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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
I Hope I Have Never Fallen and Never Shall Fall to Such a Depth of Cowardice and Ingratitude
A World of silent cathedrals. Thousands of magnificent cities. Measureless galleries. Warriors poised in their chariots inscribed in arabesque bas-reliefs spiraling into eternity. Objects have their own light and beauty. There is grandeur in this view of life…having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved. Above us shone the bright stars, beyond the zig zag line traces in the black sky by the tip of the foremast as it weaves back and forth; the gleaming stars charmed our eyes. The evening lights of Rocklin Trails had been left far in the rear. Without a doubt this was the most amazing and intense experience of my life. The faces of other people were clear and beautiful and open. Their faces looked bright and strong, like those of archangels. I could look at them without fear of shyness and with frank admiration and adoration. People looked pure, shed of a fog of dissimulations, anxieties, hypocrisies. Everyone was true to one’s own self and no one was ashamed. It was, so I had heard, a land where silence and serenity were an essential part of its beauty. I wanted to be quiet with my own heart and open to my own spirit. I sought especially the answer to the question of the relationship of the beauty of nature to the Infinite, to what some people call the Absolute and others call God. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
It was thus a strange kind of expectancy that I felt as I sat with my companions of the Cresleigh Rocklin Trails community looking at the stars gleaming in the night’s sky. A half Moon peeked over the pyramidal roof tops, and the stars scrutinized us in their sharp way, peering more brightly than the eyes of a cat at night. We witnessed another act of the drama which proves everlastingly that mortals are not alone in this natural paradise. It is a special little kingdom. Creation is a stone thrown uphill against the downward rush of habit. We must remember that without habit we cannot exits, just as without creation we would not exist. Habit and creation, or law and freedom, or gravity and turbulence, depending upon how or in what aspects we view these polarities, conduct an incessant and fruitful dialectic. In another aspect, of from another and judgmental point of view, we may call the polarities Heaven and Hell, though it is not always clear which is. Without contraries there is no progression. The doors of perception are cleansed, and by doors we mean those structural aspects of consciousness of which we are speaking, and by cleansed, we mean, unhinged and plain removed. The love of God and the vow of love inwardly is renewed each second of each day, each time eternal and each time wholly complete and new. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
Everyday as the bird rise with the lavender dawn, as from the buses on either side comes the exhilarating trills of warblers, the merry chirps of sparrows, and a well-blended chorus of notes from countless other feathery creatures, with faithfulness I pray God will not refuse us the grace. A silent priest whose figure and face arrested our attention was all and stood with natural dignity and grace of figure; his face was delicate, sensitive, intelligent. His clear blue eyes especially attracted us. We had seen him in the coffee shop, where he had quietly waited for coffee, which should have shown us that he was not native to this part of the globe. He had a pleasing English accent and a rich, expressive voice; he told us he was studying the rich treasures of Byzantine art and hagiography. We later learned that he was of a high British Family. About the human body itself there are several features we tend not to notice, they seem so common. When we have considered these common enough facts briefly, we may then turn to certain features of the human mind that also are so commonplace that one must make a special point of thinking about them if they are to be noticed at all. Our bodies are not closed, but open. Some of the openings seem mostly to let things in and other seems mostly to let thing out, but the main function of the 10 or 12 openings and numerous minor ones is to provide a constant interchange of materials between the system or field that we identify ourselves and the systems or fields that we recognize as not-ourselves. We generally face the way we are going. Another way of putting this is to say that our face is front. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
In terms of temporal passage, the things that have not yet happened are in front of us, in the course of time we shall face them. Like almost everything in nature, in our gross aspect we are approximately symmetrical, and generally bilateral. We have two ears and they are located on opposite side of the head. The fact of bilateral symmetry has a great deal to do with how we locate ourselves and all the not-ourselves in space and time. The stone road led up through a valley where the blossoming lemon and orange trees of this Easter season were exuberant with their delicate bright shades. They unceasingly tempted us to pause, like the mythological Circe, with their intoxicating order—but our muscles were responding like tuned violin strings and we had no choice but to continue up the beckoning path. I need not go on with these commonplaces, for you can yourself think of many more and of their consequences for our sense of self: our jointedness, our plasticity, the flexibility of control we have over our openings, our shape and our size and the tiny span we occupy in the scale of magnitude of the physical World, our remarkable similarity to one another, the counterphoic quality of our motility, our bony skeletons and casings, our living and moving brains, and our perishability. Joy arises from the full development of personal functioning. The parts of the body may be taught and trained, exercised and sharpened. The senses may be made more acute to discriminate smells and sights. Strength and stamina can be increased in the muscles. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
Sensory awareness and appreciation can be awakened so that more sensitivity to bodily feelings and natural events can be developed. Motor control can be cultivated so that development of mechanical and artistic skills result, and coordination and dexterity improve. The nervous system may be developed through study and the acquisition of knowledge and experience. Logical thinking and the creative potential can be nurtured and brought to fruition. Bodily functions controlling the emotions can also be developed. Awareness of emotions, appropriate expression of feelings (and their relation to other functions such as thinking and action) can be trained. I remind you of these aspects of our structure—the structural shapes of our destiny—both because I want as well to remind you of certain aspects of the structure of mind and because mind and body bear to one another a relationship which poses for psychology its ultimate and most crucial problem. I seem no reason why we should not conceive of the body as a machine, and indeed I can think of no reasonable alternative conception. However, protoplasm is different from all other mechanical systems in that it feels, and that in its complex human embodiment it possesses what we know as our own consciousness. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
This consciousness has a structure in the same sense that our body does, and some of its structural aspects do seem to derive from the structure of the body, though to say “derive from” already prejudges the question and exhibits one of the structural aspects of my own consciousness (and yours as well, I would guess), which sees a before and an after, logical antecedent and logical consequence, cause and effect. Thus far our realized human has acquired a finely tuned body, and has developed it to its full integrated functioning. If one is to develop further, one must be able to relate to other people in order to achieve the most joy. Since ours is a communal culture, this means functioning in such a way that human interaction is rewarding for all concerned. This theory assets that our needs from and toward other people are three: inclusion, control, and affection. We achieve interpersonal joy when we find a satisfying flexible balance in each of these areas between ourselves and other people. Inclusion refers to the need to be with people and to be alone. The effort in inclusion is to have enough contract to avoid loneliness and enjoy people; enough aloneness to avoid enmeshment and enjoy solitude. The fully realized mortal can feel comfortable and joyful both with and without people, and knows how much of each—and when—one functions best. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
The phenomenon of feeling cannot be shown to arise from any peculiarity of our mechanical constitution. The attempt to deduce it (for instance, the property of feeling) from the laws of mechanics, applied to never so ingenious a mechanical contrivance, would obviously be futile. It can never be explained, unless we admit that physical events are but degraded or undeveloped forms of physical events. We see frequently in creative individuals such an ability to transcend the ordinary boundaries of structures of consciousness; indeed, more than ability, an actual desire to break through the regularities of perception, to shatter what is stable or constant in consciousness, to go beyond the given World to find that something-more or that something-different that intuition says is there. Let us take a look at the features of mind that are as commonplace as those we have considered in thinking of the human body, but that ordinarily do not claim our attention. One word of qualification first, however. Structural characteristics of our body, even though we recognize them as dynamic and passing, seem to us more tangible than the structures of consciousness of which I shall speak. When I say that these structures I mean simply that they are relatively enduring and constantly recurring psychic dispositions, and thus have a sort of permanence and distinctness and boundedness which make the word structure appropriate. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
Our mind so operates that we consider the proposition logically impossible that a thing can both be and not be at the same time. Definitively and certainly, as far as human beings have the right to use these two words, our vocations impose upon us the necessity of engaging in intellectual work. And that is in order that we may serve God and the Christian faith in the realm of intelligence. The degree of intellectual honesty that is obligatory for us, by reason of our particular vocations, demands our artistic creations be so intimate and secret that no one can penetrate into them from outside. In the area of control the effort is to achieve enough influence so that a mortal can determine one’s future to the degree that one finds most comfortable, and to relinquish enough control so that one is able to learn on others to teach, guide, support, and at times to take some responsibility from one. The fully realized mortal is capable of either leading or following as appropriate, and of knowing where one personally feels most comfortable. Space and time seem to exist independently of our perception of them, and to be separate categories of being, themselves independent of one another. In science we say that a protocol sentence is one that specifies some space-time coordinate and ascribes to a thing or event there a certain quantity or value. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
In common sense, anything that happens happens at some particular time and in some particular place. Everything in principle has an explanation; that is, if we could but know everything, there would be no unintelligible or unaccountable—for event. In common parlance, there is a reason for everything. In affection the effort is to avoid being engulfed in emotional entanglement (not being free to relate without a deep involvement), but also to avoid having too little affection and a bleak, sterile life without love, warmth, tenderness, and someone to confide in. The fully realized mortal is aware of one’s needs, and function effectively not only in close, emotionally involving situations, but also in those of lesser intensity. As in the other two areas, one is able to both give and take, comfortably and joyfully. This approach to human potential is called Interpersonal Relations. Our mind seems to be distinct and separate from other minds, our self to belong to us alone; and like everything else, we exist in a particular time for us, the present, and a particular place, our body. Our self is the only self we known, and no other self knows us. And while our own individual mind, if it could validly be compared with other minds, might prove to be remarkably similar to those other minds, to us it is unique, the only one. Assume now that one has a good body structure, functioning well, and one relates optimally with the people of his or her life. However, one function within a society, and one’s development cannot be completed without the support of the society. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
If the society is repressive, one cannot develop fully. If social institutions are destructive, one cannot grow. If family life is constricting, if work is dehumanizing, if laws are humiliating, if norms are intolerable, if bigotry and prejudice are the bases human functioning, then our fully realized mortal is deep trouble. Joy at the level of organization comes when society and culture are supporting and enhancing to self-realization. Approaches at this level are called Organizational Relations. This, then, is our framework. Joy is developed through the levels of body-structure, personal functioning, interpersonal relations, and organizational relations. The fact that attention seem to wax and wane, that mind seems to sleep and to wake, that time seem to pass moment by moment in a succession of states rather than in an unstoppable flow, that most inanimate objects seem impenetrable and unmoving, that up seem to be above down, that the inside of a thing cannot be the outside of it, and so on are the basic achievement of consciousness. Joy is the feeling that comes when one realizes one’s potential for feeling, for having inner freedom and openness, for expression of expression of oneself, for being able to do whatever expression of oneself, for being able to do whatever one is capable of, and for having satisfying relations with others and society. In the older day the psychiatric way of determining whether or not the patient had what was called a clear sensorium was to ask the “W” questions: who are you, where are you, why are you here, when did you arrive, what is your name, what day I it, which way is out and so on. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
Knowing these whys and wherefores, and being able in addition to make some simple comparisons and strike some arithmetical averages, meant that you were sane enough for most purposes. It is no longer news that modern mathematics and physics can do so very well without some of these common-sense notions, and in most of the modern arts as well there are significant works that aim at breaking up the best established of our regularities of perception. A large part of the effort, unfortunately, must go into undoing. Guilt, shame, embarrassment, or fear of punishment, failure, success, retribution—all must be overcome. Destructive and blocking behavior, thoughts, and feelings must be altered. The experiences which I call hellish are marked by a sense of impossible distance between people, of intrinsic solitariness of the self, of vast darkness and desolation throughout the Universe, of the puniness of the shelters we have made for ourselves, the feebleness of fire against the outer coldness and darkness, and an anticipation of death or a feeling that one is already dead. The light and glow with which persons are suffused, or which come visibly from them, in the Heavenly experience, seems to go out when the experience is one of Hell. Or the person may seem to move in dark ugly red shadows, or to be a sickly green. Smiles become meaningless grimaces, and all human actions seem mere puppetry. In the hellish experience, time may seem impossibly slow and painful, and determinism is experienced as being a prison. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
By contrast, determinism is experienced under happier conditions as being perfectly natural and quite all right. The subject knows, with the preacher in Ecclesiastes, that there is nothing new under the Sun, that every story is an old story and has been told an infinite number of times before, but somehow that knowledge is not disturbing. Everything is reconciled; time does not matter. Talents and abilities must be developed and trained. It sounds overwhelming, but there is cause for optimism. Much work is now being done at all levels. You will recognize in these observations some concrete illustrations of the age-old paradoxes that philosophy grapples with, the paradoxes that art occasionally resolves. The philosophic problems are these: the problem of the one and the many, unity and variety; determinism and freedom; mechanism and vitalism; good and evil; time and eternity; the plenum and the void; moral absolutism and moral relativism; monotheism and polytheism and atheism. These are the basic problems of human existence, and, so far as we possibly can, we arrange things so as to forget them. The requirement that the Universe has put to the human brain is that of striking an average in countless dimensions simultaneously, so that the individual unit of life (for instance you and I) may continue to be alive as long as possible, and thus that life on the whole may increase. However, the paradox is that this striking of averages requires, from the individual point of view, a sacrifice of self. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
We are required to be part of universal habit, but evolution has brought us to that point of consciousness where we as individual human beings realize the preciousness of consciousness and perhaps take pride in our individual, inimitable selfhood. It does not make sense that we should be given life on the one hand and death on the other. The easiest thing to do is to forget it, and we usually succeed in doing so, with the help of our average-making brain, that remarkable machines which psychologist are now working to simulate in some material that does not feel and need not dissolve so soon. We are working hard to achieving personal growth through the exploration of feelings and a strong effort is being made to create an atmosphere of openness and honesty in communicating with each other. Ordinally, a strong feeling or group solidarity develops and group members are able to use each other very profitably. It is evident that an experience of such intensity and emotional importance may provide a means for initiating or facilitating the process of personal growth. It is easy enough to slide into the comforting sentiment, “Love will solve all.” However, it is not helpful to tell people that they should love. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
Telling they should love only promotes hypocrisy and sham, of which we have a good deal too much in the area of love already. Sham and hypocrisy are greater deterrents to learning to love than is outright hostility, for at least the latter may be honest and can then work worked with. Simply the proclaiming of the point that the World’s hostilities and hatreds would be overcome if only people could love invites more hypocrisy; and furthermore, we have learned in out dealings how crucial it is to lead from strength, and to meet people directly and realistically. If we begin by trying to make ourselves as individuals able to love, we shall make our most useful contribution to a World in dire need of concern for the neighbor and stranger. As with peace, those who call for love loudest often express it least. To make ourselves capable of loving, and ready to receive love, is the paramount problem of integration; indeed the key to salvation. Do let me thank you again from the bottom of my heart for your kindness to me. I shall often think of you. I hope that we shall have news of each other from time to time. May we reverse or slow down some of the averaging process, alter our experience of the passage of time, dissolve many definitions and melt many boundaries, permit greater intensities or more extreme values of experience to occur in many dimensions. I hope I have never fallen, and never shall fall, to such a depth of cowardice and ingratitude. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
I do not need any hope or any promise in order to believe that God is rich in mercy. I know this wealth of his with the certainty of experience; I have touched it. What I know of it through actual contact is so far beyond my capacity of understanding and gratitude that even the promise of future bliss could add nothing to it for me; since for human intelligence the addition of two infinites is not an addition. God’s mercy is manifest in affliction as in joy, by the same right, more perhaps, because under this form it has no human analogy. Mortal’s mercy is only shown in giving joy, or may in inflicting pain with a new to outward results, bodily healing or education. However, it is not the outward results of affliction that bear witness to divine mercy. When we try to disguise this, the outward results of true affliction are nearly always bad. It is in affliction itself that the splendor of God’s mercy shines, from its very depths, in the heart of its inconsolable bitterness. If still preserving in our love, we fall to the point where the soul cannot keep back the cry “My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” if we remain at this point without ceasing to love, we end by touching something that is not affliction, not joy, something that is central essence, necessary and pure, something not of the senses, common to joy and sorrow: the very love of God. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
It is the same as when we see someone very dear to us after a long absence; the words we exchange with one do not matter, but only the sound of one’s voice, which assures us of one’s presence. The knowledge of this presence of God does not afford consolation; it takes nothing from the fearful bitterness of affliction; nor does it heal the mutilation of the soul. However, we know quite certainly that God’s love for us is the very substance of this bitterness and this mutilation. I should like out of gratitude to be capable of bearing witness to this. This is the source of beauty. Even if there were noting more for us than life on Earth, even if the instant of death were to being us nothing new, the infinite superabundance of the divine mercy is already secretly present here below in its entirety. If we believe that the Father is within us, and if we believe that all things are possible to God, then we should no longer deny that God knows what to do with his own creation, and we should include ourselves in that creation. Only got can give life. And we should never forget that God is always working constructively. The greatest gift of life is to be accepted. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
What is so Frightening about Freedom? We Cherish it. We Fight for it. Yet We Run from it and Go to Great Lengths to Avoid an Awareness of it. Why?
