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Wake Up, Humanity! Be Alive! Look at this World in Front of You! I Will Make Up for Everything the World Has Done Wrong to You!
The anguish inside her defeated her anger. She drew close to me. No admissions and explanations. Just an image. I felt her strength recede, and her eyes misted. A great glowing fire was quelled, and I had done it, and an ever present grief enfolded it. A protective surge rose in me and the wild fantasies reigned again inside of me as if no one lese was present. Unconscious blocks to associational ability are many. For some people there is a fear of letting one’s mind go uncontrolled and saying anything that occurs, because of a feeling that there is something in the unconscious which is frightening. Such an individual, therefore, cannot allow the free play of association, but must keep them logical and controlled. Restriction of the ability to explore relations among various experiential elements is a serious limitation to producing unusual and interesting new combinations and, therefore, limits one’s ability to develop full potential. There are many acts of omission or commission which enhance the development of the associative abilities. Since the essence of this ability is making connections between events which are not obviously related, development depends upon the opportunity to explore freely the thoughts and feelings that the person experiences and to relate them to each other. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14
Emphasis on imaginative games lays the groundwork for more specific training in developing the skill of associating. However, when we are aware of anger, what then? It would appear that the most natural and spontaneous thing to do would be to express it. However, many of us find it difficult to be spontaneous at such moments. It may be desirable for us to examine some of the reasons we give ourselves for not expressing anger. Here are some of them. “I may say a lot of things I do not mean, and then I will feel terrible about it afterward.” What seem more likely is that we will say things we really do mean and do not accept in ourselves. If we say in anger, “I wish I had never met you,” or even, “I wish you never existed,” we may at that moment really feel that way—or at least part of us feels that way. It does not mean that five minutes or five hours later we may not be holding each other and intensely feeling our love for each other. For some people, humming the song that spontaneously comes into their head, and then reflecting on it, or associating to the words, can lead to a better understanding of the original puzzling situation. Either the title of the song, or the lines that the person has chosen to sing or hum, or the mood of the song, may contain the meaning of the association. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14
Humming is an enjoyable and simple method for uncovering hidden feelings that are not easily accessible to conscious thought. However, often we use fear of getting angry as an excuse because we dread the close involvement of anger. It this fear persists and the person finds one cannot loosen up and gradually express more of one’s anger, one should seek professional help, for suppressing anger increases, rather than decreases, the danger of violence. Everyone has the capacity to associate, most to a remarkable degree. However, the full use of this valuable ability requires realizing its presence, removing emotional blocks to letting it go without controls, practicing it, and gaining confidence that it works and can be a highly valuable assistant to thinking, creativity, and increased internal awareness. Internal thoughts and feelings must be expressed in some fashion. Scientific discoveries are written in technical language; music is written and played; other creative feelings are painted, sung, danced, spoken, acted. In some way a person must communicate one’s experience through the use or posture of one’s body or some part of it. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14
If they get mad at them, some people are afraid that they will damage their children’s lives. When you are angry at them the only alternative to expressing it is some form of phoniness. They can be trusted to handle your genuine feelings more than you think they can. If you are afraid that your anger is not justified that is a valid concern. Perhaps you are under some mistaken impression, but how are you going to find out if you stew in silence and do not talk about your feelings? And so we come to the knotty question, “How can we be creative in the expression of anger? Perhaps it can be stated as a general principle that anger is creative when a maximum of communication occurs with a minimum of destructiveness toward oneself and others. Like most other values, this ideal is one we will never achieve completely. However, the ideas that follow may help us grow toward it. Perhaps scientific and artistic creation differ in their relative emphasis on the expressive aspect of the creative process. In scientific creativity, the primary focus is on the first three phases of the creative process—acquisition, association, and expression. The great discoveries of Dr. Freud came through his sensitivity to and integration of the material of human personality. His writing about these discoveries was only in a minor way an integral part of his creativity. It served primarily as a vehicle for communicating these ideas. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14
A writer, poet, artist, or dancer, on the other hand, must concentrate more on the form in which one’s discoveries are expressed. We honor Browning, not simply for the conceptions behind is poetry, but for the very form of expression itself. When Katherine Dunham, Aaliyah Haughton, or Margot Fonteyn dance, the artistry is largely in the superb movement of their bodies, the mode through which their feelings are conveyed. Conscious, logical factors that enhance a person’s ability to express oneself involve a traditional educational area, the learning of skills. Learning to dance, or sing, or paint, or write is part of one’s ability to express oneself. Further, the development of skill in the use of symbolism, of expressing feelings derived form one medium in terms of another, is very central. A good example of this occurs in Walt Disney’s Fantasia, in which musical composition are represented in visual form. Unconscious factors that inhibit the expressive ability often derive form cultural or interpersonal censure. The belief that ballet dancing is not masculine, or that singing in public is uncouth, or that artists are irresponsible, or the actors are immoral, are all factors that may operate both consciously and unconsciously to inhibit the full expression of feelings in these areas. Also, the unwillingness to display oneself in front of others, as in public singing, is a major deterrent to free expression. To the degree that these inhibitions exist, self-realization is curtailed. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14
When an atmosphere of mutual exploration of creative expression can be established, wherein the whole group is attempting to support the creative efforts of each, remarkable progress can be made. Frequently, expressing the unexpressible provides such a boost in self-confidence that an individual may permanently increase one’s repertoire of modes of expression. Many of us have developed long fuses to or anger. We have learned to wait until later, probably wen we are no longer with the person, to be aware that we are angry. However, as we become more able to accept these feelings and more confident about expressing them, the fuse becomes shorter. Dealing with anger right aware will save us the wear and tear of carrying it around and will give both parties a chance to react while the situation is fresh. If married couple, for example, could follow the biblical suggestion not to let the Sun set on their anger, it would be a good thing. On the other hand, if, for example, bedtime became a time to search through their experiences of the day looking for outstanding irritations, it might quickly become a ritual to help them avoid intimacy. There are probably more fun ways of ending most days. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14
It is tricky to suggest that we express anger without being condemning, for there is a subtlety here that also defies description. Word used do not always seem to be a safe criteria. Some couples, for example, can in moments of anger call each other all kinds of names and come out of it feeling refreshed and neither condemned nor unloved. Others can be much more controlled in their choice of words and yet carry the feeling that they are condemning each other as worthless. And all of us have probably seen unsophisticated, but affectionate, mothers who in a moment of exasperation could give a child a swat on the rear and say, “Get out of here, you stupid no-goodnik, and let me get my work down,” without raising any question in the child’s mind about being loved. Sarcasm is a frequently used, indirect expression of anger that carries the feeling of condemnation since it implies contempt for the other person. Suppose, for example, that wife Anne replies sarcastically when her husband Stan says to her, “I am just so tired of the way things are between us that I sometimes feel like packing up and moving out.” Her reply is, “That is just fine. You pack your precious belongings and get out, because I just could not care less!” Anne’s response would be difficult for stand to deal with creatively even if he did not become very upset by the contempt in Anne’s comment. For by being sarcastic Anne managed to protect herself by concealing all of her feelings except the hostility. She has not allowed him to see that it does matter very much to her, as it undoubtedly does, whether he stays with her or leaves. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14
One principle which arises in our discussion of form is the transforming of one’s self which occurs in the creation of beauty. In all our creativity, we destroy and rebuild the World, and at the same time we inevitably rebuild and reform ourselves. We do this not at all in the sense of the tragedy of The Great Gatsby, who only changed the externals, such as his wardrobe, his accent, his bank account. We do it rather by grasping a deeper level of the form in the Universe which is also in our own selves. We see the scene before us in our imagination, and that means to some extent we see our own selves. This is a very curious paradox but it is present in all creative persons. Often the creative persons in their work see the perspective of a lifetime endeavor, are themselves creating a cosmos of their own. It is as though each mind is progressively unfolding itself as one goes through life. The creative individual is the one who not only attempts to make some order out of one’s music or art but to make some order in one’s own life. A continual searching for one’s forms occurs in art, and this can be automatically a search for one’s own integrity. A clear example is the life of Beethoven. He has a horrendous childhood, but his biographers relate that his creative genius was related to precisely these ordeals he suffered. His father was constantly inebriated, his mother returned to Heaven when he was young, and he had to take charge of the whole family at the age of eighteen. He never married though he passionately wanted to. However, he could create fantastic music! #RandolphHarris 8 of 14
There is no point in Beethoven’s life, where a marked development or transformation in musical styles takes place which is also not the point where an equal spiritual development and musical style go hand in hand. The transformation of the other is also the transformation of ourselves. Sometimes this transformation may not be good in the eyes of the artists’ contemporary World. Such was the situation with Rembrandt. When he was a young man his paintings were sold on all sides; he was then what we call an outstanding success. However, as he grew older and more profound, the tragic experiences in his life—the death of his children, the death of his wife—caused his paintings to take on a more somber and profound quality and made them less saleable to his fellow Hollanders. His self-portraits reflect this: each one looks more tragic than the one before it. His popularity as a painter waned, for he would not toady to the younger generation that was coming into vogue with the glossier and more readily saleable productions. He followed undeviatingly the path of his own genius. These later creative contributions make him now recognized as the greatest painter of his age. He died in sorrow and in poverty. The people in that day considered Rembrandt a failure. We now recognize him as one of the greatest painters of all time precisely because the transformation of himself and his art went hand and hand. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14
There is another question the relation between creativity and values. Certainly values have a great deal to do with psychotherapy, but they may seem to have very little to do with art or beauty. The studies of creative people indicate that the creative persons, so far as values go, are amoral, not immoral. They are not concerned with the generally conformist mortal rules that most of us are brought up with. At the same time—and perhaps because of this freedom from conventional morality—creative persons reveal another kind of ethics. It is not rules learned by rote but rather it is integrity itself. It is not marriage licenses on paper but authenticity of the relationship. It is not rules of health but reverence for nature and reverence for the human body. The artist seeks to overthrow existing values…to sow strife and ferment, so that by the emotional release those who are dead may be restored to life. Then I run wit joy to the great and imperfect ones, their confusion nourishes me, their stuttering is like divine music to my ears. As part of an art exhibit in New York, a wrecked car was dragged to the corner of a park in front of the building which housed my office. This still life was an entry in a show going on inside the building, but was obviously too large to drag indoors. The artist had draped a cow’s intestines over the seats. The conservative people living in the neighborhood were incensed and called the police, and in a couple of hours the wreck was hauled away. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14
However, the artists were simply trying to cry out, in as forceful a language as they could find, “This is what your technology is doing to you—take in our message!” A great deal of modern art could be captioned under the cry, “Wake up, humanity! Be alive! Look at this World in front of you!” This is restoring the emotionally dead, resuscitating the feelingless robot, the mechanical condition into which we have been forced by adjusting to a hyper-technological civilization. There is, on a deeper level, a very powerful relationship between beauty and ethical values. Beauty is that form in which everything is in harmony; and is that not also a definition of ethics? A final consideration, and perhaps the most important, is that art can dispense grace. Art is part of mortal’s quest for grace. Art and the beauty which it reflects enable us to integrate ourselves. We can make a synthesis between what Dr. Freud called primary and the secondary processes. The function of art can also be described by the term revelation. Art is a constant revealing of beauty as well as truth in a sense parallel to science but in the quite different form. Art produces new knowledge, new forms, often catastrophic in its endeavor to awaken people. The revelation in art comes as an immediate and unique experience. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14
We look at a picture and it immediately reveals a new Universe, a new form of experience. This is even true of a picture we have seen hundred of times. The Miro lithograph hanging in my living room brings me a new experience almost every time I look at it. The World is something different from what I had assumed. There is a grace that comes in such moments; a new depth of experience in ourselves is awakened. When persons say a particular piece of music carries them into another World, they are testifying to the revelation that is in this music. Beethoven himself once remarked, “Whoever understand my music will henceforth be free of the misery of the World.” Grace comes as a gift. It is something we do not ask for and cannot command. Indeed, we do not know the new revelation even exists until it opens itself to us. We were living in a narrow World; now, with the grace that comes in art, we suddenly find ourselves in a new World we did not know was there. I recall once, on leaving an exhibit of Hans Hofmann’s work, with the words singing in my mind like a Hallelujah chorus, “If a human being has the courage to paint such paintings, life surely has meaning!” It is the reverse of Dostoyevsky’s sentence in the Brothers Karamazou, “If God is dead, everything is permitted.” If such beauty exists and gives us it grace, then life must be ultimately good. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14
Creativity gives us a grace in the sense that it is a balm for our anxiety and a relief from our alienation. It is grace by virtue of its power to reconcile us to our deepest selves, to lead us to our own depths where primary and secondary functions are unified. Here is the right brain and the left brain working together in seeing the wholeness of our World. And thus my painting and the creative sketching—indeed, everyone’s creative acts, whatever they may be—make constructive form out of the apparent formlessness of our lives. Since the commandment “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God” is laid upon us so imperatively, it is to be inferred that the love in question is not only the love a soul can give or refuse when God comes in person to take the hand of his future bride, but also a love preceding this visit, for a permanent obligation is implied. This previous love cannot have God for its object, since God is not present to the soul and has never yet been so. It must then have another object. Yet it is destined to become the love of God. We can call it the indirect or implicit love of God. This holds good even when the object of such love bears the name of God, for we can then say either that the name is wrongly applied or that the use of it is permissible only on account of the development bound to follow later. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14
The implicit love of God can have only three immediate objects, the only three things here below in which God is really though secretly present. These are religious ceremonies, the beauty of the World, and our neighbor. Accordingly there are three loves. To these three loves friendship should perhaps be added; strictly speaking it is distinct from the love of our neighbor. These indirect loves have a virtue that is exactly and rigorously equivalent. It depends on circumstances, temperament, and vocation which is the first to enter the soul; one or other of them is dominant during the period of preparation. It is not necessarily the same one for the whole of this period. It is probably that in most cases the period of preparation does not draw toward its end, the soul is not ready to receive the personal visit of its Master, unless it has in it all three indirect loves to a high degree. The combination of these loves constitutes the love of God in the form best suited to the preparatory period, that is to say a veiled form. When the love of God in the full sense of the word wells up in the soul, they do not disappear; they become infinitely stronger and all loves taken together make only a single love. The veiled form of love necessarily come first however and often reigns alone in the soul for a very long time. Perhaps, with a great many people, it may continue to do so till death. Veiled love can reach a very high degree of purity and power. At the moment when it touches the soul, each of the forms that such love may take has the virtue of a sacrament. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14
The Stars in the Heavens Sing a Music if Only We Had the Ears to Hear
We do have legends. We had a goddess. However, now is not the time for all those things. You need not believe all I have seen. What I do have to give you is a vision. I think a vision is stronger than an illusion. And the vision is that we can exist as powerful beings without hurting anyone who is good and kind. Let us explore the human mind as it engages in the creative act. This capacity to create—which we all have, though in varying degrees—is essentially the ability to find form in chaos, to create form where there is only formlessness. That is what leads us to beauty, for beauty is that form. Beauty reveals a form in the Universe—the harmony of the spheres, as Kepler called it. It is a form which is present in the circling of the planets. It is a form which is felt in the curves and balance of our own bodies. And it is present especially in the way we see the World, for we form and reform the World in the very act of perceiving it. The imagination to do this is one of the elements that make us human beings. Since our assumption is that the chief source of joy is the realization and use of one’s resources, it follows that the failure to use these resources leads to a lack of joy. Setting aside for the moment differences in emotional reactions, this assumption maintains that the master of any skill enjoys one’s area of expertness more than if one were not a master. A good skier enjoys skiing more than one would if one could not ski well, for instance. Similarly for a violinist, a taster, a knowledgeable person, a god typist, a health person, a fine athlete and so on. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
The more of one’s abilities an individual has developed and can use, the more pleasure one feel within oneself. When you want to be better than you are, joy awaits you. The concept of creativity is the most adequate one to express the notion of joy through the optimal development of personal functioning. Creativity implies not only the use of one’s capacities, but also includes going beyond them into previously unexplored areas. For is the essential nature of a thing as distinguished from the matter in which it is embodied. We recall Plato’s ideas of the essences in Heaven. These he rightly calls forms. Form is a pattern, an image and an order given to what would otherwise simply be chaos. Form is the nonmaterial structure of our loves, on the basis of which we live and on which we base our own particular character. We recall the studies of especially creative people that were made by Frank Barron. Dr. Barron showed his cards—cards with many different drawings and paintings on them—to creative people and their counterparts, people who were not especially creative, asking them to pick out the cards that liked best. The latter group chose the orderly cards; they liked things to be clear, understandable, unclutter. However, the creative people chose the chaotic cards. The most striking thing about the creative people was this taste for chaos. They preferred the scribbles where there was no form whatever; they found a challenge in the chaos. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
Creative people yearned to make form out of it, to make of the chaos about them an order which is their own. This is the purpose of their existence. This is the fundamental creative aspect of all human beings whether they are especially talented or not. The human imagination is shown in these strivings—which may sometimes be passion and sometimes simply curiosity—to put things into form. It is what Einstein did when he proclaimed that matter and energy are related in one formula, E= mc2. Our human mind is continuously doing that, obviously on a lesser scale. Before one is able to use one’s experience in unusual, productive, and satisfying (that is, creative) ways, one must acquire a repertoire of experiences. One must be open to experience, able to perceive and sense one’s environment, and be aware of one’s own internal feelings. After being acquired, the experiential elements within a person must be related to each other. An individual must have the ability to associate two or more experiences which can lead to a useful product when they are joined. Many products may be generated in the course f creative activity, but the evaluation as to which of these satisfy the situation, and which are worthless, is essential. This phase distinguishes the bizarre from the creative, and the productive from the mundane. After the generation of an original idea or product, detailed work is usually in order. An enduring contribution involves much underlying effort. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
The above steps can be approached not only at the conscious and unconscious levels, but also through a discussion of the role of emotional blocks. The conscious attempts to enhance an individual’s capacity in the acquisition area is institutionalized as scholarship—the quest for more knowledge to add to an individual’s repertoire. Science, the method of determining the worth of a given statement, is the social institution aimed at the evaluation area. And conscious attempts to increase expression are institutionalized as the arts, where a variety of modes of communication are developed. However, methods of enhancement of the creative process that occur on a more unconscious level have not been institutionalized. It is for this level that a variety of techniques are being developed which give promise of widening mortal’s horizons by affording one new access to one’s self, and providing means for capitalizing on one’s latent internal abilities. When I am sitting in an audience listening to a talk, I find myself making lines in my imagination from a light in the ceiling to the other lights, moving my head a little bit so that such and such will be a complete triangle, or such and such will make a perfect circle. What I happen to do it with, lines and objects, other people do with music, forming various tunes in their minds. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
