirable to recapture some of one’s old ambition. If one has repressed one’s ambition entirely one is likely to be convinced that ambition has always been quite alien to one. Only when a few protective layers have been loosened by the analyst will one recall having had fantasies of a grandiose nature, or thoughts that flashed through one’s mind of being the very best in one’s field or of being exceptionally clever or handsome, or having caught oneself feeling amazed that any woman could fall in love with another man when he was around, and, even retrospectively, resenting it. In most cases, however, ignorant of the powerful role ambition plays in one’s reactions, one does not ascribe any particular significant to such thoughts. Such an ambition will sometimes be focused upon one particular goal: intelligence, or attractiveness, or achievements of some kind, or morals. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
Sometimes, however, the ambition is not centered on a definite goal, but spreads over all the person’s activities. One has to be the best in every field one comes in touch with. One may want to be at the same time a great inventor and an outstanding physician and an unequaled musician. A woman may want to be not only the first in her particular field of work, but also a perfect housewife and a best-dressed woman. Adolescents of this type may find it hard to choose or pursue any one career, because choosing one means renouncing another, or at least renouncing part of their favorite interest and activities. For most persons it would be difficult indeed to master architecture, surgery and the violin. Also such adolescents may begin their work with expectations that are excessive and fantastic: to paint like Rembrandt, to build a mansion like Sarah Winchester, to write plays like Shakespeare, to be about to make an accurate blood count as soon as starting to work in the laboratory. Since their excessive ambition leads them to expect too much they fall short in their achievements, and are thus easily discouraged and disappointed and are soon induced to give up their endeavors and start something else. Many gifted persons scatter their energies this way during their entire lives. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
Some gifted people have indeed great potentialities for achieving something in various fields, but by being interested and eventually ambitions in all of them they are incapable of consistent pursuit of any goal; in the end they achieve nothing and let their fine faculties go to waste. Whether or not there is awareness of the ambition there is always great sensitivity to any frustration of it. Even a success may be felt as a disappointment, because it does not quite measure up to high-flown expectations. For example, a success with a scientific paper or book may nevertheless be a disappointment because it does not set the Thames on fire, but arouses only a limited interest. A person of this type after having passed a difficult examination will discount one’s success by pointing out that others, too, have passed. This persistent tendency toward disappointment is one of the reasons why persons of this type cannot enjoy success. Other reasons I shall discuss later. Naturally they are also extremely sensitive to any criticism. Many persons have never produced more than their first book or their first picture, because they felt too deeply discouraged by even mild criticism. Many latent neuroses first became manifest at the criticism of a superior or the incurrence of a failure, although the criticism or the failure may in itself have been trivial, or at any rate quite out of proportion to the resulting mental trouble. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
The third difference from normal competition is the implicit hostility in the neurotic’s ambitions, one’s attitude that “no one but I shall be beautiful, capable, successful.” Hostility is inherent in every intense competition, since the victory of one of the competitors implies the defeat of the other. There is, in fact, so much destructive competition in an individualistic culture that as an isolated feature one hesitates to call it a neurotic characteristic. It is almost a cultural pattern. In the neurotic person, however, the destructive aspect is stronger than the constructive: it is more important for one to see others defeated than to succeed oneself. More precisely, the neurotic-ambitious person acts as if it were more important for one to defeat others than succeed. In reality one’s own success is of the utmost important to one; but since one has strong inhibitions toward success—as we shall see later—the only way that remains open to one is to be, or at least to feel, superior: to tear down the others, to bring them down to one’s own level, or rather beneath it. In the competitive struggles of our culture it is often expedient to try to damage a competitor in order to enhance one’s own position or glory or to keep down a potential rival. The neurotic, however, is driven by a blind, indiscriminate and compulsive urge to disparage others. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
One may unknowingly disparage others even though one realizes that the others would do one no actual harm, or even when their defeat is distinctly counter to one’s own interest. One’s feeling may be described as an articulate conviction that “only one can succeed,” which is only another way of expressing the idea that “no one but I shall succeed.” There may be an enormous amount of emotional intensity be hind one’s destructive impulses. For example, a man who was writing a play was thrown into a blind fury when he heard that a friend of his was also working on a play. This impulse to defeat or frustrate the efforts of others may be seen in many relationships. A child with excessive ambition may become impelled by a wish to defeat all one’s parents’ efforts on his or her behalf. If the parents press one in matters of deportment and social success one will develop a kind of behavior which is socially scandalous. If they concentrate their efforts one one’s intellectual development one may develop such strong inhibitions toward learning that one appears to be feebleminded. I recall two young patients brought to me who were suspected of being feebleminded, although later they proved to be very capable and intelligent. The fact that they were motivated by a wish to defeat their parents became apparent in their attempts to act in the same way toward the psychoanalyst. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
One of them pretended for some time not to understand me, so that I became insecure in my judgment of her intelligence, until I recognized that she had been playing the same game with me that she had used against her parents and teachers. Both youngsters had vigorous ambitions, but at the beginning of their treatment the ambition was completely submerged in destructive impulses. The same attitude may appear toward lessons or toward any kind of treatment. When taking lessons or undergoing treatments it is to the person’s interest to profit from them. For a neurotic person of this type, however, or more accurately speaking, for the competitive part in one, it becomes more important to defeat the efforts or thwart the possible success of the teacher or physician. And if one can achieve this goal by merely demonstrating in one’s own person that nothing has been achieved, one is willing to pay even the price of remaining ill or ignorant, thereby demonstrating to others that they are no good. It is needless to add that this process works unconsciously. In one’s conscious mind such a person will be convinced that the teacher or the physician is factually incapable, or is not the right person for one. Thus a patient of this type will be inordinately afraid that the analyst will succeed with one. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
One will go to any length to defeat the analyst’s efforts, even though in doing so one obviously defeats one’s own ends. Not only will one mislead the analyst or withhold important information, but one may even stay in the same condition or dramatically become worse, as long as one possibly can. One will not tell the analysts of any improvements, or if one does it will be only reluctantly, or in a complaining fashion, or one will credit an improvement or any gain in insight to some outside factor, such as a change in temperature, the fact that one has taken aspirin, something be has read. One will not follow any lead of the analyst, thus attempting to prove that the latter is definitely wrong. Or one will bring up as a finding of one’s own a suggestion of the analyst which one had originally rejected with violence. This latter behavior can often be observed in ordinary daily affairs; it constitutes the dynamics of unconscious plagiarism, and many battles for priority have such a psychological basis. Such a person cannot stand the idea that anyone but he or she should have a new thought. One will decidedly disparage any suggestion that is not one’s own. For instance, if it is recommended by a person whom one is competing with at the same time, one will dislike or refuse a movie or a book for that reason alone. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
When all these reactions are brought closer to awareness in the process of analysis the neurotic may have open outbreaks of rage after a good interpretation: impulses to smash something in the office or to thrash someone’s BMW, or physically assault someone while the are not looking, or to shout insulting remarks at the analyst are common. Or after some problems have been clarified one will point out immediately that there are still many problems unsolved. Even if one has improved considerably and recognizes this fact intellectually, one fights against feeling any gratitude. There are other factors involved in the phenomenon of ingratitude, such as the fear of incurring obligations, but one important element in it is frequently this humiliation which the neurotic feels for having to give someone credit for something. There is much anxiety connected with the defeating impulses because of the fact that the neurotic person automatically assumes that others will feel just as much hurt and vindictive after a defeat as one does oneself. Therefore one is anxious about hurting others and keeps the extent of one’s defeating tendencies from awareness by believing and insisting that they are factually justified. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
One can see from these examples how the unconscious personality build itself up. This is called the sensitizing effect of a preserving emotion. In dealing with criminal cases we can make use of the sensitizing effect, and then we arrange the critical stimulus words in such a way that they occur more or less within the presumable range of preservation. This can be done in order to increase the effect of the critical stimulus words. With a suspected culprit as a test person, the critical stimulus words are words which have a direct bearing upon the crimes. The test person was a man about 25 years of age, a decent individual, one of my normal test persons. I had of course to experiment with a great number of normal people before I could draw conclusions from pathological material. If you want to know what it was that disturbed this man, you simply have to read the words that caused the turbulences and fit them together. Then you get a nice story. Everyone knows nowadays most people have complexes. What is not so well known, though far more important theoretically, is that complexes have us. The existence of complexes throws serious doubt on the naïve assumption of the unity of consciousness, which is equated with “psyche,” and on the supremacy of the will. Every constellation of a complex postulates a disrupted and the intentions of the will are impeded or made impossible. Even memory is often noticeable affected, as we have seen. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
The complex must therefore be a psychic factor which, in terms of energy, possesses a value that sometimes exceeds that of our conscious intentions, otherwise such disruptions of the conscious order would not be possible at all. And in fact, an active complex puts us momentarily under a state of duress, of compulsive thinking and acting, for which under certain conditions the only appropriate term would be the judicial concept of diminished responsibility. The subject can only control one’s mind to a limited extent, and therefore behaves like an animated foreign body in the sphere of consciousness. The complex can usually be suppressed with an effort of will, but not argued out of existence, and at first suitable opportunity it reappears in all its original strength. Personality fragments undoubtedly have their own consciousness, but whether such small psychic fragments as complexes are also capable of a consciousness of their own is a still unanswered question. I must confess that this question has often occupied my thoughts, for complexes behave like devils and seem to delight in playing impish ticks. They slip just the wrong word into one’s mouth, they make one forget the name of the person one is about to introduce, they cause a tickle in the throat when the softest passage is being played on the piano at a concert, they make the tiptoeing latecomer trip over a chair with a resounding crash. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
They bid us congratulate the mourners at a burial instead of condoling with them, they are instigators of all those maddening things attributed to mischievousness of the of an object. They are the actors in our dreams, whom we confront so powerlessly; they are the elfin beings so aptly characterized in Danish folklore by the story of the clergyman who tried to teach the Lord’s prayers to two elves. They took the greatest pains to repeat the words after him correctly, but at the very first sentence they could not avoid saying, “Our Father, who are not in Heaven.” As one might expect on theoretical grounds, these impish complexes are unteachable. To these types of people, life is a struggle of all against all, and the devil take the hindmost. One’s attitude is sometimes quite apparent, but more often it is covered with a veneer of suave politeness, fairmindedness and good fellowship. This front can represent a Machiavellian concession to expediency. As a rule, however, it is a composite of pretenses, genuine feelings, and neurotic needs. A desire to make others believe he or she is a good fellow may be combined with a certain amount of actual benevolence as long as there is no question in anybody’s mind that one is in command. There may be elements of a neurotic need for affection and approval, put to the service of aggressive goals. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
We must realize that this behavior is much prompted by basic anxiety. The component of fear is so evident. One’s needs stem fundamentally from one’s feeling that the World is an arena where, in the Darwinian sense, only the fittest survive and the strong annihilate the weak. What contribute most to survival depends largely on the civilization in which the person lives; but in any case, a callous pursuit of self-interest is the paramount law. Hence, one’s primary need becomes one of control over others. Variations in the means of control are infinite. There may be an outright exercise of power, there may be indirect manipulation through oversolicitousness or putting people under obligation. One may even prefer to be the power behind the throne. The approach may be by way of the intellect, implying a belief that by reasoning or foresight everything can be managed. One’s particular form of control depends partly on one’s natural endowments. Partly, it represents a fusion of conflicting trends. If, for instance, the person inclines at the same time toward detachment one will shun any direct domination because it brings one into too close contact with others. Indirect methods will also be preferred if there is much hidden need for affection. If this wish is to be the power behind the throne, the presence of sadistic trends is indicated, since it implies using others of attainment of one’s goals. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