Hello, you have the most amazing digs. I simply love your paintings. We also express our fear of freedom by seeing much of our lives in terms of demands and obligations. Few of us can claim we lack talent, for whatever shortage of abilities we may have, most of us have a real knack for playing this game! Getting along in the World as it is, adequate degree of social conformity, capacity to adapt to a wide range of conditions, ability to fit in—this kind of adjustment is not an unmixed blessing; the unadjusted complex person, who does not fit in very well in the World as it is, sometimes perceives the World more accurately than does one’s better adjusted fellow. Deceitfulness is identified with duplicity, lack of frankness, guile, subterfuge. Again, one recalls the adjective self-descriptions of the complex people: gloomy, pessimistic, bitter, dissatisfied, demanding, pleasure-seeking, spendthrift. There is certainly some suggestion here of early deprivation, of pessimism concerning the source of supply, which is seen as untrustworthy and which must be coerced, or perhaps tricked, into yielding. It is as though the person had reason to believe that one would not get what was coming to one unless one made sure that one did, by whatever device might be available. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
It is this lack of infantile trust that leads to adult duplicity and craftiness. One aspect of complexity then (and perhaps a penalty sometimes attaching to it) is, to render it in the common phrase, a sort of “two-facedness,” an inability to be wholly oneself at all times. The more simple, natural, and likeable person finds it easier to be always oneself. As compensation, the complex person may possess the capacity to be ironic or sardonic, which can be valuable attitudes. The preference for complexity is clearly associated with originality, artistic expression, and excellence of esthetic judgment. Originality was one of the three criterion variables around which the assessment research program was organized, and every subject was rated by the faculty members of one’s department on the degree or originality one had displayed in one’s work. It is Saturday afternoon and the wife says, “Matthias, how about watching the kids for the rest of the afternoon while I go shopping?” Now, Matthias may not feel at all enthusiastic about this plan for his afternoon. However, there is a good chance that he will feel some obligation (“After all, she does work pretty hard, too!”) and will agree (by a grunt) with the proposal. However, he may also feel that she has made an unreasonable demand. So he makes a few grumbling “bitches” about it, and the wife goes off feeling hurt, angry, or guilty, with some of the fun taken out of her expedition. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
By playing the demand-obligation game Matthias has blinded himself to the alternatives that he had. What are some of the things he might have said? “Honey, I was just going to call a couple of the guy and get together with them. How about calling a baby-sitter?” Or, “Gee, I was looking forward to spending the afternoon with you and the kids. Is there any other time you could do it?” Or, “I was planning to do somethings around the house that I can’t do if I have to watch the kids. Please call in a sitter.” Of course, there is always the chance, and perhaps not so remote either, that if Matthias were aware of his alternatives and felt free to exercise them, he might genuinely enjoy playing with the children for the afternoon, but with the help of the demand-obligation game he manages to keep himself miserable and unfree. If you think you do not play this game, look at your gift-giving habits. See how often you tell yourself that a gift is expected or that you owe it to a person, thereby blunting your enjoyment in giving as an expression of your love. One of the tricky aspects of the demand-obligation game is that, when we rebel against what others expect of us and against our own feelings of obligation, we are no more free than when we accede to them. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
If Matthias flatly refuses to stay home with the children because it is expected of him, he has not really acted freely on the basic question of whether he would enjoy that time with his youngsters. Probably many hipster types are so busy rebelling against society’s expectations that they are not free to ask themselves whether they are living the life most satisfying to themselves. Whenever we perceive life primarily in terms of others’ expectations, we are less than fully free. Not being ourselves with others is another way we often express our fear of freedom. None of us is completely ourselves all of the time in our encounter with others, and no doubt some lack of candor is often necessary, even desirable, in our complicated society. However, we overwork if, for we constantly tell ourselves in all kinds of situations that we cannot really be ourselves. We say that we cannot be genuine with another because: “He’s not really capable of understanding how I feel.” Or: “He wouldn’t love me any more.” Or: “She is too mature [or too young] to understand what I’m talking about.:” Or: “He hasn’t read as much about these psychological things as I have, and it would be completely over his head if I told him how I feel.” Or “He has so many troubles at the office I don’t want to burden him with my feelings about what goes on here at home.” Or: “She reacts emotionally whenever I say how I feel, so I’ve just learned to keep my mouth shut.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
Many other things some of us do could be interpreted as expressions of our fear of freedom. Some people live vicariously, substituting imaginary lives for the adventure of living: “I guess I read an average of six of seven mystery novels a week.” Psychosomatic illnesses probably perform this, among other, services: “I’m sorry, but I have another one of my sick headaches tonight and just can’t go out. Intellectualism provides a way of substituting rumination for spontaneous living: “Doctor, I’ve read just about every psychology book I can get my hands on. I can’t understand why I keep on having troubles.” Perhaps a person must have more commerce with oneself and one’s feeling states and less with the environment during childhood if one is later to have sufficient communication with one’s own depths to produce original thought. In this view, originality evidenced in maturity is to some extent dependent upon the degree to which the person in early childhood is faced with a complicated relationship to the maternal source of supply, combined with one’s capacity to persist at and eventually to achieve some mastery of this earliest problem situation. The argument would be that this primitive experience of phenomenal complexity sets a pattern of response which results in slower maturation, more tentativeness about the final form of organization, a resistance to early crystallization of the personality, and finally, greater complexity in one’s view both of the outer and of the inner Worlds. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
Perhaps such speculation is unwarranted, however, and in any case it is clear that a great many other factors are involved in determining originality. What can be said is that originality and artistic creativeness and discrimination are related to the preference for complexity. The complex person’s greater flexibility in thought process is shown by a correlation with rated rigidity, defined as inflexibility of thought and manner; stubborn, pedantic, unbending, firm. That repressive overcontrol may sometimes be associated with the preference for simplicity has already been indicated by the correlation of complexity with constriction, and by another correlation with impulsiveness. It is shown also in the relation of the complexity measure to psychiatric variables that are scaled with hysteria, which also correlates with Schizophrenia and psychopathic deviate. Thus complexity goes along both with lack of control impulse and with the failure of repression which characterizes the schizophrenic process. This is by no means to suggest that because a person is complex, unresponsive, and lazy that they show schizophrenic tendencies of a pathological degree, but it is reasonable to supper that it correlates the sort of free-floating symbolic activity and frank confrontation and expression of the unconscious that is often so startling present in schizophrenic patients. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
Healthy people are usually able to repress aggressive and erotic impulses, or to render them innocuous by rationalization, reinterpretation, or gratification in a substitutive manner which will not cause conflict. At the risk of being over-simple, we might say that preference for the complex in the psychic life makes for a wider consciousness of impulse, while this sort of simplicity, when it is preferred, is maintained by a narrowing of that consciousness. The perceptual decision in favor of admitting complexity may make also for greater subjectively experienced anxiety. To tolerate complexity, one must very often be able to tolerate anxiety as well, this finding would seem to day. The person who prefers complexity is socially nonconformist. With all the ways people have of expressing their fear of freedom it may be fair to say that the most unlimited ability that the human being has is that of building cage around itself. And once we build our cage, we work hard to keep them in constant report. What is so frightening about freedom? We cherish it. We fight for it. Yet we run from it and go to great lengths to avoid an awareness of it. Why? One reason we are afraid of freedom is that we do not trust ourselves. If we were not restricted in some way, we are afraid of what we would do. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
One woman described a lifelong fear of high places. When she began to explore her feelings further, she became aware that she had always been afraid that if the opportunity presented itself, she might jump to her death. By being afraid of and avoiding such places she was able to bypass the risk that her mistrust of herself told her was involved. Another young wife and mother suffers considerable inconvenience because she has never learned to drive. As she talked about it, it became clear that the freedom to come and go as she pleases is too frightening. “I’m afraid of what I might do,” she said. “I might start running around be begin neglecting my home and family.” And so she keeps herself immobile and as dependent on her husband as possible. All of us, no doubt, have some kind of fear like this. We are afraid that is we ever let ourselves go we would be likely to run wild or become savages, or lazy, no-good transients, or neglecting parents. It follows, of course, that our distrust of ourselves is rooted in our self-hate. It is as though we were constantly warning ourselves to be on guard against ourselves: “Look out, now, this guy is no damn good. Let him our of your sight and he’s liable to do most anything. Keep him hobbled. And do not let down your guard for a moment.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
In reality, however, it is not the genuinely free person who runs wild, becomes a savage, or lack the motivation to be productive. On the contrary, behavior that is destructive to the self or to others is an indication that the person is enslaved to repressed feelings that drive one and that one cannot face openly. Such behavior is the by-product of self-hate. If we have lived our lives denying freedom to ourselves, perhaps there is some justification for our mistrust or freedom. Just as a bid who has spent all its life in a cage might bewildered if released and not to know how to handle life in the wild, so we, too, may not be very well prepared to handle freedom. Many people need professional help as they seek to grant themselves greater personal freedom. A second reason we are afraid of freedom is that freedom, like love, means vulnerability. When we are free and spontaneous in our relationships with others, our guard is down. We are open to the possibility of being hurt. Consequently, we often keep ourselves bound emotionally. Coupes often have the mystifying and frustrating experience of discovering shortly after marriage that they no longer have such a strong, delicious desire for each other as they had before. Sometimes they immediately conclude that they no longer love each other. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
This is probably incorrect, for love is not so unstable a quality as all that. What has happened is that the couple has become frightened, since marriage is so intense a relationship with so much potential for being hurt. They react to their fear by unconsciously cutting off their freedom to experience and express their love. And, of course, they discover all kinds of misleading and irrelevant reasons for their change of feelings. Sometimes we pick safe moments to be free. One wife complained that the only time her husband was affectionate was invariably when he was about to leave for work. At that moment he would become the loving, cuddly teddy bear of a husband whom she had dreamed of all her life. At practically all other times he would be cool and aloof. It appears evident that he felt free to be loving at that moment when he just had to leave within quick five minutes. For then it was relatively safe for his love to come out of hiding. It could not possibly lead to anything further, which might mean more vulnerability. He could hug her and run! And she was left thinking to herself, “Fell well my lonely one, nothing else here can be done. So hit the freeway. I don’t ever want to see you again. You didn’t do me right, so a long good-bye tonight. Maybe in some other life, I will see you again. I will bet the Dow Jones if you didn’t come back, I’ll be just fine. Imagine how crushed she was for you to say I was not the one. My friends say I was in denial defending you as a perfect friend, but no one was held prisoner. It’s you again! Maybe someday in your dreams, my love, maybe you can say ‘Damn, it’s you again!’” (Hit the Freeway by Toni Braxton). #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
So our fear of freedom does make some kind of sense, emotionally. We feel we cannot be trusted with freedom and to be free is to risk being hurt. However, understanding why we fear freedom does not make it any less desirable as a goal in life. For in actuality our enslavement to fear is more hurtful to us than freedom. Avoidance of freedom exacts a heavy toll in our lives. Some readers may have been thinking, during our discussion of the los of the center of values in our society, that what is necessary is simply to work out a new set of values. And others may have the thought, “There is nothing wrong with the values of the past—such as love, equality and human fellowship. We need simply to bring these values back again. Both of these pints miss the central problem—namely, that modern mortals have to a great extent lost the power to affirm and believe in any value. No matter how important the content of the values may be, or how suitable this or that value may be on paper, what the individual needs is a prior capacity, namely, the power to do the valuing. The triumph of barbarism in such movements as Hitlerian fascism did not occur because people forgot the ethical traditions of our society as one might misplace a code. The humanistic values of liberty and the greatest good for the greatest number, the Hebrew Christian values of community and love for the stranger, were still in the textbooks, were still taught in Saturday and Sunday school, and no archeological expedition was needed to unearth them. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
People rather have lost the value of individual competition, the pursuit of competitive enterprise, and individual effort and initiative, and the inner capacity to affirm, to experience values and goals as real and powerful for themselves. There is, furthermore, something artificial about setting out to find a center of value, as though one were shopping for a new coat. The endeavors to discover values outside oneself generally slide the individual directly into the question of what the group expects of one—what the style these days, in values as in coats? And this, as we have seen, has been part-and-parcel of the trends toward emptiness in our society. There is even something wrong in the phrase discussion of values. One never receives one’s convictions about values through intellectual debates. The things in a person’s life which one actually does value-one’s children and one’s love for them and theirs for one, the pleasure one has in drama or listening to music or playing gold, the pride one has in one’s work—all these one accepts as realities. One would regard any theoretical discussion of the value of one’s loving one’s children, or one’s pleasure in music, for example, as irrelevant if not impertinent. If you pushed one, one would say, “I value the love of my children because I actually experience it,” and if you pressed far enough to irritate one, one might well say, “If you have not experienced it yourself, I cannot explain it to you.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
In actual life the real value is something we experience as connected with the reality of our activity, and any verbal discussion is on a quite secondary level. We do not mean to psychologize values, or to imply that anything toward which one is inclined at the moment is good and true. Nor are we implying any depreciation of the role of the sciences of mortal, as well as philosophy and religion, in clarifying values. Indeed, I believe that the combined contributions of all these disciplines are requires for the solution of our crucial problem of what values modern mortals can live by. However, we do mean to emphasize that unless the individual oneself can affirm the value; unless one’s own inner motives, one’s own ethical awareness, are made the starting place, no discussions of values will make much real difference. Ethical judgment and decision must be rooted in the individual’s own power to evaluate. Only as one oneself affirms, on all levels of oneself, a way of acting as part of the way one sees reality and chooses to relate to it—only thus will the value have effectiveness and cogency for one’s own living. For this obviously is the only way one can or will take responsibility for one’s action. And it is the only way that one will learn from one’s action how better to act next tie, for when we act by rote or rule we close our eyes to the nuances, the new possibilities, the unique ways in which every situation is different from every other. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
Furthermore, it is only as the person chooses the action, affirms the goal in one’s own awareness, that one’s action will have conviction and power, for only then will one really believe in what one is doing. For one thing, our fear of freedom results in inner tension. We have a virtually irrepressible desire to be more spontaneous and free. Since this desire is frightening, a conflict situation is present. We have to expend great amounts of energy keeping our cages in constant repair. Energy thus expanded in maintaining rigid control of ourselves puts a strain on us physically and emotionally. No doubt many physical and emotional problems are associated with this strain. Our fear of freedom also frequently leads to numbness of oneself. When we do not feel free to be ourselves, one way out is gradually to cut ourselves off from awareness of our feelings. Extreme instances of this occur in certain schizophrenic patients who seem totally incapable of experiencing a genuine emotion of any kind. Life and the freedom to feel have become so frightening that they have retreated into a World where there is no feeling. However, deadness to the self is not limited to such individuals. All of us in some degree have retreated from complete awareness. And to this extent we have deprived ourselves of the opportunity of living life at its fullest. Often this numbness affects our relations with others, and we find it difficult to sense how we really feel toward others. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
Apparently, even the most basic sense can become somewhat dulled, giving all of life a kind of gray bleakness. And it is not unusual for a person who has been making progress in psychotherapy to report a new sense of awareness. The grass may seem greener. Natural beauty, unnoticed before, is seen with new eyes; and there is a fresh feeling of aliveness in one’s body. Fear from freedom also often cuts us off from the experience of love. When we are not free to be ourselves, we are staying at a distance from others. Since we do not let others see us as we are and since we withhold our true feelings from them, we make it almost impossible for them and ourselves to feel emotionally close. And if the other person, in spite of our masks, appears to care for us, we always have an out. We can say, “He doe not love me for what I am. I have seduced him into caring for me, and he likes me only because of what I let him see of me. If we really knew me, he would no longer care for me.” Thus we persuade ourselves that we dare not give up our slavery to our masks. And at the same time we also protect ourselves from making the frightening discovery that those who love us, love us in spite of—not because of—the masks we wear. In this way we perpetuate our fear of spontaneity. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
Our fear of freedom is especially evident in two particular areas that deserve individual examination. We are afraid of the freedom to be angry and of the freedom to be aware of and enjoy of pleasures of the flesh feelings. Pleasure, joy, and happiness all involve a sense of well-being, a sense of being up, and having good feelings toward yourself and/or others. “And the Lord God doth work by means to bring about his great and eternal purposes; and by very small means the Lord doth confound the wise and bringeth about the salvation of many souls,” reports Alma 37.7. The price we pay for avoiding the pain of being fully alive is that we are excluded from the pleasure as well. Preference for simplicity is associated with social conformity, respect for custom and ceremony, friendliness toward tradition, somewhat categorical moral judgment, an undeviating patriotism, and suppression of such troublesome new forces as inventions that would temporarily cause unemployment. It seems evident that, at its best, preference for simplicity is associated with personal stability and balance, while at its worst it makes for categorical rejection of all that threatens disorder and disequilibrium. In its pathological aspect it produces stereotyped thinking, rigid and compulsive mortality, and hatred of instinctual aggressive and erotic forces which might upset the precariously maintained balance. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
There is a passage in Hugo’s Les Miserables which is remarkably coincident with these observations. It occurs at that point in the narrative when Javert, the single-minded and merciless representative of the law, has turned his own World upside-down by allowing Jean Valjean, the outlaw whom he has so relentlessly pursued, and whom he finally had in his grasp, to escape. He says to himself, in this surprising moment, “There is something more than a duty.” At this, “he was startled; his balances were disturbed; one of the scales fell into the abyss, the other flew into the sky.” To be obliged to acknowledge this: infallibility is not infallible, there may be an error in the doctrine, all is not said when a code has spoken, society is not perfect, authority is complicate with vacillation, a cracking is possible in the immutable, judges are mortal, the law may be deceived, the tribunals may be mistaken…to see a flaw in the immense blue crystal of the firmament! Certainly it was strange, that the fireman of order, the engineer of authority, mounted upon the blind iron-horse of the rigid path, could be thrown off by a ray of light! that the incommutable, the direct, the correct, the geometrical, the passive, the perfect, could bend! Until now all that he had above him has been in his sight a smooth, simple, limpid surface; nothing there unknown, noting obscure; nothing which was not definite, coordinated, concatenated, precise, exact, circumscribed, limited, shut in, all foreseen; authority was a plane; no fall in it, no dizziness before it. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
Javert had never seen the unknown except below. The irregular, the unexpected, the disorderly opening of chaos, the possible slipping into an abyss; that belonged to inferior regions, to the rebellious, the wicked, the miserable. This passage brings together many observations made intuitively by Hugo and arrived at in more pedestrian manner in this research. A precise simplicity is seen to be related to authority, stick doctrines, tradition, morality, constriction, and repression. The opposite of all these things is typified by the flaw in the crystal, by the irregular, by disorderly chaos, by such qualities as are to be found in the inferior regions, where reside the rebellious, the wicked, and the miserable. The emphasis here is pathological, and the dichotomy absolute, but if we extend the range into normal behavior and admit the many shortcomings of the typology, there is considerable agreement between Hugo’s intuition and this set of correlations. We would suggest that the types of perceptual preference we have observed are related basically to a choice of what to attend to in the complex of phenomena that makes up the World we experience; for the World is both stable and unstable, predictable and unpredictable, ordered and chaotic. To see it predominantly as one or the other is a sort of perceptual decision. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
