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All the Rapture and Pain I Had Known in these Past Month Came Together Inside Me–I Never Promised My Soul to the Devil for this!
But no matter, only so many children can be made by one in a century. And new offspring will be weak. However, this is not necessarily a bad thing. The rule of the old covens had wisdom in it that strength should come with time. And then again, there is the old truth: you might make titans or imbeciles, no one knows why or how. Whatever will happen will happen, but choose your companions with care. Choose them because you like to look at them and you like the sound of their voices, and they have profound secrets in them that you wish to know. In other words, choose them because you love them. Otherwise you will not be able to bear their company. Make sure before you select a mate that they have some lifetime before you choose them. Never let loneliness drive you to fall in love with someone because their helplessness will be so completely your fault. Remember, beware of that power, and the power you have over those who are dying. Loneliness in us, and that sense of power can be a strong combination. What relation does this pattern of passivity/madness that we have seen in Treasure have to do with the violence in our society, which has become such a critical problem for contemporary men and women? #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
A friend of mine, not in analysis or psychotic in any way, tells us how it feels to be in a rage after a quarrel with his wife: How close this rage is to a temporary psychosis! As I walk down the street on a sidewalk that seems very far away, I cannot think; I am in a daze. However, it is foggy only externally—inside I am hyperalive, hyperaware of every thought and feeling, as though I am in an illuminated World, everything very real. The only trouble is that this inner illumination has practically no connection with the outside World. I feel slightly ashamed in relation to the outside World—ashamed and defenseless. If people made fun of me or suddenly demanded something important of me (say an accident occurred on the street). I would not be able to respond. Or if I did respond, I would have to get out of my “mad”; it would be broken through. The streets are foreign; they seem empty though people are walking on them just as always. I do not know the streets very well (though I have seen them thousands of times). I walk on as though I am drunk, picking up my feet and self-consciously putting down. I go into a restaurant, Wan Li at Renaissance Beijing Wangfujing Hotel, afraid the cashier girl will not recognize me—I am in a different skin—or she will think something is wrong. (She does recognize me and is friendly as always. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
I go to the men’s room ; I read the graffiti over the urinal without any emotion. I am still afraid someone will require something of me, attack me, and I could not defend myself. I come back to my seat, staring out the window at the far end of the restaurant. I feel only a vague relation to the World. Food is brought me; I am not much interested in eating or taste; I go vaguely through the motions. I try to recall the details of our quarrel, without much success—two or three things stand out with great vividness; the rest is a jumble. I eat my favorite cuisine, a little chicken egg foo young, with rice and gravy, and a bit of my shrimp egg roll, as I sipped on a little jasmine tea. A waiter comes up, a middle-aged Chinese gentleman, and he says to me: “I can see you think too much,” he pointed to his forehead. “You got some problem?” I smiled and nodded. He went on: “These days everybody got some problem.” His words were strangely comforting. He went away, shaking his head. This was the first breakthrough of the outside World. It made me laugh to myself, and helped me much more than one would think. I could understand how, when this state is relatively permanent, people do themselves harm, step in front of a motor car for example. They do this mostly out of a lack of awareness of the real World about them. They do it also out of revenge. Or they get a gun and shoot somebody. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
The experience of being caught up in such a rage is very close to the historical experience of being “mad.” What, for example, is the meaning of “mad” in such statements as the following made by a young African American man in Harlem: The White cops, they have a damn sadistic nature…We do not need them here in Harlem! They start more violence than any other people start…When we’re dancing on the street because we can’t go home, here comes one cop, he’ll want to chase everyone. And he gets mad. I mean he gets mad! He comes into the neighborhood aggravated and mad. In this statement, this African America man is saying that there is a relationship between the “mad” of the policeman and violence in Harlem. Does the policeman, by inciting a violent reaction, use his own rage as a stimulus to preserve what he feels is law and order? Is this one of the reasons a man would choose to become a police officer in the first place? Does he seize upon a culturally accepted psychosis and use it to ally himself with the status quo, thereby giving himself the right, in line of duty, to carry a club and gun with which to let out his own violence? #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
In the verbatim reports in Violent Men, by professor of criminology Hans Toch, we can consider these questions in greater detail. Dr. Toch believes, for example, that: The African American and the European American officers and suspects—their pride, their fear, their isolation, their need to prove themselves, above all their demand for respect—are strangely alike: victims both, prisoners of an escalating conflict they did make and cannot control. As shown by their own reports, the policemen feel they have to uphold “law and order,” and they identify this with their own individual self-esteem and masculinity. Time after time it is clear that the policeman is fighting an impotence-potency battle within himself that he expands and projects on the concept of “law and order.” Affronts to themselves the police interpret as affronts to the law of the land. They have to insist, then, that the suspects respect their authority and power. They feel their manhood or womanhood is being challenged and their reputation, on which their self-respect is based, is at stake. However, this is understandable when you look at the record number of police killings in Brazil’s state of Rio de Janerio. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
In 2016, out of 46,000 officers, 147 of them were killed and numbers are expected to climb. Majority of the killings happen in the less affluent areas. These figures help to illustrate an institutional failure to protect police, and they highlight the systematic shortcomings in training and the use of lethal force, which has made Brazil’s police a major actor in violence that plagues that country. Some people say that the conflict starts with a culture of physical and psychological torture in Brazil’s military police training, which has also directly impacted the way in which these officers serve society and in turn are treated by society. Military police officers in Brazil are critical of their training regimen, in which physical, psychological, and disciplinary abuses are allegedly committed by their superiors and are thought to be commonplace. “Sometime, it was lunchtime and my superiors would shout at me that I was a monster, a parasite,” Ex-soldier Darlan Menezes Abrantes explains. “It was as if they were training a dog. A soldier is trained to only be afraid of his superiors. The training was just meant to mess with your feelings, so that you leave the barracks as a pit bull, wanting to bite someone.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
“How am I going to serve society being trained like that? It’s ridiculous,” Ex-soldier Darlan Menezes Abrantes adds. “Police have to learn quick thinking, the ability to make decisions. But right now they train police as they would a dog for a street fight. The officers can do anything and the soldiers just have to bow their heads. You are only trained to be afraid of the officers, that’s it. A soldier who sees an officer, even from far off, trembles with fear.” The school of hard knocks is the rule rather than the exception when training military police officers. Courses are concerned with imprinting the military culture on the future soldiers, with little theoretical teaching on topics such as criminal law or human rights. Over 21,000 public security personnel from various federal agencies were interviewed, over 50 percent of whom were military police. Of these officers, 83 percent said they received a full year of training before beginning work; 39 percent said they were victims of physical or psychological torture during training; 64 percent stated they had been humiliated or disrespected by their superiors. However, officers are prohibited from talking about negative experiences, and they have little opportunity to report violations. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
The institutionalization of human rights violations within the military police during training has a direct impact on how police interact with the general population. A typical instance of an officer who, responds to a call of a family fight, sees a man sitting in a car who he thinks can tell him something about the altercation: The officer asks the man to step out of the car. The man response, “You can’t do this to me, I’m on private property.” He seemed obnoxious, the officer reported, his “attitude bothered me.” The man eventually got out of the car, but kept his hands in the pocket of his trench coat. This continued to bother the officer, who asked him to take his hands of out his pocket. Meeting with continued refusal, he called another policeman and they forced the hands out. The policeman sees this as an unforgivable defiance of his authority. He must assert police authority at all costs…(“I felt it was imperative that I take the man’s hands out of his pockets…He became abusive as we took hold of him…We arrested him and put him in the back seat of the patrol car, where he threatened to urinate on the seat, kicked and pounded on the glass.”) Police explain that they go out with batons in hand and wearing shorts and military police shirts, so that they can give the population a sense of security. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
However, on the streets barbarism prevails: petty theft, harassment, weed-smoking, everything you can imagine. “When we got hold of the suspects, it was only beating, beating, beating, and pepper spray, a lot of pepper spray. That was the first time I came into contact with the torture techniques used by the military police,” says Rodrigo Nogueira Batista—a Navy graduate who is currently serving a 30-year prison sentence for several crimes, including attempted homicide—who had been chosen to participate in a summar operations, two months after joining the military police. The culture of violence is born through the dehumanization of the military police during training. The police are created in order to guarantee a hierarchy and discipline within the community and to create a certain image of the force. Some believe they were not made to protect neither the police nor the population. The man with his hands in his pockets we talked about earlier, saw the police as the arm of the government and the enemy of the people, and he was humiliated. And, indeed, he is right in the sense that the policeman must cow him to preserve his own authority. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