The simplest form of schizophrenia, of the splitting of the personality, is paranoia, the classic persecution-mania of the “persecuteur persecute.” It consists in a simple doubling of the personality, which in milder cases is still held together by the identity of the two ego. The person strikes us at first as completely normal; one may hold office, be a TV news anchor, be in a lucrative position, we suspect nothing. We converse normally with one, and at some point, something triggers a piercing look full of abysmal mistrust and inhuman fanaticism meets from one’s eyes. One has become a hunted, dangerous animal, surrounded by invisible enemies: the other ego has risen to the surface. What has happened? Obviously at some time or other the idea of being a persecuted victim gained the upper hand, became autonomous, and formed a second subject which at times completely replaces the healthy ego. It is characteristic that neither of the two subjects can fully experience the other, although the two personalities are not separated by a belt of unconsciousness as they are in an hysterical dissociation of the personality. They know each other intimately, but they have no valid arguments against one another. The healthy ego cannot counter the affectivity of the other, for at least half its affectivity has gone over into its opposite number. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
The healthy ego is, so to speak, paralysed. This is the beginning of that schizophrenic apathy which can be observed in paranoid dementia. The person can assure you with the greatest indifference: “I am the triple owner of the World, the finest Turkey, the Lorelei, Germania and Helvetia of exclusively sweet butter and Naples and I must supply the whole World with macaroni.” All this without a blush, and with no flicker of a smile. Here there are countless subject and no central ego to experience anything and react emotionally. If the neurotic has a strongly disparaging attitude one has difficulties in forming any optimistic opinion that is authentic, taking any beneficial stand, or making any constructive decision. A good opinion on some person or matter may be shattered by the slightest negative remark that anyone makes, because it takes only a trifle to stir up one’s disparaging impulses. All these destructive impulses involved in the neurotic striving for power, prestige and possession enter into the competitive struggle. In the general competitive struggle that takes place in our culture even the normal person is likely to show these tendencies, but in the neurotic person such impulses become important in themselves, regardless of any disadvantage or suffering they may bring one. The ability to humiliate or exploit or cheat other people becomes for one a triumph of superiority, if one fails defeat. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
Much of the rage shown by the neurotic if one is incapable of taking advantage of others is due to such a feeling of defeat. If an individualistic competitive spirit prevails in any society it is bound to impair the relations between the genders, unless the spheres of life pertaining to man and woman are strictly separated. Neurotic competitiveness, however, produces even greater havoc than the average, because of its destructive character. While no one may free oneself from every form of outward suffering, all beings have the power to free themselves from mental suffering, but it takes a strong and healthy mind. How weak, how helpless is the being who oneself is alone. How strong, how supported is the being who is both oneself and more than oneself. In the one, there is only the petty little ego as the motor of force; in the other there is also the infinite Universal being (God). Any being may detect the presence of divinity within oneself, if one will patiently work through the course prescribed by authoritative books or a competent guide. It is not the prerogative of spiritual genius alone to detect it. It is only in the rational balanced growth of the mind and the sympathetic heart, the disciplined body and the tranquilized nerves, the philosophic reflectiveness, spiritual peace, and ultra-spiritual insight, that a being arrives at last at maturity and normality and thus becomes really sane. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
Be present, O Lord, to our prayers, and protect us by day and night; that in all successive changes of times we may ever be strengthened by Thine unchangeableness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Almighty and everlasting God, at evening, and morning, and noonday, we humbly beseech Thy Majesty, that Thou wouldst drive from our hearts the darkness of sins, and makes us to come to the true Light, which is Christ; through Jesus Christ our Lord. “Now, behold, I say unto you, if I had not been born of God I should not have known these things; but God has, by mouth of his holy Angels, made these things known unto me, not of any worthiness of myself,” reports Alma 36.5. O Lord, God, the Life of mortals, the Light of the faithful, the Strength of those who labour, and the Repose of the dead; grant us a tranquil night free from all disturbance; that after an interval of quiet sleep, we may, by Thy bounty, at the return of light, be endued with activity from the Holy Spirit, and enabled in security to render thanks to Thee. We render Thee thanksgiving upon thanksgiving, Lord our God, Father of our Lord God and Saviour Jesus Christ, by all means, at all times, in all places. For Thou hast sheltered, assisted, supported, and led us on through the time past of our life, and brought us to this hour. And we pray and beseech Thee, Or Good and Loving, grant us to pass this holy day, and all the time of our life, without sin; with all joy, healthy, salvation, sanctification, and fear of Thee. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
However, all envy, all fear, all temptation, all the working of Satan, all conspiracy of wicked beings, do Thou drive away, O God, from us, and from Thy Holy Church. Supply us with things food and profitable. Whereinsoever we have sinned against Thee, in word, or deed, or thought, be Thou pleased in Thy love and goodness to pass it over; and forsake us not, O God, who hope in Thee, neither lead us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one, and from his works, by the grace, and compassion, and benignity of Thine Only-begotten son. The day of Resurrection has dawned upon us, the day of true light and life, wherein Christ, the Life of believers, arose from the dead. Let us give abundant thanks and praise to God, that while we solemnly celebrate the day of our Lord’s Resurrection, He may be pleased to bestow on us quite peace and special gladness; so that being protected from morning to night by His favouring mercy, we may rejoice in the gift of our Redeemer. In this hour of this day fill us, O Lord, with Thy mercy, that rejoicing throughout the whole day we may take delight in thy praise; through Jesus Christ our Lord. If the quest does nothing more than save one in one’s darkest hours from total submergence in the all-prevalent Worldliness, it has done enough. The quest can give stability to the feelings, support to the mind, defense against the pettiness and the evil of the World. The transformations effected by this inner work seem, when stabilized, to be a natural maturity. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
Now Go and find your Dream Home!
One Must be Able to Turn to the Soul with Clear Confidence that there they Can Freely Seek the Whole Unvarnished and Uncompromised Truth!
Anything short of God is not rational, anything more than God is not possible. If the human mind be in truth the triadic structure of impression, reflection, and reaction, we think the outset of this dynamic has allowed access to the spirit of God, which is the superb, the supreme act of truly great civilizations. Of all the creations that purport to link humanity with the divine, the soul stands virtually alone in accomplishing this mission. We always knew humans tried to achieve the impossible, that one was a proud, confused, and stubborn being and because of that got themselves into mischief. Humans want above all to endure and prosper, to achieve immortality in some way. Because humans know they are mortal, the things they want most to deny is their mortality. Mortality is connected to the natural, terrestrial side of existence; and so beings reach beyond and away from that side. So much so that people try to deny finitude completely. However, humans not only have a fear of death, but also a fear of life. There are called twin fears. Still humans do not actually live stretched openly on a rack of cowardice and terror; if they did, they could not continue on with such apparent equanimity and thoughtlessness. Human’s fears are buried deeply by repression, which gives to everyday life its tranquil façade; only occasionally does the desperation show through, and only for some people. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
You are today where your thoughts have brought you; you will be tomorrow where your thoughts take you. It is repression, then, that great discovery of psychoanalysis, that explains how well people can hide their basic motives even from themselves. However, people also live in a dimension of carefreeness, trust, hope, and joy which gives them a buoyancy beyond that which repression alone could give. In a general way, all educated people know what reflex action means. It means that the acts we perform are always the result of outward discharged from the nervous centres, and that these outward discharges are themselves the result of impression from the external World, carried in along one or another of our sensory nerves. The symbolic engineering of culture gives beings a new and durable life beyond that of the body. The dynamic of human misery on this planet all stems from humans trying to be other than one is, trying to deny their terrestrial nature. This is the cause of all psychic illness, sadism, and war. The mean of rational opinion, the centre of gravity of all attempts to solve the riddle of life—some falling below it by defect, some flying above it by excess, itself alone satisfying every mental need in strictly normal measure. Our gain will thus in the first instance be psychological. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
God may be called the normal object of the mind’s belief. Whether over and above this he be really the living truth is another question. If he is, it will show the structure of our mind to be in accordance with the nature of reality. Whether it be or not in such accordance is, it seems to me, one of those questions that belong to the province of personal faith to decide. Each one of us is entitled to either to doubt r to believe in the harmony between one’s faculties either to doubt or to believe in the harmony between one’s faculties and truth; and that, whether one doubt or believe, one does alike on one’s personal responsibility and risk. People so willingly give over their destiny to the state and a great leader because tit is the politician who promises to engineer the World, to raise beings above their natural destiny, and so beings put their whole true in them. The central power promised to give them unlimited immunities and prosperities. Humans have tried to avoid the natural plagues of existence by giving themselves over to structures which embody immunity power, but they only have succeeded in laying waste to themselves with the new plagues unleased by their obedience to the politicians. We describe politicians as political plague-mongers. They are the ones who lie to the people about the real possibility and launch humankind on impossible dream which take impossible tolls of real life. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
The conceiving or theorizing faculty—the mind’s middle department—functions exclusively for the sake of ends that do not exist at all in the World of impression we receive by way of our senses, but are set by our emotional and practical subjectivity altogether. It is a transformer of the World of our impressions into a totally different World—the World of our conception: and the transformation is effected in the interest of our volitional nature, the definite subjective purposes, preferences, fondness for certain effects forms, orders, and not the slightest motive would remain for the brute order of our experience to be remodeled at all. But, as we have the elaborate volitional constitution we do have, the remodeling must be effected; there is no escape. The World’s contents are given to each of us in an order so foreign to our subjective interests that we can hardly by an effort of the imagination picture to ourselves what it is like. We have to break that order altogether—and by picking out from it the items which concern us, and connecting them with others far away, which we say “belong” with them, we are able to make out definite threads of sequence and tendency; to foresee particular liabilities and get ready for them; and to enjoy simplicity and harmony in place of what was chaos. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
However, once you base your whole life-striving on a desperate lie and try to implement that lie, try to make the World just the opposite of what it is, then you instrument your own undoing. You are spoiling everything for yourself, contaminating your purity and brining disease and weakness into your vitality. Then you have a mandate to launch a political campaign to make the World pure. Hardly anyone knows the names of the real benefactors of humankind, whereas every child knows that name of the generals of the political plague. Natural science is constantly drilling into human’s consciousness that fundamentally one is a lower than a worm’s belly in the Universe. The political plague-monger is constantly harping on chaos and destruction, but has no ideas how to make life easier on the people. This is thrusting people into the shadow World. The shadow is the other side. It is the expression of our own imperfection and Earthliness, the negative which is incompatible with the absolute values. The shadow becomes a dark thing in one’s own psyche, an inferiority which none the less really exists even though dimly suspected. The person wants to get away from this inferiority, naturally; one wants to jump over one’s own shadow. The most direct way of doing this is by looking for everything dark, inferior, and culpable in others. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
Humans are not comfortable with guilt, it strangles them, literally is the shadow that falls over their existence. The guilt-feeling is attributable to the apperception of the shadow. This guilt-feeling based on the existence of the shadow is discharged from the system in the same way both by the individual and the collective—that is to say, by the phenomenon of the projection of the shadow. The shadow, which is in conflict with the acknowledged values [for instance, the cultural façade over terrestrial being] cannot be accepted as a negative part of one’s own psyche and is therefore projected—that is, it is transferred to the outside World and experienced as an outside object. It is combated, punished, and exterminated as the alien out there instead of being dealt with as one’s own inner problem. We have the dynamic for the classic and age-old expedient for discharging the negative forces of the psyche and the guilt: scapegoating. It is precisely the split-off sense of inferiority and immoral which is projected onto the scapegoat and then destroyed symbolically with one. When people stigmatize others or hurt others for no reason all the many reasons adduced, there is one reason that goes right into the heart of mind of each person, and that is the projection of the shadow. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