One may attend to its ordered aspect, to regular sequences of events, to a stable center of the Universe (the Sun, the church, the state, the home, the parent, God, eternity, etc.), or one may instead attend primarily to the eccentric, the relative, and the arbitrary aspect of the World (the briefness of the individual life, the blind uncaringness of matter, the sometime hypocrisy of authority, accidents of circumstance, the presence of evil, tragic fate, the impossibility of freedom for the organism capable of conceiving freedom, and so on). Either of these perceptual decisions may be associated with a high degree of personal effectiveness. It is as though there is an effective and an ineffective aspect of each alterative. Our thinking about these various aspects is as yet based only upon clinical impressions of our subjects, but it is perhaps worth recording while we go on with the business of gathering more objective evidence. At its best, the decision in favor of order makes for personal stability and balance, a sort of easy-going optimism combined with religious respect for authority without subservience to it. This sort of decision will be made by persons who from an early age had good reason to trust the stability and equilibrium of the World and who derived inner sense of comfort and balance from their perception of an outer certainty. #Randolphharris 19 of 21
At its worst, the decision in favor of order makes for categorical rejection of all that threatens disorder, a fear of anything might being disequilibrium. Optimism becomes a matter of policy, religion a prescription and a ritual. Such a decision is associated with stereotyped thinking, rigid and compulsive morality, and hatred of instinctual aggressive and erotic forces which might upset the precariously maintained balance. Equilibrium depends essentially upon exclusion, a kind of perceptual distortion which consists in refusing to see parts of reality that cannot be assimilated to some preconceived system. The decision in favor of complexity, at its best, makes for originality and creativeness, a greater tolerance for unusual ideas and formulations. The sometimes disordered and unstable World has its counterpart in the person’s inner discord, but the crucial ameliorative factor is a constant effort to integrate the inner and outer complexity in a high-order synthesis. The goal is to achieve the psychological analogue of mathematical elegance: to allow into the perceptual system the greatest possible richness of experience, while yet finding in this complexity some over all patter. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Such a person is not immobilized by anxiety in the face of great uncertainty, but is at once perturbed and challenged. For such an individual, optimism is impossible, but pessimism is lifted from the personal to the tragic level, resulting not in apathy but in participation in the business of life. At its worst, such a perceptual attitude leads to grossly disorganized behavior, to surrender to chaos. It results in nihilism, despair, and disintegration. The personal life itself becomes simply an acting out of the meaninglessness of the Universe, a bitter joke directed against its own maker. The individual is overwhelmed by the apparent insolubility of the problem, and find the disorder of life disgusting and hateful. One’s essential World-view is thus depreciative and hostile. The Universe is a spiritual system and we are part of it; God is right where we are and is discovered at the center of our own being. Turning from everything that denies this and quietly contemplating the Perfection of the Inner Mortal, who is an incarnation of God, we meet the Great Reality in the only place we shall ever discover it, within our own hearts and souls and minds. The immediate availability of good conscious is the practical application of spiritual thought as a force to the solution of human problems; the inevitable necessity that good shall come to every soul; this leads to the belief in immortality and the continuity of the individual stream of consciousness, and eternal expansion of the individual life. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
Aliveness is Conducive to Joy, as the Wise think about Life—The Past is Such a Curious Creature
We did not think they would simply disappear. We could not image it. Aliveness is conducive to joy. Many people read the word joy as pleasure, but the distinction between joy and pleasure is crucial, particularly so in reference to the distinction between the being and the having modes. It is not easy to appreciate the differences, since we live in a World of joyless pleasures. What is pleasure? Even though the word is used in different ways, considering its popular thought, it seems best defined as the satisfaction of a desire that does not require activity (in the sense of aliveness) to be satisfied. Such pleasure can be of high intensity: the pleasure in having social success, earning more money, winning a lottery; the conventional pleasures of the flesh; eating to one’s heart’s content; winning a race; the state of elation brought about by drinking, trance, elicit substances; the pleasures in satisfying one’s sadism, or one’s passion to alter what is alive. Of course, in order to become rich of famous, individuals must be very active in the sense of busyness, but not in the sense of birth within. When they have achieved their goal they may be thrilled, intensely satisfied, feel they have reached a peak. However, what peak? Maybe a peak of excitement, of satisfaction, of a trancelike or orgiastic state. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
However, they may have reached this state driven by passions that, though human, are nevertheless pathological, inasmuch as they do not lead to an intrinsically adequate solution of the human condition. Such passions do not lead to greater human growth and strength but, on the contrary, to human crippling. The pleasures of the radical hedonists, the satisfaction of ever new cupidities, the pleasures of contemporary society produce different degrees of excitements. However, they are not conducive to joy. In fact, the lack of joy makes it necessary to seek ever new, ever more exciting pleasures. In this respect, modern society is in the same position the Hebrews were in three thousand years ago. Speaking to the people of Israel about one of the worst of their sins. Moses said: “You did not serve the Lord your God with joy and gladness of heart, in the midst of the fullness of all things,” reports Deuteronomy 28.47. Joy is the concomitant of productive activity. It is not a peak experience, which culminates and ends suddenly, but rather a plateau, a feeling state that accompanies the productive expression of one’s essential human faculties. Joy is not the ecstatic fire of the moment. Joy is the glow that accompanies being. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
Pleasure and thrill are conducive to sadness after the so-called peak has been reached; for the thrill has been experienced, but the vessel has not grown. One’s inner powers have not increased. One has made the attempt to break through the boredom of unproductive activity and for a moment has unified all one’s energies—expect reason and love. One has attempted to become superhuman, without being human. One seems to have succeeded to the moment of triumph, but the triumph is followed by deep sadness: because nothing has changed within oneself. As is to be expected, joy must play a central role in those religious and philosophical systems that proclaim being as the goal of life. Joy is virtue; sadness is sin. Joy, then, is what we experience in the process of growing nearer to the goal of becoming ourself. Our human center does not lie in ourselves, but in the authority to which we submit. We do not arrive at well-being by our own productive activity, but by passive obedience and the ensuing approval by the authority. We have a leader (secular or spiritual, king/queen or God) in whom we have faith; we have security as long as we are humble. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
The submission to God is not necessarily conscious as such, it can be mild or severe, the psychic and social structure need not blind us to the fact that we live in the mode of having to the degree that we internalize the authoritarian structure of our society. By submission or by domination or by trying to silence reason and awareness—these ways succeed only for the moment, and block the road to a true solution. There is but one way to save ourselves from this Hell: to leave the prison of our egocentricity, to reach out and to one ourselves with the World. If egocentric separateness is the cardinal sin, then the sin is atoned in the act of loving. The very word atonement expresses this concept, for it etymologically derives from atonement, the Middle-English expression for union. Since the sin of separateness is not an act of disobedience, it does not need to be forgiven. However, it does need to be healed; and love, not acceptance of punishment, is the healing factor. The concept of sin as disunion has been expressed by some of the church fathers, who followed Jesus’ nonauthoritarian concept of sin, and suggests where there are sins there is diversity. However, where virtue rules there is uniqueness, there is oneness. Through Adam’s sin the human race, which should be a harmonious whole without conflict between mine and thine, was transformed into a dust cloud of individuals. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
Similar thoughts concerning the destruction of the original unity in Adam can also be found in the idea that the fact of salvation appears necessary as the regaining of the lost oneness, as the restitution of the supernatural oneness with God and at the same time the oneness of mortals among each other. The concept of sin and repentance tells us that we shall be as Gods for an examination of the whole problem of sin. In the having mode, and thus the authoritarian structure, sin is disobedience and is overcome by repentance: punishment, renewed submission. In the being mode, the nonauthoritarian structure, sin is unresolved estrangement, and it is overcome by the full unfolding of reason and love, by at-onement. One can indeed interpret the story of the Fall in both ways, because the story itself is a blending of authoritarian and liberating elements. However, in themselves the concept of sin as, respectively, disobedience and alienation are diametrically opposed. The Old Testament story of the Tower of Babel seems to contain the same idea. The human race reached here a state of union, symbolized by the fact that all humanity has one language. By their own ambition for power, by their craving to have the great tower, the people destroy their unity and are disunited. In a sense, the story of the Tower is the second Fall, the sin of historical humanity. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
The story is complicated by God’s disapproving of the people’s unity and power being used to attack him. “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do, and nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech,” reports Genesis 11.6-7. Of course, the same difficulty already exists in the story of the Fall; there God is afraid of the power that man and woman would exercise if they ate of the fruit of both trees. There are two escae hatches that it is well to examine in more detail because they play so important a part in many families, spiritual or human. One of these is the attempt to escape from feelings of self-hate by hating others. This involves a mental process psychologist call projection. When a motion picture projector casts a picture on a screen, what the view sees is not determined primarily by the screen, although its quality can affect the image. The picture comes from within the projector, although the viewer may become so lost in the drama unfolding on the screen that one is no longer consciously aware of the source of the image. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
In the phenomenon of projection, psychologically speaking, the individual is both the projection machine and the viewer. In other words, a person sees what he or she projects onto the screen. In many ways, by using various scientific methods, psychologists have shown that all of us do a great deal of projecting, some of us more than others. In other words, when we look out at the World around us our view of reality is more or less distorted by the image we project, without conscious awareness, from our own minds. So, for example, psychologists have demonstrated that if we are shown a broken line drawing suggesting some image with which we are familiar, we have a tendency to complete that image in our mind when we look at the incomplete drawing. Projection is an important consideration here, because we have a tendency to project onto others qualities or feelings that we cannot accept ourselves. Thus, for example, a person who cannot accept his or her own feelings about pleasures of the flesh may feel that every man or woman who glances at him or her is out to seduce one. Since the feeling that we hate ourselves is such a threat to us, we cannot accept it in ourselves. Projection of self-hate onto others becomes one readily available way of avoiding these feelings. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
It is no surprise, then, that some children faced with frequent situations in which they feel rejected by others learn to avoid the feelings of worthlessness and self-hate by this means. Instead of being aware of the feeling, “I hate myself,” such a child will feel “They hate me!” It is only a small step further, of course, for the child’s reaction to be “Since they hate me, I hate them.” The child then has a target toward which to express all of the hostility seething within one—hostility because one feels worthless and because one has been rejected. When we project feelings we do not choose our targets indiscriminately. They usually make some kind of sense. A natural target for the child is the parents from whom one has felt rejection. And it is the child whose parents have been overly punishing and who have severely restricted the child’s freedom who most often tends to develop the reaction “My parents hate me, therefore I hate them!” When the child yells out one’s anger toward one’s parents or rebels against their directives, one is likely to meet more severe punishment and restriction. As a result, one feels more rejection and slips deeper into feelings of self-hate that is again converted into “You hate me, so I hate you.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
If this cycle is not broken, the hatred of others often widens in scope to people outside the family circle as the child grows older. Often those in positions of authority, who are probably unconsciously identified with the parents, become the great target of increasing hatred; and so the child may get into difficulty with school officials and later with the police. Thus the rebellion against parents who do not seem to care can spread to rebellion against a society that does not seem to care. And if a person becomes a parent, he or she will probably be too emotionally disadvantaged and frightened to express his or her love to one’s children. One, too, will probably be punitive and hurtful. And thus, unless the cycle is broken, the blight of self-hate perpetuates itself from one generation to another. Feelings of rejection become feelings of worthlessness, then self-hate becomes escape by hating others instead of one’s self, and further rejection (he or she has gotten into one scrape after another. Punishment does not seem to help. He seems hopeless!) and this all cycles back around to create more feelings of worthlessness. In psychotherapy, we want to know, “Did the patient improve or not?” where the word “improve” means some fairly general changes in state from bad to good. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
Some example changes used to measure the patient are such as these: (a) the patient feels better, is more comfortable, takes more interest in life, and the like; (b) important interpersonal relations are straightened out a bit; (c) physical symptoms have been relieved or cured; (d) important health-tending decisions have been made; (e) there has been an increase in insightful remarks and behavior. Each therapist then makes a formal presentation before these two judges of every case one has handled; prior to the presentation the judges have read all of the material concerning the patient that has been recorded in the clinical chart. In the instruction to the judges it is emphasized that the crucial variable is not the general level of functioning of the patient at the conclusion of therapy, but rather the change in state that had occurred between beginning and end of therapy. Further, it is made clear to the judges that part of their function is to evaluate the therapist’s involvement in one’s own account of the therapeutic process, and to weigh that factor in coming to a best estimate as to the degree of change that has actually occurred. On the basis, then, of two main sources of information (formal presentation of the case by the therapist, and an evaluation from the clinical chart), the expert raters assign cases, first of all, into two main categories, those who have shown definite improvement and those who had failed to improve or who have improved only slightly. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
It is of some interest to examine the kinds of incidents and outcomes that the judges considered indicative of improvement or lack of it. Here a case of improvement: A man who entered therapy in a very depressed, anxious physically upset state, and whose troubles centered on his relations with his foreman on a construction job (a relationship in which was outwardly submissive and cooperative but inwardly enraged finally learned to stand up to the foreman and express his feelings. There was clear advance in his feelings of independence and esteem, and toward the conclusion of the therapy the patient left the former job and started a business of his own. Here is a case where no improvement was seen: A man with a history of homosexuality attempted to seduce his male therapist, who responded with anger as well as some anxiety. The patient had to be transferred to another therapist. The kind of outcomes in improvements are generally when the patient reports feelings of well-being at the conclusion of therapy, in contrast to depression and anxiety at its start. Specific symptoms, such as headaches, frigidity, or impotence, gastric disturbances, menstrual difficulties, skin disorders, and so forth, tend to be relieved or totally cleared up; in some cases there are significant changes in the direction of more mature interpersonal relations, especially with patents, parent-substitutes, or spouses. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
The failures in psychotherapy could often be traced to the inability of the therapist to handle some particularly difficult problems. Perhaps with more experienced psychotherapists some of the patients who did not improve would have made some progress; however, there seems little doubt that the cases that were marked down as therapeutic failures were basically more difficult problems. Generally, more disturbed individuals do not improve. As stated in the past, the fear that one may lose one’s possessions is an unavoidable consequence of a sense of security that is based on what one has. I want to carry this thought a step further. It may be possible for us not to attach ourselves to property and, hence, not fear losing it. However, what about the fear of losing life itself—the fear of dying? Is this a fear only of older people or of the sick? Or is everybody afraid of dying? Does the fact that we are bound to die permeate our whole life? Does the fear of dying grow only more intense and more conscious the closer we come to the limits of life by age or sickness? We need of large systematic studies by psychoanalysts investigating this phenomenon from childhood to golden years and dealing with the unconsciousness as well as the conscious manifestations of the fear of dying. These studies need not be restricted to individual cases; they could examine large groups, using existing methods of sociopsychoanalysis. Since such studies do not now exist, we must draw tentative conclusions for many scattered data. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
Perhaps the most significant datum is the deeply engraved desire for immortality that manifests itself in the many rituals and beliefs that aim at preserving the human body. On the other hand, the modern, specifically American denial of death by the beautification of the body speaks equally for the repression of the fear of dying by merely camouflaging death. It is not just woman any more, men in the entertainment industry are buying lace front wigs and caking on makeup to try and appear twenty to thirty year young than they are. However, there is only one way—taught by the Buddha, by Jesus, by the Stoics, by Master Eckhart—to truly overcome the fear of dying, and that way is by not hanging onto life, not experiencing life as a possession. Yet, it takes a cute young lady on TV to remind people of these Biblical principals before they manifest them. Nevertheless, the fear of dying is not truly what is seems to be: the fear of stopping living. Death does not concern us, since while we are, death is not yet here; but when death is here we are no more. To be sure, there can be fear of suffering and pain that may precede dying, but this fear is different from that of dying. While the fear of dying may this seem irrational, this is not so if life is experienced as a possession. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
The fear, then, is not of dying, but of losing what I have: the fear of losing my body, my ego, my possessions, and my identity; the fear of facing the abyss of nonidentity, of being lost. To the extent that we live in the having mode, we must fear dying. No rational explanation will take away this fear. However, it may be diminished, even at the hour of death, by our reassertion of our bond to life, by a response to the love of others that may kindle our own love. Losing our fear of dying should not begin as a preparation for death, but as the continuous effort to reduce the mode of having and to increase the mode of being. The wise think about life, not death. The instruction on how to die is indeed the same as the instruction on how to live. The more we rid ourselves of the craving for possession in all its forms, particularly our ego-boundness, the less strong is the fear of dying, since there is nothing to lose. Research in psychotherapy by Harris and Christiansen declares that there is so significant relationship between improvement and intelligence. The Harris-Christiansen sample consisted of already hospitalized persons who were given psychotherapy because of delayed recovery from physical infirmary, surgery, or accident, whereas almost all patients in the present study had elected on their own initiative to seek psychotherapy at the clinic, and in their waking hours wen about business of life in an upright position. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
This difference might well account for the IQ difference between the samples, as well as for the fact that these self-referred patients were a good standard deviation above the general population mean in intelligence. Simply being aware of the fact that psychotherapy is to be had and that it makes sense to seek it when you are in personal difficulties is probably related beneficially to general intelligence and cultural sophistication. It is also to be expected on theoretical grounds that greater effectiveness of cortical functioning should be associated with a factor of modifying ability in personality and structure. Intelligence certainly involves the ability to cognize relationships adequately, including emotional relationships, and to correct one’s cognitions on the basis of new evidence. It would seem that in this sample, at any rate, the more intelligent patients were better able to use the psychotherapeutic relationship to induce desired personality changes. We believe in being honest, true, chaste, benevolent, virtuous, and in doing good to all people. And since there are endless ways of being honest and dishonest, one definition of honest is: Honesty implies freedom from lying, stealing, cheating, and bearing false witness. “Deliver my soul, O Lord, from lying lips, and from deceitful tongue,” reports Psalms 102.2. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
Who Has Not Found Heaven for Where Your Treasure is Will be Your Heart?