Blue Power in this instance is the opposite side of the coin of Power to the people. Each is engaged in protecting one’s own self-image, one’s own sense of being a human being. However, the police man, by virtue of one’s identification with law enforcement and one’s gun and badge, has a special advantage. However, there is also a special morality that police officers must follow even in their private lives. An officer cannot do things that most humans do: drink alcohol, tell a lie, fall into debt. An officer can actually be punished for these things. This creates the image of a superhuman that does not exist. The police are also forbidden from speaking in a foreign language, except when it is required as a function of their roles as an officer. The human rights of police officers are frequently violated with these rules. Yet we want them to respect the rights of the citizens when they do not have their own rights respected. Police cannot publish things on social media about the internal workings of the organization without having to respond to them. Some are under investigation and responding to various inquires for having expressed themselves on social media. Sometimes they are sent to Internal Affairs because of a comment that someone made on a website and it can be boring and embarrassing. The military police cannot question a superior. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
Because of the way the police are trained and the history of the country, suspects regularly feel that the cards are stacked against them, that no matter what they say they are going to jail, will be found guilty or killed. Their opponent in the dual are protected with a badge and gun, and often the suspect will challenge the officer to take off his or her badge and settle differences “man to man.” The placing on of hands, the physical contact, and the other aspect of touching are especially significant. The suspect has to protect the inviolability of their body. The police officer feels he or she has to assert their authority. And when it comes to asking for identification, it is a highly personal thing. Psychologically, demanding identification is like requiring a person to undress physically; it gives a person who has already been told he or she is inferior an added feeling of personal humiliation. To provokes the suspect’s sense of outrage, and the police officers finds that these situations can sometimes be pushed to the brink of a riot over a simple proof of identity. Noteworthy in these events is that often the mortal who ends up in jail was simply trying, through one’s act, to defend one’s self-image or one’s reputation or one’s rights. Both officer and suspect and almost everyone else is struggling to some for or other to build or protect one’s self-esteem, one’s sense of significance as a person. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
Both police and suspects are fighting an impotence-potency battle within themselves. Each interprets this in one’s own, though diametrically opposite, way. True, this power battle can be blown up to paranoid proportions, the offense simply being imagined; or it can take the infantile form of bullying or some other deviation. However, in order to see the roots of violence we must go below these psychological dynamics and seek its source in the individual’s struggle to establish and protect one’s self-esteem. This, in essence, a beneficial need—it is potentially constructive. Prisons do not deter criminals. Prisons unman and dehumanize; violence rests on exploitation and exploitativeness, and prison is a power-centered jungle. There seems to be growing evidence that the police and guards on one side and the incarcerated mortals on the other are of the same personality type. Our research indicated that ranks of law enforcement contain their share of violent men and women. The personalities, outlooks and actions of these officers are similar to those of the other people in our lives. They reflect the same fears and insecurities, the same fragile, self-centered perspectives. They display the same bluster and bluff, panic and punitiveness, rancor and revenge, pride and shame as do others. And whereas much police violence springs out of adaptation to police work rather than out of the problems of infancy, the result, in practice, is almost the same. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
The need for potency, which is another way of phrasing the struggle for self-esteem, is common to all of us. We see its beneficial form in the rebellion at the Attica, New York, prison, where the leader of the revolting inmates proclaimed: “We don’t want to be treated any longer as statistics, as numbers…We want to be treated as human beings, we will be treated as human beings.” Another inmate, older than the first, took a more realistic view: “If we cannot live as people, we will at least try to die as men.” History records that twenty-eight of them did die several days later when the troopers charged into the prison, shooting. However—such is the strange partnership between guards and prisoners, both being in prison and both being of the same personality types—history records that some prisoner died using their bodies to protect their prison guards from the shots. It seems necessary therefore to distinguish between alienating conditions on the one hand and estranged states on the other, although the distinction may be difficult, there being no question here of a simple stimulus-response situation. It also seems appropriate to limit the term alienation to mean an individual feeling or state of dissociation from self, from others, and from the World at large. Such states, although functions of the conditions that produce them, should not be confused with the conditions themselves. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
Alienation refers to different kinds of dissociation, break or rupture between human beings and their objects, whether the later be other persons, or the natural World, or their own creations in art, science and society; and subjectively, the corresponding states of disequilibrium, disturbance, strangeness and anxiety. One of the concepts linked with alienation is the idea of anomie to describe the conditions of normlessness, the collapse of rules of conduct. The notion of anomie, like that of alienation itself, has been used to refer to a wide array of social and personal disorders. Anomie is a breakdown in the cultural structure, occurring particularly when there is an acute disjunction between the cultural norms and goals and the capacities of members of the group to act in accord with them. The breakdown of values causes people to respond to this conflict between ends and means in various deviant ways; and of those individual adaptations one in particular—retreat from the struggle to get ahead (as in the case of harlots of addicts)—is worth mentioning here. Anomie is a social condition rather than a psychological state, we can identify it as an important cause of alienation, particularly when the response takes the form of retreat; but we should not confuse it with alienation as a state of mind. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
Similar considerations apply to other concepts which are often confused with alienation. For example, social isolation may lead to a state of estrangement, but not all isolates are alienated. Indeed, alienation may result from the social pressures of group, crowd or mass. By the same token alienation should not be confused with social disorganization, since, as we shall see, estrangement may also result in highly organized bureaucracies. Alienation is often associated with loneliness; but again, not all lonely people are estranged. Loneliness can be a creative part of human experience and another form of loneliness is self-rejection which is not really loneliness but anxiety; people who try to overcome or escape loneliness will end only by becoming self-alienated. What we have here are important conditions or correlates of alienation. Any one of these conditions may have different effects on men and women of varying personalities in different social situations, predisposing some more and others less to alienated states. Thus one mortal retreats from life, another rebels; and each of these in turn exhibits many different modes of behavior. Whatever the approach, central to the definition of alienation is that idea that mortals have lost their identity or selfhood. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
We acquire a self or identity through interaction with others. However, if one acquires a self by communicating with others, especially through language, then anxiety about or loss of selfhood is a social as well as an individual problem. What this means is that the person who experiences self-alienation is not only cut off from the springs of one’s own creativity, but is thereby also cut off from groups of which one would otherwise be a part; and one who fails to achieve a meaningful relationship with others is deprived of some part of oneself. The self can only be preserved by identification with God, godless mortal’s essential bread at being dominated by an alien power which threatens our dissolution—by which the anxiety that loss of self can be produced is realized. Despair about loss of self is called a sickness unto death. The World dominated by a giant technological and bureaucratic apparatus of one’s own creation has caused much of this alienation. The price we pay for progress is anxiety, a dread of life perhaps unparalleled in its intensity and increasing to such a pitch that the sufferer may feel oneself to be nothing more than a lost point in empty space, inasmuch as all human relationships appear to have no more than a temporary validity. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
Alienation is defined as loss of identity and is illustrated by men and women who trouble over the simple yet complex question, “Who am I?” In the Untied States of American today the literature of psychoanalysis is rich in its descriptions of such cases. Alienation is the remoteness of the neurotic from one’s own feelings, wishes, beliefs, and energies. It is the loss of the feeling of being an active, determining force in one’s own life. It is the loss of feeling oneself as an organic whole. Or, the alienated mortal is one who does not experience oneself as the center of one’s World, as the creator of one’s own acts—but one’s act and their consequences have become one’s masters, whom one obeys, or whom one may even worship. The alienated person is out of touch with oneself as one is out of touch with any other person. Implicit in most approaches to alienation is the ideal of an integrated mortal and of a cohesive society in which one will find meaning and satisfaction in one’s own productivity and in one’s relations with others. A person in solidarity society will no longer find the only aim of one’s conduct in oneself and, understanding that one is the instrument of a purpose greater than oneself, one will see that one is not without significance. We may well ask, was there ever such a society? Romantic notions about our own past or about primitive culture do not help us here. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
I have an love of spiritual freedom and intellectual independence, and think it is important to keep away from all restrictive, limiting, and narrowing groups, organization, and institutions. I have seen so many lost to the cause of Truth by such constrictions of the mind and heart, so much of its good undone by this harm, that I shrink from the idea of becoming tagged as some one man’s disciple or as a member of some ashram, society, or church. If this man has found the Right, why not let one’s natural expression of it—whether in writing, art, or life—be enough? Why create a myth around one, to befog others and falsify the goal? Why not let well alone? Having no official connection with any group, sect, organization, or church leaves me free to help anyone, anywhere. A strongly individualistic temperament cannot be at ease in the collective membership of an organization where strict and rigid doctrines are set up like the Great Wall of China and where patriotism rejects salvation for those outside. Such a temperament needs the free air of unfettered thinking and uncircumscribed good will. It can sympathize intellectually with many different points of view without losing itself in any one of them, but it can do so only because it belongs to none. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