The principal and indeed the only thing that is wrong with the World is humans. Given what both the stigmatized and the normal introduce into mixed social situations, it is understandable that all will not go smoothly. We are likely to attempt to carry on as though in fact one is wholly fitted one of the types of persons naturally available to us in the situation, whether this means treating one as someone better than we feel one might be or someone worse than we feel one probably is. If neither of these tacks is possible, then people may try to act as if the individual were a non-person, and not present at all as someone of whom ritual notice is to be take. One, may in turn, is likely to go along with these strategies, at least initially. In consequence, attention is furtively withdrawn from its obligatory targets, and self-consciousness and other-consciousness occurs, expressed in the pathology of interaction—uneasiness. In social situations with an individual known or perceived to have stigma, we are likely, then, to employ categorizations that do not fit, and we and the stigmatized individual is likely to become the more adept at managing them. One who always wears the mask of a friendly being must at last gain a power over friendliness of disposition, without which the expression itself of friendliness is not to be gained—and finally friendliness of disposition gains the ascendancy over one—one is benevolent. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
We all do a certain amount of acting. However, we may act in two ways. In the first way, we try to change how we outwardly appear. The action is the body language, the put-on sneer, the posed shrug, the controlled sigh. This is surface acting. The other way is deep acting. Here, display is a natural result of working on feeling; the actor does not try to seem happy or sad but rather expresses spontaneously a real feeling that has been self-induced. In deep acting and surface acting, feelings do not erupt spontaneously or automatically. In both cases the actor has learned to intervene—either in creating the inner shape of a feeling or in shaping the outward appearance of one. In surface acting, the expression on my face or the posture of my body feels put on. It is not part of me. In deep acting, my conscious mental work—the effort to imagine a tall surgeon looming over me, for example—keeps the feeling that I conjure up from being part of myself. Thus in either method, an actor may separate what it takes to act from the idea of a central self. However, whether the separation between “me” and my face or between “me” and my feeling counts as estrangement depends on something else—the outer context. In the World of the theater, it is an honorable art to make maximum use of the resources of memory and feeling in stage performance. In private life, the same resources can be used to advantage, though to a lesser extent. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
However, when we enter the World of profit-and-loss statements, when the psychological costs of emotional labor are not acknowledged by the company, it is then that we look at these otherwise helpful separations of “me” from my face and my feeling as potentially estranging. In surface acting the actor does not really experience the World from an imperial viewpoint, but one works at seeming to. What is on the actor’s mind? The audience, which is the nearest mirror to one’s own surface. This type of art is less profound than beautiful. It is more immediately effective than truly powerful; [its] form is more interesting than its content. It acts more on your sense of sound and sight than on your soul. Consequently it is more likely to delight than to move you. You can receive great impressions through this art. But they will neither warm your soul nor penetrate deeply into it. Their effect is harp but not lasting. Your astonishment rather than your faith is aroused. Only what can be accomplished through surprising theatrical beauty or picturesque pathos lies within the bounds of this art. However, delicate and deep human feelings are not subject to such technique. They call for natural emotions at the very moment in which they appear before you in the flesh. They call for the direct cooperation of nature itself. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
There are two ways of doing deep acting. One is by directly exhorting feeling, the other by making indirect use of a trained imagination. Only the second is true Method acting. However, in either case the acting of passions grows out of living in them. People sometimes talk as much about their efforts to feel (even if these efforts fail) as they do not about having feelings. In the flow of experience, there are occasional common but curious shades of will—will to evoke, will to suppress, and will to somehow allow a feeling, as in “I finally let myself feel sad about it.” Sometimes there is only a social custom in mind—as when a person wishes to feel sad at a funeral. However, other times there is a desperate inner desire to avoid pain. Some people fight against love, they fight against grief, they fight against anger. All of these emotions are linked. One man’s effort to prevent himself from feeling love made him remind himself when he touched, moved, overwhelmed by the sights and smell of her, or a sight and smell which recalled her, or passing their old house or eating their foods, or walking on their streets; do not do this, do not feel. First he succeeded in removing her from the struggle. He lost his love. He lost his anger. She became a limited idea, like a newspaper death notice. He did not lose her entirely, but chipped away at it: do not, do not, do not, he would remind himself in the middle of the night; do not feel; and then dream what he could. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
There are almost like orders to a contrary horse (whoa, giddyup, steady now), attempts to exhort feelings as if feeling can listen when it is talked to. It also presupposes an aspiration to feel. The being who fought against love wanted to feel the same about his former wife as he thought she felt about him; if he was a limited idea to her, he wanted her to be that for him. A country lover in twelfth-century France or a fourteen-year-old American female rock fan might have been more disposed to aspire to one-sided love, to want it that way. Deep acting comes with its social stories about what we aspire to feel. Coaching our emotions only addresses the capacity to duck a signal, to turn away from what evokes feeling. It does not move to the home of the imagery, to that which gives power to a sight, a sound, or a smell. It does not involve the deeper work of retraining the imagination. Ultimately, direct prods to feeling are not based on a deep look into how feeling works, and for this reason people are not under any circumstances use action which is directed immediately at the arousing of feeling for its own sake. The man who wanted to fight off love for his former wide might have approached the situation differently. First, it may have been more effective to use emotion memory: he might consider remembering the times he had felt furious at his wife’s thoughtlessness or cruelty. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
It might have helped the man forget his feelings for his wife if he focused on one most exasperating instance of this, reevoking all the circumstances. Perhaps she had forgotten his birthday, had made no effort to remember, and failed to feel badly about it afterwards. Then he would use the “if” supposition and say to himself: “How would I feel about her if this is what she really was like?” He would not prompt himself not to feel love; rather he would keep alive the cruel episode of the forgotten birthday and substation the “if.” He would not, then, fall naturally out of love. He would actively conduct himself out of love through deep acting. To store a wealth of emotion memories, the actor must remember experiences emotively. However, to remember experiences emotively, one must first experience them in that way too, perhaps with an eye to using the feelings later. The mind acts as a magnet to reusable feeling. So the conceiving of emotion memory as a noun, as something one has, brings with it a conceiving of memory and of spontaneous experience itself as also having the qualities of a useable, nounlike thing. Feeling—whether at the time, or as it is recalled, or as it is later evoked in acting—is an object. It may be a valuable object in a worthy pursuit, but it is an object nonetheless. Some feelings are more valuable object than others, for they are more richly associated with other memorable events: a terrifying train ride may recall a childhood fall or nightmare. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
However, memory is not enough. The memory, like any image drawn to mind, must seem real now. The actor must believe that an imagined happening really is happening now. To do this, the actor makes up an “as if,” a supposition. One actively suspends the usual reality testing, as a child does at play, and allows a make-believe situation to seem real. Often the actor can manage only a precarious belief in all of an illusion, and so one breaks it up into sturdier small details, which take one by one are easier to believe: “if I ere in a terrible storm” is chopped up into “if my eyebrows were wet and if my shoes were soaked.” The big if is broken into many little ones. The furnishings of the physical stage—a straight horse-hair chair, a pointer leaning against the wall—are used to support the actor’s if. Their purpose is not to influence the audience, as in surface acting, but to help convince the person doing deep acting that the if events are really happening. You have got to get to the stage of life where going for it is more important than winning or losing. It appears that the goal the individual most wishes to achieve, the end which one knowingly and unknowingly pursues, is to become oneself. When people are facing troubles because of their unique combination of difficulties, it is important to make them feel free and safe. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
To help others, we have to understand the way one feels in one’s own inner World, to accept one as he or she is, to create an atmosphere of freedom in which one can move in one’s thinking and feeling and being, in any direction one desires. How does the individual use this freedom? It is my experience that one uses it to become more and more oneself. One begins to drop the false fronts, or the masks, or the roles, with which one has a faced life. One appears to be trying to discover something more basic, something more truly oneself. At first one lays aside mask which one is to some degree aware of using. We can use our relationships to explore, to examine the various aspect of our own experience, to recognize and face up to the deep contradictions which one often discovers. One learns how much of this behavior even how much of the feeling one experiences, is not real, is not something which flows from the genuine reactions of one’s organism, but is a façade, a front, behind which one has been hiding. One discovers how much of one’s life is guided by what one thinks one should be, not by what one is. Often one discovers that one exists only in response to the demands of others, that one seems to have no self of one’s own, that one is only trying to think, and feel, and behave in the way that others believe one ought to think, and feel and behave. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
The dilemma of the individual, the most common despair is to be in despair at not choosing, or willing, to be oneself; but that the deepest form of despair is to choose to be another than oneself. On the other hand to will to be that self which one truly is, is indeed the opposite of despair, and this choice is the deepest responsibility of humans. Exploring the reality of self is often a painful and troubling search. This exploration becomes even more disturbing when one finds oneself involved in removing the false faces which one had not known were false faces. One begins to engage in the frightening task of exploring the turbulent and sometimes violent feelings with in oneself. To remove a mask which one has thought was part of one’s real self can be a deeply disturbing experience, yet when there is freedom to think and feel and be, the individual moves toward such a goal. Many people who put up a false front, if the wall, the damn, is not maintained, then everything will be swept away in violence of the feelings that one discovers pent-up in one’s private World. Yet it also illustrates the compelling necessity which the individual feels to search for and become oneself. It also begins to indicate the way in which the individual determines the reality in oneself—that when one fully experiences the feelings which at an organize level one is, as one experiences self-pity, hatred, and love, then one feels an assurance that one is being a part of one’s real self. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
We cannot simply repair people for more bad use of themselves. Every time a timid husband or a hardworking wife is helped to fuller functioning and changed ways, a tiny sector of society has been changed. Every time a son is released from morbid dependency upon his parents or slavish conformity to his father’s orders, a victory in the struggle for political freedom has been gained. If the father or mother can be enlightened, so much better. In such cases, the tyrannical government exists in the home; but the home is a microcosm of society at large. The purpose for which the society came into being is freedom, albeit responsible freedom. Whilst there are parts of our nature which remain still undeveloped, we are not complete humans. It is the wholeness of one’s bodily, mental, and spiritual being that humans must develop. Results will best prove the soundness of the integrated path, the effectiveness of the integrated personality. Humans are a many-sided being. One’s development must accordingly be correlated with this fact. The whole psyche of humans must get into this task of self-spiritualization. Feeling alone cannot do it, will alone cannot do it, thinking alone cannot do it, and initiating alone cannot do it. Every element must contribute to it and be shaped by it. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
Let us have faith that right makes right; and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty as we understand it. O God, who by the light of Thy Word scatterest away the darkness of ignorance, increase in our hearts the power of faith which Thou hast given; that no temptations may avail to quench the fire which Thy grace hath caused to be enkindled; through Jesus Christ our Lord. We beseech Thee, O Lord, in Thy loving kindness, to pour Thy holy light into out souls; that we may ever be devoted to Thee, by Whose wisdom we were created, and by Whose providence we are governed; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Let our prayer, O Lord, come before Thee in the morning. Thou didst take upon Thee our feeble and suffering nature; grant us to pass this day in gladness; and peace, without stumbling and without stain; that reaching the eventide without any temptation, we may praise Thee the eternal King: though Thy mercy, O our God, Who art blessed, and dost live, and govern all things, World without end. In the evening, and mourning, and noonday, we praise Thee, we bless Thee, we thank Thee, and pray Thee, Master of all, to direct our prayers as incense before Thee; and let not our hearts turn away to words of thoughts of wickedness, but rescue us from all thing that hunt our souls. For to Thee, Lord, Lord our eyes look up, and our hope is Thee. Confound us not, O our God. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
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Mills Station at Cresleigh Ranch | Residence 3
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The Soul Can Become a Big Factor in Raising the Level of Intelligence in the World and in Developing Leaders!