And then the room was empty. Perfectly empty. I turned, disconsolate and shuddering, and put my head down on my arm, as if I could go to sleep on my desk. I was considering William James, that psychologist-philosopher American-man-of-genius, who struggled all his life with the problem of his will. One of my esteemed colleagues, writing of James’s severe depression and the fact that for a number of years he was on the verge of suicide, asks us not to judge him harshly for those aspects of maladjustment. I take a different view. I believe that understanding the depressions James suffered and the way he dealt with them increases our appreciation and admiration for him. True, all his life he was plagued by vacillation and an inability to make up his mind. In his last years, when he was struggling to give up his lecturing at Harvard, he would write in his diary one day, “Resign,” the next day, “Don’t resign,” and the third day, “Resign” again. James’s difficulty in making up his mind was connected with his inner richness and the myriad of possibilities for him in every decision. However, it was precisely James’s depressions—in which he would often write of his yearning for “a reason for wishing to live four hours longer”—which forced him to be so concerned with will, and precisely in the struggle against these depressions that he learned so much about human will. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
William James believed—and, as a therapist, I believe that his judgment here is clinically sound—that it was own discovery of the capacity to will which enabled him to live a tremendously fruitful life up to his death at sixty-eight, despite his depressions and hos continual affliction with insomnia, eye troubles, back disorders, and so on. In our own “age of this disordered will,” as it has been termed, we turn to William James with eagerness to find whatever help he can give us with our own problem of will. He begins his famous chapter on will, published in 1890, by summarily dismissing wish as what we do when we desire something which is not possible for achievement, and contrast it with will, which exists when the end is within our power. If with the desire there is a sense that attainment is not possible, we simply wish. I believe that this definition is one of the places where James’s Victorianism shows through; wishes are treated as unreal and immature. Obviously, no wish is possible when we first wish it. It becomes possible only as we wish it in many different ways, and through considering it from this side and that, possibly over a great period of time, we generate the power and take the risk to make it happen. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
However, then James launches into what turns out to be one of the most thrilling treatises on will in literature, which I can only touch on. There is, first, the primary type, which is distinguished by the fact it does not require a whole series of decisions. We desire to change our shirt or begin to write on paper, and once we start, a whole series of movements is set going by itself; it is ideomotor. This primary will requires absence of conflict. James is here trying to preserve spontaneity. He is taking his stand against Victorian Will power, the exercise of the separate faculty called will power which must have failed him dismally in his own life and led him into the paralysis which expressed itself in his depressions. Now we know in our day a lot more about this so-called absence of conflict, thanks chiefly to psychoanalysis, and that infinitely more is going on in states which seem without conflict. He then touches on the healthy will which he defines as action following vision. The vision requires a clear concept and consists of motives in their right ratio to each other—which is a fairly rationalistic picture. Discussing unhealth will, he rightly focuses on the obstructed will. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
Obstructed will, one illustration of this that James cites is the state that exists when our eyes lose focus and we are unable to rally our attention. We sit blankly staring and do nothing. The objects of consciousness fail to touch the quick or break the skin. Great fatigue or exhaustion marks this condition; and an apathy resembling that then brought about is recognized in asylums under the name of abulia as a symptom of mental disease. It is interesting that he relates this apathy only to mental disease. I, for one, believe this is the chronic, endemic, psychic state of our society in our day—the neurotic personality of our time. The question then boils down to: Why does not something interest me, reach out to me, grasp me? And James then comes to the central problem of will, namely attention. I do not know whether he realized what a stroke of genius this was. When we analyze will with all the tools modern psychoanalysis brings us, we shall find ourselves pushed back to the level of attention or intention as the seat of will. The effort which goes into the exercise of the will is really effort to attention; the strain in the willing is the effort to keep the consciousness clear, for instance, the strain of keeping the attention focused. The once-born type of well-adjusted person does not a lot. This leads one to a surprising, though very keen, statement of an identity between belief, attention, and will. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
Will and belief, in short, meaning a certain relation between objects and the Self, are two names for one and the same psychological phenomenon. The most compendious possible formula perhaps would be that our belief and attention are the same fact. James then beguiles us with one of his completely human and Earthly illustrations. I cite it in detail because I wish to come back to it in discussing the unfinished aspects of James’ concept of will: We know what it is to get out of bed on a freezing morning in a room without a fire, and how they very vital principle within us protests against the ordeal. [The scene is New England before the advent of central heating.] Probably most persons have lain on certain mornings for an hour at a time unable to brace themselves to the resolve. We think how late we shall be, how the duties of the day will suffer; we say, “I must get up, this ignominious,” and so on. However, still the warm couch feels too delicious, and the cold outside too cruel, and resolution faints away and postpones itself again and again just as it seemed on the verge of the decisive act. Now how do we get up under such circumstances? If I may generalize from my own experience, we more often than not get up without any struggle or decision at all. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
We suddenly find that we have got up. A fortunate lapse of consciousness occurs; we forget both the warmth and the cold; we fall into some revery connected with the day’s life, in the course of which the idea flashes across us, “Hollo! I must lie here no longer” and idea which at that lucky instant awakens no contradictory or paralyzing suggestions, and consequently produces immediately its appropriate motor effects. It was our acute consciousness of both the warmth and the col during the period of struggle which paralyzed our activity. James concludes that the moment the inhibition ceases, the original idea exerts its effect, and up we get. He adds, with typical Jamesian confidence, that “This case seems to me to contain in miniature form the data for an entire psychology of volition.” Let us now take, for our special examination, James’s own example. We note that then he gets to the heart of the problem of will in this illustration there comes a remarkable statement. He writes, “We suddenly find that we have got up.” That is to say, he jumps over the whole problem. No decision at all occurs, but only a fortunate lapse of consciousness. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
However, I ask, what went on in that fortunate lapse of consciousness? True, the paralyzing bind of his ambivalence was released. However, that is a negative statement and does not tell us why anything else happened. Surely we cannot call this just a lucky instant, as James does, or a happenstance! If our basis for will rests on the mere luck or happenstance, our house is built upon the sands indeed, and we have no basis for with at all. Now I do not mean to imply that so far James, in this example, has not said something. He has, and it is very important: the whole incident shows the bankruptcy of Victorian will power, will consisting of a faculty which is based upon our capacity to force our bodies to act against their desires. Victorian will power turned everything into a rationalistic, moralistic issue, for instance, the attraction of the warmth of the bed, the giving in to of which is ignominious, as opposed to the so-called supergo pressure to be upright, that is, up and working. Dr. Freud described at length the self-deceit and rationalization involved in Victorian will power and I believe, dethroned it once and for all. The example shows James’s own struggle against the paralyzing effects of Victorianism, in which the goal becomes twisted into a self-centered demonstration of one’s own character and the real moral issue get entirely lost in the shuffle. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
So we return to our crucial question. What went on in that fortunate lapse of consciousness? James only tells us that we fall into some revery connected with the day’s life. Ah, here lies our secret! Psychotherapy has brought us a good deal of data about that revery which James did not have—and I do not believe that we fall into it at all. For purposes of clarity, I shall state here my own argument concerning unfinished business in James’s concept of will. I as it is also omitted by us in contemporary psychology. The answer does not lie in James’s conscious analysis or in Dr. Freud’s analysis of the unconscious, but in a dimension which cuts across and includes both conscious and unconscious, and both cognition and conation. Along with rediscovering our feelings and wants, we also should recover our relation with the subconscious aspects of ourselves. As modern mortals have given up sovereignty over their bodies, so also have they surrendered the unconscious side of their personality, and it has become almost alien to them. When we cut off an exceedingly great and significant portion of the self, we are then no longer able to use much of the wisdom and power of the unconscious. It puts us in the position of trying to drive a BMW 5 series with the reins attached to only one wheel. Though the tendencies and intuitions in the unconscious are blocked off from our conscious awareness, they are still part of the self and accessible in various degrees to being made conscious. The sooner we recover sovereignty in that portion of the kingdom the better. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
Understanding dreams is of course a subtle and complex matter—though it is not so complex as one would think when one reads about the esoteric symbols in much modern dream interpretation. These esoteric symbols put the whole problem back into a foreign language again—and that is another way, perhaps the typically modern way, of surrendering our sovereignty over the unconscious aspects of ourselves. As though we were saying the authorities and those who know the magic answers can understand our dreams, but we cannot ourselves! Dr. Erich Froom’s book, The Forgotten Language, points out that dreams, like myths and fairy tales, are not all a foreign language, but are in reality part of the one universal language shared my all humankind. Dr. Fromm’s book is to be recommended to the nontechnical reader who wishes to relearn something about this subconscious language of his fatherland. Dreams are expressions not only of conflicts and repressed desires, but also of previous knowledge that one has learned, possibly many years before, and thinks one has forgotten. Even the unskilled person, if one takes the attitude that what one’s dreams tell one is not simply to be rejected as silly, may get occasional useful guidance from one’s dreams. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
And the person who has become skillful in the understand of what one is saying to oneself in one’s dreams can get from them, from time to time, marvelously valuable hints and insights into solutions to problems. The more self-awareness a person has, the more alive one is. The more consciousness, the more self. Becoming a person means this heightened awareness, this heightened experiences of “I-ness,” this experience that it is I, the acting one, who is the subject of what is occurring. This view of what it means to become a person, in conclusion, saves us from two errors. The first is passivism—letting the deterministic forces in one’s experience take the place of self-awareness. It must be admitted that some tendencies in the older forms of psychoanalysis can be used to rationalize passivism. It was the epoch-making discovery of Dr. Freud to show how much every person is pushed by unconscious fears, desires and tendencies of all sorts, and that mortal is really much less a master in the household of one’s own mind than in the Victorian mortal of will power fondly believed. However, a harmful implication was carried along with this emphasis on the determinism of unconscious forces, which Dr. Freud himself partly succumbed to. The early psychotherapist Dr. Grodeck, for example, wrote, “We are lived by our unconscious,” and Dr, Freud in a letter commended him for his emphasis on the passivity of the ego. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
However, we must underline to correct a partial misunderstanding, that the over-all purpose of Dr. Freud’s exploration of the unconscious forces was to help people bring these forces into consciousness. The goal of psychoanalysis, as he said time and again, was to make the unconscious conscious: to enlarge the scope of awareness; to help the individual become aware of the unconscious tendencies which have tended to push the self around like mutinous sailors who have seized power below the deck of the ship; and this to help the person consciously direct one’s own ship. Hence the emphasis on the heightened awareness of one’s self, and the warning against passivism, have much in common with the over-all purpose of Dr. Freud’s thought. The other error of this view of the person enables us to avoid is activism—that is, using activity as a substitute for awareness. By activism we mean the tendency, so common in this country, to assume that the more one is acting, the more one is alive. It should be clear that when we have used the term “the active I,” we have not meant busyness or merely doing things. Many people keep busy all the time as a way of covering up their anxiety; their activism is a way of running from themselves. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
People who are busy so they have something to focus on and as a result are distracted from their problems get a pseudo and temporary sense of aliveness by being in a hurry, as though something is going on if they are but moving, and as though being busy is a proof of one’s importance. Chaucer has a sly and astute comment about this type, represented in the merchant in Canterbury Tales, “Methinks he seemed busier than he was.” It is true, however, when life is not going the way you like it and you have a lot of problems that you cannot resolve on your own, being busy gives you a sense of purpose, it makes life worth living and it makes the days rip by life a vampire speed reading a novel. You wake up, stay busy, and before you know it is bed time, you are one day closer to being free. Keeping busy is the only reason some people are still alive. Our emphasis on self-awareness certainly includes actin as an expression of the alive, integrated self, but it is the opposite to activism—the opposite, that is, to acting as an escape from self-awareness. Aliveness often means the capacity not to act, to be creatively idle—which may be more difficult for most modern people than to do something. To be idle requires a strong sense of personal identity. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
Self-awareness, as we have proposed it, brings back into the picture the quieter kinds of aliveness—the arts of contemplation and meditation for example, which the Western World, to its peril, has all but lost. It brings a new appreciation for being something rather than merely doing something. With such a relation to oneself, work for us modern mortals—who are the great toilers and producers—will not be an escape from ourselves or a way of trying to prove our worth, but a creative expression of the spontaneous powers of person who has consciously affirmed one’s relatedness to one’s World and one’s fellow mortals. The nature of faith justifies the history of religion and makes it understandable as a history of mortal’s ultimate concern, of one’s response to the manifestation of the holy in many places in many ways. A divine figure ceases to create reply, it ceases to be a common symbol and loses its power to move for action. Symbols which for a certain period, or in a certain place, expressed truth of faith for a certain group now only remind of the faith of the past. They have lost their truth, and it is an open question whether dead symbols can be revived. Probably not for those to whom they have died! A symbol of faith is infinite because it is not idolatrous. However, the human mind is a continuously working factory of idols. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
Everything said about faith is derived from the experience of actual faith, of faith as a living reality, or in a metaphoric abbreviation, of the life of faith. Without the manifestation of God in mortals the question of God and faith in God are not possible. There is no faith without participation. Since the life of faith is life in the state of ultimate concern and no human being can exist completely without such a concern, we say: Neither faith nor doubt can be eliminate from mortals as mortals. Faith and doubt have been contrasted in such a way that the quiet certainty of faith has been praised as the complete removal of doubt. There is, indeed, a serenity of the life in faith beyond the disturbing struggles between faith and doubt. To attain such a state is a natural and justified desire of every human being. Doubt is not overcome by repression, but by courage. Courage does not deny that there is doubt, but it takes the doubt into itself as an expression of its own finitude and affirms the content of an ultimate concern. Courage does not need the safety of an unquestionable conviction. It includes the risk without which no creative life is possible. All this is declared about living faith, of faith as actual concern, and not of faith as a traditional attitude without tensions, without doubt and without courage. Faith in this sense, which is the attitude of many members of the churches as well as of society at large. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
In mystical literature the vision of God is described as the stage which transcends the state of faith either after the Earthly life or in rare moments within it. In the complete reunion with the divine ground of being, the element of distance is overcome and with it uncertainty, doubt, courage and risk. The finite is taken into the infinite; it is not extinguished, but it is not separated either. This is not the ordinary human situation. To the state of separated finitude belong faith and the courage to risk. The risk of faith is the concrete content of one’s ultimate concern. Jesus and Satan appear as representative of two opposite principles. Satan is the representative of material consumption and of power over nature and mortals. Jesus is the representative being, and his manifestation is a symbol of the Savior of humanity. The World has followed Satan’s principles, since the time of the gospels. Yet even the victory of these principles could not destroy the longing for the realization of full being, expressed by Jesus as well as by many other great Masters who lived before him and after him. When you use things with a hardened heart, you use what is alien to you, and that indulgent, selfish use is avarice, which is the root of all evil. Some people hold to their selfish nature, and they may have the name of being saintly on the basis of the external appearances, but inside they are asses, because they do not grasp the meaning of divine truth. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
However, this does not mean that we should not have anything, it just means that we should not be bound by anything. God wants to act in the soul, and he himself must be in the place in which he acts—and that he would like to do. Everything and anything can become an object of craving: things we use in daily life, property, rituals, good deeds, knowledge, and thoughts. While they are not in themselves bad, they become bad; that is, when we hold onto them, when they become chains that interfere with our freedom, they block our self-realization. People need to uncover their most hidden secrete ties of selfishness, of intentions, and opinions. However, the fact of the matter is most people will not analyze their behavior nor recognize their own errors until they are faced with extreme hardship. It is not a character building exercise, but it reveals your truth self. Some people walk away from their trials and tribulations a much better person, others walk away from their trials and tribulations with a spirit of lack and limitation and will do whatever they can to prosper, even if it means hurting their own family to get ahead in the World. Therefore, people should not consider so much what they are to do as what they are. Thus take care that your emphasis is laid on being good and not on the number or kind of things to be done. Emphasize rather the fundamentals on which your work rests. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
Our being is the reality, the spirit that moves us, the character that impels our behavior; in contrast, the deeds or opinions that are separated from our dynamic core have no reality. We are to be active in the classic sense of the productive expression of one’s human powers, not in the modern sense of being busy. Activity means to go out of oneself. Run into peace. The person who is in the state of running, of continuous running into peace is a Heavenly person. One continually runs and moves and seeks peace in running. The active vessel is alive and it grows and it is filled and never will be full. Out of this criterion comes the message which is the very heart of Christianity and makes possible the courage to affirm faith in the Christ, namely, that in spite of all forces of separation between God and mortals this is overcome from the side of God. One of the forces of separation is a doubt which tries to prevent the courage to affirm one’s faith. Although we are never able to bride the infinite distance between the infinite and the finite from the side of faith, this alone makes the courage of faith possible. The risk of failure, of error and of idolatrous distortion can be taken, because the failure cannot separate us from what is our ultimate concern. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
Sometimes One Can Mistake Gratitude for Love—Dogs are Hardly an Article of Faith
Love or the lack of it is at the root of everything. Guard your children. Weigh wisdom of intervention if such is even possible. Ponder the question of inevitability. To cease wishing is a contemporary emotional and spiritual wasteland, almost like inhabiting the land of the dead. Another characteristic is satiety; if wishes are thought of only as pushed toward gratification, the end consisting of the satisfying of the need, the reality is that emptiness and vacuity and futility are greatest where all wishes are met. For this means one stops wishing. Without faith we cannot want anymore, we cannot wish. The truth of faith consists in true symbols concerning the ultimate. And the faithful is one human being with the power of thought and the need for conceptual understanding. There is a dimension of meaning expressed in the symbolism of the whish, this is what gives the wish its specifically human quality, and without this meaning, the emotional and spiritual aspects of wanting become dried up. When we have faith, it is a symbol that peace and prosperity are just around the corner and it is only a matter of time until all our need will be met. However, the relation to the ultimate is not the same in each case. The philosophical relation is in principle a detached description of the basic structure in which the ultimate manifests itself. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