The routine devotions of an institution do not appeal to this type of temperament—sensitive, moody, and independent as it is. The mortal who has seen the light and experienced its warmth will prefer one’s own way of living if it is the consequence of one’s awakening. One’s mind is bound by no religious doctrines, one’s conduct by no prohibitions or commandments. However, this does not mean one is free to do what one pleases. One mortal and one God are all the organizations needed. More is a superfluity. The seeker who cherishes one’s independent path and individual thought cannot comfortably fit into a group where all alike must be pressed into the same shape. It seems historically inevitable that every spiritual movement should sooner or later become organized and institutionalized. In that way it reflects the need and serves the tendency of average human nature. However, where a person is not average and refused to be taken up into it by that means, preferring to keep one’s independence and one’s allegiance, one is just as much entitled to do so. Those who feel tempted to do so, may study the public cults and listen to the public teachers but it would be imprudent to join any of the first or follow any of the second. It would be wiser to remain free and independent or they may be led astray from the philosophical path. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
By rejecting the easy way of joining a particular sect, a labeled group, one rejects at the same time the withdrawal of sympathy or understanding from all other groups which usually or often accompanies the joining. If the universal character of truth requires one to keep one’s mind uncorralled, the personal need of strength confirms the requirement. What is it that is eternal: the primal phenomenon, present in the here and now, of what we call revelation? It is mortal’s emerging from the moment of the supreme encounter, being no longer the same as one was when entering into it. The moment of encounter is not a living experience that stirs in the receptive soul and blissfully rounds itself out: something happens to mortals. At times it is like feeling a breath and at times like a wresting match; no matter: something happens. The mortal who steps out of the essential act of pure relation has something More in one’s being, something new has grown there of which one did not know before and for whose origin one lacks any suitable words. Whereever the scientific World orientation in its legitimate desire for a causal chain without gaps may place the origin of what is new here: for us, being concerned with the actual, no subconscious and no other psychic apparatus will do. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
Actually, we receive what we did not have before, in such a manner that we know: it has been given to us. In the language of the Bible: “Those who wait for God will receive strength in exchange.” Being faithful one accepts, one does not ask who gives. Mortals receives, and what one receives is not a content but a presence, a presence as strength. This presence and strength includes three elements that are not separate but may nevertheless be contemplated as three. First, the whole abundance of actual reciprocity, of being admitted, of being associated with one is altogether unable to indicate what that is like with which one is associated, nor does association make life any easier for us—it makes life heavier but heavy with meaning. And this is second: the inexpressible confirmation of meaning. It is guaranteed. Nothing, nothing can henceforth be meaningless. Questions about the meaning of life has vanished. However, if it were still there, it would not require an answer. You do not know how to point to or define the meaning, you lack any formula or image for it, and yet it is more certain for you than the sensations of your sense. What could it intend with us, what does it desire from us, being revealed and surreptitious? It does not wish to be interpreted by us—for that we lack the ability—only to be done by us. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
It does not wish to be interpreted by us—for that we lack the ability—only to be done by us. This comes third: it is not the meaning of another life, but that of this our life, not that of a beyond but of this our World, and it wants to be demonstrated by us in this life and this World. The meaning can be received but not experienced; it cannot be experienced, but it can be done; and this is what it intends with us. The guarantee does not wish to remain shut up within me, it wants to be born into the World by me. However, even as the meaning itself cannot be transferred or expressed as a universally valid generally acceptable piece of knowledge, putting it to the proof in action cannot be handed on as a valid ought; it is not prescribed, not inscribed on a table that could be put up over everybody’s head. The meaning we receive can be put to the proof in action only by each person in the uniqueness of one’s being and in the uniqueness of one’s life. No prescription can lead us to the encounter, and none leads from it. Only the acceptance of the presence is required to come to it or, in a new sense, to go from it. As we have nothing but a You on our lips that we are released from it into the World. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
That before which we live, that in which we live, that out of which an into which we life, the mystery—has remained what it was. It has become present for us, and through its presence it has made itself known to us as salvation; we have known it, but we have no knowledge of it that might diminish or extenuate its mysteriousness. We have come close to God, but no closer to an unriddling, unveiling of being. We have felt salvation but no solution. We cannot go to others with what we have received, saying: This is what needs to be known, this is what needs to be done. We can only go and put to the proof in action. And even this is not what we ought to do: rather we can—we cannot do otherwise. This is the eternal revelation which is present in the here and now. I neither know of nor believe in any revelation that is not the same in its primal phenomenon. I do not believe in God’s naming himself or in God’s defining himself before mortals. The word of revelation is: I am there as whoever I am there. That which reveals is that which reveals. That which has being is there, nothing more. The eternal source of strength flows, the eternal touch is waiting, the eternal voice sounds, nothing more. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
If We Take Eternity to Mean Not Infinite Temporal Duration but Timelessness, then Eternal Life Belongs to those Who Live in the Present!
If one would give birth to a dancing star, I tell you one must harbor chaos. I hide nothing from you, not my ignorance, not my fear, not the simple terror that if I try I might fail. I do not even know if it is mine to give more then once, or what is the price of giving it, but I will risk this for you, and we will discover it together, whatever the mystery and the terror, just as I have discovered alone all else. Most of us are so preoccupied with the noise, the uproar, the cacophony of the modern World that we have no energy left for constructive living. We long to pause, to absorb into our day-to-day existence, some calmness, some inner order in which we can call our soul our own, in which we take time to experience some beauty, to know and enjoy our friends, and to let whatever creative impulses or visions we have be heard, listened to, have their moment. This pressing need coincides with influx of Christian influence, especially among the young people in this country, shown by the wide sale of books on religion, and the endless listening to preachers. There can be no doubt of the depth and urgency of the hunger for some psychoreligious center of life. However, it often happens that aspirants put off the sacrifice of time which prayers and meditation call for because, they complain, they are too busy with this or that. Eternal anxiety is the lot of the free mortal. Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
Thus they never make any start at all and the years slip uselessly by. In most cases this involves no penalty other than the spiritual stagnation to which it leads, but in some cases where a higher destiny has been reserved for the individual or where a mission has to be accomplished, the result is far different. Everything and everyone that such a person uses as an excuse for keeping away from the practice of meditation, the exercise of devotion, and the communion of prayer may be removed from one’s external life by the higher self. Thus, through loss and suffering, one will be forced to obey the inward call. Human beings are given more than one chance to redeem themselves. Such is the mercy of the higher power. Prayer is a way, available for most of us without a radical changing of our vocation, by which we can put meaningful content into the pause. No matter what form or stripe this prayer may take—yoga of the physical or mental variety—all have in common the aim of providing channels to deeper levels of experience by means of the pause. When I, for example, am overburdened with fatigue or gloom or the distress of problems and the sleeplessness that goes with these things, I may pause temporarily to withdraw myself from the ego-self. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
I cannot withdraw myself from the ego-self by the head-on force of thinking. However, it can be done, sometimes with the help of a prayer, or through relaxation, or pausing and letting be. I seek to move into the psyche-self, in which I see tings sub specie aeternitatis, in which I no longer feel the pain described above—the ego-self that feels the pains described above—the ego-self that feels them is temporarily transcended. The fatigue, the distress, the gloom all seem to vanish. They psyche-self, freed from the groveling kind of pain, freed from the narcissism, freed from ego-centered misery, can be a channel to awareness of infinite possibilities. Time-backed and Earth-bound as one is, it is not surprising that one often tries to evade the Quest, to ignore it in various ways such as always keeping bust truing to fulfill increasing ambition, cultivating skepticism disguised as practicality, or demanding instant and demonstrable proofs. However, most often one deflects the thoughts of it or changes the conversation abruptly. If pursued by oneself or others, the very idea makes one nervous. One is uneasy at the thought of higher laws to be obeyed. One is fearful of what one will be asked to do and of the discipline to be practiced. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
It is sadly human to want to digress from the straight path of the Quest at times. This happens to many and a proportion of them yields to the desire. Invariable, however, the passing years bring them back to either the leaving point or the starting point. Experience always points up the lesson that the initial urge faith conviction or reasoning which put them on the path was a wise and necessary one. When they learn at first hand with sorrow, loss, or frustration, the picture of life grows a little clearer to them, what the teachers offered free without such unpleasant consequences. One can understand how in the modern World, left to itself, untouched and unthawed by the emergence of any individual, should become alienated and turn into an incubus; but how does it happen at, as you say, the I of mortal is deactualized? Whether it lives in relation or outside it, the I remains assured of itself in its self-consciousness, which is a strong thread of gold on which the changing states are strung. Whether I say, “I see you,” or “I see the tree,” seeing may not be equally actual in both cases, but the I is equally actual in both. Prayer is, par excellence, a concentration of the void, the pause, the no thing. It is a freeing of the self from the clutter of life, giving one a pleasantly dizzy and mildly ecstatic experience. This dizziness is an attractive state that one likes to come back to, at least in memory, in moments throughout the day. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