I was taken with your earnestness, your passion. You were not jaded or cynical. There was an immediacy to your feelings for these happenings, these creatures, those question. You make well ask, “But why does a person who is seeking help change for the better when one is involved, over a period of time, in a relationship with a therapist which contains conditions without a “front” or façade, openly being the feeling and attitudes which at the moment are flowing in one?” Few people think about the noble role that the soul plays. Our ability to collect, organize, and preserve the voice and observations we have is critical to our continued survival as a species. The more genuine and congruent the therapist in the relations is, the more probability there is that change in personality in the client will occur. As one find someone who is willing to listen acceptantly to one’s feelings, one little by little become sable to listen to oneself. One begins to receive the communications from within oneself—to realize that one is angry, to recognize when one is frightened, even to realize when one is feeling courageous. As one becomes more open to what is going on within one, one becomes able to listen to feelings which one has always denied and repressed. One can listen to feelings which have seemed to one so terrible, or so disorganizing, or so abnormal, or so shameful, that one has never been able to recognize their existence in one’s self. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14
While one is listen to their soul, one also becomes more acceptant of one’s self. As an individual expresses more and more of the hidden and awful aspects one oneself, one finds that the therapist showing a consistent and unconditional beneficial regard for one and one’s feelings. Slowly one moves towards taking the same attitude toward oneself, accepting oneself as one is, and therefore ready to move forward in the process of becoming. In being a sincere person, we learn that we cannot say one thing and believe in another. Take the fact of your sincerity and enthusiasm as testimony to the value of the techniques of emotion and management. It is precisely by such a technique of emotion management that sincerity itself is achieved. And so, through this hall of mirrors in the soul, when learn that when we become angry, our bodies become tense. Our heart races. We breathe more quickly and get less oxygen. Our adrenaline gets higher. When some people get angry, they cuss, want to hit someone, yell in a bucket, cry, eat, smoke a cigarette, talk to themselves. However, these responses carry a risk of offending someone, and could possibly make an individual seem less attractive or dangerous. So we need to consider some ways of how to alleviate angry toward an irate person. There is no celestial witch-doctor, no angelic magician coming to change their character overnight. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14
When I deal with an irate person, I pretend something traumatic has happened in their lives. Once I had an irate that was complaining about me, cursing at me, threatening to get my name and report me to the company. I later found out his son had just died. Now when I meet an irate, I think of that man. If you think about the other person and why they are so upset, you have taken attention off of yourself and your own frustration. And you will not feel so angry. If anger erupts despite these presentative tactics, then deep breathing, talking to yourself, reminding yourself that “you do not have to go home with that individual” are offered as ways to manage emotions. Using these, the worker become less prone to cuss, hit, cry, or smoke. The goal is to keep the focus on your response and on ways to prevent an angry repose through anger-desensitization. And sometimes you have to realize people are mentally disturbed, maybe they cannot afford their medication, and that may help you to not let them upset you so much, but it may allow you to feel more compassion for them. Imagine how hard it must be for mentally ill people to live with themselves and not seek help. Many theorists have seen emotion as a sealed biological event, something that external stimuli can bring on, as cold weather brings on a cold. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14
Furthermore, once emotion—which we call a biological response syndrome is operating, the individual passively undergoes it. This is an organismic conception. However, it seems to me a limited view. For if we conceive of emotion as only this, what are we to make of the many ways in which people taught to attend to stimuli and manage emotion, ways that can actually change feeling? It we conceive of feeling not as a periodic abdication to biology but as something we do by attending to inner sensation in a given way, by defining situations in a given way, by managing in given ways, then it becomes plainer just how plastic and susceptible to reshaping techniques a feeling can be. The very act of managing emotion can be seen as part of what the emotion becomes. However, if we assume, as the organismic theorists do, that how we manage or express feeling is extrinsic to emotion, this idea gets lost. The organismic theorists want to explain how emotion is motored by instinct, and so they by-pass the question of how we come to assess, label, and manage emotion. Emotion is a bodily orientation to an imaginary act. As such, it has a signal function; it warns of where we stand vis-à-vis outer or inner events. Feeling as it spontaneously emerges acts for better or worse as a clue. It filters out evidence about the self-relevance of what we see, recall, or fantasize. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14
The exact point at which we feel injured or insulted, complimented or enhanced, varies. Seeing and hearing is a way of knowing about the World. It is a way of testing reality. Anxiety has a signal function. It signals danger from inside, as when we fear an overload of rage, or from outside, as when an insult threatens to humiliate us beyond endurance. However, it is important to heed your feelings and sometimes turn back, it may protect you from danger. Every emotion has a signal function. No every emotion signals danger. However, every emotion does signal the “me” I put into seeing “you.: It signals the often unconscious perspective we apply when we go about seeing. Feeling signals that inner perspective. Thus, by using helpful techniques for changing feeling—in the service of avoiding stress on ourselves and making life pleasanter for those around us—we can intervene in the signal function of feeling. This simple point is obscured whenever we apply the belief that emotion is dangerous in the first place because it distorts perception and leads people to act irrationally—which means that all ways of reducing emotion are automatically good. Of course, a person gripped by fear may make mistake, may find reflection difficult, and may not (as we say) be able to think. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14
However, a persona totally without emotion has no warning system, no guidelines to the self-relevance of a sight, a memory, or a fantasy. Like one who cannot feel and touches fire, an emotionless person suffers a sense of arbitrariness, which from the point of view of his or her self-interests is irrational. In fact, emotion is a potential avenue to the reasonable view. We may misinterpret an event, feel accordingly, and then draw false conclusions from what we feel. (We sometimes call this neurosis.) We can handle this by applying a secondary framework that corrects habits of feeling and inference, as when we say, “I know I have a tendency to interpret certain gestures as rejections.” However, feeling is the essential clue that a certain viewpoint, even though it may need frequent adjustment, is alive and well. Furthermore, it can tell us about a way of telling us about a way of seeing. A less affluent person may see the deprivations of the ghetto more accurately, more rationally, through indignation and anger than through obedience or resigned realism. One will focus clearly on the police officer’s smoking gun, the landlord’s Cadillac, the look of disapproval on the employment agent’s affluent face. Outside of anger, these images become like boulders on a mountainside, minuscule parts of the landscape. Likewise, a chronically morose person who falls in love may suddenly see the World as happier people do. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14
Emotion locates the position in the viewer. It uncovers an often unconscious perspective, a comparison. “You look tall” may mean “From where I lie on the floor, you look tall.” “I feel awe” may mean “compared with what I do or think I could do, he is awesome.” Awe, love, anger, and envy tell of a self vis-à-vis a situation. When we reflect on feeling we reflect on this sense of “from where I am.” The word objective means “free from personal feeling.: Yet ironically, we need feeling in order to reflect on the external or “objective” World. Taking feelings into account as clues and then correcting for them may be our best shot at objectivity. Like hearing or seeing, feeling provides a useful set of clues in figuring out what is real. A show of feeling by someone else is interesting to us precisely because it may reflect a buried perspective and may offer a clue as to how that person may act. In public life, expressions of feeling often make for news. For example, a TV sports newscaster noted: “Reese Witherspoon has passed the stage of trying to survive in a commercial sport. We are beyond that now. The women’s tennis teams, too. The woman are really serious players. They get really mad if the hit a net ball. They get even madder than the guys, I would say.” He had seen Reese Witherspoon miss a shot (it was a new ball), redden in the face, stamp her foot, and spank the net with her racket. From this her inferred that women “really wants to win.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 14
Wanting to win, she is a “serious” player—a pro. Being a pro, she can be expected to see the tennis match as something on which her professional reputation and financial future depend. Further, from the way she broke an ordinary field of calm with a brief display of anger, she was really serious. He also inferred that she really meant it—she was “serious.” He also inferred what she must have wanted and expected just before the net ball and what the newly grasped reality—a miss—must have felt like. He tried to pick out what part of her went into seeing the ball. A miss, if you really want to win, is maddening. From the commentator’s words and tone, TV viewers could infer his point of view. He assessed the woman’s anger in relation to a prior expectation about how pros in general see, feel, and act and about how women in general act. Women tennis pros, he implied, do not laugh apologetically at a miss, as a nonprofessional woman player might. They feel, he said, in a way that is appropriate to the role of a professional player. In fact, as newcomers they overconform. “They get even madder than the guys.” Thus the view can ferret out the sportscaster’s mental set and the role of women in it. In the same way that we infer other people’s view points from how they display feeling, we decide what we ourselves are really like by reflecting on how we feel about ordinary events. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14
Consider this example, a statement from a young man of nineteen: I had agreed to give a party with a young woman who was an old friend. Ad the time approached, it became apparent to me that, while I liked her, I did not want the [social] identification with her that such an action [the jointly sponsored party] would bring. I tried explaining this to her without success, and at first I resolved to do the socially acceptable thing—go through with it. But the day before the party, I knew I simply could not do it, so I canceled out. My friend did not understand and was places in a very embarrassing position. I cannot feel ashamed no matter how hard I try. All I felt then was relief, and this is still my dominant response. I acted selfishly, but fully consciously. I imagine that my friendship could not have meant that much. The young man reached his conclusion by reasoning back from his absence of guilt or shame, from the feeling of relief he experienced. (He might also have concluded: “I have show myself to be the sort of fellow who can feel square with himself in the cases of unmet obligation. I can withstand the guilt. It is enough for me that I tried to feel shame.”) For the sportscaster and the young man, feeling was taken as a signal. To observer and actor alike it was a clue to an underlying truth, a truth that had to be dug out or inferred, a truth about the self vis-à-vis a situation. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14
The sportscaster took the anger of the women tennis player as a clue to how seriously Reese took the game of tennis. The young man who backed out on his friend took his sense of relief and absence of guilt feelings as a clue to the absence of seriousness in his “old friendship.” Feeling can be used to give a clue to the operating truth, but in private life as well as on the job, two complications can arise. The first one lies between the clue of feeling and the interpretation of it. We are capable of disguising what we feel, of pretending to feel what we do not—of doing surface acting. The box of clues is hidden, but it is not changed. The second complication emerges in a more fundamental relation between stimulus and response, between a net ball and feeling frustration, between letting someone down and feeling guilty, between being called names by an “irate” and getting angry back. Here the clues can be dissolved by deep acting, which from one point of view involves deceiving oneself as much as deceiving others. In surface acting we deceive others about what we really feel, but we do not deceive ourselves. Diplomats and actors do this best, and very small children do it worst (it is part of their charm). In deep acting we make feigning easy by making it unnecessary. When we are more successfully at emotional control, the techniques of deep acting are joined to the principles of social engineering. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14