If you are aware, I think you will find you are always subconsciously in the process of breaking something down in your imagination and putting it back together again. We do that in our ordinary reverie and we do it especially at night in our dreams. Odd things are put together—Socrates, say, is talking to the people we met yesterday. Dreams do fantastic things which seem absurd until, in thinking about the dream the next day, we find the key. All of this a making of form. The clearest aspect of form is obviously in architecture. The Parthenon is a dignified, majestic triumph of form. The Cathedral of Chartres is likewise magnificent form. Mont Saint Michel shows a combination of human and natural forms. The triangular for of the Earth, coming up out of the water in a small mountain, is built upon by human ingenuity with the triangles of Gothic architecture. One church is used as the foundation of the ones that succeeding generations erected, until finally, with the triangular peak of the last cathedral, the spire stretches up, again in triangular form, into Heaven itself. We scarcely need to add that the triangle is the central symbol of medieval culture, shown not only in Gothic architecture but also in philosophy and theology in the triangle of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The form dictates the content. We select, say, a sonnet to write or a drama to construct, because the content we have in mind can best be formed out of chaos and put into the particular forms of sonnet or drama or whatever form seems to fit. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
There is a danger in erasing chaos too easily, for it then takes away one’s stimulation. Several years ago, I took the training for transcendental meditation. I have always been interested in meditating and have done it more or less on my own. When I finished that course my mantra was given to me, I was instructed to meditate twenty minutes in the morning as soon as I woke up and twenty minutes at four or five o’clock in the afternoon. So I, being an obedient soul, started out doing that. I found that after meditating I would go down to my desk in my studio and sit there to write. And nothing would come. Everything was so peaceful, so harmonious; I was blissed out. And I had to realize through harsh experience that the secret of being a writer is to go to your desk with your mind fully of chaos, full of formlessness—formlessness of the night before, formlessness which threatens you, changes you. The essence of a writer is that out of this chaos, through struggle, or joy, or grief—through trying a dozen or perhaps a hundred ways in rewriting—one finally gets one’s ideas into some kind of form. So I learned I had to meditate with discretion in the early morning in order not to lose the chaos, and to choose those times when I had finished the day’s work and was ready to be blissed out with pleasure. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
Acquiring knowledge and experience means feeding input to a human system. A person must have some material to work with in order to be creative and to become the person one can be. One must have information and experiences that have been felt and integrated into the individual’s soul. Ability to learn is a prerequisite for the acquisition of information, but there is a different requirement for acquiring experience. Increased awareness of one’s environment through better developed senses greatly increases the material with which a person can create. Sherlock Holmes, identifying a client’s region of origin from the smell of his tobacco; a physician, perceiving a slight shadow in an X-ray; a psychologist, observing recurrent head scratching of a patient; a musician, noting the rhythm of a train’s wheels—all these observations enhance the chances for effective behavior within the respective situations. In addition to acquiring information and developing the senses, there is another area through which experiential elements come. Awareness of feelings and emotions allows experience to be felt and integrated into the self. The person who is open to experience, and able to feel and appreciate, has more experiential elements than the constricted, denying individual who cannot allow oneself to feel deeply. #RandolphHrris 7 of 19
A drama is a drama because of its form, a ballet is a dance because of its form. The Flamenco (baile) is a highly-expressive, Spanish dance because of its form. Rock and roll is a rebellion against the classical form in music, and has its own form which is shown in its discords and in its special beat. The ancient Greek philosophers set out to discover the original substance in the Universe out of which all things were made. Was it air? or ether? or water? Heraclitus proposed fire. However, each philosopher got trapped because the next question was, How did this element get its substance? Then came Pythagoras to cut the Gordian knot. He held that the fundamental element was no substance at a, but was really the form in which everything in nature is related to everything else. Form is nonmaterial, and has its existence only as things are related to other things. When I hold up a finger on each hand, you may say that there is no relation between the two. However, you would be wrong: there is the distance between them. If I put up another finger and draw an imaginary line among them, I would have a triangle. Or I get a cone, or a rectangle, or a circle. And soon I have an abstract drawing which is pure form! #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
It is not by accident that Pythagoras was the inventor not only of a great deal of mathematics (everyone studies the Pythagorean theorem in geometry in high school), but also the inventor of a number of important principles in the theory of music. The tone of a violin is a vibration of a strong of a certain length. Pythagoras made the famous discover that if their lengths are in a simple numerical ratio, vibrating strings under equal tension sound together in harmony. So we have laws of harmony and discord, all derivative from form. To Pythagoras is attributed the lyrical line, “The stars in the Heavens sing a music if only we had the ears to hear.” Now in Pythagoras, art and mathematics were identified. This was a beautiful prediction of what was to come in our modern physics. The older concern with molecules and electron has changed; our physicists are ready to admit that they do not really know what those are. “Something unknown is doing we do not know what,” says Sir Arthur Eddington. What they do know is the relationship of one form to another; they recognize the form. They know if the form is such and such, then we have such and such a physical object. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
The prototype of this significance of form is in the fascinating story of the myth of creation in the beginning of Genesis. “The Earth was without form and void,” it goes. This is a fantastic condition: when I go down to my studio, it is the way I hope to be each morning. “And God separated the light from the darkness.” Those mornings when this happened in my studio, when insights come so fast I can scarcely catch them with my pen, are great mornings! And the legend goes on, “Then God separated the sea from the land and the sky from the sea.” Now separating, diving, relating—these are all words of form. All the verbs in this fascinating legend are verbs relating to form. We read nothing about molecules or electrons, but only that God divides, separates, God forms. Creativity is an emulating of God in that we destroy the cosmos and then build it up again in ways that we hope will be closer to our heart’s desire. We hope and strive for the form in the rhythm which we have in our hearts, and in our heartbeat and the rhythm in our breathing. The chaos about us is continually being reformed, only to be destroyed again by history, by nature, and by human perversity. “My photographs are a picture of the chaos in the World,” remarked the artist-photographer Alfred Stieglitz, “and of my relationship to that chaos. My prints show the World’s constant upsetting of mortal’s equilibrium, and their eternal battle to reestablish it.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
However, the works of art living on year after year are vital proof before our eyes that reconstruction of form, of order, is eternally going on in our World. It is in this sense that the artists are the source of our conscience and our moral courage. Facilitation or inhibition of a person’s ability to be open and sensitive to knowledge, sensation, and feeling can occur on the various levels of awareness or consciousness. On a conscious level, sensitivity is a function of life-background, including exposure to traditional teaching methods for acquiring information about and contact with life experiences. Unconsciously, a person’s ability not merely to learn, but also to sense and feel, is very much connected to one’s emotional development. Emotional blocks to learning are many. Many childhood experiences prevent a person from being able to learn, because of anxiety, fear, conflict, or other immobilizing emotions engendered, for example, when parental competition with a child makes test-taking so full of conflict (the child may possibly excel the parents) that the student cannot study or retain; unresolved emotional problems also block off or distort perceptions, and blunt the ability to sense experience accurately as, for instance, when fear of criticism makes a person hear critical words where none exist. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
One of the first steps many of us may need to take toward the creative use of anger is to become aware of our anger. As has already been noted, many people develop some degree of numbness to their awareness of anger. Some progress needs to be made in reawakening this awareness before anger can be used creatively. How can this be done? If we can examine the process by which we become deadened to anger, it is often helpful. The key often is possessed in our relationship with our parents. One young man, Monsieur Lestat de Lioncourt, had particular difficulty in being aware of and expressing anger toward women. When he examined the relationship that had existed between himself and his mother, it became apparent that she had constantly manipulated and controlled Monsieur de Lioncourt’s life in many ways as he was growing up. It would be natural, of course, that he would feel much frustration and anger as a result. However, he remembered that, if he expressed any negative reaction or rebelled against this control in any way, she would react with such hurt and disappointment in him that he would feel very guilty. Gradually, Monsieur de Lioncourt, even as a child, built a psychological defense against this intolerable situation; be no longer felt his anger when she manipulated him. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
It was only as Monsieur de Lioncourt was able to remember many of these events of his life with mother and was able to experience and express some of the anger pent up since childhood that he became capable of realistic and open relationships with women in his adult life. Sometimes when we allow ourselves to experience long-buried anger and resentment from our childhood, it results in strained relationships between ourselves and our parents, if they are still alive. However, when they boil to the surface, it does usually seem necessary and desirable to deal with these feelings directly; and if the individual can stick with it, a new relationship built on honest reactions and an awareness of our common human failings may emerge from the wreckage of the old, unsatisfying, and unrealistic relationship. Problems of feeling, either emotion-flattening or hyperexcitation, are usually tied to very complex emotional problems. For example, people often cannot allow themselves to feel deep affection of others because of their fear of rejection is too great. Inhibitions of this kind can occur whether the individual is experiencing inanimate objects, ideas, other people, or one’s self. In all these cases, the individual’s openness to experience is seriously curtailed, and the repertoire of elements to enter potentially into one’s creative behavior is sharply diminished. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
The job of helping a person become more open and enriched is therefore threefold: removal of emotional blocks; development of an awareness of one’s self and one’s feelings; and development of a sensitivity and perceptiveness about other people and the World around one. Also, if we can act on or express whatever awareness of anger we do have, it will often help us to awaken to our feelings of anger. To further highlight this illustration, if a person gains the courage to talk about the slight irritations that one feels, the freedom to do this gives one confidence to become aware of more intense feelings. Once the process is started, the relief is so great that anger floods into awareness with increasing ease. Some people who are relatively dead to their anger react almost immediately to anger-producing situations with some physical symptom. Skilled therapists, for example, will often recognize a clenched fist, a tensed body, or a foot making a kicking motion, or a sudden depressed attitude as a probable sign of anger of which the person has not allowed one’s self to be fully aware. Sometimes we can use such symptoms to help ourselves recognize our anger. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
One therapist discovered that when talking to clients, he himself sometimes would very quickly develop a headache. By examining these occasions more closely he discovered that they occurred when unrecognized anger toward the client was building up. Once he had discovered this, he found that when such headaches developed he could examine his feelings and let the anger come into focus where he could deal with it directly. Once the anger was recognized and expressed, the headache would quickly disappear. If we examine the possibility that we may project our feelings of anger onto others, sensitivity to our anger may also be enhanced. All of us have some tendency to read into others the feelings that we are reluctant to recognize and accept in ourselves. If we can face it, very often when we feel that someone dislikes and resents us, we will discover that we resent them. For example, a mother might react very firmly to a child’s outburst against her request that he carry out the trash. She might feel that he carries a resentful grudge about this task, hating her for limiting his freedom to go out and play. In reality he, having had his outburst, may quickly forget the incident. If the mother were able to recognize it in herself, she might discover that she resents him for seemingly limiting her freedom and keeping her trapped in the home. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
Gary James had been in psychotherapy for several month when one day he expressed the idea that his therapist was angry at him. He was asked to play the role of the therapist and express that anger. As he “became” the therapist and talked to a pillow in another chair, which represented himself, Gary James said, “I am angry and impatient with you. I feel like giving you a good kick in the britches so you will get to work and we can get somewhere in therapy!” The therapist then said to him, “Now will you be yourself and try saying the same thing to me.” At first Gary James looked at the therapist in some surprise, then a little gleam of awareness began to appear on his face. “Yeah,” he said, “maybe I am a little angry and impatient with you. You sit there and look wise and do not seem to do a damn thing for me. I think I do feel like giving you a kick in the britches so you will get to work and help me get somewhere in therapy!” After he finished, Gary James’s face lighted up with a grin of pleasure and satisfaction that he had been able to be ware of and express the hitherto unrecognized anger. It was an important step forward for him, and it happened because he was helped to experience his projection. Like many projections, it was based on some truth, also, for the therapist admitted to Gary James the he had felt some impatience toward him, which he had not expressed. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
If we ask ourselves if we are feeling angry at the right people and for the real reasons, it may also help us become aware of our angry. For sometimes we mask from others and from ourselves our real anger by feeling irritation about less threatening things. Sometimes we do this by getting angry at people who are less threatening to us. When we cannot face and deal with our angry at the boss, for example, we may heckle the wife and kids. Or we may nag the wife about leaving dishes in the sink or not keeping the house tidy rather than recognize and deal openly with the fact that we are angry and hurt because she does not express her love for us as much as we would like. To recognize and express this basic anger and hurt would be to reveal our deep need of her and make us feel very vulnerable. Our fear of love makes such an expression of anger seem very risk. It is much safer to be aware only of last night’s dishes! If we are honest, when we become disproportionately angry about things, they must be viewed as relatively inconsequential, it may help to ask ourselves what it is we are really angry about. It seems impossible, but there is a way—a way with which we are familiar. We know quite well in what likeness this tree s made, this tree that has grown within us, this most beautiful tree where the birds of the air come and perch. We know what is the most beautiful of all. No forest bears its equal. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
Sometime still a little more frightful than a gibbet—that is the most beautiful of all trees. It was the seed of this tree that God placed within us, without or knowing what seed it was. If we had known, we should not have said yes at the first moment. It is this tree that has grown within us and has become ineradicable. Only a betrayal could uproot it. When we it a nail with a hammer, the whole of the shock received by the large head of the nail passes into the point without any of it being lost, although it is only a point. If the hammer and the head of the nail were infinitely big it would be just the same. The point of the nail would transmit this infinite shock at the point to which it was applied. Extreme affliction, which means physical pain, distress of soul, and social degradation, all at the same time, is a nail whose point is applied at the very center of the soul, whose head is all necessity spreading throughout space and time. Affliction is a marvel of divine technique. It is a simple and ingenious device which introduces into the soul of a finite creature the immensity of force, blind, brutal, and cold. The infinite distance separating God from the creature is entirely concentrated into one point to pierce the soul in its center. The person to whom such a thing happens has no part in the operation. One struggles like a butterfly pinned alive into an album. However, through all the horror one can continue to want to love. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
There is nothing impossible in wanting to love through pain, no obstacle, one might almost say no difficulty. For the greatest suffering, so long as it does not cause the soul to faint, does not touch the acquiescent part of the soul, consenting to a right direction. It is only necessary to know that love is a direction and not a state of the soul. If one is unaware of this, one falls into despair at the first onslaught of affliction. One whose soul remains ever turned toward God through nail pierces it finds oneself nailed to the very center of the Universe. It is the true center; it is not the middle; it is beyond space and time; it is God. In a dimension that does not belong to space, that is not time, that is indeed quite a different dimension, this nail has pierced cleanly through all creation, through the thickness of the screen separating the soul from God. In this marvelous dimension, the soul, without leaving the place and the instant where the body to which it is united is situated, can cross the totality of space and time and some into the very presence of God. It is at the intersection of creation and its Creator. This point of intersection is the point of the intersection of the arms of the Cross. Saint Paul was perhaps thinking about things of this kind when he said, “That ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; and to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge,” reports Epistle to the Ephesians 3.17-19. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
Living in the Eternal Moment–Tomorrow is Also a Blessed Day So Let Us Do What We Can to Make it Easier One Cannot Wait Around Forever!
I want to thank you for sharing your secrets with us. You have trusted us, and treated us as if we were sinless and kind. You big old great thing, you sure are pretty as an Angel, and you have got plenty charm enough to be a gangster. I have seen every gangster movie ever made three times and I know what I am talking about. They put a little boot black on your hair, you could play Bugsy Siegel. From the foregoing, one might be led to think that the most desirable state is to feel free. This is true, but the situation, as usual, is not so very simple. Very often the feeling of freedom and of power to act is the most desperate of defenses against a deep and totally unconscious sense of powerlessness and constraint. A familiar clinical example is vigorous phallic activity covering an unconscious sense of smallness. The kinds of character defenses that are classified in general as counterphobic go along most frequently with an exaggerated sense of conscious freedom, or euphoria, or power to act at will. This is seen in its most vivid and most pathological form in the manic-depressive psychosis. When the patient is in a manic state, one is perfectly happy, perfectly powerful, and perfectly free—absurdly so, of course, so that one is not surprised to find one a short time later in such a state of stupefaction and despair that one cannot speak or move at al. As in most affect, intensity of the experience is an excellent indicator that the extreme opposite is close to expression. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
May an intense feeling of compulsion and of lack of power be a defense against the achievement of greater freedom of the self? Why, indeed, should freedom of the self be defended against, when it is presumably what all mortals want? Christ having returned to Earth and to the Church he had founded appears and is recognized, for his grace shines among all mortals as in the days of his life. As a crowd gathers in wonderment and love about him, the Grand Inquisitor passes by, and, immediately understanding the situation, orders him arrested. That evening, in the darkness of the dungeon in which Christ is imprisoned, the Grand Inquisitor himself, alone, enters with a light in his hand. He speaks sternly and bitterly to Christ and recalls to him the temptation in the desert, during which the cursed and dread Spirit, the spirit of self-destruction and non-existence had put him the three temptations. These three temptations are to offer Christ something less than freedom; bread, or miracle, or mystery, or authority, but not freedom. For, as the dread Spirit had said, “Thou wouldst go into the World, and Thou art going into the World with empty hands, with some promise of freedom which people in their simplicity and their natural unruliness cannot even understand, which they fear and dread—for nothing has ever been more insupportable for a mortal and a human society than freedom.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
And, in the words of the Grand Inquisitor: I tell Thee that mortals are tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly to whom one can hand over that gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creature is born….Didst Thou forget that mortals prefer peace, and even death, to freedom of choice in the knowledge of good and evil? In place of the rigid ancient law, Thou wouldst have it that mortals must hereafter with free heart decide for oneself what is good and what is evil, having only Thy image before one as one’s guide. However, didst Thou not know that one would at last reject even Thy image and Thy truth, if one is weighed down with the fearful burden of free choice? Is the nature of mortals such that one can reject miracle, and at the great moments of one’s life, the moments of one’s deepest, most agonizing spiritual difficulties, cling only to the free verdict of the heart? Thou didst think too highly of mortals therein, for they are slaves. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
We must ask ourselves what arrangement of the parts of the self might produce the feeling of freedom which Christ is represented as offering to mortal, then we may get an important clue from this passage. Consider this sentence of the Grand Inquisitor: “Didst Thou forget that mortals prefers peace, and even death, to freedom of chose in the knowledge of good and evil?” And, again, “In place of the rigid, ancient law, Thou wouldst have it that mortals must hereafter with free heart decide for oneself what is good and what is evil…” Here is a psychoanalytic sort of interpretation: the knowledge of good and evil refers to conscious knowledge of all the usually unconscious, internalized prohibitions and prescriptions, particularly those that relate to the most primitive and most energy-laden of our drives. Knowledge of good and evil implies the availability to consciousness both of impulses and of the forces that control impulse. It means, further, that the expression or renunciation of impulse would become a matter of conscious decision, made by the whole self, rather than a matter of the triumph of blind forces of either desire or restraint. Another way of putting this, in terms of such theoretical constructs as psychoanalysis provides, would be to say that, in freedom, the ego would no longer relate to the superego as a child to a punishing parent, but that the superego would become entirely integrated with the ego. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