In this sense meditation is a relief and a freedom from our buying and selling, our technological culture. Prayer seems magical and curative because it opens one’s vision and being to a New World, a brightly colored World, conducive to calmness and peacefulness. In general it seems to be a less intense form of the World than the mystics describe, but in quality the same, a World which has within it sweetness, overflowing love, beauty now all about it. This is the common denominator of many diverse methods of prayer. They seem to have in common: stopping the machinery, the noise, the pressure, the haste, the compulsive driveness, and a higher level of consciousness, what was called oceanic. One experiences being absorbed into the Universe and the Universe being temporarily absorbed into one’s self. Egos appear by setting themselves apart from other egos. Persons appear by entering into relation to other persons. One is the spiritual form of natural differentiation, the other that of natural association. The purpose of setting oneself apart is to experience and use, and the purpose of that is living—which means dying one human life long. The purpose of relation is the relation itself—touching the soul. For as soon as we touch the soul, we are touched by a breath of eternal life. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
Whoever stands in relation, participates in an actuality; that is, in a being hat is neither merely a part of one nor merely outside oneself. All actuality is an activity in which I participate without being able to appropriate it. Where there is no participation, there is no actuality. Where there is self-appropriation, there is no actuality. The more directly the soul is touched, the more perfect is the participation. The I is actual through its participation in actuality. The more perfect the participation is, the more actual the I becomes. However, the I that steps out of the event of the relation into detachment and the self-consciousness accompanying that, does not lose its actuality. Participation remains in it as a living potentiality. To use words that originally refer to the highest relation but may also be applied to all others: the seed remains in one. This is the realm of subjectivity in which the I apprehends simultaneously its association and its detachment. Genuine subjectivity can be understood only dynamically, as the vibration of the I in its lonely truth. This is also the pace where the desire for ever higher and more unconditional relation and for perfect participation in being arises and keeps rising. In subjectivity the spiritual substance of the person matures. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
The person becomes conscious of oneself as participating in being, as being-with, and thus as a being. The ego becomes conscious of oneself as being this way and not that. The person says, “I am”; the ego says, “That is how I am.” “Knowing thyself” means to the person: know yourself as being. To the ego it means: knows your being-that-way. By setting oneself apart from others, the ego moves away from being. This does not mean that the person give up one’s being-that-way, one’s being is different; only, this is not the decisive perspective but merely the necessary and meaningful form of being. The ego, on the other hand, wallows in one’s being-that-way—a fiction that one has devised for oneself. For at bottom self-knowledge usually means to one the fabrication of an effective apparition of the self that has the power to deceive one every more thoroughly; and through the contemplation and veneration of this apparition one seeks the semblance of knowledge of one’s own being-that-way, while actual knowledge of it would lead one to self-destruction—or rebirth. The person beholds one’s self; the ego occupies oneself with one’s My: my manner, my race, my works, my genius. The ego does not participate in any actuality nor does one gain any. One sets oneself apart from everything else and tries to possess as much as possible by means of experience and use. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
This is one’s dynamics: setting oneself apart and taking possession—and the object is always It, tat which is not actual. One knows oneself as a subject, but this subject can appropriate as much as it wants to, it will never gain any substance: it remains like a point, functional, that which experiences, that which uses, nothing more. All of its extensive and multifarious being-that-way, all of its eager individuality cannot help it to gain any substance. There are two kinds of human beings, but there are two poles of humanity. No human being is pure person, and none is pure ego; none is entirely actual, none entirely lacking in actuality. Each lives in a twofold I. However, some mortals are so person-oriented that one may call them persons, whiles are so ego-oriented that one may call them egos. Between these and those true history takes place. The more a human being, the more humanity is dominated buy the ego, the more does the I fall prey to inactuality. In such ages the person in the human being and in humanity comes to lead a subterranean, hidden, as it were invalid existence—until it is summoned. There is always the danger that some people will be too separate from the reality of most people’s experience. Let us keep in mind that prayer occurs, often silently, in all gradations, from a chance insight on a crowded elevator to the conscious cultivation of the sense of peace to regular discipline of meditating for short periods several times a day. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
There are also dangers in becoming isolated from the World of social action by praying too much, and it can be a detriment to one’s own creativity, which means we should not only pray, but take corrective actions to help assist our prayers. We never wholly leave the ego-self behind, and we still live in the real World with its rationality and irrationality, and with our responsibility toward this World. However, it is precisely in this ever-present World that prayer can give meaning to our pauses. All forms of prayer seek to change the character of the self, a change that involves a new relationship with the void. Many people will be familiar with at least the beginning stages of the void by their practice of meditation. I speak of the holy void because holy, coming from the root whole, refers to the mystical experience of grasping the wholeness of the Universe in one’s prayer. The feeling of the World as bounded whole is the spirituality of God. The holy void is the pause appearing in imaginary spatial form. This is one reason the mystics are so often shepherds since they look out continuously on the endless desert. One has this experience of the void in looking steadily out over the sea, an experience rightly termed oceanic since it gives one feeling of infinity. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
Being in the desert or at the ocean where our vision can seemingly go on for ever can give us acute anxiety, since the eyes have no boundaries with which to orient us; or it can give us a sense of profundity, of eternity, or of infinity, all of which are pleasurable. This is why floating in a stimulus-free tank, where we are insulted from every sound and every glimmer of light can bring either intense anxiety or a transcendent, holy experience. In the void the experience of nothingness occurs, and in this one’s spiritual inspirations are called forth and one’s deepest thoughts are made manifest. In the experience of nothingness, we find ourselves cleansed of the chatter and the clatter of a World which is too much with us. If a mortal is born with spiritual capacity but refuses to use it, and even deliberately shuts it away, a day will come wen it will thrust itself up into one’s conscious self for acceptance and use. If one continue to deny it, the capacity will then operate against one, until one’s sanity becomes questionable or one’s fortunes become adverse. No mortal can afford to fail to heed the summons to the Quest. If one does, it is at one’s own peril and one will then fail in everything else, for this is an imperative call coming from the highest part of one’s being. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
In is not by accident the people love to believe in myths in searching for ways things can be said and done, for Greek mythic language is one of the ways such truths can be made manifest. In the holy void the nothingness that we experience gives our deeper thoughts room to make themselves manifest, and the otherwise silent inner voice can be heard. This is the equivalent of the listening to the silence we referred to earlier. One method of prayer consists of continuously clearing the mind of all content until God—or being, as some would prefer—can speak to us out of the void. The nothingness then becomes a something; a something that comes, the Christians would say, from the depths of our soul. The void is the dimension of eternity. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who life in the present. Our human hope is these experiences of timelessness—such as when we see something breathtakingly beautiful or hear a piece of music that seems to raise us into that seems to raise us into eternity—is to hang on to the experience of forever. Those who have been personally confronted by an illuminated mortal with the Quest of the God and reject it to continue their quest of the ego instead, are destined to suffer. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
On hearing a Symphony of Ruben de Ronde called Save Me I thought the of the sweet sounds, oh, beautiful music, do not cease! Reject me not into the World again. And again in God’s World: O World, I cannot hold thee close enough! Lord, I do fear. Thou has made the World too beautiful this years; my soul is all but out of me—let fall. No burning leaf: prithee, let no bird call. The warning which Light on the Path gives to disciples, but if thou look not for one, if thou pass one by, then there is no safeguard for thee. Thy brain will reel, thy heart grow uncertain, and in the dust of the battlefield thy sight and senses will fail, and thou wilt not know thy friends from thy enemies—this warning is apposite here and should be taken deeply to heart. Necessity will with time force this comprehension on them. Prophets and teachers will disclose this truth to them but if they do not listen then hard experience must disclose it. The void may seem to be contact with pure being, but I prefer a more modest judgment, that one gets glimpses of being, but I prefer a more modest judgment, that one gets glimpses of being, awareness that there is a beckoning path to pure being even though none of us gets very far on it. The concentration on the spaces between words, the intervals, the pauses in life—these yield the touch of ecstasy. However, the moment formulation in words occurs, the no thing becomes a something. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
Obviously, one listens with care to any message that may be formulated in moments like these, and one need not worry too much about its origin. It may be interpreted as coming from one’s deeper self, or from the various autosuggestions that occur, or from contact with the being of the Universe. The last may be experiences as a glimpse of Go—assuming that God is conceived as the ground of being and meaning in the Universe. At this point I feel, as I gotten have, what we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence. How long can a mortal withstand this silent call of the God within one? –as long as one’s hopes and desires can find some measure of satisfaction, as long as frustration does not crush them, or until destiny itself overrides one’s indifference and compels one to heed it. The Call of the Quest once heard may be lost for a while, even a long while, but it will return. The need of truth is an irrepressible one but it may take a long time to come through in all its force and clarity. One is left free to save or destroy oneself, to accept the truth or turn one’s face away from it. “Learn wisdom in thy youth; yes, learn in thy youth to keep the commandments of God. Yea, and cry unto God for all thy support; yea, let all thy doings be unto the Lord, and whithersoever thou goest let it be in the Lord; yea, let all thy thoughts be directed unto the Lord; yes, let the affections of thy heart be placed upon the Lord forever,” reports Alma 37.35,36. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Justice Without Love is Always Injustice Because it Does Not Do Justice to the Other One, Nor to Oneself, Nor to the Situation in Which We Meet!