Can a person suppress one’s anger at a person who insults one? People can be taught how—if one is qualified by a demonstrably friendly disposition to start with. Ne may have most for a while the sense of what one would have felt has one not been trying so hard to feel something else. By taking over the levers of feeling production, by pretending deeply, one alters oneself. Deep acting has always had the edge over simple pretending in its power to convince. In jobs that require dealing with the public, employers are wise to want workers to be sincere, to go well beyond the smile that is “just painted on.” Always be honest. Behind the most effective display is the feeling that fits it, and that feeling can be managed. As workers, the more seriously social engineering affects our behavior and our feelings, the more intensely we must address a new ambiguity about who is directing them (is this me or the company talking?). As customers, the greater our awareness of social engineering, the more effort we put into distinguishing between gestures of real personal feelings and gestures of company policy. We have practical knowledge of the commercial takeover of the signal function of feeling. In a routine way, we make up for it; at either end, as worker or customer, we try to correct for the social engineering of feeling. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14
We mentally subtract feeling with commercial purpose to it from the total pattern of display that we sense to be sincerely felt. In interpreting a smile, we try to take out what social engineering put in, pocketing only what seems meant just for us. We say, “It is her job to be friendly,” or “They have to believe in their product like that in order to sell it.” In the end, it seems, we make up an idea of our “real self,” an inner jewel that remains our unique possession no matter whose billboard is on our back or whose smile is on our face. We push this “real self” further inside, making it more inaccessible. Subtracting credibility from the parts of our emotional machinery that are in commercial hands, we turn to what is left to find out who we “really are.” And around the surface of our human character, where once we were vulnerable, we don a cloak to protect us against the commercial elements. And finally as one listens more accurately to the feelings within, and become less evaluative and more acceptant toward oneself, one also moves towards greater congruence. One finds it possible to move out from behind the facades one has used, to drop one’s defensive behaviors, and more openly to be what one truly is. As these changes occur, as one becomes more self-aware, more self-acceptant, less defensive and more open, one finds that one is free to change and grow in the directions natural to the human organism. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14
In regard to feelings and personal meanings, one moves away from a state in which feelings are unrecognized, unowned, unexpressed. One moves toward a flow in which ever-changing feelings are experiences in the moment, knowingly and acceptantly, and may be accurately expressed. The process involves a change in the manner of one’s experience. Initially one is remote from one’s experiencing. An example would be the intellectualizing person who talks about oneself and one’s feelings in abstractions, leaving you wondering what is actually going on within him or her. From such remoteness one moves toward an immediacy of experiencing in which one lives openly in one’s experiencing, and knows that one can turn to it to discover its current meanings. The process involves a loosening of the cognitive maps of experience. From construing experience in rigid ways, which are perceived as external facts, the client moves toward developing changing, loosely held construings of meaning in experience, constructs which are modifiable by each new experience. In general, the evidence shows that the process moves away from fixity, remoteness from feelings and experience, rigidity of self-concept, remoteness from people, impersonality of functioning. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14
It moves toward fluidity, changingness, immediacy of feelings and experience, acceptance of feelings and experience, tentativeness of constructs, discovery of a changing self in one’s changing experience, realness and closeness of relationship, a unity and integration of functioning. We are continually learning more about this process by which change comes about, and I am not sure that this very brief summary conveys much of the richness of our findings. LORD our God, great, eternal, wonderful in glory, Who keepest covenant and promises for those that love Thee with their whole heart; Who art the Life of all, the Help of those that flee unto Thee, the Hope of those who cry unto Thee; cleanse us from our sins, secret and open, and from every thought displeasing to Thy goodness,–cleanse our bodies and souls, our hearts and consciences, that with a pure heart and a clear soul, with perfect love and calm hope, we may venture confidently and fearlessly to pray Thee. LORD, we beseech Thee, let thy favour be present to Thy people who supplicate Thee; that what by Thy inspiration they faithfully ask, by the speedy bounty they may obtain; through Jesus Christ our Lord. We beseech Thee, O Lord, to look upon Thy servants, whom Thou hast enabled to put their trust in Thee; and grant them both to ask such things as shall please Thee, and also to obtain what they ask: through Jesus Christ our Lord. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14
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The Soul is One of the Few Places Left Where One Can be Private–The Edge of Sleep Can be Such a Precious Time!
The edge of sleep can be such a precious time. I felt that quickening again, that prodding from the depths of my soul that some great change was taking place in me, a vital change—another nagging thought that, some to do with language. What was it? One gets thrilled and frightened at the same time in the presence of the soul because it reminds one about one’s past, present, and, most, of the possibilities of future. A basic cause for sublime embarrassment about using the divine name—the doubt about God Himself. Such doubt is universally human, and God would not be God if we could possess Him like any object of our familiar World, and verify his reality like any other reality under inquiry. Unless doubt is conquered, there is no faith. Faith must overcome something; it must leap over the ordinary process that provide evidence, because its object is possesses the whole realm where scientific verification is possible. Faith is the courage that conquers doubt, not by removing it, but by taking it as an element into itself. I am convinced that the element of doubt, conquered in faith, is never completely lacking in any serious affirmation of God. It is not always on the surface; but it always gnaws at the depth of our being. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
We may know people intimately who have a seemingly primitive unshaken faith, but it is not difficult to discover the underswell of doubt that in critical moments surges up to the surface. Religious leaders tell us both directly and indirectly of the struggle in their minds between faith and unfaith. From fanatics of faith we hear beneath their unquestioning affirmations of God the shrill sound of their repressed doubt. It is repressed, but not annihilated. On the other hand, listening to the cynical denials of God that are an expression of the flight from the meaning of life, we hear the voice of a carefully covered despair, a despair that demonstrates not assurance but doubt about their negation. And in our encounter with those who assume scientific reasons to deny God, we find that they are certain of their denial only so long as they battle—and rightly so—against superstitious ideas of God. When, however, they ask the question of God Who is really God—namely, the question of the meaning of life as a whole and their own life, including their scientific work, their self-assurance tumbles for neither one who affirms nor one who denies God can be ultimately certain about one’s affirmation or one’s denial. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
Doubt, and not certitude, is our human situation, whether we affirm or deny God. And perhaps the differences between them is not so great as one usually thinks. They are probably very similar in their mixture of faith and doubt. Therefore, the denial of God, if serious, should not shake us. What should trouble everyone who takes life seriously is the existence of indifferences. For one who is indifferent, when hearing the name of God, and feels, at the same time, that the meaning of one’s life is being questioned, denies one’s true humanity. It is doubt in the depth of faith that often produces sublime embarrassment. Such embarrassment can be an expression of conscious or unconscious honesty. Have we not felt how something in us sometimes makes us stop, perhaps only for a moment, when we want to say “God”? This moment of hesitation may express a deep feeling for God. It says something about one who hesitates to use it. Sometimes we hesitate to use the word “God” even without words, when we are alone; we may hesitate to speak to God even privately and voicelessly, as in prayer. It may be that doubt prevents us from praying. And beyond this we may feel that the abyss between God and us makes the use of His name impossible for us; we do not dare to speak to Him, because we feel Him standing on the other side of the abyss from us. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
This can be a profound affirmation of God. The silent embarrassment of using the divine name can protect us against violating the divine mystery. We have considered the silence of tact and the silence of honesty concerning the divine name. However, behind them both possesses something more fundamental, the silence of awe, that seems to prohibit the speaking of God altogether. However, is this the last word demanded by the divine mystery? Must we spread silence around what concerns us more than anything else—the meaning of our existence? The answer is—no! For God Himself has given humankind names for Himself in those moments when He has broken into our finitude and made Himself manifest. We can, and must use these names. For silence has power only if it is the other side of speaking, and in this way becomes itself a kind of speaking. This necessity is both our justification and our being judged, when we gather together in the name of God. We are an assembly where we speak about God. We are a church. The church is the place where the mystery of the holy should be experienced wit awe and sacred embarrassment. However, is this our experience? Are our prayers, communal or personal, a use or a misuse of the divine name? #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
Do we feel the sublime embarrassment that so many people outside the churches feel? When, as ministers, we point to the Divine Presence in the sacraments, are we gripped by awe? Or, as theological interpreters of the holy, are we too sure that we can really explain God to others? When fluent Biblical quotations or quick, mechanized words of prayer pour from our mouths, is there enough sacred embarrassment in us? Do we preserve the respectful distance from the Holy-Itself, when we claim to have the truth about God, or to be at the place of His Presence or to be the administrators of His Power—the proprietors of the Christ? How much embarrassment, how much awe is alive in Saturday or Sunday devotional services all over the World? And now let me ask the church and all its members, including you and myself, a bold question. Could it be that, in order to judge the misuse of God’s name within the church, God reveals Himself from time to time by creating silence about Himself? Could it be that sometimes He prevents the use of his name in order to protect His name, that He withholds from a generation what was natural to previous generations—the use of the word God? Could it be that godlessness is not caused only by human resistance, but also by God’s paradoxical action—using beings and the forces by which they are driven to judge the assemblies that gather in His name and take His name in vain? #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
When speaking of him, is the secular silence about God that we experience everywhere today perhaps God’s way of forcing His church back to a sacred embarrassment? It may be bold to ask such questions. Certainly there can be no answer, because we do not know the character of the divine providence. However, even without an answer, the question itself should warn all those inside the church to whom the use of His name comes too easily. The entire being, who feels all needs by turns, will take nothing as an equivalent for life but the fulness of living itself. Since the essence of things are as a matter of fact disseminated through the whole extent of time and space, it is in their spread-outness and alternation that one will enjoy them. When weary of the concrete clash and dust and pettiness, one will refresh oneself by a bath in the eternal springs, or fortify oneself by a look at the immutable natures. However, one will only be a visitor, not a dweller in the region; one will never carry the philosophic yoke upon one’s shoulders, and when tired of the gray monotony of one’s problems and insipid spaciousness of one’s result, will always escape gleefully into the teeming and dramatic richness of the concrete World. So abstract concept can be a valid substitute for a concrete reality except with reference to a particular interesting he conceiver. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