The feeling of constraint, then, may be said to derive from a fearful and hating orientation of the ego to the superego—that is, from an arrangement of parts of the self that would be the inner equivalent of being constrained from without, by alien and powerful forces. Such an arrangement is learned, of course; it occurs as a result of the experience of having been constrained by others, chiefly the parents. Still, it is evident that some such specialization of parts of the self is the normal and desirable state of affairs. If discipline is orderly, rational, and loving, it will not lead to severe repression and to consequent domination by unconscious forces. The feeling of freedom and the absence of inner, irrational compulsions will then be determined chiefly by the extent to which the superego is rational and conscious, and impulse is gratified or renounced in accordance with the decision of the ego. The existence of internalized irrational parents is thus a prime source of the feeling of compulsion, and indeed may actually restrict ability to respond adaptively—recall the phrase “the rigid, ancient law.” If, however, the ego itself were to become the source of ethical prescriptions, having assimilated the old function of the superego, the source of the prescription would no longer be unconscious and the feeling of compulsion would vanish. This is the aim of the psychoanalytically-based psychotherapies. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
It should be noted that the production of a relatively rational superego by loving and rational parents is still something very short of that hypothetically possible if rarely realized state in which superego and ego are one. The client-centered therapy whose theory and practice is particularly impressive in its emphasis on the unconditional self-worth of the client and the total acceptance by the therapist of the fundamental goodness of the client. In terms of this analysis, such therapy would offer the client a loving and rational parent to internalize, but it would not have the further goal—and one that is rarely achieved in any case—of making available to consciousness once again the most primitive of impulses and the most powerful and most repressed of prohibitions. However, this latter is something of a digression. Let us return to the defensive character of compulsion, and to one of the most important of the arguments made against Christ by the Grand Inquisitor—that “nothing has ever been insupportable for mortal and a human society than freedom.” Why should the majority of people find such an arrangement of the self an intolerable one? Largely, one must answer, because of infantile fears—or, more accurately, because of fears that were very great during the period of early childhood, and that have persisted with undiminished intensity in the unconscious. Such fears were, to begin with, fears of outer forces of great power—literally, I believe, fear that one would be destroyed for expressing impulses unrestrained. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
In civilized society (which, unhappily, a baby does not realize it has been born into) such fears might be called, from our civilized, adult viewpoint, unrealistic. Most parents really do not mean their children any harm. The baby, however, is not yet civilized, and he invests the outer forces with every bit as much intensity of desire, and rage when frustrated, as he himself possess. Thus he has good reason, when he is angry or insatiate, to fear the giants with whom he interacts and on whom he depends. He fears them because of the strength of his own impulses, which he experiences fully, and because the boundary between inner and outer is still fluid, so that he is not always certain who is enraged. In the adult, such fears persist, first of all, as fear of impulses from within, and, secondly, as fear of destruction from the internalized parents. It would be easy to say, “unrealistic fears,” but the fact is that persons kill themselves for their own impulses—that is, they deal out the most extreme punishment to themselves for a crime they were impelled to commit, though the crime they do in fact commit is murder of the self rather than of the other. Where impulses are so fearsome and the forces of restraint so ferocious, it seems safer not to be free—or, to put the matter in other terms, it seems safer not to know anything about the situation of the self. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
However, here one is reminded of a most significant quotation from the New Testament—“one who would save one’s life shall lose it…” The moral message of Christ, insofar as it is embodied in this question, consisted exactly of the advocacy of the wisdom of self-forgetfulness, which objectively in psychoanalytic terms means the establishment of a relationship of harmony and love between the ego and the superego, or the dissolution of the wall that separates what we are from what we think we should be. I cannot develop the thesis in detail here, but it seems to me that the New Testament is best understood in terms of the relationship between personified conscious knowledge—the Word made flesh, alive and changing, taking its chances, open to beauty and decay—and the ancient, rigid law and lawgiver, fixed, abstract, decided. The constantly recurring imagery of the Son and the Father suggests that the specific content of the conflict and the disharmony which Christ sough to resolve. To recapitulate: freedom, or conscious knowledge of the primitive forces of id and superego, is greatly feared, even in adulthood, because of the persistence in the unconscious of the earliest and most intense of fears. Thus the prospect of freedom is intolerable. One further aspect should be touched upon. The condition of freedom, or complete consciousness, would entail complete assumption of responsibility for one’s self. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
One could not claim to know not what one did, for the impulse in all its vulnerable state would be experienced. The intention would be fully realized and, if consented to, accomplished in full knowledge. However, if one follows the dictates of an internalized parent and is thereby somewhat less free to act according to one’s deepest inclinations, one is at the same time not wholly responsible for the consequences. The parent is responsible, and the ego is still a child. Thus the individual may avoid judging for one’s self what is right and what is wrong. One is not weighed down by the fearful burden of free choice, and one is consequently actually less free. For it remains to be said that the truth shall make one free. The essential point of this analysis is that objective freedom, in the sense of response variability, is at a maximum when a genuine feeling of freedom exists, and that such a feeling of freedom occurs in the presence of a broadened consciousness both of impulse and of ethical prescriptions. So far as the postulate of determinism is concerned (for instance, absolute predictability in principle), it should be quite evident that such a postulate is irrelevant to both the objective and the subjective meanings of freedom. If one assumes a closed system of knowledge and a perfect description of the given state of affairs, then all events are absolutely predictable, including the actions of human beings of quite different degrees of objective freedom and of subjective sense of freedom. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
The acceptance of determinism as a working hypothesis is basic to psychology as a science. When it become more than that, as it so often does, and is elevated from modus vivendi to sentiment and then to principle for one’s whole life, it is surely itself a form of self-imposed restriction upon imagination and the capacity to create. For myself, I believe there is a recalcitrant oddness at the heart of things—I had almost written at the heart of hearts—and I am pleased when my mind wanders off to think no more of this or that. There are many experiences which jar us out of the quantitative, routine treadmill of time, but chief among them is the thought of dying. A modern English author describes how he endeavored for years to write by following conventional methods. “I thought I could write to formula,” as he put it; and during the war, he continued, “I found out why I had not been published before. When we were all thinking we might die the next day, I decided to write what I wanted.” When we point out, as actually happened, that his writing then became successful, some persons might interpret the illustration with a conventional success moral, “If you wish to be successful write what you want.” However, such a moral, of course, entirely misses the point. The author’s previous need to write according to external standards and for ulterior purposes—success being the chief one in our day—was exactly what was blocking him in tapping his qualities and powers as a writer. And it was precisely this need that he gave up at the time of facing death. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
If one may die tomorrow, why knock one’s self out trying to fit this standard or that formula? Assuming tat success and rewards might be achieved by writing to formula—which is a toss-up in any case—one may not be around long enough anyway to enjoy the rewards, so why not treat one’s self to the joy at the moment of writing according to one’s own integrity? The possibility of death jars us loose from the treadmill of time because it so vividly reminds us that we do not go on endlessly. It shocks us into taking the present seriously. Thinking that tomorrow is also a blessed day no longer comforts and excuses; one cannot wait around forever. It makes more crucial for us the fact that whole we are not dead at the moment, we some time will be: so why not choose something at least interesting in the meantime? The so-call cynical poet of the Old Testament, Ecclesiastes, is in fact very realistic at this point. Amid his recurrent refrain, “all is vanity,” he points out that the wise man will not wait around for future rewards and punishments. “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do” Ecclesiastes continues, “do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor substance, nor knowledge, nor wisdom in the grave whiter thou goest.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
A mortal should act under the form of eternity. For I understand Eternity to be existence itself. For the existence of a thing, such as an eternal truth cannot explained by duration or time. The existence of something depends on its essence—and idea which is not as abstruse as it sounds at first glance. To apply it to one’s self, a person acts under the form of eternity to the extent that one’s actions arise from one’s own essential center. In example of the author we talked about previously, such an act was his decision to write, not according to external changing fads, which rise and fall from week to week, but from the inward, unique, original character which makes one an individual. Living in the eternal moment does not mean mere intensity of living (though self-awareness always adds some intensity to one’s experience): nor does it mean living by an absolute doctrine or covenant, religious or otherwise, or by a moral rule. It means, rather, making one’s decision in freedom and responsibility, in self-awareness and in accord with one’s own unique character as a person. If a person is to be creative in one’s use of anger, two basic conditions need to prevail. In the first place one needs to be aware of anger and accept is as a valued part of the self. Secondly, one needs to be able to express one’s anger directly and responsibility. If these conditions can be met in some degree, various values can be achieved. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
For one thing, this creative use of anger will mean less punishment of ourselves. We will not be so likely, for example, to suffer physical illness. It is unquestionably true that many instances of heart trouble, high blood pressure, and ulcers (to name the most obvious problems) are related to the suppression of anger. When a person is filled with chronic unexpressed hostility (of which one may or may not be aware), the body is overworked by being in an almost constant state of preparation for emergency in which the heart works harder, the blood pressure rises, and digestive processes slow down. Eventually the body is likely to suffer permanent physical damage under this strain. If the person is able to deal with anger as it arises and get it out of one’s system, however, the natural rhythm of the body can be maintained as the reactions caused by the anger quickly subside. Since depression also often results from turning anger in on oneself, creative expression of anger can frequently eliminate this punishment we inflect on ourselves. Kelley, a college girl, made an almost successful suicide attempt by taking a large number of sleeping tablets. In the weeks that followed, with the encouragement of a therapist, she began to express some of the anger toward her parents that she had previously felt she dare not talk about. Kelley’s depression quickly subsided, assisted in part by the fact that her parents accepted her feelings much better than she had thought they would. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
The creative expression of anger not only helps us to be less self-destructive, but it also makes for more effective relationships with others. Many of us, because of early teaching, go through our lives assuming the opposite. If we become angry, we are likely to feel guilty because we feel we have destroyed something between ourselves and the other person. So instead of improving ourselves in the skill of expressing anger, we try to become better at controlling and suppressing it. How can getting mad at others improve our relationship with them? Well, for one thing, when we express anger, we are more emotionally honest in our relationships. Too often we do not really know each other, even when we desire to be intimate. Our encounters with each other have a shadowy, unreal quality, because there are so many gaps in our communication. We hide many of our feelings. Often the feelings we hide is anger. And when we do not express our anger to those who matter to us, we do both ourselves and them a disservice. Our lack of candor perpetuates the psychological distance that exists in the relationship and cheats us of satisfying experiences of intimacy. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
A cunning part of Satan’s strategy is to dissociate anger from agency, making us believe that we are victims of an emotion that we cannot control. One couple discovered after fifteen years of marriage that the wife had harbored resentment about a pet peeve for most of that time. Whenever they went out for and evening or weekend with other couple, she thought he did not pay their share of the costs. However, she never expressed her anger. Finally, when it did come out in a group-therapy session, she discovered that all the time he had been contributing their share or more in a quiet, unassuming way. If she had been more emotionally honest and had been able to express her anger years earlier, this particular could would not have impaired their relationship. It begins to become clear, then, that to show anger is often an expression of love and concern, a way of saying, “You matter to me.” On a community level, for example, significant social reforms have usually occurred in situations where someone has expressed anger about existing conditions, saying in effect to some segment of society, “You are hurting yourself and all of us by what you are doing.” We learn in the proclamation on the family that the family is central to the Creator’s plan and that husband and wife have a solemn responsibility to love and care for each other and a sacred duty to rear their children in love and righteousness. The family is also Satan’s primary target. He waging war on the family. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
One of his schemes is the subtle and cunning way he has of sneaking behind enemy lines and entering our homes and lines. Satan often damages and destroys families within the walls of their own homes. His strategy is to stir up anger between family members. Satan is the father of contention, and he stirs up the hearts of people with anger, one with another. To lose one’s temper is an interesting choice of words that has become a widely used idiom. To lose something implies not meaning to, accidental, involuntary, not responsible—careless perhaps but not responsible. “He made me made.” This is another phrase we hear, also implying lack of control or agency. This is a myth that must be debunked. No one makes us mad. Others do not make us angry. There is no force involved. Becoming angry is a conscious choice, a decision; therefore, we can make the choice not to become angry. We choose! Choice and accountability are inseparable principles. May the Lord bless you and inspire you to walk without anger. “One who is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and one that rules one’s spirit than one that takes a city,” reports Proverbs 16.32. It is when we become angry that we get into trouble. Most of the inmates of our prisons are there because they did something when they were angry. “Be not hasty in thy spirit to be angry: for anger rests in the heart of the unfortunate,” reports Ecclesiastes 7.9. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Where Will You Spend Eternity–Traces of Our Earthly Being Will Outlast Aeons as Every Creative Act Has its Eternal Aspect?
A loneliness slowly began to penetrate down through his throat and into his quivering heart. Give me a little time. If they still exist, if they have parented a colony, if they are anywhere in the wide World, I know those who will know where they are—without a question. It is right that you love your country. There is only one thing greater than our devotion to our country. That is our love of the City of God. Never forget the words of our father Augustine, “The citizens of the City of God fight with spiritual weapons—love and prayer and truth.” God will have mercy upon us. He will grant strength to these people who fight to save us! If we do not pray as we ought, as long as we keep God in our hearts, he will forgive us. We believe in God’s power of truth and love, we have given our lives to him. And we love our nation and our families. Christ will have mercy! He will forgive the sin upon our souls. Christ will forgive! Christ has suffered like us, he became a man to know our sins, and does know our hearts. He too did love a land—he taught us about the lilies of the field! And Christ did love his family and his friends as we love ours! Christ will take us into his care. Ah, he will forgive us, blessed Christ! When we are free, it will feel as though we are being lifted up by everlasting arms…the walls of the chapel will be erased and we will merge with our prayer, united wit Spirit. #RandolphHarris 1 of 10
As we merge with our prayers, there will be a great burst of light, and the radiance and harmony expands and takes the whole Earth and the sky…all is harmony and beauty and resplendence…one will feel an ecstasy, the dizziness within one will become joyful and at the same moment one will be filled with a vast peacefulness. The everlasting arms hold one, but one needs no support for all is a brilliant light. We will breath the air of infinity, all about us is Being in a great exaltation. Is this everlasting beauty the glimpse into the City of God, a new city where all is peace? A thing of beauty is a joy forever: It is loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness; but still will keep a bower quiet for us, and a sleep full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing. Each of us sees the World as an individual, alone, caught up in a vast maelstrom; but by our culture we learn to communicate with our fellow human beings. Poetry, dancing, painting and other arts are all ways of communicating. We not only see the World but the World conforms to our way of seeing it. This is certainly true in the field of art. The great contribution of art is that, in our centuries on this planet, we have been enabled to share, to give to each other, to communicate, to love the World and, in the broad sense, to love each other. This will sound strange to those who think the World is a cold mass of whirling star dust, but not to those who can form their World in communication by whatever beauty they can see and experience. #RandolphHarris 2 of 10
The anxiety in creating—which we see most clearly in persons like Giacometti or Michelangelo or Beethoven—is overcome by playing. This playing (which may also be hard work) is our human way of overcoming the dualism—finite and infinite—in producing a work of art. The art unites both of these. The World becomes lonely no more, for one experiences being an integral part of it. It used to be asked, in view of the invention and progress of photography, whether painting would not be superseded or at least made only an innocent and unnecessary pastime. The question is absurd. It rests on a radical misunderstanding of painting, the function of which is not to make a record of the external World but to share some special conception of life and the World which the painter experiences. Sometimes artist and people who share essays never know how they will turn out. It is just a conception of the World and will not let go of the individual until one responds. It gives one a sense of participating in the Universe. One experiences a kind of ecstasy, great or small as it may be. And when the product is finished, the producer looks at it and feels a kind of surprise because a view of reality was communicated to them, and they formed it on the medium to communicate it to their friends. The most one can hope for is that you like their production, that it gives you some joy, and that it tells you something about the World as he or she communicates with it. #RandolphHarris 3 of 10
It is by no means as easy as it may look to live in the immediate present. For it requires a high degree of awareness of one’s self as an experiencing “I.” The less one is conscious of oneself as the one who acts, that is, the more unfree and automatic one is, the less one will be aware of the immediate present. As one person who was trying to avoid boredom in a meaningless (well, not job is meaningless because they provide a life and security) routine job described it, “I work as though I were someone else, not myself.” In such situations we feel as though we were a million miles away from what we are doing, acting as though in a daze or as though in a dream or half asleep or as though there were a wall between one’s self and the present. However, the more awareness one has—that is, the more one experiences oneself as the acting, directing agent in what one is doing—the more alive one will be and the more responsive to the present moment. Like self-awareness itself, this experiencing of the reality of the present can be cultivated. It is often useful to ask one’s self, “What do I experience at this very moment?” Or “Where am I—what is most significant to me emotionally—at this given moment?” To confront the reality of the present moment often produced anxiety. On the most basic level, this anxiety is a kind of vague experience of being exposed and vulnerable; it is the feeling of being face to face with some important reality before which one cannot flinch and from which one cannot retreat or hide. #RandolphHarris 4 of 10
The reality of confronting the present moment also produces anxiety because it is like the feeling one might have in coming suddenly face to face with a person one loved and admired: one is confronted with an intense relationship one must react to, do something about. It is an intensity of experience, this immediate and direct confronting of the reality of the moment, similar to intense creative activity, and it carries with it the same susceptibility and creative anxiety as well as the same joy. The more obvious reason why confronting the present produces anxiety is that it raises the question of decisions and responsibility. One cannot do much about the past, and very little about the distant future—how pleasant, then, to dream about them! How free from bother, how relieved from troublesome thoughts about what one has to do with one’s life! The mortal who has quarreled with one’s wife can talk of one’s mother with relief, but to consider the quarrel with one’s wife sooner or later entails the question of what one proposes to do about it? It is easier to dream of “when I get married” than to face the question, “Why do I not do something about my social life now?”; simpler to muse of “my future job when I get out of college” than to ask why one’s studies are not more vital at the moment, and what one’s motives for being in college anyway. #RandolphHarris 5 of 10
The most effective way to ensure the value of the future, as we have mentioned, is to confront the present courageously and constructively. For the future is born out of and made by the present. The traces of our Earthly being will outlast aeons. That is to say, every creative act has its eternal aspect. This is not by ecclesiastical fiat, or merely because of the immortality of influence, but because, as we have shown, an essential characteristic of the creative act done in human consciousness is that it is not limited by quantitative time. No one values a painting according to how long it took to paint it or how big it is: should we judge our actions by more superficial standards than a painting? This brings us to the deteriorated forms of the religious idea of eternal life. The phrase eternal life is popularly used to imply endless time, as though eternity meant going on year after year limitlessly. One sees this view implied in the question frequently painted by some persons—with what motives Heaven only knows—on the dies f buildings to challenge the passer-by on the highways, “Where will you spent eternity?” When you think about it, this is an odd question. “Spend” implies a given quantity—if you spend half your money, you have only half left; and could one spend half or two-thirds of eternity? Such a view of eternity is not only repugnant psychologically—what a boring prospect, that one spends year after year endlessly!—but it is also absurd logically and unsound theologically. #RandolphHarris 6 of 10