I stood on the hilltop in the Moonlight and I tried not to see this paradise. I tried to picture those I loved. Were they gathered still together in that fairy-tale wood of beautiful trees? If only I could see their faces or hear their voices. I looked on these verdant green valley, now patched with beautiful contracted Cresleigh homes, a picture book World with flowers blooming in profusion, the red poinsettia as tall as trees. And the clouds, ever changing, borne like the tall sailing ships on brisk winds. What had the first Europeans thought when they looked upon this fecund land surrounded by the sparkling sea? That this was the Garden of God? Even the most uneducated people would not dare to affirm that compassion, gratitude, love of the beauty of the World, love of religious practices, and friendship belonged exclusively to those centuries and countries that recognize the Church. These forms of love are rarely found in their purity, but it would even be difficult to say that they were met with more frequently in those centuries and countries than in the others. To think that love in any of these forms can exist anywhere Christ is absent is to belittle him so grievously that it amounts to an outrage. It is impious and almost sacrilegious. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
These kinds of love are supernatural, and in a sense they are absurd. They are the height of folly. So long as the soul has not had direct contact with the very person of God, they cannot be supported by any knowledge based either on experience or reason. They cannot therefore rest upon any certainty, unless the word is used in a metaphorical sense to indicate the opposite of hesitation. In consequence it is better that they should not be associated with any belief. This is more honest intellectually, and it safeguards our love’s purity more effectively. On this account it is more fitting. In what concerns divine things, belief is not fitting. Only certainty will do. Anything less than certainty is unworthy of God. During the period of preparation, these indirect loves constitute an upward movement of the soul, a turning of the eyes, not without some effort, toward higher things. After God has come in person, not only to visit the soul as he does for a long time beforehand, but to possess it and to transport its center near to his very heart, it is otherwise. The chicken has cracked its shell; it is outside the egg of the World. These first loves continue; they are more intense than before, but they are different. One who has passed through this adventure has a deeper love than every for those who suffer affliction and for those who help one in one’s own, for one’s friends, for religious practices, and for the beauty of the World. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
However, one’s love in all these forms had become a movement of God himself, a ray merged in the light of God. That at least is what we may suppose. These indirect loves are only the attitude toward beings and things here below of the soul turned toward the Good. They themselves have not any particular good as an object. There is no final good here below. Thus strictly speaking we are no longer concerned with forms of love, but with attitudes inspire by love. In the period of preparation the soul loves in emptiness. It does not know whether anything real answers its love. It may believe that it knows, but to believe is not to know. Such a belief does not help. The soul knows for certain only that it is hungry. The important thing is that it announces its hunger by crying. If we suggest to a child that perhaps there is no bread, the child does not stop crying. It goes on crying just the same. The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry. It can only persuade itself of this by lying, for the reality of its hunger is not a belief, it is a certainty. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
We all know that there is no true good here below, that everything that appears to be good in this World is finite, limited, wears out, and once worn out, leaves necessity exposed in all its nakedness. Every human being has probably had some lucid moments in one’s life when one has definitely acknowledged to oneself that there is no final good here below. However, as soon as we have seen this truth we cover it up with lies. Many people even take pleasure in proclaiming it, seeking a morbid joy in their sadness, without ever having been able to bear facing it for a second. Mortals feel that there is a mortal danger in facing this truth squarely for any length of time. That is true. Such knowledge strikes more surely than a sword; it inflicts a death more frightening than that of the body. After a time it kills everything within us that constitutes our soul. In order to bear it we have to love the truth more than life itself. Those who do this turn away from the fleeting things of time with their souls. They do not turn toward God. When they are in total darkness, how could they do so? God himself sets their faces in the right direction. He does not, however, show himself to them for a long time. It is for them to remain motionless, without averting their eyes, listening ceaselessly, and waiting, they know not for what; deaf to entreaties and threats, unmoved by every shock, unshaken in the midst of every upheaval. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
If after a long period of waiting God allow them to have an indistinct intuition of his light or even reveals himself in person, it is only for an instant. Once more they have to remain still, attentive, inactive, calling out only when their desire cannot be contained. If God does not reveal this reality, it does not rest with the soul to believe in the reality of God. In trying to do so it either labels something else with the name of God, and that is idolatry, or its belief in God remains abstract and verbal. Such a belief prevails wherever religious doctrines are taken for granted, as is the cause with those centuries and countries in which it never enters anyone’s head to question it. The state of nonbelief is then what Saint John of the Cross calls a night. The belief is verbal and does not penetrate the soul. At a time like the present, if the unbeliever loves Go, if one is like the child who does not know whether there is bread anywhere, but cries out become one is hungry, incredulity may be equivalent to the dark night of Saint John of the Cross. When we are eating bread, and even when we have eaten it, we know that it is real. We can nevertheless raise doubts about the reality of bread. Philosophers raise doubts about the reality of the World of the senses. Such doubts are however purely verbal; they leave the certainty intact and actually serve only to make it more obvious to a well-balanced mind. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
In the same way one to whom God has revealed his reality can raise doubts about this reality without any harm. They are purely verbal doubts, a form of exercise to keep one’s intelligence in good health. What amounts to criminal treason, even before such a revelation and much more afterward, is to question the fact that God is the only thing worthy of love. That is a turning away of our eyes, for love is the soul’s looking. It means that we have stopped for an instant to wait and to listen. Queen Akasha did not seek Lestat, she waited for him. When she was convinced that he no longer existed, and that nowhere in the whole World was there anything that could be Lestat, she did not on that account return to her former associates. She drew back from them with greater aversion than ever. She preferred the absence of Lestat to the presence of anyone else. Lestat awakened her from her statue state, from her cold slumber. She no longer hoped for that. However, never for an instant did dream of employing another method which could obtain a luxurious and honored life for her—the method of reconciliation with her kith and kin. Akasha did not want wealth and consideration unless they came with Lestat. She did not even give a thought to such things. However, she wanted to turn Earth into a Heaven. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
At that moment Lestat could hold out no longer. He could not help declaring himself. He gave certain proof that he was Lestat. Akasha saw him, she heard him, she touched him. There would be no more question for her not as to whether her savior was in existence. One who has had the same adventure as Akasha, one whose soul has seen, heard, and touched for itself, one will recognize God as the reality inspiring all indirect loves, the reality of which they are as it were the reflections. God is pure beauty. This is incomprehensible, for beauty, by its very essence, has to do with the senses. To speak of an imperceptible beauty must seem a misuse of language to anyone who has any sense of exactitude: and with reason. Beauty is always a miracle. However, when the soul receives an impression of beauty which, while it is beyond all sense perception is no abstraction, but real and direct as the impression caused by a song at the moment it reached our ears, the miracle is raised to the second degree. Everything happens as though, by a miraculous favor, our very sense themselves had been made aware that silence is not the absence of sound, but something infinitely more real than sounds, and the center of a harmony more perfect than anything which a combination of sounds can produce. Furthermore there are degrees of silence. When compared with the silence of God, there is a silence in the beauty of the Universe which is like noise. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
God is, moreover, our real neighbor. The term of person can only be rightly applied to God, and this is also true of the term impersonal. God is one who bends over us, afflicted as we are, and reduced to the state of being nothing but a fragment of inert and bleeding flesh. Yet at the same time he is not some sort of victim of misfortune as well, the victim who appears to us as an inanimate body, incapable of thought, this nameless victim of whom nothing is known. The inanimate body is this created Universe. If we were able to attain it, the love we owe to God, this love that would be our crowning perfection is the divine model both of gratitude and compassion. God is also the perfect friend. So that there should be between him and us, bridging the infinite distance, something in the way of equality, he had chosen to place an absolute quality in his creatures, the absolute liberty of consent, which leaves us free to follow or swerve from the God-ward direction he has communicated to our souls. He has also extended our possibilities of error and falsehood so as to leave us the faculty of exercising a spurious rule in imagination, not only over the Universe and the human race, but also over God himself, in so far as we do not know how to use his name aright. He has given us this faculty of infinite illusion so that we should have the power to renounce it out of love. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
