We respected their choice to be together. We did not think they would simply disappear. We could not imagine it. We were afraid of hearing from them. We had no idea how they could multiply or survive in the modern World. Some people seek not to be outstanding but to fit in; they live as though they are directed by a radar set fastened to their head perpetually telling them what other people expect of them. This radar type gets one’s motives and directions for others; like a mortal who describes oneself as a set of mirrors, such an individual is able to respond but not to choose; one has no effective center of motivation of one’s own. Such people gain their strength by internalizing external rules, by compartmentalizing will power and intellect and by repressing their feelings. This type is well suited for business success, for, like 21^st century technology tycoons and the captains of Wall Street, they can manipulate people in the same way as electric cars of gas prices. The gyroscope is an excellent symbol for the since it stands for a completely mechanical center of stability. William Randolph Hearst was an example of this type: he amassed great power and wealth, but he was so anxious underneath this appearance of strength. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

The gyroscope mortals often have a strong influence over their kids and are very rigid. This is how certain attitudes in a society tend to crystallize rigidly. If we take out the gyroscope, there will be an emptiness in society, which might follow a breakdown because it would be hollow. Our society has not yet found something to take the place of the gyroscope person’s rigid rules.  If this is truly the Age of Anxiety, it may be because we have entered an era when things happen so rapidly, on such a large scale, that we are overwhelmed by them. For example, we know something of the threats to human survival on our planet. Our uncertainty as to how and when such things might happen or about what to do might be called anxiety. Anxiety, like fear, has come beneficial aspects. It is not always wise to rid ourselves of anxieties, because we can learn from them. Though anxiety is an uncomfortable feeling, rather than popping a tranquilizer we might be better off trying to discover its cause and work through it. The outer-directed people in our tie generally are characterized by attitudes of passivity and apathy. Many people of today have by and large given up the driving ambition to excel, to be at the top; or if they do have such ambition, they regard it as a fault and are often apologetic for such a hangover from their fathers’ mores. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

So many people want to be accepted by their peers even to the extent of being inconspicuous and absorbed in the group. This sociological picture is very similar in its broad lines to the picture we get in psychological work with individuals. A decade or two ago, the emptiness which was beginning to be experienced on a fairly broad scale by the middle classes could be laughed at as the sickness of the suburbs. The clearest picture of the empty life is the suburban man, who gets up at the same hoe every weekday morning, takes the same train to work in the city, performs that same task in the office, lunches at the same place, leaves the same tip for the waitress each day, comes home on the same train each night, has 2.3 children, cultivates a little garden, spends a two-week vacation at the shore every Summer which he does not enjoy, goes to church every Christmas and Easter, and moves through a routine, mechanical existence year after year until he finally has enough move saved at the age of sixty-five to last at least twenty years, and then returns to Heaven. (To some people, that life sounds like a dream come true.) #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

However, there are indications in the present decade that emptiness and boredom have become much more serious states for many people. Not long ago, a very curious incident was reported in the New York papers. A bus driver in the Bronx, New York simply drove away in his empty bus one day and was picked up by the police several days later in the state of Florida, which is about 946 miles away. He explained that, having gotten tired of driving the same route every day, he had decided to go away on a trip. While he was being brought back it was clear from the papers that the bus company was having a hard time deciding whether or how he should be punished. By the time he arrived in the Bronx, he was a cause celebre, and a crowd of people who apparently had never personally known the errant bus driver were on hand to welcome him. When it was announced that the company had decided not to turn him over for legal punishment but to give him his job back again if he would promise to make no more jaunts, there was literal as well as figurative cheering in the Bronx. Why should these solid citizens of the Bronx, living in a metropolitan section which is almost synonymous with middle-class urban conventionality, make a hero out of a man who according to their standards was an auto thief, and worse yet, failed to appear at his regular time for work? #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

On a small scale, the story of the bus driver and the reaction from the people in the Bronx reminds us of the fact that the upper middle classes in bourgeois France several decades ago were able to endure the stultifying and mechanical routine of their commercial and industrial activities only by virtue of the presence of centers of Bohemianism at their elbows. People who live as hollow mortals can endure the monotony only by an occasional blowoff—or at least by identifying with someone else’s blowoff. In some circles emptiness is even made a goal to be sought after, under the guise of being adaptable. Nowhere is this illustrated more arrestingly than in an article in Life Magazine entitled “The Wife Problem.” Summarizing a series of researches which first appeared in Fortune about the role of the wives of corporations executives, this article points out that whether or not the husband is promoted depends a great deal on whether his wife fits the pattern. Time was when only the minister’s wife was looked over by the trustees of the church before her husband was hired; now the wife of the corporation executive is screened, covertly or overly, by most companies like the steel or wool or any other commodity the company uses. She must be highly gregarious, not intellectual or conspicuous, and she must have a very sensitive antennae (again that radar set!) so that she can be forever adapting. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