Eternity is not a given quantity of time: it transcends time. Eternity is the qualitative significance of time. One does not have to identify the experience of listening to music with the theological meaning of eternity to realize that in music—or in love, or in any work which proceeds from one’s inner integrity—that the eternal is a way of relating to life, not a successions of tomorrows. Hence Jesus proclaimed, “the Kingdom of Heaven is within you.” That is to say, your experience of eternity will be found in how you relate to each given moment—or not at all. Eternity comes into the present moment as a quality of existence. The deteriorated uses of the term eternal have caused many intelligent people to avoid it. And that has been unfortunate, for it has meant omitting an important side of human experience, and constricting our views psychologically and philosophically. The problem of time may well be the fundamental problem of philosophy. An instant in time possesses value to the extent to which it is united to eternity and provides an issue out of the issuelessness of time—only in virtue of being an atom of eternity. The present moment is thus not limited from one point on the clock to another. It is always full of instants, always ready to open, to be produced. One has only to try the experiment of looking deeply within oneself, let us say, trailing almost any random idea, and one will find, so rich is a moment of consciousness in the human mind, that associations and new ideas beckon in every direction. #RandolphHarris 7 of 10
Or take a dream—it occurred in just one flash of consciousness as the alarm went off, yet it might take many minutes for you to tell all it pictured. To be sure, one picks and chooses. One does not live out one’s dreams or fantasies—except temporarily, if one is composing music, or in a psychoanalytic session, or constructing some plan in fantasy for one’s work. And even then one keeps a clear awareness of the relation of the beckoning possibilities which are being uncovered to actual reality. This the moment always has its finite side, to use a philosophical term, which the mature person never forgets. However, the moment also always has its infinite side, it always beckons with new possibilities which are being uncovered to actual reality. Thus the moment also always has infinite side, it always beckons with new possibilities which are being uncovered to actual reality. Thus the moment always has its finite side, to use a philosophical term, which the mature person never forgets. However, the moment also always has its infinite side, it always beckons with new possibilities. Time for the human being is not a corridor; it is a continual opening out. The mechanism of necessity can be transposed to any level while still remaining true to itself. It is the same in the World of pure matter, in the terrestrial World, among nations, and in souls. Seen from our present standpoint, and in human perspective, it is quite blind. #RandolphHarris 8 of 10
If, however, we transport our hearts beyond ourselves, beyond the Universe, beyond space and time to where our Father dwells, and if from there we behold this mechanism, it appears quite different. What seemed to be necessity becomes obedience. Matter is entirely passive and in consequence entirely obedient to God’s will. It is a perfect model for us. There cannot be any being other than God and that which obeys God. On account of its perfect obedience, matter deserves to be loved by those who love its Master, in the same way as a needle, handled by the beloved wife he has lost, is cherished by a lover. The beauty of the World gives us an intimation of its claim to be a place in our heart. In the beauty of the World brute necessity becomes an object of love. What is more beautiful than the action of gravity on the fugitive folds of the sea wave, or on the almost eternal folds of the mountains? The sea is not less beautiful in our eyes because we know that sometimes ships are wrecked by it. On the contrary, this adds to its beauty. If it altered the moment of its waves to spare a boat, it would be a creature gifted with discernment and choice and not this fluid, perfectly obedient to every external pressure. It is this perfect obedience that constitutes the sea’s beauty. All the horrors produced in the World are like the folds imposed upon the ways by gravity. That is why they contain an element of beauty. #RandolphHarris 9 of 10
Mortals can never escape from obedience to God. A creature cannot but obey. The only choice given to mortals, as intelligent and free creatures, is to desire obedience or not to desire it. If a mortal does not desire it, one obeys nevertheless, perpetually, inasmuch as one is a thing subject to mechanical necessity. If one desires it, one is still subject to mechanical necessity, but a new necessity is added to it, a necessity constituted by laws belonging to supernatural things. Certain actions become impossible for one; others are done by one’s agency, sometimes almost in spite of oneself. When we have the feeling that on some occasion we have disobeyed God, it simply means that for a time we have ceased to desire obedience. Of course it must be understood that, where everything else is equal, a mortal does not perform the same actions if one gives one’s consent to obedience as if one does not; just as a plant, where everything ese is equal, does not grow in the same way in the light as in the dark. The plant does not have any control or choice in the matter of its own growth. As for us, we are like plants that have the one choice of being in or out of the light. “I say unto you, can you look up to God at that day with a pure heart and clean hands? I say unto you can you look up, having the image of God engraven upon your countenances?” reports Alma 5.19. #RandolphHarris 10 of 10
God Created through Love and for Love—God Did Not Create Anything Except Love itself, and the Means to Love
The Sun was setting behind us, and the grass at our feet glowed alight with the reflection from the orange sky. There was a faint tinkle of bells echoing up this ridge. The evening breeze which touched my skin with coolness brought the perfume of wisteria. The is Heavenly peace. How abundantly God has spread his beauty here! The trivial operations of the heart are burnt away in quietude. Burnt away in humility that I could feel this, know this, and contain it within my prudent soul. How you could stay innocent so long is a miracle to me. No doubt tat is what the love of books does for you. Some of us are made to marry a faith—just as the colonel here has married a flag. Spiritual forces are stronger than firearms. The citizens of the City of God use spiritual weapons—prayer and love and truth. The City of God is Heaven, but its splendor comes into the City of the World in the truth and love which finally will conquer even the sword. It is a greater joy to aspire to the City of God, to live in the beauty which is greater than words can describe, and to converse with the eternal spirits of our Fathers and to love the truth of God. There is not real affliction unless the event that has seized and uprooted a life attacks it, directly or indirectly, in all its parts, social, psychological, and physical. The social factor is essential. There is not really affliction unless there is social degradation or the fear of it in some form or another. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
The great enigma of human life is not suffering but affliction. However, it is surprising that God should have given affliction the power to seize the very souls of the innocent and to take possession of them as their sovereign Lord. At the very best, one who is branded by affliction will keep only half of one’s soul. Affliction makes God appear to be absent for a time, more absent than light in the utter darkness of a cell. What is terrible is that if, in this darkness where there is nothing to love, the soul ceases to love, God’s absence becomes final. The soul has to go on loving in the emptiness, or at least to go on wanting to love, though it may only be with an infinitesimal part of itself. Then, one day, God will come to show himself to this soul and to reveal the beauty of the World to it, as in the case of Job. However, if the soul stops loving it falls, even in this life, into something almost equivalent to Hell. That is why those who plunge mortals into affliction before they are prepared to receive it kill their souls. On the other hand, in a time such as ours, where affliction is hanging over us all, help given to souls is effective only if it goes far enough really to prepare them for affliction. That is no small thing. Affliction hardens and discourages us because, like a red hot iron, it stamps the soul to its very depths with the scorn, the disgust, and even the self-hatred and sense of guilt and defilement that crime logically should produce but does not. Evil dwells in the hear of the criminal without being felt there. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Evil is felt in the heart of the mortal who is afflicted and innocent. Everything happens as though the state of soul suitable for criminals had been separated from crime and attached to affliction; and it even seems to be in proportion to the innocence of those who are afflicted. If Job cries out that he is innocent in such despairing accents, it is because he himself is beginning not to believe in it; it is because his soul within him is taking the side of his friends. He implores God himself to bear witness, because he no longer hears the testimony of his own conscience; it is no longer anything but an abstract, lifeless memory for him. Our senses attach all the scorn, all the revulsion, all the hatred that our reason attaches to crime, to affliction. Expect for those whose whole soul is inhabited by Christ, everybody despises the afflicted to some extent, although practically no one is conscious of it. This law of sensibility also holds good with regard to ourselves. In the case of someone in affliction, all the scorn, revulsion, and hatred are turned inward. They penetrate to the center of the soul and from there color the whole Universe with their poisoned light. Supernatural love, if it has survived, can prevent this second result from coming about, but not the first. The first is of the very essence of affliction; there is no affliction without it. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
All neurotic problems are manifested in the structure and functioning of the body. This thesis implies that by proper training in what to observe, a great deal about a person may be discerned merely from looking at the individual. There is no neurotic problem which does not manifest itself in ever aspect of the individual’s function. Because we express our personalities or character in every action and in every attitude it becomes possible to determine character traits from such diverse expressions as handwriting, the walk of the person and so forth. Most important, however, is the physical appearance at rest in movement. No words are so clear as the language of body expression once one has learned to read it. [Each part of the body is the repository of some difficulties.] The legs and feet are the foundation and support of the ego structure. However, they have other functions. It is through our legs and our feet that we keep contact with one invariable reality in our lives, the Earth or the ground. We speak of a people as being Earthy to mean that they have a good sense of reality. The contrary, to be up in the air, denotes a lack of contact with reality. The lack of contact with the feet and the ground is related to another common symptom, falling anxiety. This symptom is manifested in dreams of falling, in fear of heights, and in the fear of falling in love. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Where there is a basic insecurity in the lower half of the body, the individual compensates by holding on with arms and eyes to objective reality. One may question why I include fear of falling in love with symptoms of basic insecurity. Of course the very expression to fall in love relates this phenomena to the others, but we also know that to fall in love is a form of ego surrender. All forms of falling anxiety translate the fear of loss of ego control. It is a drenching storm inside. Another effect of affliction is, little by little, to make the soul its accomplice, by injecting a poison of inertia into it. In anyone who has suffered affliction for a long enough time there is a complicity with regard to one’s own affliction. This complicity impedes all the efforts one might make to improve one’s lot; it goes so far as to prevent one from seeking a way of deliverance, sometimes even to the point of preventing one from wishing for deliverance. Then one is established in affliction, and people might think one was satisfied. Further, this complicity may even induce one to shun the means of deliverance. In such cases it veils itself with excuses which are often ridiculous. Even a person who has come through one’s affliction will still have something left in one compelling one to plunge into it again, if it has bitten deeply and forever into the substance of one’s soul. It is as though affliction had established itself in one like a parasite and were directing one to suit its own purposes. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
When we study the expression of the face as a measure of the character and of the personality we are on more familiar ground. Our attention should be directed first to the eyes. It must be with some reason that the eyes are regarded as the mirrors of the soul. Some eyes are bright and sparkle, some shine like stars, others are dull and many are vacant. Of course, the expression changes. We seek, therefore, for the typical look. Some eyes are sad, others are angry; some are cold and hard, others are soft and appealing. Of greater significance are those unconscious expressions which are frozen into the countenance, so much so that we take them for granted as part of the personality. Sometimes these impulses triumph over all the movements of the soul toward happiness. If the affliction has been ended as a result of some kindness, it may take the form of hatred for the benefactor; such is the cause of certain apparently inexplicable acts of savage ingratitude. It is sometimes easy to deliver an unhappy person from one’s present distress, but it is difficult to set one free from one’s part affliction. Only God can do it. And even the grace of God itself cannot cure irremediably wounded nature here below. One can only accept the existence of affliction by considering it at a distance. God created through love and for love. God did not create anything except love itself, and the means to love. God created love in all its forms. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
God created beings capable of love from all possible distance, the infinite distance. This infinite distance between God and God, this supreme tearing apart, this agony beyond all others, this marvel of love is life. Noting can be further from God than that which has been made accursed. This tearing apart, over which supreme love places the bond of supreme union, echoes perpetually across the Universe in the midst of the silence, like two notes, separate yet melting into one, like pure and heart-rending harmony. This is the Word of God. The whole creation is nothing but its vibration. When human music in its greatest purity pierces our soul, this is what we hear through it. When we have learned to hear the silence, this is what we grasp more distinctly through it. Those who preserve in love hear this note from the very lowest depths into which affliction has thrust them. From that moment they can no longer have any doubt. Sin is not a distance, it is a turning of our gaze in the wrong direction. It is true that there is a mysterious connection between this distance and an original disobedience. From the beginning, we are told, humanity turned its gaze away from God and walked in the wrong direction for as far as it could go. That was because it could walk them. As for us, we are nailed down to the spot, only free to choose which way we look, ruled by necessity. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
A blind mechanism, headless of degrees of spiritual perfection, continually tosses people about and throws some of them at the very foot of the Cross. It rests with them to keep or not to keep their eyes turned toward God through all the jolting. It does not mean that God’s Providence is lacking. It is in his Providence that God has willed that necessity should be like a blind mechanism. If the mechanism were not blind there would not be any affliction. Affliction is anonymous before all things; it deprives its victims of their personality and makes them into things. It is indifferent; and it is the coldness of this indifference—a metallic coldness—that freezes all those it touches right to the depths of their souls. They will never find warmth again. They will never believe any more that they are anyone. Have you not seen people who show a perpetual expression of pain on their face? Are these people in pain? Certainly! Depth analysis of the unconscious would reveal that these expressions portray repressed feelings—surprise, disgust or pain. Affliction would not have this power without the element of chance contained by it. Those who are persecuted for their faith and are aware of the fact are not afflicted, although they have to suffer. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
People only fall into a state of affliction if suffering or fear fills the soul to the point of making it forget the cause of the persecution. The martyrs who entered the arena, singing as they went face wild beasts, were not afflicted. Christ was afflicted. He did not die like a martyr. He died more like a common criminal, confused with thieves, only a little more ridiculous. For affliction is ridiculous. Only blind necessity can throw mortals to the extreme point of distance, right next to the Cross. Human crime, which is the cause of most affliction, is part blind necessity, because criminals do not know what they are doing. We have already seen that we are frightened of the anger within us, because we have been taught to fear it and to consider its direct expression to be evil and dangerous. We have also seen that chronic suppression of anger does damage to ourselves and to our relationships with others. It is time now to look at the beneficial side in order to see that anger is a natural and legitimate part of our lives and that it has creative uses in our relationships with others. Perhaps the naturalness of anger can best be observed in people who have not yet learned to suppress their feelings. In its most pure form, anger is a reaction to frustration of desire. Anger is often coupled with other emotions. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
If a person is threatened by a bully one will feel frightened, but one is also likely to feel angry, too. If the fear is strong enough to keep person from attacking, one may feel a helpless rage. One’s fear tells the individual to run and one’s anger says to attack. Momentarily, at least, one is immobilized. Although adult situations are usually more subtle and sophisticated than this, similar feelings are more common. Hurt, too, is often accompanied by anger. If the bully attacks and bloodies someone’s nose, there will be anger as well as pain. If the threat is not removed the person will also fear further hurt. Most often the pain that is experienced will have been inflicted psychologically rather than by physical injury. Certain automatic bodily reactions are the natural accompaniment of the emotion of anger. These probably differ very little from those that occur when we become frightened. These changes in the body serve the practical purpose of preparing the individual to meet the emergency situation at hand. What happens to Barron Schutz when he becomes angry? If Barron’s stomach is at work, that digestive process slows to a virtual halt. The blood supply in those regions and in the skin is sharply reduced and this supply rushes to the muscles and to the brain, where the body assumes it will be needed. His heart beats faster and blood pressure rises. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Meanwhile, the adrenal glands have pumped adrenaline into the blood stream, which causes certain chemical changes to take place. Sugar is released into the blood stream, and more oxygen becomes available, increasing potential output energy. Changes also occur to provide for more rapid clotting of the blood than usual if a physical wound is suffered. In a dramatic way the body has prepared itself for action. If Barron decides to fight, his body is ready. If he decided to run away, his body is ready for that, too! And so Barron probably really can run faster if he is being chased across a meadow by rampaging bull than he could if his emotions, fear in this case, were not creating changes in the body. So it is natural that on occasion we become angry and our bodies react with natural and automatic changes. It is in relation to people we care for, however, that we often find it most difficult to accept our anger as natural and legitimate. Granted, we say to ourselves, “that it is acceptable for me to get mad at people I may not care for or do not know, but surely it is not right for me to get angry with someone I love.” However, this reasoning we use on ourselves does not hold up under close examination. It persists only because we have been infected with the teaching the love and anger cannot coexist. It rests on the assumption: “If you are angry at me, you must not love me.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
In reality the opposite is probably more nearly correct; “If you are never angry at me, you must not live me.” For anger is inevitable in relationships that matter to us. If someone whom we care for is sarcastic to us, the sarcasm cuts deeper. If one we love hurts us, the pain is more acute. And if we are frustrated in our desires by a person we love, the loss is more deeply felt. The likelihood of an angry reaction is therefore increased. Furthermore, the more emotionally intimate we are with a person the more certain it is that anger producing situations will arise. Intimacy includes the expression of needs and desires, and these are never completely parallel for any two people. So our desires will often clash with those of a person we love, and one or both of us will be frustrated. Some anger is bound to occur as a result of frustration. If, as sometimes happens, a man and wife claim never to have had an argument or a dispute during their marriage, they must be: newly married; concealing their issues; very insensitive to their feelings; or very emotionally distant from each other. The first thing necessary for a constructive dealing with time is to earn to live in the reality of the present moment. For psychologically speaking, this present moment is all we have. The past and future have meaning because they are part of the present: a past event has existence now because you are thinking of it at this present moment, or because it influences you so that you, as a living being in the present, are that much different. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
The future has reality because one can bring it into one’s mind in the present. Past was the present at one time, and the future will be the present at some coming moment. To try to live in the when of the future or the then of the past always involves an artificiality, a separating one’s self from reality; for in actuality, one exists in the present. The past has meaning as it lights up the present, and the future as it makes the present richer. When a person looks directly into oneself, all one is aware of is one’s instant of consciousness at that particular moment of the present. It is this instant of consciousness which is most real, and must not be fled from. God produces himself and knows himself perfectly, just as we in our miserable fashion make and know objects outside ourselves. However, before all things, God is love. Before all things God loves himself. This love, this friendship of God, is the Trinity. Between the terms united by this relation of divine love there is more than nearness; there is infinite nearness of identity. However, resulting from the Creation, the Incarnation, and the Passion, there is also infinite distance. The totality of space and the totality of time, interposing their immensity, put an infinite distance between God and God. “God knows all these things; and it suffice me to know that this is the case—that there is a time appointed that all shall raise from the dead. Now there must needs be a space betwixt the time of death and the time of resurrection,” reports Alma 40.5-6. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
Lovers or friends desire two things. The one is to love each other so much that they enter into each other and only make one being. The other is to love each other so much that, with half the globe between them, their union will not be diminished in the slightest degree. All that mortals vainly desire here below is perfectly realized in God. We have all those impossible desires within us a mark of our destination, and they are good for us when we no longer hope to accomplish them. The love between God and God, which in itself is God, is this bond of double virtue: the bond that unites two beings so closely that they are no longer distinguishable and really form a single unity and the bond that stretches across distance and triumphs over infinite separation. The unity of God, wherein all plurality disappears, and the abandonment, wherein Christ believes he is left while never ceasing to love his Father perfectly, these are two forms expressing the divine virtue of the same Love, the Love that is God himself. God is so essentially love that the unity, which in a sense is his actual definition, is pure effect of love. Moreover, corresponding to the infinite virtue of unification belonging to this love, there is the infinite separation over which it triumphs, which is the whole creation spread throughout the totality of space and time, made of mechanically harsh matter and interposes between Christ and his Father. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