In fact, contact with God is the true sacrament. We can, however, be almost certain that those whose love of God has caused the disappearance of the pure loves belonging to our life here below are no true friends of God. After the soul has had direct contact with God, our neighbor, our friends, religious ceremonies, and the beauty of the World do not fall to the level of unrealities. On the contrary, it is only then that these things become real. Previously they were half dreams. Previously they had no reality. “In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of Heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all peoples, nations, and mortals of every language worshipped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed,” reports Daniel 7.11. Could God possibly forgive people without at least demanding their conversation and some ritual observances? People, at any time, can return and be accepted by God. God can at any time forgive those who repent. Many people say we live in a sick society—and the quality of life might be changed radically by the development of a new sense of community. If every person returns from one’s evil way and from the violence on one’s hands, who knows, God may return. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
Modern mortals are voracious readers who have never learned to read well. Part of the trouble is that one is taught to read drivel that is hardly worth reading well. (There was a time when children learned to read by reading the Bible.) One ends up by reading mainly newspapers and magazines—ephemeral, anonymous trash that one scans on its way to the garbage can. One has no wish to remember it for any length of time; it is written as if to make sure that one will not; and one reads it in a manner that makes doubly sure. There is no person behind what one reads; not even a committee. Somebody wrote it in the first place—if one can call that writing—and then various other people took turns changing it. For the final result no one is responsible; and it rarely merits a serious response. It cries out to be forgotten soon, like the books on which one is learned to read, in school. They were usually anonymous, too; or they should have been. In adolescence students are suddenly turned loose on books worth reading, but generally do not know how to read them. And if, untaught, some instinct prompts them to read well, chances are that they are asked completely tone-deaf questions as soon as they have finished their assignment—either making them feel that they read badly after all or spoiling something worthwhile for the rest of their lives. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
We must learn to feel addressed by a book, by the human being behind it, as if a person spoke directly to us. A good book or essay or poem is not primarily an object to be put to use, or an object of experience: it is the voice of You speaking to me, requiring a response. “So whatever you wish that mortals would do to you, do so to them; for this is the law and the prophets,” reports Matthew 7.12. Recently I have had to think about the relation of love to justice. And it occurred to me that among the words of Jesus there is a statement of what is called the “Golden Rule.” The Golden Rule was well known to Christians and Greeks, although mostly in a negative form: What you do not want that mortal should do to you, do not so to them. Certainly, the absolute for is richer in meaning and nearer to love, but it is not love. It is calculating justice. How, then, is it related to love? How does it fit the message of the kingdom of God and the justice of the kingdom as expressed in the Sermon on the Mount where the Golden Rule appears? Let us think of an ordinary day in our life and of occasions for the application of the Golden Rule. We meet each other in the morning, we expect a friendly face or word and we are ready to give it although our minds are full of anxious anticipation of the burdens. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
Somebody wants a part of our limited time, we give it, having asked somebody else to give us a part of one’s time. We need help and we give it if we are asked, although it includes sacrifice. We are frank with others, expecting that they will be frank with us even if it hurts. We are fair to those who fight against us expecting fairness from them. We participate in the sorrows of our neighbors, certain that they will participate in ours. All this can happen in one day. All this is Golden Rule. And if somebody has violated this rule, consciously or unconsciously, we are willing to forgive as we hope to be forgiven. It is not astonishing that for many people the Golden Rule is considered as the real content of Christianity. It is not surprising that in the name of the Golden Rule criticism is suppressed, independent action discouraged, serious problems avoided. It is even understandable that statesmen ask other nations to behave toward their own nations according to the Golden Rule. And does not Jesus himself say that the Golden Rule is the law and the prophets? However, we know that this is not the answer of the New Testament. The great commandment as Jesus repeats it and the descriptions of love in Paul and John’s tremendous assertion that God is love, infinitely transcend the Golden Rule. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
The Golden Rule must be transcended, for it does not tell us what we should wish that mortal would do to us. We wish to have freedom from heavy duties. We are ready to give the same freedom to others. However, someone who loves us refuses to give it to us, and one oneself refuses to ask us for it. And if one did, we should refuse to give it to one because it would reduce our growth and violate the law of love. We wish to receive a fortune which makes us secure and independent. We would be ready to give a fortune to a friend who asks us for it, if we had it. However, in both cases love would be violated. For the gift would ruin us and the other individual. We want to be forgiven and we are ready to do the same. However, perhaps it is in both cases an escape from the seriousness of a personal problem, and therefore against love. The measure of what we shall do to mortals cannot be our wishes about what they shall do to us. For our wishes express not only our right but also our wrong and our foolishness more than our wisdom. This is the limit of the Golden Rule. This is the limit of calculating justice. Only for one who knows what one should wish and who actually wishes it, is the Golden Rule ultimately valid. Only love can transform calculating justice into creative justice. Love makes justice just. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
Justice without love is always injustice because it does not do justice to the other one, nor to the oneself, nor to the situation in which we meet. For the other one and I and we together in this moment in this place are unique, unrepeatable occasion, calling for a unique unrepeatable act of uniting love. If this call is not heard by listening love, it is not obeyed by the creative genius of love, injustice is done. And this is true even of oneself. One who loves listens to the call of one’s own innermost center and obeys this call and does justice to one’s own being. For love does not remove, it establishes justice. It does not add something to what justice does but it shows justice what to do. It makes the Golden Rule possible. For we do not speak for a love which swallows justice. This would result in chaos and extinction. However, we speak for a love in which justice is the form and structure of love. We speak for a love which respects the claim of the other one to be acknowledged as what one is, and the claim of ourselves to be acknowledged as what we are, above all as persons. Only distorted love, which is a cover for hostility or self-disgust, denies that which united love. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
Love makes justice just. The divine love is justifying love accepting and fulfilling one who, according to calculating justice, must be rejected. This justification of one who is unjust is the fulfillment of God’s creative justice, and of God’s reuniting love. Knowing that the ultimate meaning of freedom will elude us, let us still endeavor to define the term as best we can. The first definition is on the psychological level, the domain of everyday actions: Freedom is the capacity to pause in the face of stimuli from many directions at once and, in this pause, to throw one’s weight toward this response rather than that one. This is the freedom we experience in a store when we pause over the purchase of a necktie or a shirt. We summon up in our imaginations the image of how we will look in this or that tie, what so-and-so will say about it, or how the color will fit such and such a suit. And then we buy the tie or we move on to something else. This is freedom of doing, or existential freedom. This freedom is shown most interestingly in the supermarket, when we push our carts through the aisles between the tumultuous variety of packages and cans of food on the shelves, each one silently shouting through its bright-colored label “Buy me!” We see the shoppers with expressions of hesitancy, vacuity, wonder, pausing for some inspiration as to which of all these foods will be good for dinner tonight. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
The shopper seems hypnotized, charmed, preoccupied. Like patients on a ward in a mental hospital, they do not see me as I walk directly across their line of vision. The expressions of wonder and hesitancy are a readiness, an invitation, an openness to some stimulus on the shelves to persuade them to throw the balance this way of that in making their choice. This first freedom is experienced by each of us hundreds of times every day. It is decked up in respectable terms like decision/choice when we discuss freedom in psychology classes—if we ever discuss freedom in psychology classes at all. The most profound illustration of this kind of freedom is our ability to ask questions. Take, for example, my asking a question after listening to a lecture. The very fact that the question comes up in my mind at all implied that there is more than one answer. Otherwise there would be no point in asking the question in the first place. This is freedom; it implies that there is some possibility, some freedom of selection in what I ask. The speaker then pauses for a few seconds after I have asked it, turning over in his or her mind the possible answers. We sense that there is, in asking and answering questions, a good deal more going on, and it is of a richer nature, than the mere responding to various stimuli and selecting a response. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
Each person who lights this candle within one’s own mind will soon begin to attract other mortals like moths to a flame burning by a fire—not all mortal nor many mortals but only those who are groping for a way out of their darkness. Can a scrupulously impartial search through World-thought and experience lead to discovery of truth? “Wilt thou be made whole?” asked Jesus. Questioning implies some value judgment, some investment of the person’s life, some invitation to share, to make contact, some challenge to consider a new idea. Regrettably, in recent decades our very idea of freedom has been diminished and grown shallow in comparisons with previous ages; it has been relegated almost exclusively to freedom from outside pressure, to freedom from state coercion—to freedom understood on the juridical level, and no higher. Only when this search for a higher life has becomes an absolute necessity to a mortal, has one found even the first qualification needed for the Quest. “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. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
I Was Caught Up in Something Above Human Desires–Dream the Impossible Dream, Conquer the Unbeatable Foe, and Be Better Far than You Are!