The good wife is good by not doing things—by not complaining when her husband works late, by not fussing when a transfer is coming up; by not engaging in any controversial activity. Thus her success depends not on how she actively uses her powers, but on her knowing when and how to be passive. However, the rule that transcends all others is to not be too good. Keeping up with the Joneses is still important. However, where in pushier and more primitive times it implied going substantially ahead of the Joneses, today keeping up means just that: keeping up. One can move ahead, yes—but slightly, and the timing must be exquisite. In the end the company conditions almost everything the wife does—from the companions she is permitted to have down to the car she drives and what and how much she drinks and reads. To be sure, in return for this indenture the modern corporation takes care of its members in the form of giving them added security, insurance, planned vacations, and so on. The Company had become like Big Brother—the symbol for the dictator—in Orwell’s novel, 1984. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

Of course, the results of such control is a little frightening. Conformity, it would appear, is being elevated into something akin to a religion. Perhaps Americans will arrive at an ant society, not through fiat of a dictator, but through unbridled desire to get along with one another. While one might laugh at the meaningless boredom of some people, the emptiness has for many now moved from the state of boredom to a state of futility and despair which holds promise of dangers. The minor addiction to unprescribed medication among a small number of adolescents is partially due to the media they consume on the television, but also because of some state laws. Youth need to be reminded that it is important to stay sober because they really need their education to make it in society today. Education will help them move past the condition of emptiness. If youth are not growing toward something, one does not merely stagnate; the pent-up potentialities turn into morbidity and despair, and eventually into deviant activities. What is the psychological origin of this experience of emptiness? The feeling of emptiness or vacuity which we have observed sociologically and individually should not be take to mean that people are empty, or without emotional potentiality. A human being is not empty in a static sense, as though one were a storage battery which needs charging. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

The experience of emptiness, rather, generally comes from the people’s feeling that they are powerless to do anything effective about their lives or the World they live in. Inner vacuousness is the long-term, accumulated result of a person’s particular conviction toward oneself, namely one’s conviction that one cannot act as an entity in directing one’s own life, or change other people’s attitudes toward one, or effectually influence the World around one. Thus one gets the deep sense of despair and futility which so many people in our day have. And soon, since what one wants and what one feels can make no real difference, one gives up wanting and feeling. Apathy and lack of feeling are also defenses against anxiety. When a person continually faces dangers one is powerless to overcome, one’s final line of defense is at last to avoid even feeling the dangers. Sensitive students of our time have seen these developments coming. People today no longer live under the authority of the church or moral laws, but under anonymous authorities like public opinion and those of the TV news media. However, what you do not understand is that 90 percent of the TV news media is control by six corporations, so what you are getting is a view they want manifested in society, to direct politics, business and economics and it may not be fair or accurate. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

The authority of public opinion is the public itself, but this public is merely a collection of many individuals each with one’s radar set adjusted to finding out what others expect of them. Many corporate executives are successful not only because of their education and experience, but also because the husband and wife are able to be successful in adjusting to public opinion. The public is thus made up of all the Elons, Britneys, Drakes, Toms, Marys, Dicks and Harrys who are the slaves to the authority of public opinion! The public is therefore afraid of a ghost, a bogeyman, a chimera. It is an anonymous authority with a capital “A” when the authority is a composite of ourselves, but ourselves without any individual centers. We are in the long run afraid of our own collective emptiness. And we have good reason to be frightened by this situation of conformity and individual emptiness. We need only remind ourselves that the ethical and emotional emptiness in European society three to five decades ago was an open invitation to fascist dictatorships to step in and fill the vacuum. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

The great danger of this situation of vacuity and powerlessness is that it leads sooner or later to painful anxiety and despair, and ultimately, if not corrected, to futility and the blocking off of the most precious qualities of the human being. Its end results are the dwarfing and impoverishment of persons psychologically, or else surrender to some destructive authoritarianism. There is a correlation between economy and culture. Human nature itself needs and laws are in constant interaction with the economic conditions which shape historical development; and while mortals are sharped by the form of social and economic organization, they in turn also mold it. The passions and strivings which are rooted in mortal’s nature, and in the conditions of their existence, are the most powerful driving force for human development. Much like how many people love celebrity culture, so they try to design their homes like houses of the stars, buy fancy cars, buy clothes like those of their favor celebrities and even style their hair like theirs, and that is how cultural factors influence economic basis of society. Observation of the human reality proves that the economic structure of Capitalism constitutes a definite progress over all other socialist theories from a scientific viewpoint. Automatically, when the economic changes have been achieved, a better society can be brought into life by the people who have undergone a moral change within themselves. For instance, people are trying to preserve the economy, so are creating “repair cafes” to make to repair electronics. This is being called the “Repair Revolution.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

This is the age-old dilemma of our own personal responsibility even though we are moved by fate. In society, among workers and intellectuals, there is an expression of hope for the liberation of mortals, for the establishment of new moral values, for the realization of human solidarity. It reflects a condition of life to which we all are heir. It is the ultimate statement that truth and reality can be psychologized only to a limited extent. We must have a transpersonal belief in fate and moral responsibility at the same time. God has given every mortal a soul and that is our bond with the divine. To live in accord with one’s soul is difficult but profoundly rewarding. It is natural drive in its starkest form but a drive which mortals, being conscious of, can to some extent assimilate and direct. Our soul opens us up to the creative possibilities we did not know we possessed. And although we experience trials, tribulations, and crises, the struggle gives us a never-failing source of forms and potentialities to awe and to delight. Satan, Lucifer, and other figures who were all at one time archangels, are psychologically necessary. They have to be invented, had to be created, in order to make human action and freedom possible. Otherwise, there would be no consciousness. For every thought destroys as it creates: to think this thing, I have to cut out something else; to say “yes” to this is to say “no” to that and to have a “no” in the very ambivalence of the “yes.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