As for us mortals, our misery gives us the infinitely precious privilege of sharing in this distance placed between the Son and his Father. This distance is only separation, however, for those who love. For those who love, separation, although painful, is a good, because it is love. Even the distress of the abandoned Christ is good. There cannot be a greater good for us on Earth than to share in it. God can never be perfectly present to us here below on account of our flesh. However, he can be almost perfectly absent from us in extreme affliction. This is the only possibility of perfection for us on Earth. That is why the Cross is our only hope. “No forest bears such a tree, with such blossoms, such foliage, and such fruit.” This Universe where we are living, and of which we form a tiny particle, is the distance put by Love between God and God. We are a point in this distance. Space, time, and the mechanism that governs matter are the distance. Everything we call evil is only this mechanism. God has provided that when his grace penetrates to the very center of a mortal and from there illuminates all his being, he is able to walk on the water without violating any of the laws of nature. When, however, a mortal turns away from God, one simply gives oneself up to the law of gravity. Then one thinks that one can decide and choose, but one is only a thing, a stone that falls. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
If we examine human society and souls closely and with real attention, we see that wherever the virtue of supernatural light is absent, everything is obedient to mechanical laws as blind and as exact as the laws of gravitation. To know this is profitable and necessary. Those whom we call criminals are only tiles blown off a roof by the wind and falling at random. Their only fault is the initial choice by which they became such tiles. In most relatively efficient neuroses, the feeling of lack of freedom is suppressed almost all the time, just as the feeling of unhappiness and the sense of loneliness is suppressed. It is commonly true that patients who seek psychotherapy do so at just that moment not because of their neurosis, but because of a temporary breakdown of their usual defenses. Thus the psychoneurotic patient at the beginning of therapy is depressed, anxious, and confused, overwhelmed by feelings that may be characterized in general as psychic impotence. The inability to act is usually caused by a conflict of forces of almost equal strength, a conflict which cannot be dealt with by whatever defenses the patient had previously been wont to employ. The very urgency of the conflict most powerfully brings into consciousness the feeling of inability to act. This painful feeling brings home to the patient one’s need for help, and thus it is usually the initial motivating force in psychotherapy. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
Psychoanalysis proper cannot begin until the crisis that brought the patient to analysis has subsided. In brief psychotherapy, only too often the patient is discharged as improved at the point where the crisis is successfully passed, and where if the relationship were to continue the neurosis itself would have to be analyzed (which would require above all an analysis of the transference and the countertransference). The aim of the superficial therapies, whether explicitly recognized or not, is to re-establish, on a somewhat more efficient basis, the same response patterns that have been the patient’s chief life achievement in relation to one’s self. Improvement in this sort of psychotherapy may therefore at times be a sad thing, for the patent’s initial agitated state might have served as the lever to life one out of one’s neurotic pattern. Such agitation is often the first stirring of a desire for a feeling of freedom after years of unconscious bondage. It should be said here that the feeling of lack of freedom, when it comes to consciousness under such circumstances, may be taken as a genuine expression, or a correct perception, of real lack of freedom in the objective sense of the term. In the individual’s situation—and it must be remembered that the structure of one’s self is part of one’s situation—in that situation, one’s response repertoire is indeed exceedingly limited, so that one is actually not very free. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
The important point is that the feeling of being compelled arises from within, and that it is not proportionate to what we have called potential freedom; rather, it is a function of what we have defined above as actual freedom. To recall those definitions: potential freedom is the total repertoire of responses available to the individual in the whole range of situations in which one might be placed; actual freedom is given by the response repertoire in a particular situation. One of the most poignant aspects of neurotic suffering is the realization by the frustrated individual that objectively it is perfectly within one’s capacities for one to bring about the conditions for which one yearns. One is potentially free—but actually not, because of the structure of the self, and because one one’s self is one’s situation. It is, of course, not freedom of will that one lacks, objectively, one no longer experiences a sense of inner constraint. The increasing demand for psychotherapy is, I believe, due to the fact that it offers, or is seen as offering, greater freedom for the self. It is because of the nature of this inducement, so dear to humankind, that psychotherapy may be, at its worst, one of the baser forms of commerce, and at its best, one of the most heartening of human relationships. “Now, concerning the state of the soul between death and the resurrection—Behold, it has been made known unto me by an Angel, that the spirits of all mortals, as soon as they are departed from this mortal body, yea, the spirits of all mortals, whether they be good or evil, are taken home to that God who gave them life,” reports Alma 40.11. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
Splendor comes into the City of the World in the Truth and Love Which Finally Will Conquer Even the Sword
This secret has to be kept by you from anyone else. If you keep it from everybody else, then in time I can come to be with them. I mean the rest of the family. I can know them for a little while. The way Reese know everyone at Cresleigh Rocklin Trails. I have always loved that place. Let us talk in the garden. When one deals with values and with action in the realm of values is a question that has been with us throughout this series, whether one can really separate psychology from philosophy. If we place the philosophic positions of other people in the context of objectively discernible fact and consider philosophy of life as a psychological attribute of the persons whom we study, what we have been trying to say is that scientific inquiry is possible. This skating on thin ice, let us admit again, and the ice gets thinner and thinner as we get closer to the great issues. Towards the end of his life (in 1932), Dr. Freud responded to a letter from Albert Einstein, in a correspondence initiated by the ill-destined League of Nations, in which Einstein asked him to state his views as to the possibility of the mitigation of human aggression to a degree sufficient to allow Homo sapiens to survive the immediate crisis and to evolve towards a World community in which peace on Earth would be secured. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
Dr. Freud refers here to the evolution of culture, whose most characteristic features are, in his view, the strengthening of the intellect and the internalization of aggressive impulses. Individuals at the forefront of the cultural evolution exhibit these traits to the highest degree, ergo, we pacifists. Looking at history, it is apparent that the cultural process working within the individual will avail us little unless the culture is able to produce supra-individual institutions that will be decisive in institutionalizing human violence and curbing it by law. The most substantial finding is that sane attitudes are related in the character structure of egalitarian values, interest, and behavior patterns, in males as well as in females. They are also related negatively to Extraversion (traits that indicate how outgoing, energetic, and social people are) and positively to Psychasthenia (psychological disorder characterized by phobias, obsession, compulsions, or excessive anxiety). All three characteristics suggest a lessening of aggression directed outward and more control over its external expression through sublimation and a turning inward. At the same time, sane attitudes go along with curiosity, a higher level of self-development, independence, vitality, originality, creativity, motivation to achieve, and visual ability. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
Higher scorers on the scale show greater preference for complexity, are more original in the responses to the consequences of life, produce better poetic metaphors, are more esthetically sensitive, and score higher on a scale designed to measure the disposition towards originality. All in all, then, it does seem that pacifistic tendencies are related to personality development and are found most prominently in persons whose inner life and creativity are more highly developed and who reflect the general direction of evolution of culture. To be sure, every individual’s private problems and anxiety play into this concern about the clock running out in our World. As everyone knows it is easy enough to use the insecurity of the age as an excuse for one’s own neurosis. We can sigh, “The times are out of joint,” and then excuse ourselves from inquiring whether something may not well be severely out of joint within ourselves. However, quite apart from the fact that our neurotic tendencies love to masquerade behind the imposing phase, “catastrophic World situation,” there remains a wide margin in which the issue raised by the questioners is entirely realistic and sound. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
Our World will continue in its stage of anxiety for some time to come: and everyone who does not choose to play ostrich must confront that fact and learn to live with insecurity. However, it does no good to avoid such questions by some stoical answers like, “We were born in this age and we would better make the most of it.” Let us, rather, inquire into mortal’s relation to time—actually a very curious relation—to see whether we may gain insights which help us to make our time rather than our enemy. We have seen that one of the unique characteristic of mortals is that they can stand outside their present time and imagine themselves ahead in the future or back in the past. This power to look before and after is part of mortal’s ability to be conscious of themselves. Plants and animals live by quantitative time: an hour, a week or a year past, and the tree has another ring on its trunk. However, it is a quite different thing for human beings: mortals are the time-surmounting mammal. The key characteristic which distinguishes mortals from all other living things is their time-binding capacity. The capacity to use the fruits of past labors and experiences as intellectual or spiritual capital for developments in the present. The capacity of human beings to conduct their lives in the ever increasing light of inherited wisdom. The capacity in virtue of which mortals are at once the heritor of the by-gone ages and the trustee of posterity. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
Psychologically and spiritually, mortals do not live by the clock alone. Their time, rather, depends on the significance of the event. Yesterday, let us say, a young man spent an hour traveling on the subway each way to his work, eight hours on his relatively fascinating job, ten minutes after work talking to a young lady he has recently fallen in love with and dreams of marrying, and two hours in the evening at an advance placement adult career education class. Today he remembers noting of the two hours on the subway—it was an entirely empty experience, and he, as is the practice of many people, had closed his eyes and tried to sleep, that is to suspend time until the trip was over. The eight hours on the job made only a little impression on him, as it was mostly routine assignments that day; of the evening class he can recall a little more. However, the ten minutes with the young lady occupies him most of all. He had four dreams that night—one about his class, and three about the young lady. That is to say, ten minutes with the young lady takes up more room space than twenty hours in the rest of the day. Psychological time is not the sheer passage of time as such, but the meaning of the experience, that is, what is significant for the person’s hopes, anxiety, growth. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
Or take a thirty-year-old adult’s memories of his childhood. During the year he was five, thousands of events happened to him. However, now at thirty he can recall only three or four—the day when he went to play with his friend and their grandmother took them to get two scoops each of rainbow sherbet at Lucky, and his ice cream fell as soon as they walked outside the store, or the instant when he saw his new diamond back bicycle under the Christmas tree, or the night his father come home with a cheese cake and he thought it was a pie. This is all he can recall but, interestingly enough, he remembers this handful of events which occurred twenty-five years ago more vividly than ninety-nine percent of the events that occurred just yesterday. Memory is not just the imprint of the past time upon us; it is the keeper of what is meaningful for our deepest hopes and fears. As such, memory is another evidence that we have flexible and creative relation to time, the guiding principle being not the clock but the qualitive significance of our experiences. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
This does not mean that quantitative time can be ignored: we have simply pointed out that we do not live by such time alone. Mortals are always part-and-parcel of the natural World, involved in nature at every point; we will rarely live over one hundred and fifty years, at this point in life, no matter what we think about it. We age, or we get tired if we work too long at a stretch, and we cannot escape the necessity of being realistic about the clock and calendar. Mortals die like every other form of life. However, they are the being who knows it and can foresee their death. By being aware of time, we can control and use it in certain ways. The free will-determinism problem has the quality of a paradox because it opposes a poignant and universal human experience (freedom of choice) to a most impelling assumption (that there is a reason for everything), and a choice must be made between them. It appears, of course, that is one admits that all events are absolutely predictable, then one must admit that what one is about to do a moment from now can be stated with certainty; but if this is so, then one cannot do otherwise. And if there is some possible action that one cannot do, then one is not free. One is, in fact, compelled. To deny such compulsion, it appears, one must assert that in principle not all events are predictable. Thus one seems to regain freedom to act differently a moment from now, in spite of all the psychological responses-catalogues that can ever be invented. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
In the absence of predictability, what obtains is not freedom, but chance. Free will versus determinism is a mistake opposition. There is chance versus predictability, and there is freedom versus constraint, but freedom and predictability belong to two different Universes of discourse. In the nature of the case they cannot be brought into any relationship with one another, save the mistake opposition with which classical philosophy has so long concerned itself. There is no solution to the problem of free will versus determinism; there is possible, and proper, only resolution. Freedom is a personal feeling. It is a range of possible adaptive responses available to organisms in all situation in which they may find themselves. Freedom generally increases univocally as the response repertoire increases. In a particular situation, it is a function as well of the constraints imposed by the situation. In effect, the situation together with the organism defines the organism’s freedom at any given moment. Thus one may speak of potential freedom and actual freedom, actual freedom being freedom at the moment in a given situation, and potential freedom being some value expressing the relation of the organism’s response repertoire to the population of possible situations in which the organism might be placed. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
Freedom in this sense is worth considerable thought. It can be given such thought by the human brain, the freest of all organizations. It is the happy and unique characteristic of the brain that its manifold possibilities of action may all take place inwardly, and that it may act invisibly. This capacity for inward action is a bother to tyrants and defeats the most valiant efforts at imposing constraints. That is why freedom of thought is an indefeasible natural right. One’s brain is inside one’s own skull, and within that limited space it exercises an utterly amazing potential for varied response. The more a person is able to direct one’s life consciously, the more one can use time for constructive benefits. The more, however, that one is conformist, unfree, undifferentiated, the more, that is, one works not by choice but compulsion, the more one is then the object of quantitative time. One is the servant of the time clock or whistle; one teaches such and such number of classes per week or punches so many rivets per hour, one feels good or bad depending on whether it is Monday and the beginning of a work week or Friday and the end; one gauges one’s rewards or lack of them on the scale of how much time one puts in. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
The more conformist and unfree an individual is, the more time is the master. A particular in instance of freedom (for instance, indefeasible freedom of thought, or its intrinsic solitariness), while it seems most important at times wen forces are hostile to civilization are in the ascendancy, it is a relatively minor and unimportant aspect of the freedom that the development of a complicated nervous system has given mortals. It is safe to say that our potential freedom is unimaginable. A small extension of it may be seen in the most complex of our calculating machines, and a prevision of its scope enlivens the pages of science fiction. The essence of our human freedom is this, that matter has acquired the capacity to work radical modifications in itself. Thus, among its available responses is the ability to act in such a manner as to increase its own flexibility, or deliberately to maximize its own response variability. One of the products of this ability in the human case is the invention and cultivation of psychotherapy, which provides a unique meeting ground of the objectivity and subjective meanings of freedom. In any event, in this sense of freedom, as the range of possible adaptive responses, freedom is a characteristic of material organization, and the range of values it takes is infinite. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
Some of the anxiety on the time is running out theme in our day comes from something deeper than the potential of what could happen to the World. For the passage of time in any age has the power to frighten the human being. Many people are caught in the short when they feel time slipping by. Some people had life plans that have been interrupted and will take time. For instance, a man who has been delayed in buying his house might be downtrodden because he wanted his trees to be mature by a certain age. Other people, in general, may feel that time is their archenemy. Our conscious time always confronts us with the question of whether we are alive, growing, or merely trying to ward off being finite beings. When people are afraid of maturing, it is usually because they are not really living. Hence it follows that the best way to meet the anxiety about maturing is to make sure one at the moment is fully alive. However, even more significantly, people are afraid of time because, like being alone, it raises the specter of emptiness, of the frightening void. If our awareness of the passage of time tells us that only that day comes and goes and Winter follows Autumn and that nothing is happening in our life expect hour succeeding hour, one must desensitize oneself or else suffer the painful boredom and emptiness. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
It is interesting that when we are bored, we tend to go to sleep—that is, to blot out consciousness, and become as nearly extinct as possible. Every human being experiences some boredom; a great deal of one’s work, for example, must be gone through more or less by routine; but it becomes unendurable only when it has not been freely chosen or affirmed by the individual as necessary for the attainment of some greater foal. On a not so everyday level, the anticipation of empty time can be a horror for people because they feel that if they had nothing to do, no dates and no regular plans, they would suffer from neurosis or psychosis due to the uncertainty. That is why people develop hobbies, read books and plant gardens, human need something to make their time on this Earth feel meaningful. A good time is usually defined as escaping boredom. As we face hard things in the Lord’s way, may we lift up our heads and rejoice. Sometimes the Lord asks us to do a hard thing, and sometimes our challenges are created by our own or others’ use of agency. The generation gap refers to fundamental differences in experience and in philosophy of life between today’s young men and women and their parents, considered as generations separated in time by twenty or thirty years. It is interesting that some fathers are more concerned with their children thinking they are trendy, instead of them being stuffy. A few of them just want to be seen as the type of dad who drives a sports car. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
Nonetheless, all parents want to instill hope into their children. What a pleasant thing it is when your children are hopeful about their future. Hope in its creative and healthy sense—whether it is hope for religious fulfillment or for a happy marriage or for achievement in one’s profession—can and should be an energizing attitude, the bringing of part of the joy about some future event into the present so that by anticipation, we are more alive and more able to act in the present. Thinking of the past can, of course, have the same escape function as thinking of the future. Whenever a difficult problem appears in the present, one can say, “At least things were better at such and such a time,” and let one’s mind bask in that memory. Indeed, so strong and universal are the tendencies to find comfort in the distant past or future that there are recurrent myths in almost every culture picturing each pole—the Garden of Eden and its variants of the longing for the happier day in a state of childlike innocence, and the myths of paradise ahead in the form of Heaven or the Earthly utopias of those who believe in perpetual, automatic progress. As living in hopes for the future is said to be the usual escape of unsophisticated people, so living in the past may be the common escape of sophisticated persons. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
In therapy, people who live in the past know that it is not always a good idea to flee into hopes of the future rewards in Heaven, but they have learned that it is entirely respectable to talk about the past: for do not one’s basic problems have their roots in early childhood? This truth can then be used as a neat rationalization. For when a person comes to a session after a quarrel with his wife, he can then leap back into talking about childhood and how it affected him, or how he got along with his last girlfriend. This is often easier for him than to confront the immediate question of what caused the quarrel and what are his motives in his present relation with his wife. Fortunately the therapist can generally tell whether the person is using one’s past as an escape (in which case to talk about it will never make any psychological change in him) or as a source of illumination and a release of dynamic for the present. One can be aware of the passage of time because we are so alive in the present moment, not just because we keep ourselves busy to escape time. Sometimes an hour is like a week because it lumbers so slowly and painfully: in the former—being unaware of time because of the heightened aliveness of the moment—an hour is like a week because it gives so much joy and happiness. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
Also, many people complain just because some want to watch a television program that the TV is telling them a vision of how to act, dress, and what to think. While they may be true, the TV also has a way of reinforcing norms, like the law, and it shows you what happens to people who break the law. Some people complain about the television because they think it is inhibiting their control over a person. However, many people read books and seek religion for enlightenment. So, the TV is not telling them how to feel. Recently, something happened in our community and for weeks, I was unable to really put into words how I felt because the situation was also tied to something I experienced. Yet, after a few weeks of reflection, I was able to express what I was feeling. No one could tell me what to think or what to feel because for me the situation was very unique. Sometimes when people are trying to control you and they see you growing and their programming slipping, they will try to confuse you. Face it, some people like TV because they like the action packed programs, or designing, it gives them a level of excitement they are not experiencing in their own lives and probably never will. The citizens of the City of God use spiritual weapons—prayer and live and truth. The City of God is Heaven, but its splendor comes into the City of the World in the truth and love which finally will conquer even the sword. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
A Love of God and Affliction–Be a Person on Whom Nothing is Lost!