You do right by me, now, or I will shout you down. Truth is I cannot recollect what happened. A serious cultural block to self-realization is the prejudice against races, religions, sexes, and various other categories of people. Attempts to overcome prejudice have been prominent down through the ages. Success has been spotty but few promising directions have emerged. One is that the problem of overcoming prejudice allows for no simple solution. It is compounded of politics, economics, housing, labor, and interpersonal relations. Its solution must lie in the intensive work at all levels. When people do not get along well together, one method is to arrive at a civilized solution to the problem. Individuals can treat each other very politely and try to have as little contact as possible. One of the cornerstone institutions of our society is the family. Its importance in molding the individuals in the society can hardly be overestimated, but only recently had that importance been converted into a practical human technology. In the psychiatric realm, the recent emphasis on community and social psychiatry reflects the importance being placed on the family with mental illness. What good does it do to treat a patient and then send him or her back to the same home situation that got the individual in trouble? #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
So family therapy has developed. Skilled practitioners are now trained to deal with the family as a unit and to do therapy in the entire family social system. Changes may be needed in the whole family arrangement. Sometimes the improvement of the patient leads to a breakdown of the mother, or of a sibling. So all are dealt with together. Gradually, examination of this area develops into an exploration of the whole field of marital relation. The institution of marriage is questioned. It is successful? Is it the best pattern of intimate relations for everyone? What about close relations with people for short periods? Or are relations that are renewed periodically? How can one learn to enjoy brief relations? They are far more frequent than lifelong relations, and yet there is little social support for learning to profit much from these contacts. Groups that enter into this kind of thinking open up areas of vital importance to everyone. For some this is thinking the unthinkable. For many more it is exciting to be able to ventilate and explore these feelings instead of hiding them and accumulating guilt. It is freeing. It is examining a social institution that can greatly enhance a person’s self-realization, or that can—and perhaps this is more frequently—greatly inhibit one’s development. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
First of all, to follow our notion that joy derives from realizing potential, what potential is it that these methods help the individual to realize? Perhaps it is the potential for being more of a person than I thought I could be; for being more significant, competent, and lovable; for being a more meaningful individua, capable of coping more effectively with the World and better able to give and receive love. This possibility leads to a somewhat different emphasis in analyzing the requirements for growth than is usual in traditional psychotherapy. The problems that a person develops in growing up, that blunt the realization of one’s full potential, are not so much the objective events of one’s life as the feeling one gets about oneself as an individual as a result of these events. For example, it is not so much a broken home that leaves its mark on a child, but one’s perception of one’s role in causing the situation, and of one’s ability to deal with it. If one is left feeling guilty, worthless, and helpless, these are the feelings which debilitate one. However, if one can feel guiltless, capable of functioning within the situation, improving it, compensating for its lacks, then the situation may induce a feeling of strength and confidence. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
When the early childhood stories of severely disturbed psychotics are compared with those of successful business executives, this notion takes on some credibility. In encounter groups I am frequently startled at the similarity of some of these childhood situations. Certainly they are not the same, but there are so many cases of successful executives whose father or mother experienced death by suicide, who cannot remember a happy moment in all their early years, whose parents were divorced or died very early, who were shifted from one orphanage to another throughout their entire childhood, who can never remember being kissed or even held by their parents, and so on. If these events occur in the lives of successful men and women, then there must be something more tan traumatic childhood events that determine the direction of a child’s evolution into an adult. Such analysis suggests that the place to concentrate for making useful changes in people is not so much on the traumatic historical events as on the individual’s perception of one’s self. Perhaps this gives a clue to the effectiveness of fantasy, dramatic, and other methods. Therefore, dream the impossible dream, conquer the unbeatable foe, and be better far than you are. When you can perceive that your potential for being more is far greater than you had originally thought, this will lead to feelings of exhilaration, strength, and contentment. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Joy is burgeoning. Methods for attaining more joy are growing and becoming more effective. We are developing ways to make our bodies more alive, healthier, lighter, more flexible, stronger, less tired, more graceful, more integrated. We have ways for using our bodies better, for sensing more, for functioning more effectively, for developing skills and sensitivity, for being more imaginative and creative, and for feeling more and holding the feelings longer. More and more we can enjoy other people, learn to work and play with them, to love and discuss thing with them, to give and take with them, to be with them contentedly or to be happily alone, to lead or to follow them, to create with them. Leo Pete seems were absorbed sitting there by the window looking out at the night sky. He is reaching out. Does Leo Pete not know that the stars are unreachable? No, I guess he does not. Wait—he seems very joyful. What is that in Leo Pete’s hand? Could it be…? One can understand why some people yearn to remain in the state of ecstasy and self-transcendence all the time. The delicious feeling of self-transcendence are set loose in different ways by music which we love, by poetry which activates long thoughts and deep feelings, as well as in painting and the other arts. If such ecstasy is as joyful, as reassuring, as soul cleansing as I have indicated, why not live with the Absolute all the time? #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
Why not stay on the level of ecstasy and beauty and self-transcendence perpetually and forever? This self that seems at times to be the repository of all the garbage that goes on in one’s mine, this ego which seems to be the root of anxiety and guilt feeling and despair—why not stay always on the level where these undesirable and unpleasant centers of feeling are wiped away? Why not transcend one’s less attractive self all the time? The answer is simple. Because ecstasy and self-transcendence are also the source of violence, destruction, wars, and hatred as well as these noble things I have mentioned. The transcendence of the self gives us not only the delicious feelings, but also sadness, yearning, anger and all other emotions. We know how Hitler was able to set loose through martial music the emotions which led to the most violent of World Wars. The emotions are stimulated for good or evil, and we are loosed from our customary banality. We have only to call to mind the great communal ecstasy shared by over a hundred thousand young person in Woodstock, New York in the Summer of 1969, the ongoing Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival held at Empire Polo Club in Indio, California, or A State of Trance, which will touch down in Oakland, California on 29 June 2019. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
Let us take from psychotherapy a more systematic example of self-transcendence leading to violence. The following case, referred to occurred in the early 1970s in New York City. A patient who was a doctoral student at a university participated in a march on Wall Street to protest the Vietnam War. This march was attacked not only by the police but also by construction workers employed on a new building. In his subsequent therapy hour, he described the experience as follows: I had a spontaneous feeling, I was caught up in something above human desires. We all were together in a great cause. Business as usual was thrown aside. You forget your bodily needs and cares, you channel everything though the group, the group becomes the most important thing. However, the group was leaderless, it was milling aimlessly about. I saw the construction workers down one street getting prepared to throw bricks at us. I tired to cry out to the group, “Go down this other street instead!” (A little later in that hour) When someone shouted, “Let’s get the computer!” the group was milling aimlessly about. All my life I have wanted to smash a computer. Now someone else was doing it—that made it great, it was justifiable. (Later) It is hard to talk in here about personal problems at a time like this. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
Quite apart from the right or wrong of this movement or its success or failure, or the Luddite uselessness of smashing computers, it is clear that this young man was caught up in self-transcendence that each of us can identify with. He felt the cause was greater than his usual self, something he could surrender to; and he got a strong sense of unity or bonding with his fellows; he no longer needed to take responsibility for himself. During those days in therapy he was the healthiest, most normal (if I may use these threadbare words) of any time until then. His feeling of wanting to do violence was justified by the group; it was a time like war, when all the primitive desires of being human come out and are justified and rationalized by patriotism, the self-transcendence of the whole group. Thus self-transcendence is neither good nor evil in itself. It is an experience beyond good and evil. War itself, the most destructive form of mortal violence is also a time of ecstasy and self-transcendence. The families in war-ravaged countries as France miss the sense of adventure, the banding together against a common enemy, the sense of being caught up in something above human desire. They miss the challenge of being devoted to a cause great than themselves. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
A French woman living in France in her comfortable bourgeois home with her husband and son, confessed earnestly and somewhat apologetically, “My life is so utterly boring nowadays! Anything is better than to have nothing at all happening day after day. You know that I do not love war or want it to return. However, at least it made me feel alive, as I have not felt alive before or since.” Of course, this is prior to the recent attacks that have been happening in France. I am sure people enjoy peace, but miss the feeling of pride in their country that people display. As time goes on and we have peace, people become fragmented and the sense of fraternity tends to die down. The people who serve in the wars never seem to have peace, however. While they are serving, being attacked constantly and defending their homes, they cannot just quit their jobs and walk away, they are constantly shivering and hungry and harried with anxieties about their wife and child. They realize their days of being at home and living a leisure life was happier times. While peace can expose a void in some that war’s excitement enables one to cover up, others do not want the ecstasy and self-transcendence, which war has given them. There are other ways to foster national pride. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
Still there are other perspectives. A veteran of the Vietnam War, William Broyles, wrote in Esquire (November, 1984) an article entitled “Why Men Love War.” In it, Broyles quotes his fellow soldiers whom he met at the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in Washington, “What people cannot understand is how much fun Vietnam was. I loved it. I loved it, and I cannot tell anybody.” Broyles is describing again the adventure, the sense of community, the intense bonding with fellow mortals, the zest of risking everything—all experiences of ecstasy and self-transcendence. The banding together into a great unity, the sense of transcending individual desires, the freedom from personal responsibility—all these aspects of war are clearly conductive to ecstasy and self-transcendence. No wonder William James wrote in his classic essay, “The Moral Equivalent of War,” that in our anti-war campaigns we are self-defeating in emphasizing the horror of war; for the horror is part of the fascination. We who are opposed to war need a new approach, James went on, that will set up beneficial ideals that bring the sense of adventure, the attraction, the sense of giving one’s self to a cause more than business as usual, if we are to succeed in our prevention of war. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