The interest of theoretic rationality, the relief of identification, is but one of a thousand human purposes. When others rear their heads, it must pack up its little bundle and retire till its turn recurs. The exaggerated dignity and value that philosophers have claimed for their solutions is this greatly reduced. The only virtue their theoretic conception need have is simplicity, and a simple conception is an equivalent for the world only so far as the World is simple,–the World meanwhile, whatever simplicity it may harbor, being also a mightily complex affair. Enough simplicity remains, however, and enough urgency in our craving to reach it, to make the theoretic function one of the most invincible of human impulses. The quest of the fewest elements of things is an ideal that some will follow, as long as there are beings to think at all. However, suppose the goal attained. Supposed that at last we have a system unified in the sense that has been explained. Our World can now be conceived simply, and our mind enjoys the relief. Our universal concept has made the concrete chaos rational. However, now I ask, Can that which is the ground of rationality in all else be itself properly called rational? It would seem at first sight that it might. One is tempted at any rate to say that, since the craving for rationality is appeased by the identification of one thing with another, a datum which left nothing else outstanding might quench that craving definitively, or be rational in se. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
No otherness being left to annoy us, we should sit down at peace. In other words, as the theoretic tranquility of the boor results from one’s spinning no further considerations about one’s chaotic Universe, so any datum whatever (provided it were simple, clear, and ultimate) ought to banish puzzle from the Universe of the philosopher and confer peace, inasmuch as there would then be for one absolutely no further considerations to spin. A difficult is solved, a mystery unriddled, when it can be shown to resemble something else; to be an example of a fact already known. Mystery is isolation, exception, or it may be apparent contradiction: the resolution of the mystery is found in assimilation, identity, fraternity. When all things are assimilated, so far as assimilation can go, so far as likeness hold, there is an end to explanation; there is an end to what the mind can do, or can intelligently desire. The path of science as exhibited in modern ages is toward generality, wider and wider, until we reach the highest, the widest laws of every department of things; there explanation is finished, mystery ends, perfect vision is gained. However, unfortunately, this first answer will not hold. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
Our mind is so wedded to the process of seeing an other beside every item of its experience, that when the notion of an absolute datum is presented to it, it goes through its usual procedure and remains pointing at the void beyond, as if in that lay further matter for contemplation. In short, it spins for itself the further absolute consideration of nonentity enveloping the being of its datum; and as that leads nowhere, back recoils the thought toward its datum again. However, there is no natural bridge between nonentity and this particular datum, and the thought stands oscillating hither and tither, wondering “Why was there anything but nonentity; why just this universal datum and not another?” and finds no end, in wandering mazes lost. When the attempt to fuse the manifold into a single totality has been most successful, when the conception of the Universe as a unique fact is nearest its perfection, the carving for further explanation, the ontological wonder-sickness, arises in its extreme form. The uneasiness which keeps the never-resting clock of metaphysics in motion, is the consciousness that the non-existence of this World is just as possible as its existence. The notion of nonentity may thus be called the parent of the philosophic craving in its subtilest and profoundest sense. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
Absolute existence is absolute mystery, for its relations with the nothing remain unmediated to our understanding. One philosopher only had pretended to throw a logical bridge over this chasm. Hegel, by trying to show that nonentity and concrete being are linked together by a series of identities of a synthetic kind, binds everything conceivable into a unity, with no outlying notion to disturb the free rotary circulation of the mind within its bounds. Since such unchecked movement gives the feeling of rationality, he must be held, if he has succeeded, to have eternally and absolutely quenched all rational demands. However, for those who deem Hegel’s heroic effort to have failed, nought remains but to confess that when all things have been unified to the supreme degree, the notion of a possible other than the actual may still haunt our imagination and prey upon our system. The bottom of being I left logically opaque to us, as something which we simply come upon and find, and about which (if we wish to act) we should pause and wonder as little as possible. The philosopher’s logical tranquility is thus in essence no other than the boor’s. They differ only as to the point at which each refuses to let further considerations upset the absoluteness of the data one assumes. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
The boor does so immediately, and is liable at any moment to the ravages of many kinds of doubt. The philosopher does not do so till unity has been reached, and is warranted against the inroads of those considerations, but only practically, not essentially, secure from the blighting breath of the ultimate Why? If one cannot exorcise this question, one must ignore or blink it, and, assuming the data of one’s system as something given, and the gift as ultimate, simply proceed to a life of contemplation or of action based on it. There is no doubt that this acting on an opaque necessity is accompanied by a certain pleasure. There is an infinite significance in fact. Necessity is the last and highest point that we can reach. It is not only the interest of ultimate and definitive knowledge, but also that of the feelings, to find a last repose and an ideal equilibrium in an uttermost datum which can simply not be other than it is. Such is the attitude of ordinary beings in their theism, God’s fiat being in physics and morals such an uttermost datum. Such is also the attitude of all hard-minded analysts and Verstandesmenschen. Of experiences as a whole no account can be given. However, meditating attempts may be made. The peace of rationality may be sought through ecstasy when logic fails. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
To religious persons of every shade of doctrine moments come when the World, as it is, seems so divinely orderly, and the acceptance of it by the heart so rapturously complete, that intellectual questions vanish; nay, the intellect itself is hushed to sleep,–thought is not; enjoyment it expires. Ontological emotion so fills the soul that ontological speculation can no longer overlap it and put her girdle of interrogation-marks round existence. Even the least religious of beings must have felt when loafing on the grass on some transparent summer morning, that swiftly arose and spread round one the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the Earth. At such moments of energetic living we feel as if there were something diseased and contemptible, yea vile, in theoretic grubbing and brooding. In the eye of healthy sense the philosopher is at best a learned fool. It is a matter of complete assurance and scientific observation for the truth seeker that God exists, that beings have souls, that we are here on Earth to become untied with this soul, and that one can attain true happiness only by following good and avoiding evil. One is not a quester after saintly prestige: one will not outwardly try to present oneself as a holy person. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
One could never make a commercial business out of spiritual uplift, nor even turn it into a paid professional career. How different from those ambition leaders whose pretended motive of serving humanity is really a cover for the service of their own ego. People may think a person who is attuned to their soul exercises infinite tolerance and patience. This is because they have no standard by which to measure the qualities of one’s rhythm of consciousness. Tolerance and patience imply their opposites. People who are connected to their soul reactions conform to neither. One literally lives where they do not apply. The set of conditions which for the ordinary being gives rise to the possibility of tolerance and patience or their opposites is for one an opportunity for reflection. Such a beings has no enemies, although one may have those who regard one as their enemy. For hate cannot enter one’s heart; goodwill towards all is its fragrant atmosphere. In all relations, whether as a friend or a partner or spouse, one is possessing, but one requires in return to be unpossessed. Here, then, is the point which I see the new mission of humanity, to rise up incomparably higher than all those preceding. Up until the present, many people have been principally occupied with the material aspect of reality. From now on one must give their attention to reality as a living function. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
The soul is one of the few places left where one can be private. The soul’s existence is not persuasion, but knowledge—it is an instrument of choice, and the choice is always yours, not your elected or designated leaders. The adept has no indispensable need to know. One is being, which is one’s foundational consciousness—pure, unmixed with mental images or thoughts, and not dispersed in the existence of the five sense. One does not seek and will not accept those who are already members of any society or group which provides them with instruction, for one will not interfere between the teacher and the taught. Truth must be sought in its fullness, not as a supplement to the teaching of others. For one will not adulterate truth. The truth one has to give is not the same as that taught by one and one does not want to distort it to fit such misconceptions. One who has found one’s genuine self does not need to pose for the benefit of gushing disciples. One obtains the deepest satisfaction merely from being oneself. What other may say about one in praise cannot being one anything like pleasures which one’s own higher consciousness beings one. One’s ever-present calmness is not a mask for secretive emotions, inner conflicts, mental tensions, or explosive passions. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
One has paid a high price for this serenity. One has accepted the necessity of walking alone, the shattering of all illusions, the denudation of human desire, and the funeral of animal passion. The illuminated individual’s conduct in this World is a guided one. One’s senses tell one what is happening in the World about one, but one’s soul guides one to a proper evaluation of those sense reports. In this way one lives in the World, but is not of it. Of one alone is it true today that one’s is a spiritual life. One possesses a largeness of heart at all times, an immense tolerance towards the frailty of faulty men and women. Most of the studies throw light on the attitudes on the part of the helping person which makes a relationship growth-promoting or growth-inhibiting. A careful study of parent-child relationships denotes that parental attitudes towards children, the “acceptant-democratic” seemed most growth-facilitating. Children of these parents with their warm and equalitarian attitudes showed an accelerated intellectual development (an increasing I.Q.), more originality, more emotional security and control, less excitability than children from other types of homes. Though somewhat slow initially in social development, they were, by the time they reached school age, popular, friendly, non-aggressive leaders. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
When parents’’ attitudes are classed as “actively rejectant” the children show a slightly decelerated intellectual development, relatively poor use of the abilities they do possess, and some lack of originality. They are emotionally unstable, rebellious, aggressive, and quarrelsome. The children of parents with other attitude syndromes tend in various respect to fall in between these extremes. I am sure that these findings do not surprise us as related to child development. I would like to suggest that they probably apply to other relationships as well, and that the counselor or physician or administrator who is warmly emotional and expressive, respectful of the individuality of oneself and of the others, and who exhibits a non-possessive caring, probably facilitates self-realization much as does a parent with these attitudes. When one has fully accomplished this passing-over, all the elements of one’s lower nature will then have been fully eliminated. The ego will be destroyed. Instead of being enslaved by its own senses and passions, blinded by its own thoughts and ignorance, one’s mind will be inspired, enlightened, and liberated by God. Yet life in the human self will not be destroyed because one has entered life in the divine God. However, neither will it continue in the old and lower way. That self will henceforth function as a perfectly obedient instrument of the soul and no longer of the animal body or intellectual nature. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
No evil thought and no animal passion can ever again take hold of one’s mind. What remains of one’s character is therefore the incorruptible part and the immortal part. Death may rob one of lesser things, but not of the thing which one cherishes most. Having already parted in one’s heart with what is perishable, one can await it without perturbation and with sublime resignation. When we comprehend what it is that must go into the making of a truth seeker, how many and how diverse the experiences through which one has passed in former days, we realize that such a being’s wisdom is part of one’s bloodstream. The free soul is a living room to an ordinary citizen, a treasury to a researcher, and a chamber of horrors to a dictator. “Thou also sayest, except we repent we shall perish. How knowest thou the thought and intent of our hearts? How knowest thou that we have cause to repent? How knowest thou that we are not a righteous people? Behold, we have built sanctuaries, and we do assemble ourselves together to worship God. We do believe that God will says all humans,” reports Alam 21.6. Not only does God supply infinite riches to our soul, but we may sit at home, and yet be in all quarters of the Earth. The eternal access to God is not a privilege, but a necessity for any free society. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
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The Line Between Knowing and Loving is Impossible to Draw–Feelings are More Important than Anything Under the Sun!