For consciousness works by way of either/or: it is destructive as well as constructive. Without rebellion, no consciousness. Thus, the hope that Satan or other adversaries can be gotten rid of by gradual progress toward perfection is possible. Faith is a total and centered act of the personal self, the act of unconditional, infinite and ultimate concern. The question now arises: what is the source of this all-embracing and all-transcending concern? The word concern points to two sides of a relationship, the relation between the one who is concerned and one’s concern. In both respects we have to imagine mortal’s situation in itself and in one’s World. The reality of mortal’s ultimate concern reveals something about one’s being, namely, that one is able to transcend the flux of relative and transitory experiences of one’s ordinary life. Mortal’s experiences, feelings, thoughts are conditioned and finite. They not only come and go, but their content is of finite and conditional concern—unless they are elevated to unconditional validity. However, this presupposed the general possibility of doing so; it presupposes the element of infinite in mortals. Mortals are able to understand in an immediate personal and central act the meaning of the ultimate, the unconditional, the absolute, the infinite. This alone makes faith a human potentiality. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

Human potentialities are powers that drive toward actualization. Mortals are driven toward faith by one’s awareness of the infinite to which one belongs, but which one does not own like a possession. This is in abstract terms what concretely appears as the restlessness of the hearts within the flux of life. The unconditional concern which is faith is the concern about the unconditional. The infinite passion, as faith as been described, is the passion for the infinite. Or, the ultimate concern is apprehension about what is experienced as definitive. In this way we have turned from the subjective meaning of faith as a centered act of the personality to its objective meaning, to what is meant in the act of faith. It would not help at this point of our analysis to call that which is meant in the act of faith God or a god. For at this step we ask: What in the idea of God constitutes divinity? The answer is: It is the element of the unconditional and of ultimacy. This carries the quality of divinity. If this is seen, one can understand why almost every thing in Heaven and on Earth has received ultimacy in the history of religion. However, we also can understand that a critical principle was and is at work in mortal’s religious consciousness, namely, that which is really ultimate over against what claims to be supreme but it only preliminary, transitory, finite. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

The term ultimate concern united the subjective and the objective side of the act of faith—the fides qua creditur (the faith through which is believes) and the fides quae crediture (the faith which is believed). The first is the classical term for the centered act of the personality, the ultimate concern. The second is the classical term for that toward which this act is directed, the ultimate itself, expressed in symbols of the divine. This distinction is very important, but not ultimately so, for the one side cannot be without the other. There is no faith without a content toward which it is directed. There is always something meant in the act of faith. And there is no way of having the content of faith expect in the act of faith. All speaking about divine matters which is not done in the state of ultimate concern is meaningless. Because that which is meant in the act of faith cannot be approached in any other way than through an act of faith. In terms like ultimate, unconditional, infinite, absolute, the difference between subjectivity and objectivity is overcome. The ultimate of the act of faith and the ultimate that is meant in the act of faith are one and the same. This is symbolically expressed by the mystics when they say that their knowledge of God has of himself; and is expressed by Paul when he says (1 Corinthians 13) that he will know as he is known, namely by God. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

God never can be object without being at the same time subject. Even a successful prayer, is according to Paul (Romans 8), not possible without God as Spirit praying within us. The same experience expressed in abstract language is the disappearance of the ordinary subject-object scheme in the experiences of the ultimate, the unconditional. In the act of faith that which is the source of this act is present beyond the cleavage of the subject and object. It is present as both and beyond both. This character of faith gives an additional criterion for distinguishing true and false ultimacy. The finite which claims infinity without having it (as, for example, a nation or success) is not able to transcend the subject-object scheme. It remains an object which the believer looks at as a subject. One can approach it with ordinary knowledge and subject it to ordinary handling. There are, of course, many degrees in the endless realm of false ultimacies. The nation is nearer to true ultimacy than is success. Nationalistic ecstasy can produce a state in which the subject is almost swallowed by the object. However, after a periods the subject emerges again, disappointed radically and totally, and by looking at the nation in a skeptical and calculating way does injustice even to its justified claims. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

The more idolatrous a faith the less it is able to overcome the cleavage between subject and object. For that is the difference between true and idolatrous faith. In true faith the ultimate concern is a concern about the truly supreme; while in idolatrous faith is existential disappointment, a disappointment which penetrates into the very existence of mortals! This is the dynamics of idolatrous faith: that it is faith, and as such, the centered act of a personality; that the centering point is something which is more or less the periphery: and that, therefore, the act of faith leads to a loss of the center and to the disruption of the personality. The ecstatic character of even an idolatrous faith can hide this consequence only for a certain time. However, finally it breaks into the open. Perception—our interpretation of the data our senses supply—finally determines what our experience of the World is. Our perceptions can be distorted, however, and our senses fooled. In addition, there may be a whole range of senses receiving input that we do not yet really understand. These are the so-called extra senses, those we associate with extra sensory perception (ESP). “Fear not, for behold, it is God that has shown unto you this marvelous thing, in the which is shown unto you that ye cannot lay your hands on us to slay us,” reports Helaman 5.26.  The Lord is with us, mindful of us, and blessing us in way only he can do. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