The relation of faith is in principle an involved expression of concern about the meaning of the ultimate for the faithful. The difference is obvious and fundamental. However, it is, as the phrase “in principle” indicates, a difference which is not maintained in the actual life of philosophy and of faith. It cannot be maintained, because the philosopher is a human being with an ultimate concern, hidden or open. And the faithful one is a human being with the power of thought and the need for conceptual understanding. This is not only a biological fact. It has consequences for the life of philosophy in the philosopher and or the life of faith in the faithful. An analysis of philosophical systems, essays or fragments of all kinds shows that the direction in which the philosopher asks the question and the preference one gives to special types of answers is determined by cognitive consideration and by a state of ultimate concern. The historically most significant philosophies show not only the greatest power of thought but the most passionate concern about the meaning of the ultimate whose manifestations they describe. The philosophy, in its genuine meaning, is carried on by people in whom passions of an ultimate concern is united with a clear and detached observation of the way ultimate reality manifests itself in the process of the Universe. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
At most general faith means much the same as trust. Therefore, we are being asked to have faith as knowledge of specific truths revealed by God. Faith is a practical commitment beyond the evidence to one’s belief that God exists. We are to have a firm and certain knowledge of God’s benevolence towards us, founded upon the truth of the freely given promise in Christ, both revealed to our minds and sealed upon our hearts through the Holy Spirit. It is this element of ultimate concern behind the philosophical ideas which supplies the truth of faith in them. Our vision of the Universe and our predicament within it unites faith and conceptual work. We may hold that in our sinful state we will inevitably offer a resistance to faith that may be overcome only by God’s grace. It is, however, a further step for individuals of faith to put their revealed knowledge into practice by trusting their lives to God and seeking to obey his will. Humans contain the potentialities of these creative principles, and can choose to make their lives an ascent towards and then a union with the intuitive intelligence. The One is not a being, but infinite being. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
Thus Christian and Jewish philosophers who held to a creator God could affirm such a conception that God is infinite, and created the World. God, as the creator of all, is not far from any one of us. Philosophy is not only the mother’s womb out of which science and history have come, it is also an ever-present element in actual scientific and historical work. The frame of reference within which the great physicists have seen and are seeing the Universe of their inquiries is philosophical, even if their actual inquiries verify it. In no case is it a result of their discoveries. It is always a vision of the totality of being which consciously or unconsciously determines the frame of their thought. Because this is so one justified in saying that even in the scientific view of reality an element of faith is effective. Scientific view of reality an element of faith is effective. Scientists rightly try to prevent these elements of faith and philosophical truth from interfering with their actual research. This is possible to a great extent; but even the most protected experiment is not absolutely pure—pure in the sense of the exclusion of interfering factors such as the observer, and as the interest which determines the kind of question asked of nature in an experiment. What we said about the philosopher must also be said about the scientist. Even in one’s scientific work one is a human being, grasped by an ultimate concern, and one asks the question of the Universe as such, the philosophical question. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
Intellectual inquiry into the faith is to be understood as faith seeking understanding (fides quaerens intellectum). To believe is to thin with assent (credere est assensione cogitare). It is an act of the intellect determined not by the reason, but by the will. Faith involves a commitment to believe in a God, to believe God, and to believe in God. What is eternal is unchanging. In the same way the historian is consciously or unconsciously a philosopher. It is quite obvious that every task of the historian beyond finding of the facts is dependent on evaluation of historical factors, especially the nature of mortals, one’s freedom, one’s determination, one’s development out of nature and so forth. It is less obvious but also true that even in the fact of finding historical facts philosophical presuppositions are involved. This is especially true in deciding, out of the infinite number of happenings in every infinitely small moment of time, which facts shall be called historically relevant facts. The historian is further forced to give one’s evaluation of sources and their reliability, a task which is not independent of one’s interpretation of human nature. Finally, in the moment in which a historical work gives implicit or explicit assertions about the meaning of historical events for human existence, the philosophical presuppositions of history are evident. Where there is philosophy there is an expression of an ultimate concern; there is an element of faith, however hidden it may be by the passions of the historian for pure facts. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
God does not possess anything superadded to his essence, and his essence includes all his perfections. No one can attain to truth unless one philosophizes in the light of faith. Our faith in eternal salvation shows that we have theological truths that exceed human reason. And if one could attain truths about religious claims without faith, these truths would be incomplete. Higher truths are attained through faith. All these consideration show that, in spite of their essential difference, there is an actual union of philosophical truth and the truth of faith in every philosophy and that this union is significant for the work of the scientist and the historian. This union has been called philosophical faith. The term is misleading, because it seems to confuse the two elements, philosophical truth and the truth of faith. Furthermore, the term seems to indicate that there is one philosophical faith, a philosophia perennis, as it has been termed. However, only philosophical questions are perennial, not the answers. There is a continuous process of interpretation of philosophical elements and elements of faith, not one philosophical faith. Revealed theology is a single speculative science concerned with knowledge of God. Because of its greater certitude and higher dignity of subject matter, it is nobler than any other science. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
Philosophical theology, though, can make demonstrations using the articles of faith as its principles. Moreover, it can apologetically refute objections raised against the faith even if no articles of faith are presupposed. There is truth of faith in philosophical truth. And there is philosophical truth in the truth of faith. In order to see the latter point we must confront the conceptual expression of philosophical truth with the symbolical expression of truth of faith. Now, one can say that most philosophical concepts have mythological ancestors and that most mythological symbols have conceptual elements which can and must be developed as soon as the philosophical consciousness has appeared. In the idea of God the concepts of being, life, spirit, unity and diversity are implied. In the symbol of the creation concepts of finitude, anxiety, freedom and time are implied. The symbol of the “fall of Adam” implies a concept of mortal’s essential nature, of one’s conflict with oneself, of one’s estrangement from oneself. Only because every religious symbol has conceptual potentialities is theo-logy possible. There is a philosophy implied in every symbol of faith. However, faith does not determine the movement of the philosophical thought, just as philosophy does not determine the character of one’s ultimate concern. Symbols of faith can open the eyes of the philosopher to qualities of the Universe which otherwise would not have been recognized. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
Faith is the starting point, scripture offers the data, and philosophy is a supplement not a competitor. Faith, philosophy, and scripture help make sense of each other. However, faith does not command a definite philosophy, although churches and theological movements have claimed and used Platonic, Aristotelian, Kantian or Humean philosophies. The philosophical implications of the symbols of faith can be developed in many ways, but the truth of faith and the truth of philosophy have no authority over each other. In the past few years, a number of persons in psychiatry and related fields have been pondering and exploring the problems of wishing and willing. We may assume that this confluence of concern must be in answer to a strong need in out time for a new light on these problems. It is not wishing that cases illness but lack of wishing. The problem is to deepen people’s capacity to wish, and one side of our task in therapy is to create the ability to wish. Wish is an optimistic picturing in imagination. It is a transitive verb—to wish involves an act. Wishing is similar to faith because it allows us to see beyond our experience and knowledge and hope that something good may happen, and so we send out more beneficial vibrations into the Universe. Every genuine wish is a creative act. I find support for this in therapy: it is indeed a beneficial step when the patient can feel and state strongly, for example, “I wish to buy a beautiful Cresleigh home and feel safe and secure in my community.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
That wish, in effect, moves the conflict from a submerged, unarticulated plane in which one takes no responsibility but expects God and parent to read his or her wishes by telepathy, to an overt, healthy conflict over what one wants. On the basis of theological myth of creation God exults when mortals come through with a wish of one’s own. The wish in interpersonal relationship requires mutuality. This is a truth shown in its breach in many myths, and brings the person to one’s doom. Peer Gynt in Ibsen’s play runs around the World wishing and acting on his wishes; the only trouble is that is wishes have noting to do with the other person he meets but are entirely egocentric, encased in cask of self, sealed up with a bung of self. In The Sleeping Beauty, by the same token, the young princes who assault the briars in order to rescue and awaken the slumbering girl before the time is ripe, are exemplars of behavior which tries to force the other in love and pleasures of flesh before the other is ready; they exhibit a wishing without mutuality. The young princes are devoted to their own desires and needs without relation to Thou. If wish and will can be seen and experienced in this light of autonomous, imaginative acts of interpersonal mutuality, there is profound truth in St. Augustine’s dictum, “Love and do what you will.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
We cannot be naïve about human nature. We know full well that this wishing is stated in ideal terms. We know that the trouble is precisely that mortals do wish and will against their neighbor, that imagination is not only the source of our capacity to form the creative mutual wish but it is also bounded by the individual’s own limits, convictions, and experience; and, thus, there is always in our wishing an element of doing violence to the others as well as to ourselves, no matter how well analyzed we may be or how much the recipient of grace or how many times we have experienced satori. This is called the willful element, willful here being the insistence of one’s own wish against the reality of the situation. Willfulness is the kind of will motivated by defiance, in which the wish is more against something than for its object. The defiant, willful is correlated with fantasy rather than with imagination, and is the spirit which negates reality, whether it be a person or an aspect of impersonal nature, rather than sees it, forms it, respect it, or takes joy in it. There are two realms of will, the first consisting of an experience of the self in its totality, a relatively spontaneous movement in a certain direction. In this kind of willing, the body moves as a whole, and the experience is characterized by a relaxation and by an imaginative, open quality. This is an experience of freedom which is anterior to all talk about political or psychological freedom; it is a freedom, presupposed by the determinist and anterior to all the discussions of determinism. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
In contrast, the will of the second realm is that in which some obtrusive element enters is that in which some obtrusive element enters, some necessity for a decision of an either/or character, a decision with an element of an against something alone with a for something. If one uses the Freudian terminology, the “will of the Super-Ego” would be included in their realm. We can will to read but not to understand, we can will knowledge but not wisdom, we can will scrupulosity but not mortality. This is illustrated in creative work. In the second realm of will is the conscious, effortful, critical application to creative endeavor, in preparing a speech for meeting or revising one’s manuscript, for example. However, when actually giving the speech, or when hopefully creative inspiration takes over in our writing, we are engrossed with a degree of forgetfulness of self. In this experience, wishing and willing become one. One characteristic of the creative experience is that it makes for a temporary union by transcending the conflict. The temptation is for the second ream to take over the first; we lose our spontaneity, our free flow of activity, and will become effortful, controlled and so forth, Victorian will power. Our error, then, is that will tries to take over the work of imagination. This is very close to a wish. Will is the capacity to organize oneself so that movement in a certain direction or toward a certain goal may take place. Wish is the imaginative playing with the possibility of some act or state occurring. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
Will and wish may be seen as operating in polarity. Will requires self-consciousness; wish does not. Will implies some possibility of either/or choice; wish does not. Wish gives the warmth, the content, the imagination, the innocence’s play, the freshness, and the richness of the will. Will gives the self-direction, the maturity, to wish. Will protect wish, permits it to continue without wish, will loses its life-blood, its viability, and tends to expire in self-contradiction. If you have only will and no wish, you have the dried-up, Victorian, neopuritan mortal. If you have only wish and no will, you have the driven, unfree, infantile person who, as an adult-remaining-an-infant, may become the robot mortal. Awareness of one’s feelings lays the groundwork for knowing what one want. This point may look very simple at first glance—who does not know what one wants? However, the amazing thing is how few people actually do. If one looks honestly into oneself, does one not find that most of what one thinks one wants is just routines like fresh fish on Friday; or what one wants is what one thinks one should want—like being a success in his or her work; or wants to want—like loving one’s neighbor? One can often see clearly the expression of direct and honest wants in children before they have been taught to falsify their desires. The child exclaims, “I like ice cream, I want a cone,” and there is no confusion about who wants what. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
Such directness of desire often comes like a breath of fresh air in a murky land. It may not be best that one has the cone at the time, and it is obviously the parents’ responsibility to say Yes or No if the child is not mature enough to decide. However, let the parents not teach the child to falsify one’s emotions by trying to persuade him or her that he or she does not want the cone! To be aware of one’s feelings and desires does not at all imply expressing them indiscriminately wherever one happens to be. Judgment and decision are part of any mature consciousness of self. However, how is one going to have a basis for judging wat one will or will not do unless one first knows what one wants? For an adolescent to be aware that one wants to drive a brand-new BMW 3 Series, does not mean that one acts on this impulse. However, suppose he never lets his impulses reach the threshold of awareness because they are not socially acceptable? How is he then to know years later, when he buys a care, whether he wants to drive it or not, or whether because thus is then the acceptable and expected act, the routine thing to do? People who voice with alarm the caution that unless desires and emotions are suppressed they will pop out every which way, and everyone, will experience neurotic emotions. As a matter of fact, we know that it is precisely the emotions and desires which have been repressed which later return to drive the person compulsively. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
The Victorian gyroscope kind of person had to control his or her emotions rigidly, for, by virtue of having locked them up in jail, one had turned them into lawbreakers. However, the more integrated a person is, the loses compulsive become one’s emotions. In the mature person feelings and wants occur in a configuration. In seeing a dinner as part of a drama on the stage, to give a simple example, one is not consumed with desires for food; one came to see a drama and not to eat. Or wen listening to a concert singer, one is not consumed with pleasures of the flesh even though she may be very attractive; the configuration is set by the fact that one chose in coming to hear music. Of course, as we have indicted, none of us escape conflicts from time to time. However, these are different from being compulsively driven by emotions. Every direct and immediate experience of feeling and wanting is spontaneous and unique. That is to say, the wanting and feeling are uniquely part of that particular situation at the particular time and place. Spontaneity means to be able to respond directly to the total picture—or, as it is technically called, to respond to the figure-ground configuration. Spontaneity is the active “I” becoming part of the figure ground. In a good portrait painting the background is always an integral part of the portrait; so an act of a mature human being is an integral part of the self in relation to the World around it. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
Spontaneity, thus, is very different from effervescence or egocentricity, or letting out one’s feelings regardless of the environment. Spontaneity, rather is the acting “I” responding to a particular environment at a given moment. The originality and uniqueness which is always part of spontaneous feeling can be understood in this light. For just as there never was exactly that situation before and never will be again, so the feeling one has at that time is new and never to be exactly repeated. It is only neurotic behavior which is rigidly repetitive. God’s great plan of happiness provide a perfect balance between eternal justice and the mercy we can obtain through the Atonement of Jesus Christ. It also enables us to be transformed into new creatures in Christ. A loving God reaches out to each of us. We know that through his love and because of his Atonement of his only begotten Son, all humankind may be saved, by obedience to the laws and ordinances. Eternal relationships are also fundamental to our theology. The family is ordained of God. Under the great plan of our loving Creator, the mission is to achieve the supernal blessing of exaltation in the celestial kingdom. Finally, God’s love is so great that, except for the few who become people of perdition, God has provided a destiny of glory for all his children, including those who have passed away. Our loving Heavenly Father wants us to have joy. “Do not tell secrets to those whose faith and silence you have not already tested,” reports Kate Atkinson. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
That I Did Always Love—God Fumbles at Your Spirit and Life Hath Immortality
Our souls closing to each other, the inevitable blindness between Maker and Fledgling. The only fence against the World is thorough knowledge of it. Many people often wonder why people victimize them, why someone might stalk then, and why someone will just not leave them along? There is a dialectical relationship between apathy and violence. To live in apathy provokes violence. Violence is the ultimate destructive substitute which surges in to fill the vacuum where there is no relatedness. There are degrees of violence, from the relative normal shock effect of many forms of modern art, through pornography and obscenity—which achieve their desired reaction through violence to our forms of life—to the extreme pathology of assassinations and the murders of the moors. When inward life dries up, when feeling decreases and apathy increases, when one cannot affect or even genuinely touch another person, violence flares up as a daimonic necessity for contact, a mad drive forcing touch in the most direct way possible. This is one aspect of the well-known relationship between sexual feelings and crimes of violence. To inflict pain and torture at least proves that one can affect somebody. In the alienated state of mass communication, the average citizen knows dozen of TV personalities who come smiling into one’s living room of an evening—but one oneself is never known. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
In this state of alienation and anonymity, painful for anyone to bear, the average person may well have fantasies which hover on the edge of pathology. The mood of the anonymous person is, if I cannot affect or touch anybody, I can at least shock you into some feeling, force you into some passion through wounds and pain; I shall at least make sure we both feel somethings, and I shall force you to see me and know that I also am here! Many deviant people have forced the group to take cognizance of one by destructive behavior; and though one is condemned, at least the community notices the individual. To be actively hated is almost as good as to be actively liked; it breaks down utterly unbearable situation of anonymity and aloneness. One cannot fully appreciate the nature of alienation without considering one specific aspect of modern life: it is routinization, and the repression of the awareness of the basic problems of human existence. We touch here on the universal problem of life. People have to earn their daily bread, and this always a more or less absorbing task. One has to take car of the many time and energy-consuming tasks of daily life, and is enmeshed in a certain routine necessary for the fulfillment of those tasks. One builds a social order, conventions, habits and ideas, which help one to perform what is necessary, and to live with one’s follow mortals with a minimum friction. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
It is characteristic of all culture that it builds a human-made, artificial World, superimposed on the natural World in which mortals live. However, mortals can fulfill oneself only if one remains in touch with the fundamental facts of one’s existence, if one can experience the exaltation of love and solidarity, as well as the tragic fact of one’s aloneness and of the fragmentary character of one’s existence. If a person is completely enmeshed in the routine and in the artifacts of life, one cannot see anything but the human-made, common sense appearance of the World, one loses one’s touch with the grasp of oneself and the World. Apathy is a curious state. Apathy seems to be a miracle of protection by which a personality in utter fiasco rests until it can do something else. The longer the situation goes unmet, the more apathy is prolonged; and it sooner or later becomes a character state. This affectlessness is a shrinking-up in the winds of continuous demands, a freezing in the face of hyperstimuli, letting the current go by since one fears one would be overwhelmed if one responded to it. No one who has ever ridden the subway at rush hour, with its cacophonous din and hordes of anonymous humanity, will be surprised at this. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
It is not difficult to appreciate how people living in a schizoid age have to protect themselves from tremendous overstimulation—protect themselves from the barrage of words and noise over the radio and TV, protect themselves from the assembly line demands of collectivized industry and gigantic factory-modeled multiversities. In a World where numbers inexorably take over as our means of identification, like flowing lava threatening to suffocate and fossilize all breathing life in its path; in a World where normality is defined as keeping your cool; where sex is so available that the only way to preserve any inner center is to learn to have intercourse without committing yourself—in such a schizoid World, which young people experience more directly since they have not had time to build up the defenses which dull the senses of their elders, it is not surprising that will and love have become increasingly problematic and even, as some people believe, impossible of achievement. Apathy is the withdrawal of the will and love, a statement that they do not matter, a suspension of commitment. It is necessary in times of stress and turmoil; and the present greater quantity of stimuli is a form of stress. We find in every culture the conflict between routine and the attempt to get back to the fundamental realities of existence. To help in this attempt has been one of the functions of art and religion, even though religion itself has eventually become a new routine. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