“It is easy for us to make beings like you. We do it all the time. There is nothing to it. We can easily replace you. Understand, all the mental and physical equipment we have given you is for a purpose.” At this point, I knew my first real fear. I was afraid they were going to do away with Derek then and there. I could not bear it. The pain in me was so all-consuming that it took all the strength I possessed to stand by and say nothing. However, I did not feel that there was anything that I could do to prevent whatever the Parents would now do to Derek. What deep-seated fears and needs underly Derek’s delusional system? We were long in finding out, for Derek’s preventions effectively concealed the secret of his autistic behavior. In the meantime we dealt with his peripheral problems one by one. During his first year with us Derek’s most trying problem was toilet behavior. This surprised us, for Derek’s personality was not “anal” in the Freudian sense; his original personality damage had antedated the period of his toilet-training. Rigid and early toilet-training, however, had certainly contributed to his anxieties. It was our effort to help Derek with this problem that led to his first recognition of us as human beings. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Going to the toilet, like everything else in Derek’s life, was surrounded y elaborate preventions. We had to accompany him; he had to take off all his clothes; he could only squat, not sit on the toilet seat; he had to touch the wall with one hand, in which he also clutched frantically the vacuum tubes that powered his elimination. He was terrified lest his whole body would be sucked down. To counteract this fear we gave him a metal wastebasket in lieu of the toilet. Eventually, when eliminating into the wastebasket, he no longer needed to take off all his clothes, nor to hold on to the wall. He still needed the tubes and motor which, he believed moved his bowels for him. However, here again the all-important machinery was itself a source of new terrors. In Derek’s World the gadgets had to move their bowels, too. He was terribly concerned that they should, but since they were so much more powerful than men, he was also terrified that if his tubes moved their bowels, their feces would fill all of space and leave him no room to live. He was thus always caught in some fearful contradiction. Our readiness to accept his toilet habits, which obviously entailed some hardship for his counselors, gave Derek the confidence to express his obsession in drawings. Drawing these fantasies was a first step toward letting us in, however distantly, to what concerned him most deeply. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
Drawing was the first step in a year-long process of externalizing Derek’s anal preoccupations. As a result he began seeing feces everywhere; the whole World became to hm a mire of excrement. At the same time he began to eliminate freely wherever he happened to be. However, with this release from his infantile imprisonment in compulsive rules, the toilet and the whole process of elimination became less dangerous. Thus far it had been beyond Derek’s comprehension that anybody could possibly move his bowels without mechanical assistance. Now Derek took a further step forward; defecation became the first physiological process he could perform without the help of vacuum tubes. It must not be thought that he was proud of this ability. Taking pride in an achievement presupposes that one accomplishes it of one’s own free will. He still did not feel himself an autonomous person who could do things on his own. To Derek defecation still seemed enslaved to some incomprehensible but utterly binding cosmic law, perhaps the law his parents had imposed on him when he was being toilet trained. It was not simply that his parents had subjected him to rigid, early training. Many children are so trained. However, in most cases the parents have a deep emotional investment in the child’s performance. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
As a result of this deep emotional investment, the child’s response in turn makes training an occasion for interaction between them and for the building of genuine relationships. Derek’s parents had no emotional investment in him. His obedience gave them no satisfaction and won him no affection or approval. As a toilet-trained child he saved his mother labor, just as household machines saved her labor. As a machine he was not loved for his performance, nor could he love himself. So it has been with all other aspects of Derek’s existence with his parents. Their reactions to his eating or noneating, sleeping or wakening, urinating or defecating, being dressed or undressed, washed or bathed did not flow from any unitary interest in him, deeply embedded in their personalities. By treating him mechanically his parents made him a machine. The various functions of life—even the parts of his body—bore no integrating relationship to one another or to any sense of self that was acknowledged and confirmed by others. Though he had acquired mastery over some functions, such as toilet-training and speech, he had acquired them separately and kept then isolated from each other. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
Toilet-training had thus not gained Derek a pleasant feeling of body mastery; speech had not led to communication of thought or feeling. On the contrary, each achievement only steered him away from -self-mastery and integration. Toilet-training had enslaved him. Speech left him talking in neologisms that obstructed his and our ability to relate to each other. In Derek’s development the normal process of growth had been made to run backward. Whatever he had learned put him not at the end of his infantile development toward integration but, on the contrary, farther behind than he was a its beginning. Had we understood this sooner, his first years with us would have been less baffling. In order to explore more fully the relations among the several parts of social front, it will be convenient to consider here a significant characteristic of the information conveyed by front, namely, its abstractness and generality. However specialized and unique a routine is, its social front, with certain exceptions will tend to claim fact that can be equally claimed and asserted of other, somewhat different routines. It is unlikely that Derek’s calamity could befall a child in any time and culture but our own. He suffered no physical deprivation; he starved for human contact. Just to be taken care of is not enough. At the extreme where utter scarcity reigns, the forming of relationships is certainly hampered. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
However, in our society of mechanized plenty often makes for equal difficulties in a child’s learning to relate. Where parents can provide simple creature-comforts for their children only at the cost of significant effort, it is likely that they will feel pleasure, that gives children a sense of personal worth and sets the process of relating in motion. However, if comfort is so readily available that the parents feel no particular pleasure in winning it for their children, then the children cannot develop the feeling of being worthwhile around the satisfaction of their basic needs. Of course parents and children can and do develop relationships around other situations. However, matters are then no longer so simple and direct. If he is to feel loved and worthy of respect and consideration, the child must be on the receiving end of care and concern given with pleasures and without the exaction of return. This feeling gives him the ability to trust; he can entrust his well-being to persons to whom he is so important. Out of such trust the child learns to form close and stable relationships. For Derek relations with his parents were empty of pleasures in comfort-giving as in all other situations. His was an extreme instance of a plight that sends many schizophrenic children to our clinics and hospitals. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
Many months passed before he could relate to us; his despair that anybody could like him made contact impossible. When Derek could finally trust us enough to let himself become more infantile, he began to play at being a papoose. There was a corresponding change in his fantasies. He drew endless pictures of himself as an electrical papoose. Totally enclosed, suspended in empty space, he is run by unknown, unseen powers through wireless electricity. As we eventually came to understand, the heart of Derek’s delusional system was the artificial, mechanical womb he had created and into which he had locked himself. In his papoose fantasies lay the wish to be entirely reborn in a womb. His new experience in the school suggested that life, after all, might be worth living. Now he was searching for a way to be reborn in a better way. Since machines were better than men, what was more natural than trying to rebirth through them? This was the deeper meaning of his electrical papoose. As Derek made progress, his pictures of himself became more dominant in his drawings. Though still machine operated, he has grown in self-importance. Now he has acquired hands that do something, and he has had the courage to make a picture of the machine that runs him. Later still the papoose became a person, rather than a robot encased in glass. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Eventually Derek began to create an imaginary family at the school: the “Carr” family. Why the Carr family? In the car he was enclosed as he had been in his papoose, but at least the car was not stationary; it could move. More important, in a car one was not only driven but also could drive. The Carr family was Derek’s way of exploring the possibility of leaving the school, of living with a good family in a safe, protecting car. Derek at last broke through his prison. In this brief account it has not been possible to trace the painfully slow process of his first true relations with other human beings. Suffice it to say that he ceased to be a mechanical boy and became a human child. This newborn child was, however, nearly 12 years old. To recover the lost time is a tremendous task. That work has occupied Derek and us ever since. Sometimes he sets to it with a will; at other times the difficulty of real life makes him regret that he ever came out of his shell. However, he has never wanted to return to his mechanical life. One last detail and this fragment of Derek’s story has been told. When Derek was 12, he made a float for our Veteran’s Day parade. It carried the slogan: “Feeling are more important that anything under the Sun.” Feelings, Derek had learned, are what make for humanity; their absence, for a mechanical existence. With this knowledge Derek entered the human condition. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
Instead of having to maintain a different pattern of expectation and responsive treatment for each slightly different performer and performance one can place the situation in a broad category around which it is easy for one to mobilize one’s past experience and stereotypical thinking. Observers then need only be familiar with a small and hence manageable vocabulary of fronts, and know how to respond to them in order to orient themselves in a wide variety of situations. There are grounds for believing that the tendency for a large number of different acts to be presented from behind a small number of fronts is a natural development in social organization. In the descriptive kinship system which gives each persona a unique place, it may work for very small communities, but, as the number of persons becomes large, clan segmentation becomes necessary as a means of providing a less complicated system of identifications and treatments. As a compromise, the full range of diversity is cut at a few crucial points, and all those within a given bracket are allowed or obliged to maintain the same social front in certain situations. In addition to the fact that different routines may employ the same front, it is to be noted that a given social front tends to become institutionalized in terms of the abstract stereotyped expectations to which it gives rise, and tends to take on meaning and stability apart from the specific tasks which happen at the time to be performed in its name. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
The front becomes a collective representation and a fact in its own right. When an actor takes on an established social role, usually one finds that a particular front has already been established for it. Whether one’s acquisitions of the role was primarily motivated by a desire to perform the given takes or by a desire to maintain the corresponding front, the factor will find that one must do both. Further, if the individual takes on a task that is not only new to one but also unestablished in the society, of if one attempts to change the light in which one’s task is viewed, one is likely to find that there are already several well-established fronts among which one must choose. Thus, when a task is given a new front we seldom find that the front it is given is itself new. Since fronts tend to be selected, not created, we may expect trouble to arise when those who perform a given task are forced to select a suitable from for themselves from among several quite dissimilar ones. Thus, in military organizations, task are always developing which (it is felt) require too much authority and skill to be carried out behind the front maintained by one grade of personnel and too little authority and skill to be carried out behind the front maintained by the next grade in the hierarchy. Since there are relatively large jumps between grades, the task will come to carry too much rank or to carry too little. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