Our desire is to always have God’s Spirit with us to push fear aside for a more eternal view of our mortal lives. Stand in holy places—be not troubled—and promises shall be fulfilled. We will find answers to our questions that trouble us or the peace to simply set them aside. That is the Spirit in action. This Earth is a sacred place in the kingdom of God, and this Earth calls for our reverence, our respect for others, our best selves in living the gospel, and our hopes to lay aside our fears and seek the healing power of Jesus Christ through his Atonement. People say this Earth is not our home, but we do live here. Much like a house rent, it may not be your permanent home, but it is your home because you are legally occupying the dwelling. There is no room for fear in these holy places of God or in the hearts of his children. Why? Because of love. God loves us—always—and we love him. Our love of God counters all fears, and his love abounds in holy places. Think about it. Wen we are tentative in our commitments to the Lord, when we stray from his path leading to life eternal, when we question or doubt our significance in his divine design, when we allow fear to open the door to all its companions—discouragement, anger, frustration, disappointment—the Spirit leave us, and we are without the Lord. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

We must learn to receive revelation. We experience the World through our sense. To receive personal revelation, we must place priority on living the gospel and encouraging faithfulness and spirituality in others as well as ourselves. However, we do not experience the same things. Our perceptions of the World differ. When we stand in holy placed, we can feel God’s love and perfect love casts out all fear. Sensation and perception are intimately linked together. It is through them that we both see the World. If we actively trust in the Lord and is ways, if we are engaged in his work, we will not fear the trends of the World or be troubled by them. I plead with you to set aside Worldly influences and pressures and seek spirituality in your daily life. Love what the Lord loves—which includes his commandments, his holy houses, our sacred covenants with him, the sacrament each Sabbath day, our communication through prayer—and you will not be troubled. We must trust the Lord and his promises and they will be fulfilled. We are wise and have received the truth, and have taken the Holy Spirit for our guide. “Peace, peace be unto you, because your faith in my Well Beloved, who was from the foundation of the World,” Helaman 5.47. The way to love other people is to express what we feel—anger and love—without aiming to hurt feelings. Open but reverent communication is how to make love in our lives. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

You do right by me, now. Or I will shout you down. Truth is I cannot recollect what happened. One can understand such a reaction only if one appreciates the degree to which words can assume a magical function, and if one takes into account the decrease in reasonable thought, that is to say, in objectivity, which is so characteristic of our age. While mortals are born with certain character traits, their character is definitely determined only by the circumstances under why they live.  If the social conditions of life are satisfactory, mortal’s character will develop its inherent virtues. Many people were trained in all previous history only to defend themselves or to destroy others. A new social order must be created, in which mortals are trained in principles that would permit them to act in union, and to create real and genuine bonds between individuals. Nothing living can prosper without freedom. It is out task to loosen the hardening of hearts so that what lies buried may rise to the surface: so that what truly lives yet now seems dead may emerge and grow light.  We must go to the root, and the root—is mortals themselves. The history of the World is nothing but the creation of human, is the history of the birth of mortals. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

However, all history is also the history of mortal’s alienation from oneself, from one’s own human powers; the consolidation of our own product to an objective force above us, outgrowing our control, defeating our expectations, annihilating our calculations is one of the main factors in al previous historical development. Mortals have been the object of circumstances, they must become the subject, so that mortals become the highest being for mortals. Freedom is not only freedom from political oppressors, but the freedom from the domination of mortals by things and circumstances. The free person is the rich person, but not the person rich in an economic sense, but rich in human sense. The wealthy mortal is the mortal who is much, and not the one who has much. The analysis of society and of the historical process must begin with mortals, not with an abstraction, but with the real, concrete mortal, in one’s physiological and psychological qualities. It must begin with a concept of the essence of mortals, and the study of economics and of society serves only the purpose of understanding how circumstances have crippled mortals, how one has become alienated from oneself and one’s powers. The nature of humans cannot be deduced from the specific manifestation of human nature as it is engendered by the capitalist system. Our aim must be to know what is good for humans. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

The aim of development of mortals is a new harmony between people and people, and between people and nature, a development in which mortal’s relatedness to one’s fellow mortals will correspond to one’s most important human need. How can this emancipation of mortals be attained? Mortal’s physical energy has become a commodity, hence mortals have become a thing. We are the nice people and, like the cultivated citizens of Athens in Socrates’ time, we do not like to be publicly reminded, whether we secretly admit it to ourselves or not, that we are motivated even in our love by lust for power, anger, and revenge. What is necessary for the cure is that we confront and come to terms with our souls. The principle this implies is identify with that which haunts you, not in order to fight it off, but to take it into yourself; for it must represent some rejected element in you. The community gives a humanly trustworthy, interpersonal World in which one can struggle against the negative forces. Sometimes we can be the source of hostility and aggression, but when we can, through consciousness, integrate it into our self-system, it becomes the course of energy and spirit which enlivens us. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