You are not going to walk away from here with any answers. Get angry at me. Go ahead. Some night, many years from now, maybe Aaliyah will choose to explain what happened, but for now you have to accept what you have seen. You no longer need to worry about Aaliyah. Aaliyah is on her own. One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained shaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence differently. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application. No account of the Universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness disregarded. How to regard them is the question—for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness. Yet they may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a region though they fail to give a map. At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
First I met Conrad in a hotel in Athens. To say I met him is not quite accurate—I was first attracted by his laugh as he stood near his elevator. I turned to observe him, but my eyes were still blinded by the dazzling light from the street. I had just crossed Constitution Plaza in the heart of Athens, and the midmorning Sun, reflected from the concrete pavement beneath my feet and the ivory-colored Pentelicus marble of the marble of the buildings on all sides of the Plaza, had rendered my eyes almost useless. There is no spot in the World quite so bright as Athens on a July morning. The tends of thousands of beautiful houses, some pink or yellow-tinted, toss the Sunlight back, back, forth and forth like mirrors. Even the mountains lying low around the city like a great horseshoe added their glowing yellow-brown to the warmth, and the endless stretch of blue sky is rarely broken by clouds. The few cypress trees and palms only add to the oppressiveness of the light, for their yellow-green is overpowered until it becomes almost the color of the Sun. Still one cannot resist raising one’s eyes to have a look at the Acropolis rising on its long battlements just a half mile to the left above the Plaza. There the broken columns of the Parthenon stand in wounded dignity against the sky, giving a splendid impression of the colors which make Greece—gold and blue. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Standing for a moment in the lobby of the Hotel Mediterranean Plaza, I blinked to adjust my eyes to the dusky interior. It was then that I heard Conrad laugh. His laughter was full, not raucous like that of most Greek boys, and somewhat humble as befits a boy who lives in hotels, as though he were expecting you to laugh with him. I noticed his long rows of teeth, shining and perfect, and his nice mouth. His face was perfectly chiseled, and his laughter accentuated his cheek bones. His golden hair, brilliant and thick, was brushed back over his head in the pompadour style which used to be so popular among American boys. He must have been about fifteen at the time, but because of his slim build he appeared younger than his age—a kind of man and boy in one. I never did learn the cause of his laughter that morning; I merely looked at him with half a smile and accepted his courtesies as he asked my floor and let me off the elevator with those effusive “sirs” by which the Greeks show politeness. However, I noticed a book opened and turned upside down in his hands, the Dramas of Sophocles. Later as I sat in my room writing, gazing out into the shared patio at the rear of the hotel, I thought how Conrad resembled my own younger brother back in America. Except the reading of Sophocles—I marveled at that. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
It would have surprised me to know then that this laughing boy would be in a few years picking his way through the fir trees of Albanian mountains. One evening, two weeks later, I came across him sitting on a bench in the Plaza, and I heard a story which has remained deeply etched in my memory ever since. I sat down beside him, partly because I was curious to learn more about this boy and partly because I wised to enjoy the refreshing loveliness of the evening. Summers evenings in Athens, when for two hours after Sundown (Sun changing angles in the sky) they sky plays with shades of pink and turquoise, can be as invigorating as the days are stifling. A languid breeze comes up from the Bay of Salamis, loaded with rich fragrance which has been accumulating in the drying, semi-tropical vegetation on the island of Aegina several miles out in the bay. The breeze brings with it an occasional pungent odor from the harbor of the Piraeus. Music seems to carry farther on such an evening, and the sporadic taxi horns did not clash too cacophonously with we could hear Ready Between the Lines by Aaliyah emerging from a restaurant at the far end of the Plaza. I had often sat on this bench, letting myself be lulled by the lazy movement of palm fingers moving in and out of the darkness above my head, then turning to watch the lights come on way up Mt. Lycabettus. I often counted the stars as they sprang out with a brilliance possible only in the transparent atmosphere of Mediterranean countries. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Conrad had been reading a book before the Sun had set, and he answered my question about what he was reading with his irrepressible laugh that accompanied every utterance, humorous or not. “The history, sir of the Persian Wars, sir.” That curious “sir” twice in one sentence! It did seem to me that they overdid their courtesy. “You find it interesting?” “O yes sir, yes sir! One of my ancestors fought at Thermopylae. His name was Argyros, and he was a very brave man.” “You do not believe, Conrad, that the ancient Greeks who fought those Persians were the same race as the modern Greeks, do you?” I baited him. “O yes, yes sir!” he cried earnestly, using the word malista which carries a strong affirmation like our English certainly. “I come from Asia Minor,” he went on so quickly that he stammered, “from Asia Minor, sir, the Ionian Greeks lived there, and they are the descendants directly from the Greeks who fought at Thermopylae.” “How did they get over to Asia Minor?” “The people of the Peloponnesus, sir, migrated to Asian Minor. Our family lived in the Peloponnesus in ancient times. My great ancestors went with the Spartan army under Leonidas to fight at Thermopylae. He was one of the three hundred who stayed to hold the pass for three days so they would have time to fortify Athens. He died there. My father often told me about our ancestor Argyros. Then many years later the Greeks from the Peloponnesus made a colony in Asia Minor.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
Conrad was spouting this history like a religious faith. I knew it was fairly dubious—modern Greeks are mainly Slavic in race, and historians do not know where the glorious races of the ancient Hellenes ended. However, I saw there was no use arguing ethnology with the zealous Conrad, and furthermore I did want to pump him up about himself. Rather than speaking of measured intelligence that is stable for the individual over time because it is defined as the ratio of mental age to chronological age, we shall speak of intelligence as the content of what is intellected and the developing capacities for further intellection. In this sense of the term, intelligence is continuously growing for both the individual and the species; it is meaningful to say that we are more intelligent than we were a few years ago, and that our children will be more intelligent than we are. Something of the sort has indeed been happening in the development of the increasing superiority of mortals over other organisms and their increasing scope in comprehending the World about them and themselves. Although we are on unsure speculative ground in attempting to identify the crucial stages in the evolution of consciousness, we may at any rate guess that Homo sapiens gradually differentiated themselves from the family of Hominidae by acquiring the ability not only to use tools but to use tools to make tools, an accompanying awareness of superior adaptability occurred. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
Conrad went on to tell me about the massacres of 1922. “Almost every Greek in our town was killed. You do not know, sir, about those massacres?” I did know something of the war between Turkey and Greece in 1922, which ended with the terrible battle of Smyrna when the city was brined, and the Greek army with thousands of refugees was driven right into the sea and would have been annihilated, had it not been from the timely assistance of some British warships that picked up those who could swim or get hold of boats. However, evidently Conrad was thinking of something else. “We lived in the town of Merzifoun, way back near the Caucasus. I was a small boy then, but I remember the town well. Almost all the people were Greeks—the only Turks around were government officials. They did not bother us much and we had a happy life. My father used to ride about the country on horseback buying tobacco to sell to American companies. He sometimes took me riding with him on his trips—I would sit on the old horse behind him. There were not many towns in our province, you see, only barren hills and plateaus. When we arrived in a village the men were always glad to see my father. They would take him to the café and sit at the tables in the street and drink Turkish coffee and a little ouzo and laugh and talk. These were Greeks, sir, the Turks in the village would stand around smiling; they always seemed sour at something. However, my father got along with them well, he never quarreled with them, and he used to greet them cheerfully and offer them cigarettes. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
“The Turks would sit at their own café, never talking or laughing like my father and his friends, only silently smoking their long waterpipes. I used to sit at the edge of the street a little way from my father’s table and watch those Turks smoking. Have you seen those Turkish pipes, sir?” “Yes,” I answered. Then I added, “You must have been very fond of your father.” “I loved him very much,” said Conrad. The boy was not sitting moodily, looking out across the Plaza toward the sparkling lights on Mt. Lycabettus, and he went on talking not as a student to an Amerikanos but as one human being to another. “The happiest memories of my whole life are those trips I took with my father. Oh, we had good enough times at home, my mother and two sister and I. However, how I loved to go with my father! As we were riding the many hours between villages he would tell me stories of the ancient Greeks, how the Persians came down with a huge army and the Athenians fought them at Marathon and drove them into the sea and killed so many that the mound where they are buried looks like a mountain. And he told me about Leonidas the Spartan general who made the stand at Thermopylae. That was when my father would speak about Argyros, our great ancestor. I used to be filled with pride I almost burst when I heard how my ancestor had volunteered to stay with the three hundred soldiers in the narrow pass in the mountains, and how he fought there even through the Persian arrows were so thick the hid the Sun. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
“Then my father would tell me about the shepherd traitor who took the Persians around by a secret pass to attack Leonidas and the Spartans from the rear, and my anger would boil up and my father would laugh as I clenched my fists. However, he was proud that I begged to hear those stories over and over again. And he used to say, ‘Conrad, never forget that your great ancestor was Argyros’.” The boy was talking so animatedly now, his hands gesturing aimlessly around in the dark. In the dim lights of the Plaza lamps I got a glimpse of his black eyes dancing with delight at these boyhood memories. However, suddenly he sat quietly, vacantly, his face sober and his jaw heavily set. In the realm of suffering, affliction is something apart, specific, and irreducible. It is quite a different thing from simple suffering. It takes possession of the soul and marks it through and through with its own particular mark. Affliction is inseparable from physical suffering and yet quite distinct. With suffering, all that is not bound up with physical pain or something analogous is artificial, imaginary, and can be eliminated by a suitable adjustment of the mind. Even in the case of the absence or death of someone we love, the irreducible part of the sorrow is akin to physical pain, a difficulty in breathing, a constriction of the heart, an unsatisfied need, hunger, or the almost biological disorder caused by the brutal liberation of some energy, hitherto directed by an attachment and now left without a guide. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
At some very early point too must have some the kind of self-awareness that makes death an important subjective fact, an awareness which, coupled with primitive awe or bewilderment at the fact of being, serves as the basis of magic and religion. Some even believe there were another form of primates, from the British Iles, who looked human, but were far more intelligent, extremely naïve, and lacked aggression. Being far less aggressive than humans by nature, they lost out to the new species, and were scattered and went into hiding. They pretended to be humans. These primates concealed their birthing rites, but coupling with humans did happen. And unbeknownst to early civilizations, they developed a kind of human who carried a giant helix of genes, twice the number of a normal human. There were legends about their spirits in Louisiana. They were so powerful some thought the spirits has the psychic powers to possess unborn fetus who shared their DNA and be reborn with it. As animism grew more subtle in its personifications, mythic explanations of the origin of things became possible, and human-like gods were created. The passage to the idea of a single god, originated or at least dramatized by Akhnaton, led, by linkage to the god of the Israelites, to the idea of Christ. Meanwhile the development of a conscious science (essentially, the evolution of canons of evidence for belief in the regularity of events in nature) had occurred, beginning with the Meletians in early Greece. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Perhaps it is not too fanciful to suggest that the analogue to the achievement of early mortals in making tools to make tools is the scientific method: not just knowing how to learn but knowing how to make sure we know. These twin achievements, separated by at least a hundred thousand years, are the fundaments f technology and science. They increased vastly the range of what might be intellected as well as the capacities for intellection. Scientific thought itself then produced several radical developments in mortal’s self-awareness: the Copernican revolution, showing us something of the place of our Earth in the Universe; the Darwinian revolution, showing us something of our place in organic evolution; and what I shall call the Cartesian-Freudian revolution, for Dr. Freud completed what Descartes began, showing us the existence of vast reaches of mind beyond our conscious, rational mental processes. Hundreds of geniuses of the life of the psyche had of course known and expressed intuitively before Dr. Freud the mysteries of the unconscious; his achievement was simply the climax of an increasingly popular development in European thought. Dr. Freud had shown quite convincingly the idea of the unconscious was conceivable around 1700, topical around 1800, and effective around 1900. By 1950 its exploration by individuals through psychoanalysis could be described as commonplace. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
What we are witnesses today is the easy accessibility and mass distribution of means for producing experience of the usually unexperienced aspects of mental functioning. With the use of chemical technology made available to the millions the experience of transcendence of the individual ego, which a century was available only to the disciplined mystic. However, there are, of course, more varied phenomena than the feeling of ego-transcendence produced by mind altering substances, and there are more motives than the religio-mystical motive lying behind the present widespread use of psychotropic substances. The claim that psychotropic substances expand the consciousness refers to changes in several dimensions of experience. Persons interested in the experience primarily for reasons of esthetic appreciation or expression, or for its intrinsic novelty may or may not be artists, but their attitude toward experience tends to be perceptually open and non-judgmental. These individuals especially seek and enjoy the perceptual changes, such as increased vividness of color, visual harmonies, change in depth perception, sharper definition of detail, synesthesias, change in time sense (especially when listening to music), increased volume of unusual imagery, and so on. The effects are, as we have noted, not always beautiful, and in fact may be quite unpleasant: hellish experience, for instance, features garish or horrible colors (sickly greens, ugly dark reds, poisonous orange), or sometimes an impression of threatening blackness accompanied by feelings of doom and gloom and isolation. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
The person’s perception of one’s own body may become unpleasant: one’s limbs may seem to be distorted or flesh decaying; in a mirror one’s face may seem to be distorted or eyes blank, reflecting a meaningless emptiness at the self’s center; all attempts at communication may seem a mockery, the shell of the self a prison from which there is no exit. Yet even the negative; surrealism has in fact accustomed us to just such visions of the World. Among the esthetic adepts there is even a phrase for the negative experience when it occurs: it is known as “paying your taxes.” In this a group of users, only a boor would complain of a bad trip. Their goal is novel experience for its own sake. Some think this is how Judy Chicago came of with The Dinner Party, how Frida Kahlo invented Las Dos Fridas. Psychotropic substances were also thought to have influenced the work of Andy Warhol, which some think is evident in his paintings like Shot of Marilyns, Self Portrait, Triple Elvis, Race Riot, Prince, Rorschach, and many more. Of course, Andy Warhol is one of the most prolific popular culture artists in modern times. Rock Guitar singer and song writer Jimi Hendrix was also thought to be under these psychotropic substances which lead to some of his most popular songs: Purple Haze (where he talks about trying to escape some reality), All Along the Watchtower (which could also be a religio-mystical song), Little Wing, Hear My Train Coming, and many more. And while Bill Gates was stealing computer time, The Beatles were thought to also be under the influence as well as groups like The Animals. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
Altered states of consciousness has been thought of as ways to produce some of the most creative work in the World, but some people never come down or in other words, spend a life time paying their taxes, or they perish. Some even have reported that their girlfriend’s eyes turned yellow and she had snakes for hair. Some use the substances primarily for religious experience, whether in their own search for transcendent meaning or out of an interest in the psychology of religion or its philosophical bases. It may produce a feeling of oneness with the Universe and a reduction or complete loss of the sense of personal identity. A few have thought to, while in fascinosum or tremendum, feel a sense of joy, gratitude, pleasure, or onrush of grace, at catching a glimpse of the Ultimate, or numen; the tremendum is a reaction of awe, horror, fear, or a feeling of being overwhelmed. As in the esthetic experience, both the negative and the positive are seen as valid and therefore endurable. Others use psychotropic drugs as a cure for alcoholism. People who have used psychotropic drugs because they are disturbed or potentially suicidal or psychotic have reported it fails to produce a breakthrough and leaves them feeling hopeless and in an even chaotic psychic state than before. A certain number of persons have in essence already quit life and are simply looking for something to carry them over the edge to oblivion. These are rare cases, of course, but they do provide the headlines when they come to grief. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
Keep in mind, also, that laws make the possession and knowing use of the psychedelic or unauthorized use of psychotropic drugs a crime because they are known to be habit forming, and may not be safe for use for some people and can lead to death. Psychologists and psychiatrists are working closely with student groups both to educate them to the dangers of the situation and to understand what is going on. A major problem arising from the new laws is that civil authority thus becomes alienate from young people who have great potential for contributing to the society of the future. In a healthy society, the intellectually able and creative citizens serve to vivify and support the social authority; but if they are defined as enemies of society for pursuing activities that they consider constructive, they will incorporate in the personal identity significant elements of anti-sociality. Many people are looking for new relationships between the individual and the state, and the development also of new social institutions to replace marriage and the family. These young people feel very keenly about the invasion of privacy by the police and by state information-collectors. They seek a human nature which will be free of the tyranny of the machine. These individuals do not want to be on a space journey where the new is using their imagination. Another recurring themes in this group is that history is ending, or sometimes, less cosmically, that Christianity is ending. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
Some indeed say that the World is about to end, and that the expansion of consciousness is isomorphic with the expansion of the physical Universe; that both will fall back to the center simultaneously and instantaneously, and will vanish in a trice. Still others see the World as ending in a nuclear explosion. Whatever the vision, the World as we know it now, for example, modern society, is seen as fleeting, perishable, not viable. And it does no good to ask what rearrangement of things as they are is being proposed by these youth; nothing is being proposed, and they see it as the nature of the case that nothing can be proposed. You can ask a person to imagine pink elephants or rhinoceroses with horses’ heads or skyscrapers that walk and talk, but you cannot ask him or her to imagine an unknown primary color. There is a new time coming, and we will know what it is when it happens. Pour us your poison that it may renew our strength. Fire burns our brains. Now let us leap—Heaven or Hell, what matter?—into the deep, at the bottom of the Unknown to find the new. The motive for this sort of exploration of the potentialities of the mind is an extraordinarily powerful one. It is in essence highly idealistic and moral, regardless of its associations with behaviors that much of society many consider immoral. Indeed, it may even arise in part because of the basic human need to feel worthwhile through knowing that one is behaving responsibly and in a way that makes sense to others. Be a person on whom nothing is lost. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
A new mortality must be created—realization of depth or heights of the self for which no words exist. Express the value of sensitive and unforgetting attention. The great act of attention is all-inclusive; the more of life that is remembered and brought to bear upon the present movement in living expression, the more fully conscious a person is declared to be. As you might expect, this dimension is rather difficult to define. I can only appeal from my introspection to your introspection in offering it for consideration. What I mean here is something akin to Plato’s idea of the musical unconscious, or as he also called it, the spiritual unconscious. Be the magic power of this immense midnight at the crossroads of your senses, be the purport of their strange meeting. The sensitivity to the breadth of consciousness of others, includes animals and nature. This also involves a recognition of the game character of social interaction and personal relationship: at a low level, an awareness of the games people play, including oneself of course, and at a high level an appreciation of mythic enactment in human affairs, the extent to which the roles that are possible to us because of our evolutionary history find expression in any given time-stretch in out lives. I would not be willing to say consciousness has been expanded or extended unless it could be shown to be so when the person is in his or her normal state, free of drug effect. In brief, my view is that the intact ego, in which all the capacities of mind are used to the fullest, is the best vehicle we have for bring ourselves into valid and discriminating relationship with the protean forms of reality. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
The evolutionary task, in the individual and in the species, is to create an ego that itself capable of including the states of consciousness now called paranormal. The states the psychedelic and psychotropic drugs produce should not themselves be confused with expanded consciousness. That comes later, if it comes at all, when and if the experience of unusual realities is brought into the ego and the ego itself is thereby enlarged in scope. A corollary of this is that the ego already possessed of considerable scope is more likely to be able to use such an experience further to grow and enlarge itself, just as it is the stronger ego that can use psychotherapy more effectively. A sorrow that is not centered around an irreducible core of such a nature is mere romanticism or literature. Humiliation is also a violent condition of the whole corporal being, which longs to surge up under the outrage but is forces, by impotence or fear, to hold itself in check. On the other hand pain that is only physical is a very unimportant matter and leaves no trace in the soul. Toothache is an example. An hour or two of violent pain caused by a decayed tooth is nothing once it is over. It is another matter if the physical suffering is very prolonged or frequent, but in such a case we are dealing with something quite different from an attack of pain; it is often an affliction. “God shall consecrate thine affliction for thy gain,” reports 2 Nephi 2.2. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
We Have Nevertheless Been Making Progress Each Minute of that Hour in Another More Mysterious Dimension
“Oh beautiful Sun, you have squandered your Golden light upon an empty house.” He stared at her, narrowing his eyes. I could not figure whether he wanted a blurred focus or a fine one. It was though he saw her loveliness afresh. People and students who love God should never say: “For my part I like mathematics”; “I like French”; “I like Greek.” They should learn to like all these subjects, because all of them develop that faculty of attention which, directed toward God, is the very substance of prayer. If we have no aptitude or natural taste for geometry, this does not mean that our faculty for attention will not be developed by wrestling with a problem or studying a theorem. On the contrary it is almost an advantage. It does not matter much whether we success in finding the solution or understanding the proof, although it is important to try really hard to do so. Never in any case whatever is a genuine effort of the attention wasted. It always has its effect on the spiritual plane and in consequence on the lower one of the intelligence, for all spiritual light lightens the mind. If we concentrate our attention on trying to solve a problem of geometry, and if at the end of an hour we are no nearer to doing so than at the beginning, we have nevertheless been making progress each minute of that hour in another more mysterious dimension. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
Without our knowing or feeling it, this apparently barren effort has brought more light into the soul. The result will one day be discovered in prayer. Moreover, it may very likely be felt in some department of the intelligence in no way connected with mathematics. Perhaps one who made the unsuccessful effort will one day be able to grasp the beauty of a line of Racine more vividly on account of it. However, it is certain that this effort will bear its fruit in prayer. There is no doubt whatever about that. Certainties of this kind are experimental. However, if we do not believe in them before experiencing them, if at least we do not behave as though we believed in them, we shall never have the experience that leads to such certainties. There is a kind of contradiction here. Above a given level this is the case with all useful knowledge concerning spiritual progress. If we do not regulate our conduct by it before having proved it, if we do not hold on to it for a long time by faith alone, a faith at first stormy and without light, we shall never transform it into certainty. Faith is the indispensable condition. The best support for faith is the guarantee that is we ask our Father for bread, he does not give us a stone. Quite apart from explicit religious belief, every time that a human being succeeds in making an effort of attention with the sole idea of increasing one’s grasp of truth, one acquires a greater aptitude for grasping it, even if it produces no visible fruit. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