Even the most primitive history of mortals shows us an attempt to get in touch with the essence of reality by artistic creation. Primitive mortals are not satisfied with the practical function of their tools and weapons, but strives to adorn and beautify them, transcending their utilitarian function. Aside from art, the most significant way of breaking through the surface of routine and of getting in touch with the ultimate realities of life is to be found in what may be called the general term of ritual. I am referring here to ritual in the broad sense of the word, as we find it in the performance of a Greek drama, for instance, and not only to rituals in the narrower religious sense. What was the function of the Greek drama? Fundamental problems of human existence were presented in an artistic and dramatic form, and participating in dramatic performance, the spectator—though not as a spectator in our modern sense of the consumer—was carried away from the sphere of daily routine and brought in touch wit oneself as a human being, with the roots of one’s existence. One touched the ground with one’s feet, and in this process gained strength by which one was brought back to oneself. Whether we think of the Greek drama, the medieval passion play, or an Indian dance, whether we think of Hindu, Jewish, or Christian rituals, we are dealing with various forms of dramatization of the fundamental problems of human existence, with an acting out of the very same problems which are thought out in philosophy and theology. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
What is left of such dramatization of life in modern culture? Almost nothing. Mortals hardly ever gets out of the realm of mortal-made conventions and things, and hardly every breaks through the surface of one’s routine, aside from grotesque attempts to satisfy the needs for a ritual as we see it practiced in lodges and fraternities. The only phenomenon approaching the meaning of a ritual, is the participation of the spectator in competitive sports; here at least, one fundamental problem of human existence is dealt with: the fight between mortals and the vicarious experience of victory and defeat. However, what a primitive and restricted aspect of human existence, reducing the richness of human life to one partial aspect! If there is a fire, or a car collision in a big city, scores of people will gather and watch. Millions of people are fascinated daily by reportings of crimes and by detective stories. They religiously go to movies in which crime and passion are the two central theme. All this interest and fascination is not simply an expression of bad taste and sensationalism, but of a deep longing for a dramatization of ultimate phenomena of human existence, life and death, crime and punishment, the battle between mortal and nature. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
However, while Greek drama dealt with these problems on a high artistic and metaphysical level, our modern drama and ritual are crude and do not produce any cathartic effect. All this fascination with competitive sports, crime and passion, shows the need for breaking through the routine surface, but the way its satisfaction shows the extreme poverty of our solution. Conflicts occur at all levels of human experience. Rather than speak of mental health as a goal, we use the concept of self-actualization to describe the behaviors in healthy, happy, productive, and life-affirming people. Ways to uncover or freeing the hidden self are Sensitivity Training and Basic Encounter Groups. However, sometimes in society there are individuals or groups of people who know that they are collectively mentally ill and they do not seek help, instead they all band together and accept each other are they are, even when they are a danger to themselves and the community. It is usually not until they seriously hurt someone or are caught in some other criminal act that they are forced to seek help or incarcerated. As stated before, some people target individuals and hurt them because they want that person to know they exist and want to force that person to think about them by torturing and hurting that individual. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
Although people were becoming more and more aware of the orderly relation of the physical Universe, up until about two hundred years ago people were still tied to a spirit-demon model to explain their behavior. Psychology comes from two Greek words, psyche (soul, mind) and logos (orderly expression). Originally, it meant the orderly study of the soul or mind, but now it generally means the systematic study of behavior. Some psychologists prefer another definition: The systematic study of conscious or unconscious behavior. Modern psychology grew out of philosophical and physiological explanations of human behavior. Physiological explanations of human behavior are those which concentrate on the body, rather than the mind or emotion. Those who used the scientific method to study human beings began to assume they could be understood rationally, like the rest of the World, through a systematic study of their observable behavior. To a large extent psychology is the scientific study of behavior. Its goals are to develop a descriptive scientific language about behavior, to interpret and explain behavior, and to use the information this gained to improve the human condition. Inborn patterns and instincts exist within each person. When these come into conflict with social requirements and teachings, varying degrees of psychological disorder results. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
Some people enter an introduction psychology course feeling that psychology is relevant only to sick people. Others think it is an effective device to manipulate others. (That is the meaning people usually have in mind when they say, “Wow, did I ‘psych’ that person out!”) I am studying psychology because after being a victim of crimes starting from when I was a teenager up until the present, I wanted to know why an individual kept stalking and harassing me and even attempted to kill me when I did not really know this person. This person is much older than myself and was a customer at my job and for more than half of my life he and his friends have been terrorizing me and I wanted to know why. In therapy, they could not answer my questions, and in group therapy, I felt it was a little too much to open up about. I would ask my elders and was always told that I do not want to understand those people. Beside law enforcement handling the situation, as it is still under investigation, a person needs to understand why a person would attach themselves to one like that and not move on. Well, that question has now been answered. They want to be recognized and hurt you to get that recognition. For them, being hated and just as important as being loved. People who like to victimize others are emotionally disturbed, and their humanity is incomplete, for it has never astonished them. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
It is not totally unheard of that monsters exit in our community and are allowed to spend years and decade preying on the unsuspecting, and are protected by people in power and allowed to continue abusing others, as if it is their God given right. Look at what is going on in Hollywood with certain actors who have taken advantage of men and women, and several of them, for decades and gotten away with it up until recent. Look Lawrence Gerard Nassar, who was accused of molesting at least 250 girls and young women and one young male, these claims date back nearly 30 years. And then, of course, there is the football coach Gerald Arthur Sandusky who was arrested and charged with 52 counts of sexual abuse of young boys for over 15 years. You cannot tell me that of all these victims no one spoke up, no one went to the police, and that the community did not hear these victim’s stories, see their physical and emotion wounds, notice the changes in their behavior and/or appearance. Did not see their grades drop, and them engaging in risky behaviors as a way of acting out and seeking attention. It is even possible that the community harassed some of these victims and make fun of them for speaking up. While some of these abusers are still facing charges, others have been sentenced and because of the severity of their crimes, the number of victims, and their age they will spend life in prison. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
Sometimes getting help is a lot harder than people realize because for one, people do not want to speak up, and also because when you reach out, sometimes people are put in place to silence you, shame you, or make you feel like it is your fault that you are a victim. Thankfully, there are organizations like Time’s Up for women. However, there are still no organizations dedicated to seeking justice for men. And also, some people are scared to talk to the police because they feel like someone might retaliate against them, which has happened to many victims. Many people actually die before they get help, some lose their minds, and others experience death by suicide. People say that suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem, but when you have been terrorized for more than half of your life, things start to look different. Some people think they only want their voice will be heard is by ending their life, that it is the only way they can escape, or that God wants them to be a martyr. Some people are more gifted than others. Whatever the case may be, we live in a society that needs balance. However, the more aware you are of yourself and your World, the more control you will have over your own life. Self-knowledge leads to wonder, and wonder to curiosity and investigation, so that noting interest people more than people, even if it is only one’s own person. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
The process of growth involved asking good questions and struggling for objective answers to stimulate better questions. Fully human people appreciate their own uniqueness and individuality. Many parents teach their children try to copy some imaginary perfect human being. However, each person is unique, and healthy people appreciate their own special qualities. Fully human people are aware of the common bond they have with all other people. They know that they are like other people in having physical and emotional needs that must be expressed and satisfied. They look for the common thread in all human experiences. They recognize that differences such as nationality or religion are artificially imposed and less important than the similarities among humankind. Also, if you have been a victim of crimes(s), sometimes you may even lose your family support, and even your friends may abandon you and turn on you. You would be surprised at how material gain, wealth, or money can buy loyalty. Some people tend to idolize celebrities and think that they are amazing people and love their fans and would never do anything to hurt a fan, but sometimes even a celebrity will use you if it means they get a second chance at their failing career. It may seem like no one is on your side, but keep your faith in God and keep trying. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
Fully human people know they are fully responsible for their own existence. They make their own choices as to who they will be. They look for no external system or authority to give their life meaning. Remember, God is inside of your and your body is his temple. Sometimes people use drugs and alcohol to escape reality on occasion, but they realize that these reduce their ability to be responsible for their own choices. Fully human people do not demand perfection but try to fulfill their own potential. They recognize their mistakes and accept this as much as their ability to succeed. They use neither their success nor their failures to prove that they are superior or inferior to other people. And although you may be reaching legal age, but or still a minor, or a young adult, listen to the advice you were given as a kid and stay away from strangers. Often the older, much older adults who want to be your friend may seem nice, but they probably have ulterior motives that you cannot sense because you are too young and do not have experience. And that is what some people are depending on. It takes tremendous courage to resist the lure of appearances. Fully human people value human beings above material goods. They reject any value system that places the accumulation of wealth above the welfare of people. They strongly feel that human rights are far more important than material rights. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
Without a consciousness of truth itself doubt of truth would be impossible. The anxiety of meaninglessness is conquered where the ultimate meaning is. We have to experience step after step the lack of meaning in the different levels of reality which we enter, works through, and leave. As long as we walk ahead on this road the anxieties of guilt and condemnation are also conquered. They are not absent. Guilt can be acquired on every level, partly through a failure to fulfill its intrinsic demands, partly through a failure to proceed beyond the level. However, as long as the certainty of final fulfillment is given, the anxiety of guilt does not become anxiety of condemnation. There is automatic punishment accord to the law of karma. Fully human people recognize they have a capacity for enjoyment and pleasure. They see life as time for fun. They are not afraid of pleasure and seek to share it with other people. This allows them to still possess a level of innocence and be open to spontaneous enjoyment of life. Fully human people try to be real and open in their relationships with others. They are willing to risk other people’s reactions to their open expression of feelings. They use openness and authenticity, not to manipulate or control, but to share knowledge of themselves with others. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
The true experience of the presence of power is the mystical element of the person-to-person encounter with God. The Savior is putting his name in our hearts. And we are feeling the pure love for Christ for others and ourselves. Our mortal life is designed by a loving God to be a test and source of growth for each of us. Since the beginning, the tests have not been easy. We face trails that come from having mortal bodies. All of us live in a World where Satan’s war against truth and against our personal happiness is becoming more intense. The World and our lives can seem to be in increasing commotion. However, the loving God who allowed these tests for us also designed a sure way to pass through them. We may be momentarily disheartened, remember, life is not meant to be easy. Trials must be borne and grief endured along the way. “For with God, nothing shall be impossible,” reports Luke 1.37. We are children of God and created in his image, entitled through our worthiness to receive revelation to help with our righteous endeavors. “The Lord is God, and the Spirit beareth record, and the record is true, and the truth abideth forever and ever,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 1.39. We are promised that God’s Spirit will always be with us. Because of these promises, the Savior is the rock upon which we can stand safely and without fear in every storm we face. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
God knows and loves each one of us. He knows our names as we know his. He knows our troubles. He has experienced them. God’s name will be in our hearts and fixed in our memory. “Wise words, she said ‘We had better run for it now.’ A timely escape, we laugh until we fall down. Now we are writing on the bathroom walls, always sleeping on someone’s floor, walking around the streets like we rule them all. They know we kick around here. These days are ours. Somebody is knocking at the bathroom door. We always stay a little longer. Nobody hears what we say, hidden in the games that we play,” reports Emma Hewitt (These Day Are Ours). Throughout recorded history (and probably since before it was recorded) mortals have displayed some interesting and puzzling behaviors. These behaviors are varied, and yet have in common the desire or need or ability to get out of the human skin and experience something beyond. This technical definition of this is mortal’s self-transcending behavior. Mortals have always apparently always experienced or tried to experience some sort of shedding of the limitations of human existence, and one has used a number of techniques to do so. The First Reflection and the Second Reflection. The First involves the uses of bodily senses and reason. The subject is separated from the object being perceived by the subject, spectator view of the World. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
The Second Reflection transcends or rises above science, technology, and objective knowledge. It s the attempt to reach beyond human thought into the realm of Being. True freedom is achieved when the self is conscious of the many rich possibilities of insight and development that are open to it. In other words, mortals are free only when one opens oneself up to hope, fidelity, and love and when one understands that freedom points beyond itself to transcendent reality. Love and intelligence are related to freedom, and they are the most concrete as well as the most creative things in the World. A correct understanding of Heavenly Father’s character can change how we see ourselves and others and help us to understand God’s tremendous love for his children and his great desire to help us become like him. An incorrect view of God’s nature can leave us feeling as if we are incapable of every making it back to his presence. However, redemption comes through the Holy Messiah—Freedom of choice (agency) is essential to existence and progression—Adam fell that mortals might be—Mortals are free to choose liberty and eternal life. People may feel like they are making a mark and just coy, but even God and tie and bend and break steel. “And because of the intercession for all, all mortals come unto God; wherefore, they stand in the presence of him, to be judged of him according to the truth and holiness which is in one,” reports 2 Nephi 2.10. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
What Mystery Pervades but Nature is a Stranger High from the Earth
We stood on the front porch, like dwarves underneath the columns. The blue light was suddenly soothing and the moment lost its proportions. It was like eternal dusk here in the country. I could hear the birds of the night, the distant unquiet waters of the lake. Courage is the self-affirmation of being in spite of the fact of nonbeing. It is the act of the individual self in taking the anxiety of nonbeing upon itself by affirming itself either as part of an embracing whole or in its individual selfhood. Courage always includes a risk, it is always threatened by nonbeing, whether the risk of losing oneself and becoming a thing within the whole of things or of the losing one’s World in an empty self-relatedness. Courage needs the power of being, a power transcending the nonbeing which is experienced in the anxiety of emptiness and meaninglessness, which is effective in the anxiety of guilt and condemnation. The courage which takes this threefold anxiety into itself must be rooted in a power of being that is greater than the power of oneself and the power of one’s World. Neither self-affirmation as a part nor self-affirmation as oneself is beyond the manifold threat of nonbeing. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
Those who are mentioned as representatives of these forms of courage try to transcend themselves and the World in which they participate in order to find the power of being-itself and a courage to be which is beyond the threat of nonbeing. There are no exceptions to this rule; and this means that every courage to be has an open or hidden religious root. For religion is the state of being grasped by the power of being-itself. In some cases the religious root is carefully covered, in others it is passionately denied; in some it is deeply hidden and in others superficially. However, it is never completely absent. For everything that is participates in being-itself, and everybody has some awareness of this participation, especially in the moments in which one experiences the threat of nonbeing. This leads us to a final consideration, the double question of: How is the courage to be rooted in being-itself, and how much we understand being-itself in the light of courage to be? The first question deals with the ground of being as source of the courage to be, the second with the courage to be as key to the ground of being. Self-awareness makes human experience resonant, it imparts that simultaneous echo to all that we think and feel as the box of a violin reverberates with the sound of the strings. It gives depth and volume to what would otherwise be shallow and flat. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
One of modern psychology’s major goals is to better understand what controls human behavior and so to be better able to predict behavior accurately. We are all constantly predicting human behavior. For instance, if you could not predict the instructor would be there you, would come to class. One a date, you observe the behavior of your companion and predict the moment to express your affection. If you want to borrow money from a friend, you observe your friend’s behavior and predict the moment when your appeal will get you the results you want. If you forget an assignment, you predict what story will sound best to the instructor, so you can get a time extension. Each of us engages in prediction every day, based on past experience and present observation. In the same way, psychologist try to study behavior systematically to make predictions based on the best empirical evidence. Empirical data or evidence is that which is obtained by experiment or observation. Psychologists’ predictions are always probability statements, and they tend to be more accurate for groups than for individuals. Probability is the relative possibility or likelihood that an event will occur, the chance that it will happen. The average age of a college freshman class can be predicted with a high degree of success, even though one average-looking freshman might actually be only fifteen years old. A college instructor can predict with a fair degree of accuracy the probable grade distribution for a class, but it would be more difficult to predict which student will what grade. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
The idea of predicting behavior is a frightening one to many people. You might be afraid that if you can predict your own behavior you will have no choice as to how you will act. However, this is not necessarily so. There is no such thing as chance or accident; the words merely signify our ignorance of some real and immediate causes. Suppose you know that having your mother nag you about studying bothers you so much that you are likely to refuse to study. You can ask her not to nag you about studying. Or you can try somehow to change your own reaction to her nagging. All of these choices grow out of your own awareness of the pattern: Mother nags = I refuse to study. If you are aware of patterns of behavior, you can predict what your future reactions will be if they follow past patters. Only then can you decide somehow to change the pattern. Therapy where the central position of the therapist is a forerunner is not acceptable. Therapy is for the benefit of the client, not for the therapist, and therefore the client should be the standard by which all things were judged; the client should set the tone and the pace of the therapy; one’s needs have to take priority. An object of vast importance in the phenomenal World of each individual is one’s self. Many years ago the significance of this in psychotherapy was driven home to many, in spite of an initial prejudice against anything so vague, so unobservable, so tainted with introspectionism. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
Clients persist in expressing themselves in terms such as these: “I feel I am not being my real self,” “I would not want anyone to know the real me,” “It feels good to let go and just be myself here,” “I think if I chip off all the plaster façade I have got a pretty solid self underneath.” Gradually, a therapist becomes aware that change in therapy is very vitally concerned with the self-yet how could this every become a part of psychological science? Psychotherapy is a relation of trust and respect, mutually felt and shown, which is something that one should experience in all relationship, regardless of if they are personal or professional. It is important for people to be able to trust someone who is evaluating them, just as it is important for one to be able to trust the person one is in a relationship with. Never idolize someone and be a puff piece for them. However, sometimes when you are nice and trying to inflate someone’s self-esteem, they may also take it as a sign that they can take advantage of you when there are actually no real feelings there. So, people reap what they sew. In psychotherapy, there is a constant attempt to foster growth. The growth, well-being, fullest functioning, and self-actualization of the client is the major goal. We state this idealistically, for it is not always so. In some psychotherapies the goal is group or social conformity, or getting the client to become normal, according to some socially determined definition of that word. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