It is important that we learn to possess the fragments of our soul. By frankly confronting these fragments, coming to terms with them, integrating them into the self-system—this process yields several benefits. It strengthens the self because it integrates what had been left out. It overcomes the split, the paralyzing ambivalence in the self. And it renders the person more human by breaking down the self-righteousness and aloof detachment which are the usual defenses of the human being who denies the soul. In such therapy we notice that there is a freeing of the patient from morbid bonds to the past. Love and will are reciprocally related: to help one is to strengthen the other. Anger and love and the feeling of both do not operate in separate compartments or in separate people. We cannot reject one and hope to experience the other. Our aim is to discover ways in which we can stand against the insecurity of our time, to find a center of strength within ourselves, and as far as we can, to point the way toward achieving values and goals which can be depended upon in a day when very little is secure. Many people do not know what they want; they often do not have any clear idea of what they feel. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

When people talk about lack of autonomy, or lament their inability to make decisions—difficulties which are present in all decades—it soon becomes evident that their underlying problem is that they have no definite experience of their wants or desires. Thus they feel swayed this way and that, with painful feelings of powerlessness, because they feel vacuous, empty. The complaint which leads them to come for help may be, for example, that their love relationships always break up or that they cannot go through with marriage plans or are dissatisfied with the marriage partner. However, they do not talk long before they make it clear that they expect the marriage partner, real or hoped-for, to fill some lack, some vacancy within themselves; and they are anxious and angry because he or she does not talk. They generally can talk fluently about what they should want—to complete their college degrees successfully, to get a job, to fall in love and marry and raise a family—but it is soon evident, even to them, that they are describing what others, parents, professors, employers, expect of them rather than what they themselves want. Soon people realize that they are just a collection of mirrors, reflecting what everyone expects of me. We have to help people clear up the repressions, bring the desire into consciousness, and eventually help them become able to gratify their desire in accord with reality. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

Very often people are more sensitive and gifted members of the society; they need to get help, broadly speaking, because they are less successful at rationalizing than the well-adjusted citizen who is able for the time being to over up one’s underlying conflicts. This is why we need to have faith. Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned: the dynamics of faith are the dynamics of mortal’s ultimate concern. Mortals, like every living being, is concerned about many things, above all about those which condition one’s very existence, such as food and shelter. However, mortals, in contrast to other living beings, as spiritual concerns—cognitive, aesthetic, social, political. Some of them are urgent, often extremely urgent, and each of them as well as the vital concerns can claim ultimacy for a human life or the life of a social group. It is claims ultimacy it demands the total surrender of one who accepts this claim, and it promises total fulfillment even if all other claims have to be subjected to it or rejected in its name. If a national group makes the life and growth of the nation its ultimate concern, it demands that all other concerns, economic well-being, health and life, family, aesthetic and cognitive truth, justice and humanity, be sacrificed. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

The extreme nationalisms of our century are laboratories for the study of what ultimate concern means in all aspects of human existence including the smallest concerns of one’s daily life. Everything is centered in the only god, the nation—a god who certainly proves to be a demon, but who shows clearly the unconditional character of an ultimate concern. However, it is not only the unconditional demand made that which is one’s ultimate concern, it is also the promise of ultimate fulfillment which is accepted in the act of faith. The content of this promise is not necessarily defined. It can be expressed in indefinite symbols or in concrete symbols which cannot be taken literally, like the greatness of one’s nation in which one participates even if one has died for it, or the conquest of humankind by the saving race, and so forth. In each of these cases it is ultimate fulfillment that is promised, and it is exclusion from such fulfillment which is threatened if the unconditional demand is not obeyed. An example—and more than an example—is the faith manifest in the religion of the Old Testament. It also has the character of ultimate concern in demand, threat and promise. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

The content of this concern is not the nation—although some nationalist groups have sometimes tried to distort that—but the content is the God of justice, who, because he represents justice for everybody and every nation, is called the Universal God, the God of the Universe. He is the ultimate concern of every pious being, and therefore in his name the great commandment is given: “You shall love the Lord your God will all your heart, and with all your soul, and with al your might,” reports Deuteronomy 6.5. This is what ultimate concern means and from these words the term ultimate concern is derived. They state unambiguously the character of genuine faith, the demand of total surrender to the subject of ultimate concern. The Old Testament is full of commands which make the nature of this surrender concrete, and it is full of promises and threats in relation to it. Here is also the promises of symbolic indefiniteness, although they center around fulfillment of the national and individual life, and the threat is the exclusion from such fulfillment through national extinction and individual catastrophe. Faith, for the people of the Old Testament, is the state of being ultimately and unconditionally concerned about God and about what he represents in demands, threat, and promise. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

Another example—almost a counter-example, yet nevertheless equally revealing—is the ultimate concern with success and wit social standing and economic power. It is the god of many people in the highly competitive Western culture and it does what every ultimate concern must do: it demands unconditional surrender to its laws even if the price is the sacrifice of genuine human relations, personal conviction, and creative eros. Its threat is social and economic defeat, and its promise—indefinite as all such promises—the fulfillment of one’s being. It is the breakdown of this kind of faith which characterizes and makes religiously important most contemporary literature. Not false calculations but a misplaced faith is revealed in novels like Point of No Return. When fulfilled, the promise of this faith proves to be empty. Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned. The content matters infinitely for the life of the believer, but it does not matter for the formal definition of faith. And this is the step we have to make in order to understand the dynamics of faith. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