As a legend explains: In the eternal darkness, the Angel, unable to find any food, longed for light, and the Earth was illumined. If there is a real desire, if the thing desired is really light, the desire for light produces it. When there is an effort of attention, there is a real desire. If all other incentives are absent, it is really light that is desire. Even if our efforts of attention seem for years to be producing no result, one day a light that is in exact proportion to them will flood the soul. Every effort adds a little gold to a treasure no power on Earth can take away. The useless efforts made by the Cure d’Ars, for long and painful years, in his attempt to learn Latin bore fruit in the marvelous discernment that enabled him to see the very soul of his penitents behind their words and even their silences. Students must therefore work without any wish to gain good marks, to pass examinations, to win school successes; without any reference to their natural abilities and tastes; applying themselves equally to all their tasks, with the idea that each one will help to form in them the habit of that attention which is the substance of prayer. When we set out to do a piece of work, it is necessary to wish to do it correctly, because such a wish is indispensable in any true effort. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
Underlying this immediate objective, however, our deep purpose should aim solely at increasing power of attention with a view to prayer; as, when we write, we draw the shape of the letter on paper, not with a view to the shape, but with a view to the idea we want to express. If we are to put them to the right use, to make this the sole and exclusive purpose of our studies is the first condition to be observed. The second condition is to take great pains to examine squarely and to contemplate attentively and slowly each school task in which we have failed, seeing how unpleasing and second rate it is, without seeking any excuse or overlooking any mistake or any of our tutor’s corrections, trying to get down to the origin of each fault. If it is bad and to hide it forthwith, there is a great temptation to do the opposite, to give a sideways glance at the corrected exercise. Most of us do this nearly always. We have to withstand this temptation. Incidentally, moreover, nothing is more necessary for academic success, because despite all our efforts, we work without making much progress when we refuse to give our attention to the faults we have made and our tutor’s corrections. Above all it is thus that we can acquire the virtue of humility, and that is far more precious treasure than all academic progress. From this point of view it is perhaps even more useful to contemplate our stupidity than our sin. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
Consciousness of sin gives us the feeling that we are evil, and a kind of pride sometimes finds a place in it. When we force ourselves to fix the gaze, not only of our eyes but of our souls, upon a school exercise in which we have failed through sheer stupidity, a sense of our mediocrity is borne in upon us with irresistible evidence. No knowledge is more to be desire. If we can arrive at knowing this truth with all our souls we shall be well established on the right foundation. If these two conditions are perfectly carried out there is no doubt that school studies are quite as good a road to sanctity as any other. To carry out the second, it is enough to wish to do so. This is not the case with the first. In order really to pay attention, it is necessary to know how to set about it. Most often attention is confused with a kind of muscular effort. If one says to one’s pupils: “Now you must pay attention,” one sees them contracting their brows, holding their breath, stiffening their muscle. If after two minutes they are asked what they have been paying attention to, they cannot reply. They have been concentrating on nothing. They have not been paying attention. They have been contracting their muscles. We often expend this kind of muscular effort on studies. As it ends by making us tired, we have the impression that we have been working. That is an illusion. Tiredness has nothing to do with work. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
Work itself is the useful effort, whether it is tiring or not. This kind of muscular effort in work is entirely barren, even if it is made with the best of intentions. Good intentions in such cases are among those the pave the way to hell. Studies conducted in such a way can sometimes succeed academically from the point of view of gaining marks and passing examinations, but that is in spite of the effort and thanks to natural gifts; moreover such studies are never of any use. Will power, the kind that, if need be, makes us set our teeth and endure suffering, is the principal weapon of the apprentice engaged in manual work. However, contrary to the usual belief, it has practically no place in study. The intelligence can only be led by desire. For there to be desire, there must be pleasure and joy in the work. The intelligence only grows and bears fruit in joy. The joy of learning is as indispensable is as indispensable in study as breathing and running. Where it is lacking there are no real students, but only poor caricatures of apprentices who, at the end of their apprenticeship, will not even have a trade. It is the part played by joy in our studies that makes of them a preparation for spiritual life, for desire directed toward God is the only power capable of raising the soul. Or rather, it is God alone who comes down. God only comes to those who ask him to come; and he cannot refuse to come to those who implore him long, often, and ardently. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
Attention is an effort, the greatest of all efforts perhaps, but it is a negative effort. Of itself, it does not involved tiredness. When we become tired, attention is scarcely possible any more, unless we have already had a good deal of practice. It is better to stop working altogether, to seek some relaxation, and then a little later to return to the task; we have to press on and loosen up alternately, just as we breathe in and out. Twenty minutes of concentrated, untired attention is infinitely better than three hours of the kind of frowning application that leads us to say with a sense of duty done: “I have worked well!” However, in spite of all appearances, it is also far more difficult. Something in our soul has a far more violent repugnance for true attention than the flesh has for bodily fatigue. This something is much more closely connected with evil than is the flesh. That is every time that we really concentrate our attention, we destroy the evil in ourselves. If we concentrate with this intention, a quarter of an hour of attention is better than a great many good works. When people are on the verge of returning to Heaven they think, strangely enough, about beauty. Many of these thoughts are about how beautiful is this Earth that they are about to leave. A friend in his forties was passing away from cancer. He spent his last days on the Sun-porch in a deck chair thinking, as he expressed it, “How beautiful each day is!” #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
The psychologist Dr. Abraham Maslow, who lived on the Charles River west of Cambridge, had had a severe heart attack and feared another. During this period he was describing his change in attitude in a letter in which he said, “My river has never seemed so beautiful.” The crisis situations are the aspect of beauty that transcends death. Beauty calls up in us the qualities that go beyond death, such as eternity, serenity, the use of the imagination to project us beyond time and space. Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her alone shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires. Nature, for example, shows how obviously true this is. The incredibly wonderful colors of autumn leaves, say in Vermont, are a species of death. The leaves are most beautiful as they die, and because they die. We also know that the immortal gods on Mount Olympus who has no death were thoroughly bored with life and so was Lestat de Lioncourt. The life on Olympus consisted mostly of pranks and tricks to liven up their lethargic existence; there was no creation of any significance that went on among the gods as such. However, when Zeus or some other god got interested in a mortal woman, then something creative dud happen. Only when death was introduced into the boring drowsiness of Olympus did the home of the gods get stirred up and alive. It is a very puzzling thought that without death, there would be no beauty. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
Only this waiting, this attention, can move God to treat his children with such amazing tenderness. God wants us to learn lessons, enjoy life, be happy and be good people. Death is the mother of beauty also in the sense that it is a setting of unlimited limits. We all know we are finite, and we already receive a forewarning of these limits in infirmary and great fatigue. We are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve. The artist and architects know this most clearly, and hence are the ones who create things which last beyond their mortal years. They partake of eternity in that they, even are they are long gone, are offering something to future generations. Many people seek to overcome the boundaries of life, to gain a kind of eternity in their creative work amid the ephemeral days we humans pass together. The artist leaves a gift for us and for the future. No one can look at Winchester Mansion, Hearts Castle, or Sistine chapel without realizing that the irascible Sarah Winchester, William Randolph Hearst, and Michelangelo have left their spirit, in a series of forms, that give a sense of beauty and eternity to those of us who live four centuries, one century, or half a century later, and I think this effect will last as long as humankind inhabits this planet. To be sure in the realm of action we have to do all that is demanded of us, no matter what effort, weariness, and suffering it may cost, for one who disobeys does not love; but after that we are only unprofitable servants. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
Such service is a condition of love, but it is not enough. Beauty is eternity born into human existence. A chord of music, such as the one that opens Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata, or a lyric from Aaliyah’s Its Whatever, sets loose within us a quality of eternity, a sense that this moment is ultimate. One thinks, “I could live or die tomorrow but now I have this moment.” It is a quality of life, not a place nor a new life, that gives our present life this experience of eternity. We must all live under the light of eternity. Eternity is existence itself, for the existence of a thing cannot be explained by duration or time, but only by this quality of eternity. When the setting Sun sends amber rays through the mystic blues of the high clerestory windows in the Winchester Mansion, I find myself breathing a kind of silent prayer, “May this moment last forever!” Let these beautiful moments linger, they are so fair! Foreknowledge comes, and fills us with such bliss, we take our joy, our highest moments this. We undertake on our own initiative. It is only watching, waiting, attention. Happy then are those who pass their adolescence and youth in developing this power of attention. No doubt they are no nearer to goodness than their brothers and sisters and cousins working in fields and factories. They are near in a different way. The less affluent and working class possess a nearness to God of incomparable savor which is found in the depths of scarcity, in the absence of social consideration and in the endurance of long drawn-out sufferings. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
If, however, we consider the occupations in themselves, studies are thought to be near to God because of the attention which is their soul. Whoever goes through years of study without developing this attention within oneself has lost great treasure. Perhaps that is why some parents spend million to get their kids into college, not only to they want to develop their minds, but they want to enhance their souls. Not only does the love of God have attention for its substance; the love of our neighbor, which we know to be the same love, is made of this same substance. Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this World but people capable of giving them their attention. The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. Nearly all those who think they have this capacity do not posses it. Warmth of heart, impulsiveness, pity are not enough. In the first legend of the Grail, it is said that the Grail (the miraculous vessel that satisfies all hunger by virtue of the consecrated Host) belongs to the first comer who asks the guardian of the vessel, a king three-quarters paralyzed by the most painful wound, “What are you going through?” #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
To love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him or her: “What are you going through?” It is a recognition that the sufferer exists, not only as a unit in a collection, or a specimen from the social category labeled unfortunate, but as a person, exactly like us, who was one day stamped with a special mark by affliction. For this reason it is enough, but it is indispensable, to know how to look at him in a certain way. This way of looking is first of all attentive. The soul empties itself of all its own contents in order to receive into itself the being it is looking at, just as one is, in all one’s truth. Only one who is capable of attention can do this. So it comes about that, paradoxical as it may seem, a Latin prose or a geometry problem, even though they are done incorrectly, may be of great service one day, provided we devote the right kind of effort to them. Should the occasion arise, they can one day make us better able to give someone in affliction exactly the help required to save one, at the supreme moment of one’s need. For a youth, capable of grasping this truth and generous enough to desire this fruit above all others, studies could have their fullest spiritual effect, quite apart from any particular religious belief. Academic work is one of those fields containing a pearl so precious that it is worth while to sell all our possession, keeping nothing for ourselves, in order to be able to acquire it. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
The fact is that the clock does go on, our duration does plague us, and death comes closer every moment. However, we have to remember to live under the light of eternity, which is the light of beauty. For this is what beauty does for us, in the grace that beauty brings us, in death as the mother of beauty. All of these are but ripples of life on the sea of eternity. This heart, all evil will shed away. A pulse in the eternal mind, no less gives somewhere back the thoughts. Our sights and sounds; dreams are to be happy as our day; and laughter, learnt of friends, and gentleness in hearts at peace, under Heaven are an important motive. I have a rendezvous with death at some disputed barricade when Spring comes round with rustling shade and apple blossoms fill the air. Countless people are inspired in this confrontation with death to turn to the experience into beauty. What is there in the threat of death in muddy trenches and in the grime and the fatigue of war, waiting for possible death in battle tomorrow, that should lead these men (and women) to turn their thoughts to the beauty of poetry? As they go through the routine of life in the trenches these young people put words together to make poetry to console first of all their own hearts, and then to communicate with a wider, unknown World that will follow them. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
Poetry sublimate the ugliness of the trenches and blot out the stench of their present life by remembering the odor of apple blossoms filling the air. Their deep loneliness is covered over by the memories of times when they loved and were loved. The poetry that people at war achieve and pass on to us possess a serenity despite, or even because of, the conflict of which they are a part. It is not surprising, as one thinks about it, that in the ugliness of the trenches they yearn for the timelessness of beauty, and they long for the sense of repose that comes in beauty. The experience of inner harmony they pass on to us, seeking inner peace where there is no outer peace, as a guide to those who live after them. Nor is it surprising that they ponder whatever harmony of the spheres they can create in their imaginations, and cherish it to their heart. We transcend our fate, as these soldiers do, by the beauty of poetry. These soldiers are thus able to confront the fear and anxiety that is endemic in wartime. In this respect the beauty of poetry enables them to achieve the aim of all good therapy, namely to help the person to raise repressed conflicts into consciousness, and to confront the fact that their danger only condenses into a short time what all of us have to face over the longer period of life itself. Their works bring into consciousness their underlying fears and anxieties, and do it in the highest form of consciousness, namely beauty. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
These young poets, like other sensitive people, long to make of their senseless deaths a genuine tragedy which, on a deeper level than the futility of warfare, it actually is. As in the tragedy of O’ Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, there is a deeper sense of nobility which is present by the very vividness of its absence on the stage. In this sense the useless death of any youth is a tragedy, and this tragedy makes perhaps our clearest picture of beauty. In this question we may find some explanation of why humankind does to war century after century. Though we always rationalize our participation in the wars of our country, we know as we look backward over human history that the need to fight wars is an expression of the great and fundamental tragedies of our human fate. My hunches about the intimate relation between beauty and death have, over the course of my life, led to the understanding that just as psychological break down and pathology can become important sources of artistic creativity, so the impulse to wage wars in which our youngest and best lost their lives seems somehow linked to that same irresistible attraction of lovely and soothing death. “And I would not that yet think that I know of myself—not of the temporal but of the spiritual, not of the carnal mind but of God,” Alma 36.4. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
Tell God it is Not Our Fault but His—Because He Made the World so Beautiful!
Later Medieval culture flourished because people followed the vision of the City of God. Modern society flourished because people were energized by the vision of the growth of the Earthly City of Progress. In our century, however, this vision deteriorated to that of the Tower of Babel, which is now beginning to collapse and will ultimately bury everybody in its ruins. If the City of God and the Earthly City were thesis and antithesis, a new synthesis is the only alternative to chaos: the synthesis between the spiritual core of the Late Medieval World and the development of rational thought and science since the Renaissance. This synthesis is The City of Being. The reason we do not see truth is not that we have not read enough books, or do not have enough academic degrees, but what we do not have enough courage. By truth we do not mean scientific facts alone, or even chiefly. The problem with facts is to be accurate. If you recall the last dozen questions which troubled you—on which, that is, you had to ponder and chew to find out what you could believe is true—you will discover that very few if any of them had to do with matters that could be proven by scientific facts. Even in discovering scientific truth before it is reduced to accepted formulae, such as Columbus’ venture to prove the Earth was round or Dr. Freud’s early explorations, the finding of the truth hinges greatly on the investigator’s inner qualities of probity and courage. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
We hear the songs of the Angels in the Angelus, we bow a moment to communicate with the infinite, and thank him for our humanity and blessings. The key to Christian conception of studies is the realization that prayer consist of attention. It is the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable toward God. The quality of attention counts for much in the quality in prayer. Warmth of the heart cannot make up for it. The highest part of the attention only makes contact with God, when prayer is intense and pure enough for such a contact to be established; but the whole attention is turned toward God. Once the living human being is reduced to a number, the true bureaucrats can commit acts of utter cruelty, not because they are driven by cruelty of a magnitude commensurate to their deeds, but because they feel no human bond to their subjects. While less vile than the sadists, the bureaucrats are more dangerous, because in them there is not even a conflict between conscience and duty: their conscience is doing their duty; human beings as objects of empathy and compassion do not exist for many of them. The hypnoid methods used in advertising and political propaganda are a serious danger to mental health, specifically to clear and critical thinking and emotional independence. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
The assault on reason and the sense of reality pursues the individual everywhere and daily at any time: during many hours of watching television, or when driving on a highway, or in the political propaganda of candidates, and so on. The particular effect of these suggestive methods is that they create an atmosphere of being half-awake, of believing and not believing, of losing one’s sense of reality. Caring means caring not only for our fellow beings on Earth but also for our descendants. With the exception of a few great newspapers, even the factual information on political, economic, and social data is extremely limited. The so-called great newspapers inform better, but they also misinform better: by not publishing all the news impartially; by slanting headlines, in addition to writing headlines that often do not conform with their accompanying text; by being partisan in their editorials, written under the cover of seemingly reasonable and moralizing language. In fact, the newspapers, the magazines, television, and radio produce a commodity: news, from the raw material of events. Only news is salable, and the news media determine which events are news, which are not. At the very best, information is ready-made, concerns only the surface of events, and barely gives the citizens an opportunity to penetrate through the surface and recognize the deeper cause of the events. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
As long as the sale of news is a business, newspapers and magazines can hardly be prevented from printing what sells (in various degrees of unscrupulousness) their publications and does not antagonize the advertisers. If the informed opinion and decision are to be possible, the information problem must be solved in a different way. Life is neither a game of chance nor a business deal, and we must seek elsewhere for an appreciation of the real possibilities for salvation: in the healing art of medicine, for example. If a sick person has even the barest chance for survival, no responsible physician will say, “Let us give up the effort,” or will use only palliatives. On the contrary, everything conceivable is done to save the sick person’s life. Certainly, a sick society cannot expect anything less. Otherwise, dehumanized mortals will become so mad that they will not be able to sustain a viable society in the long run, and in the short run will not be able to refrain from being dangerous. A growing number of people feel la malaise du siècle: they sense their depression; they are conscious of it, in spite of all kinds of efforts to repress it. They feel the unhappiness of their isolation and the emptiness of their togetherness; they feel all this very clearly and consciously; others feel it less clearly, but are fully aware of it when someone else puts it into words. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
So far in World history a life of empty pleasure was possible for only a small elite, and they remained essentially sane because they knew they had power and that they had to think and to act in order not to lose their power. Today, the empty life of consumption is that of the whole middle class, which economically and politically has no power and little personal responsibility. The major part of the Western World knows the benefits of the consumer type of happiness, and growing numbers of those who benefit from it are finding it wanting. They are beginning to discover that having much does not create well-being; traditional ethical teaching has been put to the test—and is being confirmed by experience. The greed to have and to hoard has been modified by the tendency to merely function well, to exchange oneself as a commodity who is—nothing. It is easier for the alienated, marketing character to change than it is for the hoarding character, which is frantically holding onto possession, and particularly narcissism. However, people today are yearning for human beings who have wisdom and convictions and the courage to act according to their own convictions. Given even these hopeful factors, however, the chances for necessary human and social changes are still a challenge. Our only hope is possessed in the energizing attraction of a new vision. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
The utopian goal is more realistic than the realism of today’s leaders. Only if the old motivations of profit, power, and intellect are replaced by new ones: being, sharing, understanding, the realization of the new society and new mortal is possible. If the marketing character is replaced by the productive, loving character, we will succeed in making humanity more Godly. As I reflect, I call to mind the sensitive persons, especially writers, who have turned to God as modern-day pilgrims to awaken their hearts, to find answers to fundamental questions, to re-kindle some inner spiritual reality. During the whole of this pilgrimage our hearts have been tormented by many intricate questions. There is such a stark contrast there among medievalism, natural beauty and modernity, that every visitor’s life is brought up against the stark reality of beauty’s closeness to death. And is beauty an answer, a way of making that choice to live and create without cringing, without hiding one’s self from the soul? For beauty confronts and absorbs the soul into the whole, absorbs the shadow into the light, brings holiness into what would otherwise be a meaningless, destructive void. I am certain that it was the beauty of nature along the pathways which led from spiritual path to divine journey which gave me my own glimpse into eternity. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
I felt some replenishment, some re-kindling of my own spirit. The serenity of deed ready for the experience of the divine. The serenity of those moments was worth my preserving forever. Therefore, I am still a lover of the meadows and the woods and mountains. And I too am still a lover of the orange blossoms and the pine groves and the bubbling streams. I knew that the flowers and the spring verdure were not in themselves Gd. However, are we not given a glimpse of the beauty of God by these happy trumpetings of brilliant pink if the flowering Judas trees, and by the lemon blossoms with their magical odor and by the heavily scented lavender of the wisteria hanging from every branch? Beauty is not God, but it is the resplendent gown of God and of our spiritual life. Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know. Yes. However, there are still thing I yearned to know. Is beauty at least our pathway to the spirit? Is beauty the gateway to spiritual enhancement and to the serenity of eternity? Is beauty related to the eternity of death? Then I stand before my own soul, like an inexorable judge before a prisoner lying on the rack, and make it answer until there is nothing left to ask. Almost all the errors and unutterable follies of which doctrines and philosophies are so full seem to me to spring from a lack of this probity. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