A normal person may get along very well in society, since he or she follows all the rules and meets all the expectations, but one is not necessarily happy or healthy or full of oneself. Our prejudice in this matter leans us toward the assumption that a person, to be treated and helped by psychotherapy, has to be enabled to become more of the potential full human being one is inside. Again, becoming authentic and honest with oneself and with others is not a guarantee of happiness and tranquility. Recall that significant selfhood is a mixed blessing. Along with increased awareness and better functioning comes the disadvantages of being sensitive and involved with life. Patients need to find meaning even in the most meaningless of experiences. Try, for example, to find some sort of meaning in being in a prison (even if it is a mental one), awaiting death for a crime you cannot imagine committing. God put us on this Earth for many reasons, and one of them is to help the lost find meaning in their lostness, to help the dying find meaning in their death, to help the conflicted to find some sort of meaning in their conflict. Our attempts will add a new dimension to those of us who try to enable others to simply be real, to be more authentic, to experience their own significance as human beings. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
Not all psychotherapies dwell in the past. Some form of Reality Therapy attempts to help the conflicted or hidden self to emerge by confronting it with reality and by helping the person to take on responsibility for being the person who lives one’s own life. Coming even further away from emphasis on the past and on determinism is the growing field of Behavior or Reinforcement Therapy. In operant conditioning, principles are applied to teach people learning theory to change behavior. It is found to be successful in developing competence and new skills among those with cognitive disabilities, schizophrenics, and in changing of habits. There has also been much success in treating autistic children. Though the behavioristic therapists believe in social or cultural determinism—and reject any notion of freedom—they may have much to say to us concerning how people can maximize their potentials. We should try to regulate human conduct by offering rewards for good behavior whenever possible instead of threatening punishment for breaches of the law. We should reshape our society so that we all would be trained from birth to want to do what society wants us to do. We have the techniques now to do it. Only by using them can we hope to maximize human potentiality. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
If we are living in what some call the “age of disordered will,” wat underlies this disordered will? I believe it is a state of feelinglessness, the despairing possibility that nothing matters, a condition very close to apathy. Pamela H. Johnson, after reporting the murders on the moors of England, found herself unable to shake loose her conviction that “We may be approaching the state which the psychologists call affectlessness.” If apathy or affectlessness is a dominant mood emerging in our day, we can understand on a deeper level why love and will have become so difficult. While one might laugh at the meaningless boredom of people a decade or two ago, 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 human being cannot live in a condition of emptiness for very long: if one is not growing toward something, one does not merely stagnate; the pent-up potentialities turn into morbidity and despair, and eventually into destructive activities. The feeling of emptiness or vacuity generally comes from 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 about 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. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
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. Our emptiness has been turning into despair and destructiveness, violence and assassination; it is now undeniable that these go hand in hand with apathy. “For more than half an hour, 38 respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens,” reported The New York Times in March, 1964, “watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens. In April of the same yea, the Times said, in an impassioned editorial about another event in which a crowd urged a deranged youth who was clinging to a hotel ledge to jump, calling him “chicken” and “yellow”: “Are they any different from the wild-eyed Romans watching and cheering as men and beasts tore each other apart in the Colosseum? Does the attitude of that Albany mob bespeak a way of life for many Americans? If so, the bell tolls for us. In May of the same year, a Times article was headed “Rape Victim’s Screams Draw 40 But No One Acts.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
A number of similar events occurred during the next months which awakened us from our apathy long enough to realize how apathetic we had become, and how much modern city existence had developed in us the habit of uninvolvement and unfeeling detachment. I am aware how easy it is to exaggerate specific events, and I have no wish to overstate my case. Nevertheless, I do believe that there is in our society a definite trend toward a state of affectlessness as an attitude toward life, a character state. The anomie about which intellectuals had speculated earlier seemed now to emerge with a hideous reality on our very streets and in our very subways. What shall we call this state reported by so many of our contemporaries—estrangement, playing it cool, alienation, withdrawal of feeling, indifference, anomie, depersonalization? Each one of these terms expresses a part of the condition to which I refer—a condition in which men and women find themselves experiencing a distance between themselves and the objects which used to excite their affection and their will. I wish to leave this open for the moment what the sources of this are. When I use the term apathy, despite its limiting connotations, it is because its literal meaning is the closest to what I am describing: “want of feeling; lack of passion, emotion or excitement, indifference.” Apathy and the schizoid World go hand and had as cause and effect of each other. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
Apathy is particularly important because of its close relation to love and will. It is so seductive. And behind its delicate probing frown is this conflict, this unadmitted and sinful power. What is it? Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is. The opposite of will is not indecision—which actually may represent the struggle of the effort to decide, but being uninvolved, detached, unrelated to the significant events. Then the issue of will never can arise. The interrelation of love and will inheres in the fact that both terms describe a person in the process of reaching out, moving toward the World, seeking to affect others or the inanimate World, and opening oneself to be affected; molding, forming, relating to the World or requiring that it relate to one. This is why love and will are so difficult in an age of transition, when all the familiar mooring places are gone. The blocking of the ways in which we affect others and are affected by them is the essential disorder of both love and will. Apathy, or a-pathos, is a withdrawal of feeling; it may begin as playing it cool, a studied practice of being unconcerned and unaffected. “I did not want to get involved,” was the consistent response of the thirty-eight citizens of Kew Gardens when they were questioned as to why they had to acted. Apathy, operating like Dr. Freud’s “death instinct,” is a gradual letting go of involvement until one finds that life itself has gone by. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
The division between the community and the political state has led to the projection of all social feelings into the state, which thus becomes an idol, a power standing over and above mortals. Mortals submits to the state as to the embodiment of one’s own social feelings, which one worships as powers alienated from oneself; in one’s private life as an individual one suffers from the isolation and loneness which are the necessary result of this separation. The worship of the state can only disappears if one takes back the social powers into oneself, and builds a community in which one’s social feelings are not something added to one’s private existence, but in which one’s private and social existence are one and the same. What is the relationship of mortals toward oneself? I have descried elsewhere this relationship as marketing orientation. In this orientation, mortals experience themselves as a thing to be employed successfully on the market. One does not experience oneself as an active agent, as the bearer of human powers. One is alienated from these powers. One’s aim is to sell oneself successfully on the market. One’s sense of self does not stem from one’s activity as a loving and thinking individual, but from one’s socioeconomic role. If things could speak, a typewriter would answer the question “Who are you?” by saying “I m a typewriter,” and an automobile, by saying “I am an automobile,” or more specifically by saying, “I am a Ford,” or “a Buick,” or “a Cadillac.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
If you ask a mortal “Who are you?”, one answers “I am a manufacturer,” “I am a clerk,” “I am a doctor”—or “I am a married man,” “I am the father of two kids,” and one’s answer has pretty the same meaning as that of the speaking thing would have. That is the way one experiences oneself, not as a mortal, with love, fear, convictions, doubts, but as that abstraction, alienated from one’s real nature, which fulfills a certain function in the social system. One’s sense of value depends on one’s success: on whether one can sell oneself favorably, whether one can make more of oneself than one started out with, whether one is a success. One’s body, mind and soul are one’s capital, and one’s task in life is to invest it favorably, to make a profit of oneself. Human qualities like friendliness, courtesy, kindness, are transformed into commodities, into assets of the personality package conducive to a higher price on the personality market. If the individual fails in a profitable investment of oneself, one feels that one is a failure; if one succeeds, one is a success. Clearly, one’s sense of one’s own value always depends on factors extraneous to oneself, on the fickle judgment of the market, which decides about one’s value as it decides about the value of commodities. One, like all commodities that can be sold profitably on the market, is worthless as far as one’s exchange value is concerned, even though one’s value may be considerable. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
The alienated personality who is for sale must lose a good deal of these sense of dignity which is so characteristic of mortals even in most primitive cultures. One must lose almost all sense of self, of oneself as a unique and induplicable entity. The sense of self stems from the experience of myself as the subject of my experiences, my thought, my feeling, my decision, my judgment, my action. It presupposes that my experience is my own, and not an alienated one. Things have no self and people who have become things can have no self. This selflessness of modern mortals has appeared to one of the most gifted and original contemporary psychiatrists, the late H.S. Sullivan, as being a natural phenomenon. He spoke of those psychologists who, like myself, assume that the lack of the sense of self is a pathological phenomenon, as of people who suffer from a delusion. The self for him is nothing but the many roles we play in relations to others, roles which have the function of eliciting approval and avoiding the anxiety which is produced by disapproval. Some people who are chasing after material gain realize that they have lost themselves, that they are just like an onion with layer after layer, and without a kernel. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
When people make the discovery that they have lost themselves, the dread of nonbeing seizes them and a panic might make them desire to land in hell, rather than to thrown back into the casting ladle of nonbeing. Indeed, with the experience of self disappears the experience of identity—and when this happens, mortals could become insane if they do not save themselves by acquiring a secondary sense of self; one does that by experiencing oneself as being approved of, worthwhile, successful, useful—briefly, as a salable commodity which one is because one is looked upon by others as an entity, not unique but fitting into one of the current patterns. Look backward, remembering that you proved your worthiness in your premortal state. You are a valiant child of God, and with his help, you can triumph in the battles of this fallen World. You have done it before, and you can do it again. Look forward. Your troubles and sorrows are very real, but they will not last forever. Your dark night will pass, because the Son did rise with healing in his wings. Disappointments comes to visit on occasions but is never allowed to stay. We are troubled, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed. You may be exhausted, but do not ever give up. “So do not fear, for I am with your; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand,” reports Isaiah 41.10. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
Even with your own painful wounds, you will instinctively reach out to others. This is part of life. It is why we are here. We are here to have a body and to be tried and tested. Some of those tests are physical; some of those tests are spiritual, and your trials here have been both physical and spiritual. By keeping God’s commandments, we can find joy even in the midst of our worst circumstances. The Lord Jesus Christ will bring you added strength and greater hope. For you, the righteous, the Healer of our souls, in his time and his way, will heal all your wounds. No injustice, no persecution, no trial, no sadness, no heartache, no suffering, no wound—however deep, however wide, however painful—will be excluded from the comfort, peace, and lasting hope of the Lord whose open arms and whose wounded hands will welcome us back into his presence. “Wherefore, thy soul shall be blessed, ad thou shalt dwell safely,” reports 2 Nephi 2.3. God shall wipe away all tears from your eyes. This day will come. “You crucify yourself. Look at what has happened, baby. Are you still by yourself because I cannot reach you lately? All you said was not enough. I could not wait forever. If I had stayed to hold you up, it would not make you better. I know you could, but you will no leave them. I know you are cool, but you will not listen. Look at what has happened, baby,” reports Emma Hewitt (Crucify). #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Therefore, as One Returned, I Feel Odd Secrets of the Line to Tell Before the Seal Unscrutinized by Eye
He looked at me for a long moment, as though he was seeing me with new eyes, but it was only his weariness. He was seeing what he wanted to see it me, and he thanked me again. This was truly one of the most baffling mortals I had ever met. And to think, he was her husband, and I had though him the perfect husband for her when we had first met. He reached out and took my hand before I could stop him. Could he not feel how hard it was? Only the thinnest layer of flesh was permeable. I was a monster. Yet he peered into my eyes as though plumbing for something separate from the Deadly Sins that prevailed with in me. We can speak of idolatry or alienation not only in relationship to other people, but also in relationship to oneself, when the person is subject to irrational passions. The person who is mainly motivated by one’s lust for power, does not experience oneself any more in the richness and limitlessness of a human beings, but one becomes a slave to one partial striving in oneself, which is projected into external aims, by which one is possessed. The person who is given to the exclusive pursuit of one’s passion for money is possessed by one’s striving for it; money is the idol which one worships as the projection of one isolated power of oneself, one’s greed for it. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14
Many twenty first- century mortals have lost a meaningful World and a self which lives in meanings out of a spiritual center. The mortal-created World of objects has drawn into itself one who created it and who now lose their subjectivity in it. One has sacrificed oneself to one’s own productions. However, mortals are still aware of what he or she has lost or is continuously losing. Yet, they are still mortal enough to experience one’s dehumanization as despair. At this level, power is a sensational exaggeration made for the sake of profit and fame; it is a morbid play with negativities. In this sense, the neurotic person is an alienated person. One’s actions are not one’s own; while an individual is under the illusion of doing what he or she wants, one is actually driven by forces which are separated from oneself, which work behind the individual’s back; one is a stranger to oneself, just as one’s fellow mortals are a stranger to the individual who is consumed by greed, lust, and power. These type of people experiences the other and oneself not as what the really are, but distorted by the unconscious forces which operate in them. The insane person is the absolutely alienated person; one has completely lost oneself as the center of one’s own experience; one has lost the sense of self. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14
What is common to all these phenomena—the worship of idols, the idolatrous worship of God, the idolatrous love for a person, the worship of a political leader or the state, and the idolatrous worship of the externalization of irrational passions—is the process of alienation. It is the fact that mortals do not experience themselves as the active bearer of one’s own powers and richness, but as an impoverished thing, dependent on powers outside of oneself, unto whom one has projected one’s living substance. As the reference to idolatry indicates, alienation is by no means a modern phenomenon. Suffice it to say that it seems alienation differs from culture to culture, both in the specific spheres which are alienated, and in the thoroughness and completeness of the process. Alienation as we find it in modern society is almost total; it pervades the relationship of mortals to their work, to things they consume, to the state, to one’s fellow mortals, and to oneself. Mortals have created a World of human-made things as it never existed before. They have constructed a complicated social machine to administer the technical machine they built. Yet this whole creation of theirs stands over and above them. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14
One does not feel oneself as a creator and center, but as the servant of a Golem, which one’s hands have built. The more powerful and gigantic the forces are which one unleashes, the more powerless one feels oneself as a human being. Mortals confront themselves with one’s own forces embodied in things one has crated, alienated from oneself. They are owned by their own creation, and have lost ownership of oneself. They have lost ownership of themselves. Many individuals have built a golden calf, and says, “these are your gods who have brought you out of Egypt.” What happens to the worker? As the neurotic state progresses, they are unable to understand what is happening in our period. They are unable to distinguish the genuine from the neurotic anxiety. People begin to attack as a morbid longing for negativity what in reality is courageous acceptance of the negative. They decay what is actually the creative expression of decay. They reject as meaninglessness the meaningful attempt to reveal the meaninglessness of our situation. In industry the person becomes an economic atom that dances to the tune of atomistic management. Your place is just here, you will sit in this fashion, your arms will move x inches in a course of y radius and the time of movement will be .000 minutes. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14
Work is becoming more repetitive and thoughtless as the planners, the micromotionists, and the scientific managers further strip the workers of their rights to think and move freely. Life is being denied; need to control, creativeness, curiosity, and independent thought are being baulked, and the result, the inevitable result, is flight or fight on the part of the worker, apathy or destructiveness, psychic regression. The role of the manager is also one of alienation. It is true, one manages the whole and a part, but one too is alienated from one’s product as something concrete and useful. One’s aim is to employ profitably the capital invested by others, although in comparison with the older type of owner-manager, modern management is much less interested in the amount of profit to be paid out as dividend to the stockholder than it is in the efficient operation and expansion of the enterprise. Characteristically, within management those in charge of labor relations and of sales—that is, of human manipulation—gain, relatively speaking, an increasing importance in comparison with those in charge of the technical aspects of production. The manager, like the worker, like everybody, deal with impersonal giants: with the giant competitive enterprise; with the giant national market; with the giant consumer, who has to be coaxed and manipulated; with the giant unions, and the giant government. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14
All these giants have their own lives, as it were. They determine the activity of the manager and they direct the activity of the worker and clerk. The problem of the manager opens up one of the most significant phenomena in an alienated culture, that of bureaucratization. Both big business and government administrations are conducted by bureaucracy. Bureaucrats are specialists in the administration of things and of mortals. Due to the bigness of the apparatus to be administered, and the resulting abstractification, the bureaucrats’ relationship to the people is usually one of complete alienation. They, the people to be administered, are objects whom the bureaucrats consider neither with love nor hate, but completely impersonally; the manager-bureaucrat must not feel, as far as one’s professional activity is concerned; one must manipulate people as though they were figures, or things. Since the vastness of the organization and the extreme division of labor prevents any single individual from seeing the whole, since there is no organic, spontaneous co-operation between the various individuals or groups within the industry, the managing bureaucrats are necessary; without them the enterprise would collapse in a short time, since nobody would know the secret which makes it function. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14
Bureaucrats are as indispensable as the tons of paper gigabytes and terabytes consumed under their leadership. Just because everybody senses, with a feeling of powerlessness, the vital role of bureaucrats, they are given an almost godlike respect. If it were not for the bureaucrats, people believe, everything would go to pieces, and we would starve. Whereas, in the medieval World, the leaders were considered representatives of god-intended order, in modern Capitalism the role of the bureaucrat is hardly less sacred—since he or she is necessary for the survival of the whole. Karl Marx gave a profound definition of the bureaucrat saying: “The bureaucrat relates oneself to the World as a mere object of one’s activity.” It is interesting to note that the spirit of bureaucracy has entered not only business and government administration, but also trade unions and the great political socialist parities in England, Germany, and France. In Russia and America, too, the bureaucratic managers and their alienated spirit have conquered these countries, Russia and America could perhaps exist without terror—if certain conditions were given—but it could not exist without the system of total bureaucratization. However, somehow, many people feel that this is not a true safety; one has to suppress inclinations to accept the visions of bureaucrats as revelations, and some feel seriously threatened by it. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14