When Reese remarked to me that a man in her home town would not have committed suicide if one person had known him, what was she saying? I believe she was saying that this man had no person to whom he could open himself up, no one who was interested enough in him to listen, to pay attention to him. Se was saying that he lacked someone who had compassion for him, a compassion which would be the basis of his self-esteem. If he had had such a person, he would have counted himself too valuable to wipe out. She was also saying, although she did not know it, that the line between knowing and loving is impossible to draw. One merges into the other. If I know someone well I will tend to have compassion for one; and as I have compassion for one I will try to know one well. This is why it is next to impossible, when somebody you dislike is talking to listen to one, take in what you hear, and let it form itself into a comprehensible structure in your mind. If not our ears, the tendency is to close off our minds; to block out the person we do not like. The development of power is a prerequisite for compassion just as it is for communication. At the beginning of psychotherapy persons are normally so bereft of power in interpersonal relationships that they have very little compassion to give. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
Compassion requires that one have some security, some position of power from which one can give concern to another. Lack of self-esteem and self-affirmation makes it very difficult to have anything left over for others; an individual must have something with which to prime the pump before one can give to others. I cannot agree with some of my colleagues who hold that there are two kinds of people: those who operate by love, and those who operate by power. I believe this is a dichotomy which leaves the way open for the illusion of the past, namely that one can have powerless love and another (generally a person one does not like) loveless power. Do not protest, let love alone rule! Can you prove it true? However resolve: every morning I shall concern myself anew about the boundary between the love-deeds-Yes and the power-deed-No and pressing forward honor reality. If we are to honor reality, we must be aware that power and love can have a dialectical relationship, each feeding and nourishing the other. We must turn our attention to the interplay between love and power, and the fact that powers needs love if it is not to slide into manipulation. Power without charity ends up in cruelty. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
The destructive kind of power generally comes from persons who have suffered radical deprivation, like when Duke Harry, despairing over the lack of effect his protest had in Washington, fantasied firing all the people in the supermarket. The constructive forms of power, such as nutrient power and integrative power, come only when there has already been built up within the individual some self-esteem and self-affirmation. Having established the relationship between power and love, let me now state that there is an experience in which love does transcend power. This is shown in Goethe’s drama in which Faust has made his compact with Mephistopheles to gain infinite knowledge and infinite sensual experience. Mephistopheles can give him only power, and that he does. Faust has loved Margarete and Helen of Tory and thinks he will leave them easily and casually behind. However, when Faust experiences the moment when his soul should logically be surrendered to the devil, he is saved by Margarete’s love for him. The mothers re-enter the drama, carrying with them the ties that every being has with nature and humankind. This allegory of love conquering power reveals an archetype of human experience that speaks to us all in diverse ways: I do not know what would remain to us were love not transfigured power and power not staying love. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
We are the creatures whose love is continually straying into power, and whose power is occasionally transfigured by love. We all participate in some way or other in the power structure of our society. Compassion is the name of that form of love which is based on our knowing and our understanding each other. Compassion is the awareness that we are all in the same yacht and that we all shall either skin of swim together. Compassion arises from the recognition of community. It realizes that all being, men and women, are bothers and sisters, even though a disciplining of our own instincts is necessary for us even to being to carry out that belief in our actions. Compassion is the tie felt for another not because one fulfills one’s potentialities (as if anyone ever did!). Compassion is felt for another as much because one does not fulfill one’s potentialities—in other words, one is human, like you or me, forever engaged in the struggle between fulfillment and nonfulfillment. We then surrender the demand that we be divine in order to join humankind in its suffering and its destiny. We are all lonely….We have learnt to pity one another for being alone. And we have learnt that nothing remains to be discovered except compassion. Compassion is the acceptance of the conviction that nothing human is foreign to me. I can then understand that if my enemy is killed, humanity is reduced that much. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
Even if the sum total of cruelty has not greatly diminished in the last twenty-one centuries—children still suffer for the things which they have not the slightest responsibility—we shall not require a token of success. It is in the confronting of this dilemma—fighting cruelty without regard for tangible success—that beings discover what one is in the dept of one’s personality. An interesting illustration of the dilemma of selecting an appropriate front from several not quite fitting ones may be found today in American medical organization with respect to the task of administering anesthesia. In some hospitals anesthesia is still administered by nurses being the front that nurses are allowed to have in hospitals regardless of the task they perform—a front involving ceremonial subordination to doctors and a relatively low rate of pay. In order to establish anesthesiology as a specialty for graduate medical doctors, interested practitioners have had to advocate strongly the idea that administering anesthesia is a sufficiently complex and vital task to justify giving to those who perform it the ceremonial and financial reward given to doctors. The difference between the front maintained by a nurse and the front maintained by a doctor is great; many things that are acceptable for nurses are infra dignitatem for doctors. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Some medical people have felt that a nurse under-ranked for the task of administering anesthesia and that doctors over-ranked; were there an established status midway between nurse and doctor, an easier solution to the problem could perhaps be found. Similarly, had the Canadian Army had a rank halfway between lieutenant and captain, two and a half pips instead of two or three, then Dental Corps captains, any of them of underrepresented ethnic origin, could have been given a rank that would perhaps have been more suitable in the eyes of the Army than the captaincies they were actually given. I do not mean here to stress the point of view of a formal organization or a society; the individual, as someone who possesses a limited range of sign-equipment, must also make unhappy choices. Thus, in the crofting community studied by the writer, hosts often marked the visit of a friend by offering one a shot of hard liquor, a glass of wine, some home-made brew, or a cup of tea. The higher the rank or temporary ceremonial status of the visitor, the more likely one was to receive an offering near the liquor end of the continuum. Now one problem associated with this range of sign-equipment was that some crofters could not afford to keep a bottle of hard liquor, so that wine tended to be the most indulgent gesture they could employ. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
However, perhaps a more common difficulty was the fact that certain visitors, given their permanent and temporary status at the time, outranked one potable and under-ranked the next one in line. There was often a danger that the visitor would feel just a little affronted or, on the other hand, that the host’s costly and limited sign-equipment would be misused. In our middle classes a similar situation arises when a hostess has to decide whether or not to use the good silver, or which would be the more appropriate to wear, her best afternoon dress or her plainest evening gown. Compassion gives us a basis for arriving at the humanistic position which will include both power and love. Compassion occupies a position opposite to violence; as violence projects hostile images on the opponent, compassion accepts such daimonic impulses in one’s self. It gives us the basis for judging someone without condemning one. Although loving one’s enemies requires grace, compassion for one’s enemies is a human possibility. I have suggested that social front can be divined into traditional parts, such as settings, appearances, and manner, and that (since different routines may be presented from behind the same front) we may not find a perfect fit between the specific character of a performance and the general socialized guise in which it appears to us. #RandolphHarris #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
These two facts, taken together, lead one to appreciate that items in the social front of a particular routine are not only found in the social fronts of a whole range of routines, but also that the whole range of routines in which one items of sign equipment is found will differ from the range of routines in which another item in the same social front will be found. Thus, a lawyer may talk to a client in a social setting that one employs only for this purpose (or for a study), but the suitable clothes one wears on such occasions one will also employ, with equal suitability, at dinner with colleagues and at the theater with is wife. Similarly, the prints that hang on one’s wall and the carpet or hardwood on the floor may be found in domestic social establishments. Of course, in highly ceremonial occasions, settings, manner, and appearance may all be unique and specific, used only for performances of a single type of routine, but such exclusive use of sign equipment is the exception rather than the rule. Will our compassion be ignited by the wars in African and the Middle East? Many of us have no way out of despair at being unable to stop these cruel holocausts, noting effective to do, struggle as we might with the viable alternatives. Almost universally these wars are hated, and is they could, most people would like to forget. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Regardless of all our protests and prayers, it goes on and on, with the steady attrition of our sense of honesty, credulity, and even language. However, even as we continue all efforts to end the wars as soon as is humanly possible, it may be that the Middle East and Africa will be, in the long run, of service—if one may speak that way without blasphemy—to America. With all the evil the wars in Africa and the Middle East, daimonically indeed, represent an occasion in which American could achieve an insight into life that will be essential to its future. This could come about by our gaining a tragic sense, an awareness of our own complicity in evil, our own participation in automatized, dehumanized destructiveness. “All the violence you see amongst the mammals, all of it stems from the drive to live, to survive, and to have offspring to survive and to obtain all the food and drink necessary to survive and procreate. This is the basis of all life on Earth. And self-aware human mammals—intelligent mammals—are the most savage and cruel and vicious of all beings on the planet, or any planet in the ‘Realm of Worlds.’ They are always too deeply enmeshed in pain or pleasure, loneliness or suffocating sense of paralysis, a need for love, or a raging jealousy resulting from love, or a desire for vengeance due to personal defeat or injury. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
“And when they [humans] are physically wounded or experience disease, their suffering is unendurable for them. They are driven by it to terrible extremes. Peace, harmony, joy elude these creatures. (Pages 248-249 of Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis by Anne Rice.) The guilt we feel is surely a normal guilt and may be the beginning of America’s transformation from an adolescent posturing to the maturity of a responsible nation. So far we have kept our innocence, despite all lessons to the contrary. Let us hope that these sad events will constitute a farewell to war. Do not let the repetitiveness of pain and suffering make you callous to the endless torment. “There is hope. You have seen the human mammals of the planet weeping and sobbing and praying. They have hope, hope that the Maker (God) hears them and that when they die their spirits go up and away from Earth.” (Pages 254 of Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis by Anne Rice.) If the so-called powerful and practical persons and the self-confessed materialistic ones only knew how much nearer to realities the sage is than the they, how much more “practical” one is, they would be very much surprised. “Thus we nay see that the Lord is merciful unto al who will, in he sincerity of their hears, call upon his holy name. Yea, thus we see that the gate of Heaven is open unto all, even to those who will believe on the name of Jesus Christ, who is the Son of God,” reports Helaman 3.27-28. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
ROCKLIN TRAILS
FINAL HOME REMAINS | Rocklin, CA | Mid $400,000’s
ONE HOME REMAINING!
When we set out to design our new Rocklin Trails community, we didn’t start out by thinking about walls and windows and square footage. We began by thinking about long walks and family dinners and the rush to get your morning started. In short, we started thinking about life and how best to fit that life within the new homes that we build.
Rocklin Trails will inspire you to reinvent the way you think about outdoor living. Here, you’ll find a lifestyle inspired by walkability. Our paseo-fronting homes create beautiful green-space entries and an open environment, all without compromising privacy. Adjacent to the community, Rocklin Trails homeowners have access to a peaceful and natural creek-side walking trail and in just a short stroll, you’ll find the answers to many of your shopping, recreation and entertainment needs.
Within each of the eighty new homes in Rocklin, California, you will find thoughtful design to suit the needs of any generation and any lifestyle with energy efficiency and construction longevity at its core.
We invite you to imagine a new way to live – here at Rocklin Trails.
https://cresleigh.com/new-homes-in-rocklin-california-rocklin-trails/