The truth was not found, not because it was unsought, but because the intention always was to find again instead some preconceived opinion or other, or at least not to wound some favorite idea, and with this aim in view subterfuges had to be employed against both other people and the thinker oneself. It is the courage of making a clean heart of it in the face of every question that makes the philosopher. The philosopher [must] interrogate oneself without mercy. This philosophical courage, however, does not arise from reflection, cannot be wrung from resolutions, but is an inborn trend of the mind. If one is to see truth, and it does not come from the intellect as such but is a part of the inborn capacity for self-awareness, such probity is necessary. Probity is an ethical attitude, involving courage and other aspects of one’s relation to one’s self; if a person is to fulfill oneself as a human being, it not only can be developed to an extent but must be developed. When people have profound inner conflict, they self-blind themselves to the truth. They blind themselves so that they are closed off in greater or less degree from the reality around them. After learning how they have been living a delusion, we may take it as an act symbolizing the tragic difficulty, the finiteness and blindness of mortals in seeing the truth about themselves and their origin. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
Drama gives some people an age-old but ever new picture of the inner pain and conflict in finding out the truth about themselves. For to seek truth is always to run the risk of discovering what one would hate to see. It requires that kind of relationship to one’s self, and that confidence in ultimate values, that one can dare to risk the possibility of being uprooted from the beliefs and day-to-day values by which one has lived. It is not surprising, then, that a genuine love of wisdom is a relatively rare thing in human life. To see truth, like the other unique characteristics of mortals, depends on mortal’s ability to be conscious of oneself. One thus can transcend the immediate situation, and in imagination one can try to see life steadily and see it whole. By one’s self-consciousness one can also search within oneself, and there find the wisdom which speaks in greater or lesser degree to every mortal who has ears to hear. The ancient Greeks, as Plato reports, believed that we discover truth reminiscence, that is by remembering, by intuitively searching into our own experience. In the famous demonstration of this, Socrates gets an uneducated enslaved-boy, Meno, to prove the whole Pythagorean theorem simply by asking him questions. We do not need to accept Plato’s mythological explanation—that each of us carries Haven, and knowledge is a recollecting of these ideas—to agree that the phenomenon itself is a very common experience. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
Each of us has been observing, experiencing, learning a great deal more throughout our lives—probably especially in the early years—than we are aware, and we have had to lock it away in the closet of so-called unconsciousness because of the necessity of getting along with parents, teachers, and social conventions. “Children and crazy people tell the truth” goes the adage—and unfortunately children soon learn not to. This forgotten store of wisdom is available to us as we become sufficiently clarified, sensitive, courageous and vigilant to tap it. The popular idea that people cannot see truth because their selves get in the way is therefore false. It is not the self which makes us see through a glass darkly and distort what we see: it is rather the neurotic needs, repressions and conflicts. These lead us to transfer some prejudice or expectation of our own to other people and the World around us. Thus, it is precisely the lack of self-awareness which leads us to call error truth. The more a person lacks self-awareness, the more one is prey to the anxiety and irrational anger and resentment: and while anger generally blocks us from using our more subtle intuitive means of sensing truth, anxiety always blocks us. Also, if a person tries to rule out the self in seeing truth, if, that is, one pretends that one comes to one’s conclusions like a disembodied judge surveying everything from Mount Olympus, one is victim of greater delusion. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
Since one assumes one’s truth is absolute and uninfluenced by one’s personal interests rather than simply one’s most honest approximation to truth, one may become a dangerous person who adheres to rigid doctrines. Only technical issues can be true in abstraction from the immediate needs, desires and struggles of the human beings involved. In fact, one of the most common ways of avoiding seeing truth—the particular form of resistance generally used by intellectuals in psychotherapy—is to make an abstract or logical principle out of the problem, and generally by enough cleaver intellectualizing one can arrive at a fine-looking solution which is so fascinating. However, lo and behold, we later discover that all the brilliant intellectualizing did not solve the problem in reality at all, and in fact was precisely a way of avoiding the problem. Seeing truth is a function not of the separate intellect, but of the whole mortal: one experiences truth in moving ahead as a thinking-feeling-acting unity. We love not intellect the less, but the person more in this approach to truth. I have been a learner all my life, but I make truth, which is universal, my own from within, through the exercise of my freedom, and my knowledge of truth is my own relation to truth. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
As one becomes free from unhealthy ties, one also become freer from the prejudices of life, freer from the tendency of each mortal to see one’s own image in others’ eyes in the World around him or her. To be able to see truth thus goes along with emotional and ethical maturity. When one is able to see truth in this way, one gains confidence in what one days. One has become convinced of one’s beliefs on one’s own pulse and in one’s own experience, rather than through abstract principles or through being told. And one also gains humility, for one knows that since previous things one saw were partially distorted, what one now sees will also have its element of imperfection. This kind of humility does not weaken the strength of one’s stand for one’s own beliefs, but keeps the door open for new learning and the discover of new truth on the morrow. A man does not need to be a bully either physically or psychologically. He does not have to dominate those around him or have his way all the time. Those who exhibit such needs are basically insecure about their masculinity, constantly trying to convince themselves and others that they are “real men.” A man is self-affirming and independent. He can express his feelings directly and fight for himself when need be. His independence also makes it possible for him to see others’ viewpoints and change his mind when it seems appropriate to do so. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
A man can afford to be gentle, for his self-confidence is deeply based and not dependent on maintaining some manly pose. The advertising slogan “tough, but oh, so gentle” may describe him well. He is not too frightened to share his feelings of love, hurt, discouragement, and desire for love. A woman has opinions of her own and is an individual in her own right, not a pale shadow of her husband. She can express her ideas and fight for them when need be. A woman does not need to be a driving competitor to her husband. She does what she does because she enjoys it and find fulfillment, not because she had to prove her worth; for she already has confidence in that. A woman can be loving, cuddly, and soft without being a whimpering, spineless, dependent creature who uses her helplessness to control people around her and get what she wants from them. Like a man, she is not too frightened to share her feelings of love, hurt, discouragement, and need for love. Perhaps more than ever before in history our society has opened the door to the kind of relationship between men and women that is envisioned here. We have the opportunity of genuine intimacy between those who have been educationally prepared to talk the same language and share many of the same concerns. To become the kind of men and women who can achieve this is a difficult task that we will never perfectly achieve. However, the adventure of moving in that direction is an exciting one! #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
After many years of being all but ignored, the importance of body-functioning to emotional states is becoming recognized more widely and applied to growth-producing situations. A particularly fascinating discovery is the fruitfulness of certain language which, in describing emotional and behavioral states, translates almost literally into terms used to describe bodily states and functions. This translation has a profound impact on methods of dealing effectively with emotional states. A method for helping a person act out and deal with the sense of being immobilized by others, for example, is to put one in a tight circle of people and ask one to try to break out, physically. The method is based on the transformation of one’s emotional feeling of immobilization into the experience of being physically immobilized, to allow one the opportunity to break what one feels are unbreakable bonds…however, this is getting ahead of our story. Implicit general recognition of the close connection between the emotional and the physical is evident in the verbal idioms that have developed in social interaction. Feelings and behavior are expressed in terms of all parts of the body, of body-movement, and of bodily functions. We have heard terms like: lost your head, save face, no guts, cheeky, and you have never just to name a few. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
Supporting the recognition in everyday life of the close connection between bodily and emotional and mental states, there is a growing volume of theoretical work describing these connections and the way they develop and manifest themselves. Psychosomatic medicine has made a strong case for the fact that emotional states affect the body. More recently, the opposite view has also been developed—that body-organization and physiology affect the feelings—a view called somatopsychic. Psychological attitudes affect body-posture and functioning, and this body-formation then has a strong influence on subsequent feelings. An individual experiencing temporary fear, grief, or anger, all too often carries one’s body in an attitude which the World recognizes as the outward manifestation of that particular emotion. If one persists in this dramatization or consistently re-established it, thus forming what is ordinary referred to as a habit pattern, the muscular arrangement becomes set. Materially speaking some muscles shorten and thicken, others are invaded by connective tissues, still others become immobilized by consolidation of the tissue involved. Once this has happened the physical attitude is invariable; it is involuntary; it can no longer be changed basically by taking thought or even by mental suggestions. Such setting of a physical response also establishes an emotional pattern. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
Since it is not possible to establish a free flow through the physical flesh, the subjective emotional tone becomes progressively more limited and tends to remain in a restricted closely defined area. Now what the individual feels is no longer an emotion, a response to an immediate situation, henceforth one lives, moves and has one’s being in an attitude. Life is not good or bad; it is just hard. Interpersonal obstacles occur so often because so much of our day-to-day activity involves interaction (real, potential, or imagined) with other people. As long as there are other people, we are going to experience some interpersonal obstacles and, thus, frustration. People have biases, prejudices, and pet likes and dislikes. Some people are just mean and ornery; others are ignorant, and their ignorance causes them to act mean and ornery, though they would be shocked to know we think of them as such. Each of us, then, having a conscious self, an ego, which we try to cultivate and nurture, also has unconscious selves, aspects of ourselves of which we do not even know about. Whenever a conflict among any of the various portions of the psyche occurs, there may be a tendency to dissociate our conscious identity from those unwanted, ugly, or immoral parts of ourselves. “For behold, again I say unto you that if ye will enter in by the way, and receive the Holy Ghost, it will show unto you all things what ye should do,” 2 Nephi 32.5. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
When a Soul has Attained a Love Filling the Whole Universe Indiscriminately, this Love Becomes the Angel with Golden Wings
I give you the vision of Creation and Eternity here. The dim awareness of this difficulty is probably one of the main reasons that so little effort is made to make the necessary changes. Many think: “Why strive for the impossible? Let us rather act as if the course we are steering will lead us to the place of safety and happiness that our maps indicate.” Those who unconsciously despair yet put on the mask of optimism are not necessarily wise. However, only if they are hardheaded realists, shed all illusions, and fully appreciate the difficulties, those who have not given up hope can succeed. This sobriety marks the distinction between awake and dreaming utopians. If, by an absurd hypothesis, I were to die without ever having committed any serious faults and yet all the same I were to fall to the bottom of Hell, I should nevertheless owe God an infinite debt of gratitude for his infinite mercy, on account of my Earthly life, and notwithstanding the fact that I am such a poor unsatisfactory creature. Even in this hypothesis I should think all the same that I had received all my share of the riches of divine mercy. For already here below we receive the capacity for loving God and for representing him to ourselves with complete certainty as having the substance of real, eternal, perfect, and infinite joy. Through our fleshly veils we receive from above presages of eternity which are enough to efface all doubts on this subject. #RandolphHarris 1 of 11
The human Utopia of the Messianic Time—a united new humankind living in solidarity and peace, free from economic strife and from war and class struggle—can be achieved, provided we spend the same energy, intelligence, and enthusiasm on the realization of the human Utopia as we have spent on the realization of our technical Utopias. Whether such a change from the supremacy of natural science to a new social science will take place, nobody can tell. If it does, we might still have a chance for survival, but whether it will depends on one factor: how many brilliant, learned, disciplined, and caring men and women are attracted by the new challenge to the human mind, and by the fact that this time the goal is not control over nature but control over technique and over irrational social forces and institutions that threaten the survival of Western society, if not the human race. The problem is the will and the humanist spirit of those who work on them; besides, when people can see a vision and simultaneously recognize what can be done step by step in a concrete way to achieve it, the will begin to feel encouragement and enthusiasm instead of fright. Human beings shall neither live in inhuman poverty, nor simply be consumers. So great is the confusion about love in our day that it is even difficult to find agreed upon definitions of what love is. We define love as a delight in the presence of the other person and an affirming of one’s value and development as much as one’s own. Thus there are always two elements to love—that of the worth and good of the other person, and that of one’s own joy and happiness in relation with one. #RandolphHarris 2 of 11
The capacity to love presupposes self-awareness, because love requires the ability to have empathy wit the other person, to appreciate and affirm one’s potentialities. Love also presupposes freedom; certainly love which is not freely given is not love. TO love someone because you are not free to love someone else, or because you happen by the accident of birth to be in some family relation to the individual, is not to love. Furthermore, if one loves because one cannot do without the other, love is not given by choice; for one could not choose not to love. The hallmark of such unfree love is that it does not discriminate: it does not distinguish the loved person’s qualities or one’s being from the next person’s. In such a relation you are not really seen by the one who purports to love you—you might just as well be someone else. Neither the one who loves nor the loved one acts as persons in such relationships; the former is not a subject operating with some freedom, and the latter is significant chiefly as an object to be clung to. There are kinds of dependence which in our society—having so many anxious, lonely and empty persons in it—masquerade as love. They vary from different forms of mutual assistance or reciprocal satisfaction of desires (which may be quite sound if called by their right names), through the various business forms of personal relationships to clear parasitical masochism. #RandolphHarris 3 of 11
In not infrequently happens that two persons, feeling solitary and empty by themselves, relate to each other in a kind of unspoken bargain to keep each other from suffering loneliness. Self-affirmation in human relationships is much more likely to leave people feeling close to each other than the alternative of trying to guess what the other person wants and then attempting to please one. On causal inspection it might appear very desirable in a marriage, for example, for both the man and the woman to be dedicated to pleasing the partner. It almost sounds like the Golden Rule of doing unto others as we would have then do on to us, does it not? These are two hitches. In the first place, if one does not tell us, how can we be sure what the other person really wants? It is not unusual at all for couple to do something that neither of them wants to do, because they have only guessed—never really known—what the other wanted done and because each has been so considerate of the other person’s feelings that they have not made their own wishes clearly know. The second hitch is that is we acceded to another person’s wished (or what we think they want) we are likely to have more resentment about the matter than we are fully aware of. And we are almost sure to express that resentment in some way, however subtle. If the Golden Rule is indeed to be applied it would be: I am going to let those I care for know how I feel and what I desire, because this is the way I would like them to relate to me. #RandolphHarris 4 of 11
If I do not agree with what they say, I am perfectly capable of standing up for myself. And I have sufficiency confidence in them to assume that they can fight for themselves if and when necessary. In the home, it appears that the most emotionally satisfying arrangement for both men and women is one where there is free-floating leadership. In other words, when a decision is to be made there is no assurance in advance whose judgment will be followed. In this arrangement both the man and the woman (and the children, too) are free to express their feelings and ideas. This makes for some lively discussion, even passionate discussions, at times! However, as a matter of fact democracies are always considerably more discussion prone then authoritarian governments. And how much love and emotional closeness can be experienced between a man and a woman if a man is convinced of his superiority and a woman is afraid to open her mouth for fear of displeasing the master? Besides, is a book not more exciting and more fun if you do not know for certain in advance how it is going to end? Even if we only consider the plane of purely human relations, the gratitude we own those we love is infinite. Our human relationships perpetually enshrine the light of God and should raise gratitude to a still higher degree. #RandolphHarris 5 of 11
It might seem that God is sending you this truth through the pen I am holding. It is more suitable for some thoughts to come by direct inspiration; it is more suitable for other thoughts to be transmitted through some creature. God uses either way with his friends. However, when love is engaged in for the purposes of vanquishing loneliness, it accomplishes its purpose only at the price of increased emptiness for both persons. Love, is generally confused with dependence: but in point of fact, you can only love to proportion to your capacity for independence. The creative relationship between men and women that is being suggested here calls for relatively mature and self-reliant individuals. It is important to bond with the Heavenly country and live in an atmosphere of human warmth. This is the native city to which we owe our love. Our love should stretch as widely across all space, and should be as equally distributed in every portion of it, as is the very light of the Sun. Christ has bidden us to attain to the perfection of our Heavenly Father by imitating his indiscriminate bestowal of light. Our intelligence too should have the same complete impartiality. Every existing thing is equally upheld in its existence by God’s creative love. The friends of God should love him to the point of merging their love his with regard to all things here below. When a soul has attained a love filling the whole Universe indiscriminately, this love becomes the Angel with golden wings that pierces an opening in the celestial sphere of the World. #RandolphHarris 6 of 11
After that, such a soul loves the Universe, not from within but from without; from the dwelling place of the Wisdom of God, our first-born brother. Such a love does not love beings and things in God, but from the abode of God. Being close to God it views all beings and things from there, and its gaze is merged in the gaze of God. It is true that Christ said to his disciples: “Love one another.” However, I think that there is a question of friendship, a personal friendship between two beings, by which God’s friends should be bound each to each. Friendship is the one legitimate exception to the duty of only loving universally. Moreover, to my way of thinking, it is not really pure unless it is so to speak surrounded on all sides by a compact envelope of indifference which preserves a distance. We are living in times that have no precedent, and in our present situation universality, which could formerly be implicit, has to be fully explicit. It has to permeate our language and the whole of our way of life. Today it is not nearly enough to be a saint, but we must have the saintliness demanded by the present moment, a new saintliness, itself also without precedent. A new type pf sanctity is indeed a fresh spring, an invention. If all is kept in proportion and if the order of each things is preserved, it is almost equivalent to a new revelation of the Universe and of human destiny. It is the exposure of a large portion of truth and beauty hitherto concealed under a thick layer of dust. More genius is needed than was needed by Archimedes to invent machines and physics. A new saintliness is a still more marvelous invention. #RandolphHarris 7 of 11
Only a kind of perversity can oblige God’s friends to deprive themselves of having genius, since to receive it in superabundance they only need to ask their Father for it in Christ’s name. Such a petition is legitimate, today at any rate, because it is necessary. I think that under this or any equivalent form it is the first thing we have to ask for now; we have to ask for it daily, hourly, as a famished child constantly asks for bread. The World needs saints who have genius, just as a plague-stricken town needs doctors. Where there is a need there is also an obligation. By a strange twist, the thought of God’s anger only arouses love in me. God’s favor and mercy makes tears at my heart. We receive love from others not in proportion to our demands or sacrifices or needs, but roughly in proportion to our own capacity to love. And our capacity to love depends, in turn, upon our prior capacity to be persons in our own right. To love means, essentially, to give; and to give requires a maturity of self-feeling. A truly living God does not involve a demand for love in return. To produce art requires that the artist be able to love—that is to give without thought of being rewarded. We are not talking about love as a giving up or self-abnegation. One gives only if one as something to give, only if one has a basis of strength within oneself from which to give. #RandolphHarris 8 of 11
It is most unfortunate that on our society that we have had to try to purify love from aggression and competitive triumph by identifying it with weakness. Indeed, this inoculation has been so much of a success that the common prejudice is that the weaker people are, the more they love; and that the strong person odes not need to love! No wonder tenderness, that yeast without which love is as soggy and heavy as unrisen bread, has been generally scorned, and often separated out of the love experience. What was forgotten was that tenderness goes along with strength: one can be gentle as one is strong; otherwise tenderness and gentleness are masquerades for clinging. The Latin origin of our words is nearer the truth—”virtue,” of which love is certainly one, comes from the root vir, man (here in the sense of masculine strength), from which the word “virility is also derived. Some may be questioning, “But does one not lose oneself in love?” To be sure, in love as in creative consciousness, it is true that one is merged with the other. However, should not be called losing one’s self; again like creative consciousness, it is the highest level of fulfillment of one’s self. When pleasures of the flesh is an expression of love, for example, the emotion experienced at the moment of climax is not hostility or triumph, but union with the other person. The poets are not lying to us when they sing of the ecstasy of love. #RandolphHarris 9 of 11
As in creative ecstasy, it is that moment of self-realization when one temporarily overleaps the barrier between one identity and another. It is a giving of one’s self and a finding of one’s self at once. Such ecstasy represents the fullest interdependence in human relations; and the same paradox applies as in creative consciousness- one can merge one’s self in ecstasy only as one has gained the prior capacity to stand alone, to be a person in one’s own right. We do not man this discussion to be a counsel of perfection. Nor is it meant to rule out or depreciate all of the other kinds of beneficial relationships, such as friendship (which may also be an important aspect of parent-child relations), various degrees of interchange of human warmth and understanding, the sharing of pleasures of the flesh and passion, and so on. Let us not tall into the error so common in our society of making love in its ideal sense all-important, so that one has only the alternatives of admitting one has never found the pearl of great price or resorting to hypocrisy in trying to persuade oneself that all of the emotions one does feel are love. We can only repeat: we propose calling the emotions by their right names. Learning to love will proceed most soundly if we cease trying to persuade ourselves that to love is easy, and if we are realistic enough to abandon the illusory masquerades for love in a society which is always talking about love but has so little of it. #RandolphHarris 10 of 11
Our greatest sense of fulfillment and satisfaction comes in being in meaningful relationships with other people (not necessarily in marriage) whom we love and who love us. We never outgrown our need for love, human understanding, and communication. If we can achieve a relatively high degree of personal independence, then we will be free to satisfy these needs in mutually fulfilling relationships with others. If we have confidence in our abilities to be relatively free and able to disentangle ourselves if we feel others are attempting to manipulate and control us, it will be less frightening to us to say in the many ways that it can be said openly and clearly, “I love you, and I need and want your love.” By participating in the community, people find life becomes more interesting and stimulating. Intelligence is continuously growing for both the individual and the species; it I meaningful to say that we are more intelligent than we were a few years, ago and that our children will be more intelligent than we are. There is no other armor so strong as truth, none other that will turn aside the shafts of envy, hatred, malice, and al the rest of that great horde of iniquities, as will the simple unadorned truth. We believe in being honest. May God help us to practice what we believe. Our challenge is to avoid bondage of any kind, help the Lord gather his elect, and sacrifice for the rising generation. #RandolphHarris 11 of 11
Randolph Harris II International Institute 