Only the adversary, the enemy of us all, would try to convince us that the ideals outlined in the general conference are depressing and unrealistic, that people do not really improve, that no one really progresses. And why does Lucifer give that speech? Because he knows he cannot improve, he cannot progress, that Worlds without end he will never have a bright tomorrow. He is a miserable man bound by eternal limitations, and he wants you to be miserable too. Well, do not fall for that. With the gift of the Atonement of Jesus Christ and the strength of Heaven to help us, we can improve, and the great thing about the gospel is we get credit for trying, even if we do not always succeed. When there was a controversy in the early Church regarding who was entitled to Heaven’s blessings and who was not, the Lord declared to the Prophet Joseph Smith, “Verily I say unto you, [the gifts of God] are given for the benefit of those who love me and keep my commandments, and [for them] that seeketh so to do.” Are we not all thankful for that added provision? That has to be a lifesaver because sometimes that is all we can offer! We take some solace in the fact that if God were to reward only the perfectly faithful, he would not have much of a distribution list. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

Please remember tomorrow, and all the days after that, that the Lord blesses those who want to improve, who accept the need for commandments and try to keep them, who cherish Christlike virtues and strive to the best of their ability to acquire them. If you stumble in that pursuit, so does everyone; the Savior is there to help you keep going. If you fall, summon his strength. Call out, “Oh, Jesus, have mercy on me.” He will help you get back up. He will help you repent, repair, fix whatever you have to fix, and keep going. Soon enough you will have the success you seek. We are going to be blessed for our desire to do good, even as we actually strive to be so. And to qualify for those blessings, we must make certain we do not deny them to others; we are to deal justly, never unjustly, never unfairly; we are to walk humbly never arrogantly, never pridefully; we are to judge righteously, never self-righteously, never unrighteously. The first great commandment of all eternity is to love God with all of our heart, might, mind, and strength—that is the first great commandment. However, the first great truth of all eternity is that God loves us with all of his heart, might, mind, and strength. That love is the foundation stone of all eternity, and it should be the foundation stone of our daily life. Indeed, it is only with that reassurance burning in our soul that we can have the confidence to keep trying to improve, keep seeking forgiveness for our sins, and keep extending that grace to our neighbor. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

Faith as ultimate concern is an act of the total personality. It happens in the center of the personal life and includes all its elements. Faith is the most centered act of the human mind. It is not a movement of a special section or a special function of mortal’s total being. They all are untied in the act of faith. However, faith is not the sum total of their impacts. It transcends every special impact as well as the totality of them and it has itself a decisive impact on each of them. Since faith is an act of the personality as a whole, it participates in the dynamics of personal life. These dynamics have been described in many ways, especially in the recent developments of analytic psychology. Thinking in polarities, their tensions and their possible conflicts, is a common characteristic of most of them. This makes the psychology of personality highly dynamic and requires a dynamic theory of faith as the most personal acts. The first and decisive polarity in analytic psychology is that between the so-called unconscious and the conscious. Faith as an act of the total personality is not imaginable without the participation of the unconscious elements in the personality structure. They are always present and decide largely about the content of faith. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

However, on the other hand, faith is a conscious act and the unconscious elements participate in the creation of faith only if they are taken into the personal center which transcends each of them. If this does not happen, if unconscious forces determine the mental status without a centered act, faith does not occur, and compulsions take its place. For faith is a matter of freedom. Freedom is nothing more than the possibility of centered personal acts. The frequent discussion in which faith and freedom are contrasted could be helped by the insight that faith is a free, namely, centered act of the personality. In this respect freedom and faith are identical. Also important to understand is that real faith, even if it uses the father image for its expression, transforms this image into a principle of truth and justice to be defended even against the father. Faith and culture can be affirmed only if we stay grounded in reality, but keep a focus on our eternal lives. This leads to the question of how faith as a personal, centered act is related to the rational structure of mortal’s personality which is manifest in one’s meaningful language, in one’s ability to know the true and to do the good, in one’s sense of beauty and justice. All this, and not only one’s possibility to analyze, to calculate and to argue, makes one a rational being. However, in spite of this larger concept of reason we must deny that mortal’s essential nature is identical with the rational character of one’s mind. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

Mortals are able to decide for or against reason. This power is the power of one’s self, the center of self-relatedness in which all elements of one’s being are untied. Faith is not an act of any of one’s rational functions, as it is not an act of the unconscious, but it is an act in which both the rational and the nonrational elements of one’s being are transcended. Faith as the embracing and centered act of the personality is ecstatic. It transcends both the drives of the nonrational unconscious and the structures of the rational conscious. It transcends them, but it does not destroy them. The ecstatic character of faith does not exclude its rational character although it is not identical with it, and it includes nonrational strivings without being identical with them. In the ecstasy of faith there is an awareness of truth and of ethical value; there are also past loves and hates, conflicts and reunions, individual and collective influences. Ecstasy means standing outside of oneself—without ceasing to be oneself—with all the elements which are united in the personal center. “And as many as had devils cast out from them, and were healed of their sicknesses and their infirmities, did truly manifest unto the people that they had been wrought upon by the Spirit of God, and has been healed; and they did show forth signs also and did do some miracles among the people,” 3 Nephi 7.22. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