However, one does not feel spiritually threatened by something which is not an element of oneself. And since it is a symptom of the neurotic character to resist nonbeing by reducing being, one can turn to God for traditional safety. There should be no question of what Christian theology has to do in this situation. It should decide for truth against safety, even if the safety is consecrated and supported by the churches. Certainly there is a Christian conformism, from the beginning of the Church on, and there is a Christian collectivism—or at least semicollectivism, in several periods of Church history. However, this should not induce Christian theologians to identify Christian courage with the courage to be as a part. They should realize that the courage to be as a part—even if they rightly assume that neither of these forms of the courage to be gives the final solution. It is the endless compassion of God that allows us to see others for who they are. Through the lens of pure love, we see immortal beings of infinite potential and worth and beloved sons and daughters of Almighty God. Once we see through that lens, we cannot discount, disregard, or discriminate against anyone. In the Savior’s work, it is often by small and simple means that great things are brought to pass. We know that it requires repetitive practice to become good at anything. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14
Because of your unique talents, abilities, and personality, you will help others become better and happier. Yes, life can be hard at times. Certainly we all have our times of despair and discouragement. However, regardless of our differences, we seek to embrace one another as sons and daughters of our beloved Heavenly Father. God loves his children enough to give them a blueprint for the architecture to happiness and meaning in this life and a way to experience eternal joy in the halls of glory in the life to come. Being truly self-actualized is considered the exception rather than the rule since most people are working to meet more pressing needs. A peak experience involves feelings of limitless horizons opening up to the vision, the feeling of being simultaneously more powerful and also more helpless than one every was before, the feeling of ecstasy and wonder and awe, the loss of placement in time and space with, finally, the conviction that something extremely important and valuable had happened, so that subject was to some extent transformed and strengthened even in one’s daily life by such experiences. These are moments of transcendence in which a person emerges feeling changed and transformed. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14
We have long believed that love and will are interdependent and belong together. Both are conjunctive processes of being—a reaching out to influence others, molding, forming, creating the consciousness of the other. However, this is only possible, in an inner sense, if one opens oneself at the same time to the influence of the other. The self-actualizer can appreciate the irony and the absurd in life, and especially in the behaviors of mortals in general, but one has no patience with ethnic jokes, sick jokes, cruelty jokes or those situations in which a particular person is made the butt of a joke. This sense of humor enables one to transcend unimportant concerns, and of course, enables one to laugh at oneself when one becomes foolish or ridiculous. Will without love becomes manipulation. Love without will in our own day becomes sentimental and experimental. Therefore, we must display more than average creativeness, originality, and inventiveness. We are not always artistic or mechanically oriented people, nor always involved in problem solving occupations. Even though work tends to be fairly ordinary, one displays innovative skills, more creativity, and a joy from strong encouragement to follow one’s own lead. There is a feeling of the everlasting going and coming, the eternal return, the growing and mating and dying and growing again, which is part of the spiritual process. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14
Human beings are part of this eternal going and returning, part of its sadness as well as its song. However, mortals, the seeker, is called by one’s consciousness to transcend the eternal return. Our own convictions are to seek the inner reality, with the belief that the fruits of future values will be able to grow only after they are sown by the values of our history. When the full results of our bankruptcy of inner values is brought home to us, it is especially important that we seek the source of love and will. Although we may not be well adjusted in the naïve sense of being always approved of or totally identified with our culture, we can still be well adjusted personally—that is, congruent and authentic in and to ourselves—even if we reject the ideals of social adjustment. So, it is not concerning that some may see others as eccentric or even somewhat odd when compared with the run-of-the-mill, conforming, look-alike people around us. Our value system results automatically from acceptance of ourselves and others. Most self-actualizers are not petty moralizers. What most people are offended by, what most people consider moral problems, are usually of no concern to self-actualizing people. Belief in the flexibility and potentiality of the human being is so strong that one assumes that, unless interfered with, people will usually be just fine. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14
Many people cannot identify with the theory of self-actualization because it seems to point to a state of excellence. Nonsense! No one’s life is flawless. We all have our own Hells we are trying to work ourselves out of, not day by day, but inch by inch. Self-actualizers are far from faultless. They are human. As a consequence of their kinship, deep feeling, sensitivity, and awareness, they suffer more of the pains of being alive. They also experience more of the joys! Because they find so much pleasure in being alive and being authentic, they often expect too much of the same kind of behavior from people who are less able to live the same way. This makes them frequently impatient, even somewhat resentful, concerning those they care about. The striking thing about love and will in or day is that, whereas in the past we were always held up to as the answer to life’s predicaments, we now have ourselves become the problem. It is always true that love and will become more difficult in a transitional age; and ours is an era of radical age; and ours is an era of radical transition. The old myths and symbols by which we oriented ourselves are gone, anxiety is rampant; we cling to each other and try to persuade ourselves that what we feel is love; we do not will because we are afraid that if we choose one thing or one person we will lose the other, and we are too insecure to take that chance. #Randolphharris 12 of 14
The bottom then drops out of the conjunctive emotions and processes—of which love and will are the two foremost examples. The individual is forced to turn inward; one becomes obsessed with the new form of the problem of identity, namely, Even-if-I-know-who-I-am, I-have-no-significance. I am unable to influence others. The next step can be apathy. And the following step may be violence. For no human being can stand the perpetually numbing experience of one’s own powerlessness. So great is the emphasis on love as the resolution to life’s predicament that people’s self-esteem ascended or feel depending on whether or not they had achieved it. Those who believed they had found it indulged in self-righteousness, confident in their visible proof of salvation as the Calvinist’s wealth used to be tangible evidence of one’s being numbered among the elect. Those who failed to find it felt not simply bereft to a greater or lesser extent, but, on a deeper and more damaging inner level, their self-esteem was undermined. They felt marked as a new species of pariah, and would confess in psychotherapy that they awoke in the small hours of the morning not necessarily especially lonely or unhappy but plagued with the gnawing conviction that thy had somehow missed the great success of life. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14
And all the while, with the rising divorce rates, the increasing banalization of love in literature and art, and the fact that physical intimacy for many people has become more meaningless as it is more available, this love has seemed tremendously elusive if not an outright illusion. Some members of the community came to the conclusion that love is destroyed by the very nature of our bourgeious society, and the reforms they proposed had the specific purpose of making a World in which love is more possible. “You and me could be enough. We will ride the storm. When the skies get rough, I will stay though cold and dark. I will take your hand and I will pick you up. And I will give you love until the Worlds run dry and I will give you love. Never question why. No hesitation. I will be on your side and I will give you love. It is you and I. We have no need for the light of day, while the World is asleep, we will be miles away. To innocence, through right or wrong, you take my hand and you lead me on,” reports Emma Hewitt (Give You Love). In such a contradictory situation, the sexual form of live—lowest common denominator on the ladder of salvation—understandably became preoccupation; for sex, as rooted in mortal’s inescapable biology, seems always dependable to give at least a facsimile of love. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14
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Not with a Club the Heart is Broken, Nor with a Stone—I think that Earth Seems so to those in Heaven!
Oh, and it is the same old beat with you, Erich, you Devil, you want to do it, you want to, you want to see it, you greedy little beast, you cannot give her over to the Angels and you know they are waiting! You know the God who can sanctify her suffering has purified her an will forgive her last cries. Mental health is to be determined objectively and society has both a furthering and a distorting influence on mortals, contradicts not only the relativistic view, discussed in the past, but two other views which I want to discuss now. One, decidedly the most popular one today, wants to make us believe that contemporary Western society and more especially, the American way of life corresponds to the deepest needs of human nature and that adjustments to this way of life means mental health and maturity. Social psychology, instead of being a tool for the criticism of society, thus becomes the apologist for the status quo. The concept of maturity and mental health in this view, corresponds to the desirable attitude of a worker or employee in industry or business. Maturity is the ability to stick to a job, the capacity to give more on any job than is asked for, reliability, persistence to carry out a plan regardless of the difficulties, the ability to work with other people under organization and authority, the ability to make decisions, a will to life, flexibility, independence, and tolerance. #RandolphHarris 1 of 12
Maturity is the virtues of a good worker, employee or soldier in the big social organizations of our time; they are the qualities which are usually mentioned in advertisements for a junior executive. To one, and many others who think like one, maturity is the same as adjustment to our society, without ever raising the question whether this adjustment is to a healthy or a pathological way of conducting one’s life. “And now my beloved beings, I had said these things unto you that I might awaken you to a sense of your duty to God, that ye may walk blameless before him, that ye may walk after the holy order of God, after which you have been received,” reports Alma 7.22. If you remain true, you will get the sign that God is with you. When you come to your wits’ end and feel inclined to panic—do not! Stand true to God, and he will bring out his truth in a way that will make your life an expression of worship. Put into practice what you have learned. Make a determination to trust in God. “The house of the LORD God is to be here,” reports 1 Chronicles 22.1. If you have always prided yourself on your sensitivity to the needs of others, you may find resistance when you adopt toughness. Sometimes when people look at it, it is like someone turned on the Christmas lights, it makes them giddy and full of joy. Will you be accepted? #RandolphHarris 2 of 12
Maturity is the same as adjustment to our society, without ever raising the question whether this adjustment is to a healthy or a pathological way of conducting one’s life. However, in contrast to this view is the one which runs from Dr. Freud, and which assumes a basic and unalterable contradiction between human nature and society, a contradiction between human nature and society, a contradiction which follows from the alleged asocial nature of mortals. For Dr. Freud, mortals are driven by two biologically rooted impulses: the craving for sexual pleasure, and for destruction. The aim of one’s sexual desire is complete sexual freedom, that is, unlimited access to all women and men one might find desirable. Some mortals discovered by experience that sexual (genital) love affords them their greatest gratification, so that it becomes in affect the prototype of all happiness to him or her. These types of people must have been impelled to seek their happiness further along the path of sexual relations, to make genital erotism the central point of one’s life. Primitive humans have yet to cope with no, or exceedingly few restrictions to the satisfaction of those basic desires. #RandolphHarris 3 of 12
Primitive mortals can give vent to their aggression, and there are few limitations to the satisfaction of one’s sexual impulses. In actual fact, most primitive mortals knew nothing of any restrictions on their instincts, some do not even “feel” that they have instincts. Civilized humans have exchanged some part of their changes of happiness for a measure of security. The happy savage’s aggressiveness has two sources: one, the innate striving for destruction (death instinct) and the other the frustration of one’s instinctual desires, imposed upon him or her by society. While mortals may channel part of one’s aggression against oneself, through the Super-Ego, and while a minority can sublimate their sexual desire into love of humanity, aggressiveness remains ineradicable. Mortals will always compete with, and attack each other, if not for material things, then for the prerogatives in sexual relationships, which must arouse the strongest rancor and most violent enmity among men and women who are otherwise equal. Let us suppose this were also to be removed by instituting complete liberty in sexual life, so that the family, the germ-cell of culture, ceased to exist; one could not, it is true, foresee the new paths on which cultural development might then proceed, but one thing one would be bound to expect and that the ineffable feature of human nature would follow wherever it led. #RandolphHarris 4 of 12
Since for Dr. Freud love is in its essence sexual desire, he is compelled to assume a contradiction between love and social cohesion. Love, according to him, is by its very nature egotistical and antisocial, and the sense of solidarity and humanly love are not primary feelings rooted in mortal’s nature, but aim-inhibited sexual desires. One the basis of his concept of mortals, that of their inherent wish for unlimited sexual satisfaction, and of his destructiveness, Dr. Freud must arrive at a picture of the necessary conflict between civilization and mental health and happiness. Primitive mortals are healthy and happy because one is not frustrated in one’s basic instincts, but one lacks the blessings of culture. Civilized humans are more secure, enjoy art and science, but they are bound to be neurotic because of the continued frustration of one’s instincts, enforced by civilization. For Dr. Freud, social life and civilization are essentially in contrast to the needs of human nature as he sees it, and mortals are confronted with the tragic alternative between happiness based on the unrestricted satisfaction of one’s instincts, and security and cultural achievements based on instinctual frustration, hence conducive to neurosis and all other forms of mental sickness. Civilization, to Dr. Freud, is the product of instinctual frustration and thus the cause of mental illness. #RandolphHarris 5 of 12
Dr. Freud’s concept of human nature as being essentially competitive (and asocial) is the same as we find it in most authors who believe that the characteristics. Dr. Freud’s theory of the competitive struggles for survival. It can also be translated into the sphere of economy. There are basically two types of people, the homo sexual is and the homo economicus. One is after sex, the other is after money. Both the economic mortal and the sexual mortal are convenient fabrications whose alleged nature—isolated, asocial, greedy and competitive—makes Capitalism appear as the system which corresponds perfectly to human nature, and places it beyond the reach of criticism. The necessary conflict between human nature and society, imply the defense of contemporary society and they both are one-sided distortions. Furthermore, most ignore the fact that society is only in conflict with the asocial aspects of mortals, partly produced by itself, but often also with one’s most valuable human qualities, which is suppresses rather than furthers. #RandolphHarris 6 of 12
An objective examination of the relation between society and human nature must consider both the furthering and the inhibiting impact of society on humans, taking into account the nature of mortals and the needs stemming from it. The neglected pathogenic function of modern society needs to be highlighted. Many of the self-defeating behaviors are motivated by conscious needs. For instance, there appear to be people all around us who have a strong dislike for themselves. In each of us there may be a tinge of dislike for some aspect of our self: freckles, hair, teeth, vocabulary, color, accent. However,most of us manage to combine our dislike of parts of ourselves with very good feelings about the rest of the package. A few people, though, manage to reach a point where they entertain active hatred for their entire beings. They manage to pull off some of the greatest self-defeating stunts since the six hundred marched into the Valley of Death in the Crimean War! Some of these people do it with alcohol, using it precisely because they know it will put them into a state in which they will commit self-defeating or losing behavior. They drink to get courage or strength enough to hurt themselves. There are many who do the same with drugs of various kinds. Again, this is not to dispute the physiological factors of addiction or habituation. It is simply to emphasize that even before the physiological hook gets into some people, they hook themselves onto a drug or habit that will inevitably bring them down. #RandolphHarris 7 of 12
An example of the conscious needs that motivate self-defeating behavior is dependency. Some people refuse to take their medicine because they like or need to be dependent on their doctors or they need their family’s concerns. Others get themselves in trouble with authorities because they need to keep themselves tied to their parents or spouses; they build a bond of trouble-rescue-restriction-release-trouble, a cycle that repeats itself week after month after year in some cases. Why? It is a bit too simple to say that the needs are always entirely conscious or even always entirely unconscious.Just as our physiques are three-dimensional, our complexities encompass behaviors that have horizontal, vertical, and depth dimensions as well. Add to this the dimensions that we call time and space and you have a model of human behavior that cannot be sketched on a flat piece of paper. Therefore, we must keep in mind the person, who will play more roles in one’s life, but—like an actor—the mortal is one person and all one’s roles are the individual, too. This multi-dimensioned person is each of us. Mixed in with all the motivations we have described as being universal are the ones that are unique to each of us. There is, therefore, no one answer to the “why?” of the behavior, whether it is the behavior of one or many. It may be instructive, but only instructive, to see what may cause actions in particular cases. #RandolphHarris 8 of 12
If a mortal has a strong need to enter into complicated situations from which one cannot extricate oneself, we may uncover some of the reasons why, but only some of them. If you do something, even after an authority figure has told you to stop, changes are that among your individually unique needs is the need to engage in whatever destructive behavior you have been warned to stop, apparently this need is stronger than your need to stay out of danger. Some people engage in bad behavior because they feel a strong need to be punished. They feel that they can only be satisfied or happy when they are being pushed out or put into a situation where they are in some sort of danger of losing out. When these types of people win or achieve something, they feel and empty, hollow sort of triumph. Only when these individuals have guilt so ingrained in their being are punishing themselves or being punished can they admit to feelings of satisfaction. It is hard for guilt given people to admit this to friends. Not even their wives or husbands have ever heard them say these things, but their spouses notice over the years that they only seem completely happy and at ease when they are being pressured, when they are driving themselves to take on unnecessary extra work. It seemed to one woman that her husband was “trying to kill himself,” with his overly emotional and wild criminal behaviors. #RandolphHarris 9 of 12
Dr. Freud thought we each have an instinctive death wish. We do not find the evidence for this to be either conclusive or impressive. However, we know that many people learn to deal with their guilt feelings or their negative self-concepts by punishing themselves or by being punished. Without using the term as a diagnosis, this behavior is often called masochism. A person who is still doing something dangerous, even after being warned not to, is a symbol of all the things one does that one has been told one should not do. One is almost totally absorbed by and concerned with guilt. The diagnosis of potential death and danger us almost like a priestly issue of penance: this is what one must undergo to purge oneself of one’s guilt. Some people are begging to be punished because they want to get their just desserts, which could even be death, for being the bad person they are. “No, I insist on paying the full price. I will not take for the LORD what is yours, or sacrifice a burnt offering that costs me nothing,” reports 1 Chronicles 21.24. This long example, we repeat, deals only with one person. It is not meant to explain all people who engage in risky behaviors or careers, all compulsive people, or to condemn all teachings about guilt. It is, however, instructive. Guilt, as experienced by most of us, is the feeling we have when we have let ourselves down, when we have not lived up to our own expectations. #RandolphHarris 10 of 12
As such, it is a good motivator: guilt enables us to shift our gears and try a different speed or direction in our behavior. We should feel guilt for committing certain social indiscretions or violations of necessary and expected behaviors. If I step on the foot a woman by accident, both my love for people and my social responsibility will produce guilt feelings. Hopefully, I will be a more careful walker in the future. However, if I tore up my feet, sold my shoes, and swore never to go near people again, I would probably be labeled neurotic—given to extreme guilt reactions. When anxiety and other strong emotions produce fears or self-defeating responses in us, we are experiencing a form of neurosis. This particular problem in living is quite common in the lives of most of us. Each of us at times, precisely because we view our many facets as separate, lets this imagined separateness become virtually real. As the gaps in our thinking about our selves grow, so the gaps and distortions really grow in our everyday behavior. It we imagine that we have a good self and a bad self, any attempt to emphasize the one we want or need to emphasize exaggerates our behaviors in that direction, almost as if we were to say: “See? That other part of me does not even exist!” #RandolphHarris 11 of 12
Of course it exists, It is just as real and as important apart of your total self as any other part. However, it is only a part. However,it is only a part. It is so interwoven and inextricably tied in with all the other facets that often you do not know which one is which. That in itself is not bad, either. Rather than trying to single out which part is which, one would be much better off simply accepting and living with the entire package. However, this is so simple to say and so difficult to do. We are encouraged by our society’s values, by its mores, by so many things, to live only partially. Some of the negative consequences of such splitting up are separateness, marginality, and alienation. “There is a God, and he created all things, both the Heavens and the Earth, and all things that in them are, both things to act and things to be acted upon,” reports 2 Nephi 2.14. As children of our Heavenly Father, we have been blessed with the gift of moral agency, the capacity and power of independent action. Endowed with agency, we are agents, and we primarily are to act and not merely be acted upon—especially as we seek learning by study and also by faith. As gospel learners, we should be doers of the word, and not just hearers only. Our hearts are open to the influence of the Holy Ghost as we properly exercise agency and act in accordance with correct principles—and we thereby invite God’s teachings and testifying power. #RandolphHarris 12 of 12
Randolph Harris II International 