A further polarity in these elements, relevant for the understanding of faith, is the tension between the cognitive function of mortal’s personal life, on the one hand, and emotion and will, on the other hand. We must sharply and insistently understand that every act of faith is cognitive affirmation, not as the result of an independent process of inquiry but as an inseparable element in a total act of acceptance and surrender. This also excludes the idea that faith is the result of an independent act of will to believe. There is certainly affirmation by the will of what concerns one ultimately, but faith is not a creation of will. In the ecstasy of faith the will to accept and to surrender is an element, but not the cause. And this is true also of feeling. Faith is not an emotional outburst: tis is not the meaning of ecstasy. Certainly, emotion is in it, as in every act of man’s spiritual life. However, emotion does not produce faith. Faith has a cognitive content and is an act of the will. It is the unity of every element in the centered self. Of course, the unity of all elements in the act of fait does not prevent one or the other element from dominating in a special faith. It dominates the character of faith but it does not create the act of faith. “When you shall read these things, if it be wisdom in God that you should read them, that you would remember how merciful the Lord has been unto the children of mortals, from the creation of Adam even down until the time that you shall receive these things, and ponder it in your hearts,” reports Moroni 10.3. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

This also answers the question of a possible psychological of faith. Everything that happens in a mortal’s personal being can become an object of psychology. And it is rather important for bot the philosopher of religion and the practical minister to know how the act of faith is embedded in the totality of psychological processes. However, in contrast to this justified and desirable form of a psychology of faith there is another one which tries to derive faith from something that is not faith but is most frequently fear. The presupposition of this method is that fear or something else from which faith is derived is more original and basic than faith. However, this presupposition cannot be proved. One the contrary, one can prove that in the scientific method which leads to such consequences faith is already effective. Faith precedes all attempt to derive it from something else, because these attempts are themselves based on faith. No matter how serious the trial, how deep the distress, how great the affliction, God will never desert us. He never has, and he never will. He cannot do it. It is not God’s character to quit us. God will always stand by us. God, our Heavenly Father, wants us to be. He wants to bless us. A rewarding, abundant, and eternal life is the very object of God’s merciful plan for his children. It is a plan predicated on the truth that all things work together for good to them that love God. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

Now I found myself instantly fascinated, which was not too comfortable since it was my role to fascinate as our conversation went on. She had fully expected to read my thoughts and she could not. And she was blocked from knowing what was going on upstairs. She did not like it. However, to put it more Biblically, she was deeply grieved. And being shut out, she tried to make sense of my appearance, not at all concerned with the superficial eccentricity of my frock coat and my messy hair, but the subtle sheen of my skin and the electric blue of my eyes. There are forces within us that refuse to be so simply categorized. They overlap too much, and they are not yet fully enough understood. As we try to understand the role of emotion in our lives, we know that feelings and moods often act as motivational factors. Our feelings and moods cause us to want or need certain things; they cause us to do certain things in order to bring about what we desire. Our age is by no means the first to experience the banalization of love, and to find that without passion, love sickness. Love cannot grow without passion. Two people find fulfillment in love, and especially the sexual expressions of love. They must recognize the other self as similar to one’s own, and live with the concept of resonance. When you strike a chord on a piano which is perfectly attuned to another in the same room, the second piano echoes the chord. #RandolphHarris 1 of 8

In interpersonal resonance, the mutual echoing of two natures depends upon the recognition of similarities, and takes place through sympathetic imagination—the process of taking the role of the other, and imagining not only how they other feels, but why one feels as one does. This is what we are after: a way of looking at the deepest, most total expression of love. If two people feel their kinship as human beings, as actualized selves, then in their expressions of relatedness they will tune themselves in. Love (or affection) is expressed by the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual coming-together of two healthy, happy, total, and confident human beings. Love is the center of the vitality of a culture—its heart and soul. Love can pierce brutal as well as gentle hearts, to their death or to their healing delight, anguish and joy, anxiety—these are the warp and woof of which the fabric of the human soul. To love means to open ourselves to the negative as well as the beneficial—to grief, sorrow, and disappointment as well as to joy, fulfillment, and an intensity of consciousness we did not know was possible before. When we fall in love, as the expressive verb puts it, the World shakes and changes around us, not only in the way it looks but in our whole experience of what we are doing in the World. #RandolphHarris 2 of 8

Generally, the shaking is consciously felt in its beneficial aspects—as the wonderful new Heaven and Earth which love with its miracle and mystery has suddenly produced. Love is the answer, we sing. Aside from the banality of such reassurances, our Western culture seems to be engaged in a romantic—albeit desperate—conspiracy to enforce the illusion that that is all there is to love. The very strength of the effort to support that illusion betrays the presence of the repressed, opposing pole. This opposing element is the consciousness of death. For death is always in the shadow of the delight of love. In faint adumbration there is present the dread, haunting question: Will this new relationship destroy us? When we love, we give up the center of ourselves. We are thrown from our previous state of existence into a void; and though we hope to attain a New World, a new existence, we can never be sure. Nothing looks the same, and may well never look the same again. The World is annihilated; how can we know whether it will ever be built up again? We give, and give up, our own center; how shall we know that we will get it back? We wake up to find the whole World shaking: where or when will it come to rest? #RandolphHarris 3 of 8

The most excruciating joy is accompanied by the consciousness of the imminence of death—and with the same intensity. And it seems that one is not possible without the other. This experience of annihilation is an inward one and, as the myth rightly puts it, is essentially wat love does to us. It is not simply what the other person does to us. To love completely carries with it the treat of the annihilation of everything. This intensity of consciousness has something in common wit the ecstasy of the mystic in one’s union with God: just as one can never be sure God is there, so love carries us to that intensity of consciousness in which we no longer have any guarantee of security. This razor’s edge, this dizzy balance of anxiety and joy, has much to do with the exciting quality of love. The dread joy is not just the question of whether the love will be returned in kind. Indeed, the real dialectic is within the person oneself and the anxiety is not essentially quieted if the love one does respond. Paradoxically, the object of our affection is sometimes more anxious when the love is returned than when not. For is one loves unrequitedly, which is even an aim in some love writing, or from a safe distance, like Dante and the whole Stylist movement in Italian literature, one can at least go on about one’s customary daily tasks, writing one’s Divine Comedy or one’s sonnets or novels. #RandolphHarris 4 of 8

It is when the love is realized that it may literally break the limb’s strength, as with Anthony and Cleopatra, or Paris and Helen, or Queen Akasha and Lord de Lioncourt, or Heloise and Abelard. Hence, human beings are afraid of love. And, all the saccharine books to the contrary, there is reason to be afraid. In common human experience, this relationship between death and love is perhaps most clear to people wen they have children. A mortal may have thought very little about death—and prided oneself on one’s bravery—until one becomes a parent. Then one find in one’s love for one’s child an experience of vulnerability to death: the Cruel Imposter can at any time take away the child, the object of one’s love. In this sense love is an experience of greater vulnerability. Love is also a reminder of our own mortality. When a friend or member of our family ides, we are vividly impressed by the fact that life is evanescent and irretrievable. However, there is also a deeper sense of its meaningful possibilities and an impetus to risk ourselves in taking the leap. Some—perhaps most—human beings never know deep love until they experience, at someone’s death, the preciousness of friendship, devotion, loyalty. If we never died, could we love passionately? #RandolphHarris 5 of 8

This is one of the reason, mythologically speaking, why the love affairs among the immortal gods on Mt. Olympus are so insipid and boring. The loves of Zeus and Juno are completely uninteresting until they involve a mortal. Love has the power to change the course of history only wen Zeus comes down to Leda or Io and falls in love with this mortal woman who can years to have a child because she knows she will not live forever. Love is not only enriched by our sense of mortality but constituted by it. Love is the cross-fertilization of mortality and immortality. This is why the daimon Eros is described as midway between gods and men and partakes of the nature of both. I have been speaking, to some degree, in ideal terms. I am fully aware that this degree of involvement will be called neurotic by many of my colleagues. This is the day of cool relationships—one should never become involved to a degree which prevents one’s moving out at any moment! However, I submit that this involvement is neurotic only if frozen, or fixated; only if the partners demand that they live always on this level. While none of us lives on the level I am describing for very long, it remains a kind of backdrop, an ideal situation which out to be somewhere in the relation lending meaning to the drab and dull days which also come. #RandolphHarris 6 of 8

There is a virginal quality of every genuine love experience. It seems that each time is new; we feel convinced that nobody every experienced this before, though in our conceit we are sure that we shall remember it forever. When I was lecturing on this theme at a university, two different young men came up to tell me privately that they understood me because they were in love, but the expressed genuine concern that the other students would not understand. Such presumption—that nobody as ever been in love but me and I never before!—is, I fear, par for the course. There are so many lights that can be cast on love, and it throws on the human problems in love than all our glib talk about the art of loving, about love as the answer to all our needs, love as instant self-actualization, love as contentment, or love as a mail-order technique! There is an aura of over-seriousness in the above paragraphs that indicated our deep concern for the preservation and respect of really human love. Loves most beautiful moments come when neither partner is involved in the mundane, everyday workaday affairs of life, when they forget everything, including themselves, and are concerned only with the pleasure and greater joy of the other person. Wholesome love is spontaneous, unrehearsed, and certainly unself-conscious celebration of one’s chemistry and commitment to another person. #RandolphHarris 7 of 8

We know that human beings who experience their love in satisfying and growth-producing means are happier, healthier, and more loving people generally. This should continue. It is important that our society examine its own attitudes toward the important area of love. Are they reasonable in the light of modern scientific findings? Are they in keeping with what we understand about human selfhood? A loving relationship, as with any intimate shared experience, needs and deserves privacy, uninterrupted opportunity. It is a challenge to consider the fact that enlightening our children produces adults who respect knowledge and truth; keeping then in the dark usually produces adults who gear the light and truth. It is part of the normative behavior of our people to find someone with whom we believe we can share a happy and productive life and make this decision public. Achievement motivation is a is a powerful force in many societies of the World, especially those with high levels of technological development, affluence, and success orientation. Heavenly Father provides us with the conditions we need to progress within his plan. If we keep his commandments, the Heavenly Father will help each of us. Our lives are in God’s hands and our days are known and shall not be numbered less. God ensures that eventually all things work for the good of those who loves him. #RandolphHarris 8 of 8