A captain who was one of the teachers in the ROTC which I was required to take during my two years at Michigan State College once remarked in his lectures to the class, “You are told war is hell. I never had such a good time in my life as I did in France during the last war.” I looked at the man as though the were a pariah; but since then I have realized that he was saying something much more important than he knew. As long as this captain had to arise every morning and get dressed and shaved and drag himself over to the campus to drum some army tactics into the heads of five hundred students who did not want to hear, he—and the millions of people who likewise have no sense of zest in life—will dream about the adventure and excitement of this most destructive form of human violence. War, the epitome of destruction as it is, and the threat to our total planet that it is in our day of nuclear war, nevertheless gives a sense of ecstasy and self-transcendence that is prized by millions of people. For people cannot stand to be of no significance. And ecstasy and the self-transcendence which goes with war and violence lift one out of the feeling of insignificance. Psychotics show this need for significance in such obvious thins as insisting they are Napoleon, Lestat de Lioncourt or Christ, or that they have a special relationship with Jupiter or other constellations in the Heavens. Neurotics show in a less obvious way. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
But there is, however it is shown, still the powerful drive to demonstrate “I amount to something, I will be missed if I experience death by suicide. I will take drugs to be whisked into a state where I have no more guilt and despair, and I feel only own significance.” Terrorism and the whole drug scene are vivid examples of the fact that what persons abhor most of all in life is the possibility that they will not matter. John Wilkes Booth would be a name long since erased in history, but he shot Lincoln and therefore he will be known as long as anyone can read a history book. One of my college professors is actually related to him and teaches African American history, but appears to be European America, and does an excellent job with the subject. If Hinckley had succeeded in assassinating Reagan, he would indeed have proved to his imagined sweetheart that he was a man of consequences, someone to be reckoned with. There can be no freedom which does not begin with the freedom to eat and the right to work. Freedom involves the economic conditions of action, and in the struggle for democracy economic security has only late last been recognized as a political condition of personal freedom. However, there has been hypocrisy and moral confusion about freedom with the abuse of privacy and the misuse of political freedom in present and past few years in this country. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
Like the good Germans, we [in America] continue to think we are free, while the walls of dossiers, the machinery of repression, the weapons of political assassination pile up around us. Where is the movement to restore our freedom? Who are the leaders prepared to insist that it would not happen here? We hear the haunting final chorus of the movie Nashville: “It don’t worry me, it don’t worry me. You say that I ain’t free, but it don’t worry me.” Is this to be the final epitaph of American liberty? Is Freedom dying? We are losing our freedom. Already freedom has lost it exalted place in philosophy and policy. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance. There is little vigilance in our country at present. The main cases of this demise of freedom are the widespread growth of materialism and hedonism in American. I believe that the materialism and hedonism, so often decried are themselves symptoms of an underlying, endemic anxiety. When they cannot get gratification from anything else, men and women devote themselves to making money. It is above all a personal dilemma, whatever its economic repercussions. Couples develop sexual hedonism as an end in itself because pleasures of the flesh allays anxiety and because they find authentic love so rarely available in our alienated and narcissistic culture. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
At present in our country there is a general experience of suppressed panic: anxiety not only about the hydrogen bomb, space wars and the prospect of atomic way, but about uncontrolled inflation, unemployment, anxiety that our old values have deteriorated as our religious have eroded, about our disintegrating family structure, concern about pollution of the air, the oil crises, and infinitum. The mass of citizens react as a neurotic would react: we hasten to conceal the frightening facts with the handiest substitutes, which dull our anxiety and enable us temporarily forget. The price surrounding our freedom is much greater than most people are away. For freedom is a necessity for progress, and a necessity for survival. If we lose our inner freedom, we lose with it our self-direction and autonomy, the qualities that distinguish human beings from robots and computers. The attack on freedom, and the mockery of it, is the predictable mythoclasm which always occurs when a great truth goes bankrupt. In mythoclasm people attack and mock the thing they used to venerate. In the vehemence of the attack we hear the silent unexpressed cries “Our belief in freedom should have saved us—it let us down just when we needed it most!” #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
The attack is based on resentment and rage that our freedom does not turn out to be the noble thing inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty or that Abraham Lincoln’s new birth of freedom has never occurred. In all such periods of mythoclasm, the great truths yield the greatest bootlegged power to their attackers. Thus, the attack on freedom—especially by those so called journalist and psychologist who use their freedom to stump the nation, arguing that freedom is an illusion—gets its power precisely from what it denies. However, the period of mythoclasm soon becomes empty and unrewarding, and we must then engage in the long and lonely search for inner integrity. The constructive way is to look within ourselves to discover again the reborn truth, the phoenix quality of freedom now so needed, and to integrate in anew into our being. This is the deepest meaning of Lincoln’s new birth of freedom. For is not the central reason for the near bankruptcy of a once glorious concept that we have grossly oversimplified freedom? We have assumed it was an easy acquisition which we inherited simply by being born in the land of the free. Did we not let the paradox of freedom become encrusted until freedom itself became identified with organizational and racial conflicts, or with religious, or with economic systems, and ultimately with one’s own personal idiosyncrasies? Thus the decline and fall of a great concept! #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
Perhaps the central question should not be can religion help? Rather, what kind of religion can help? What type of religious belief and what kind of community of believers would be consistently helpful in a thoroughgoing way in assisting people to experience love? The God of such a faith would love each of us unconditionally in the sense that nothing that we could do would destroy that love. If we ascribe other humanlike emotions to him, we might envision him becoming angry, hurt, or sad about what we do; but the basic underlying love would be constant. He would not be interested in punishing us, instead his focus of attention would be on loving us and being loved by us. He would, of course, be concerned for our welfare and happiness. God would see existence clearly. The fact we develop very destructive ways of dealing with each other would not be hidden or glossed over by him. God would not condemn us for the awful messes we get ourselves into, but would understand that they occur because of our self-hate and our fear of being hurt if we allow ourselves to show that we love and desire love in return. The religious community would exemplify these same attitudes toward themselves, each other, and those outside the community insofar as humanly possible. They would recognize that they, too, are caught in the same dilemmas as all of humankind and would acknowledge the fear of love within themselves, which would limit freedom to be loving. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
The religious community would be concerned primarily with creating a climate in which people could experience the love and acceptance that would break through self-hate, thereby freeing them to experience and express love. It would be likely that these experiences would take place most effectively in small, potentially intimate groups. In these groups honesty and genuiness would be the keynote. When individual felt angry with each other, they would be encouraged to express their anger in whatever words might seem most appropriate without concern about whether they were proper or not. They would be encouraged to experience and express all their feelings: anger, hurt, jealousy, whatever. And out of it all might come a feeling of their mutuality as human beings and the awareness that they do not need to hide from each other and experience only some pale substitute for love. They might discover the intense sense of loving and being loved for which we long but which is so frightening to us. Doe such a God exist? This is a question each person must decide one oneself. It is a matter of faith. If the encrustations of centuries of legalizing tendencies of the church can be scraped away, perhaps it is not so far removed as we may imagine from the God Jesus followed. Apparently some Christian leaders feel this way, for they have moved in the direction of such a faith. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
Can such a religious community exist? It remains a question whether such honesty could be tolerated within the established churches. Some movement in that direction has take place, but it is scattered and meets with opposition. However, if the church is to retain any relevance whatsoever to life, something of the sort must occur. Perhaps some appropriation of ideas form other faiths or other ways of life could infuse new life. Or perhaps religion must find a new life outside the organized church with new beginnings by those who are able to see and dare to try that which the established church could not tolerate. The belief that the neglect of actual life is the beginning of spiritual life, and that the failure to use clear thought is the beginning of guidance from God, belongs to mysticism in its most rudimentary stages—and has no truth in it. The World will come to believe in God because there is no alternative, and it will do so inspire of religion’s historical weaknesses and intellectual defects. However, if those weaknesses and defects were self-eliminated, how much better it would be for everyone. The art of living that the experiences of everyday life yield up their meaning to us, and the reflections of daily prayer endow us with wisdom. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
Wake Up, Humanity! Be Alive! Look at this World in Front of You! I Will Make Up for Everything the World Has Done Wrong to You!
The anguish inside her defeated her anger. She drew close to me. No admissions and explanations. Just an image. I felt her strength recede, and her eyes misted. A great glowing fire was quelled, and I had done it, and an ever present grief enfolded it. A protective surge rose in me and the wild fantasies reigned again inside of me as if no one lese was present. Unconscious blocks to associational ability are many. For some people there is a fear of letting one’s mind go uncontrolled and saying anything that occurs, because of a feeling that there is something in the unconscious which is frightening. Such an individual, therefore, cannot allow the free play of association, but must keep them logical and controlled. Restriction of the ability to explore relations among various experiential elements is a serious limitation to producing unusual and interesting new combinations and, therefore, limits one’s ability to develop full potential. There are many acts of omission or commission which enhance the development of the associative abilities. Since the essence of this ability is making connections between events which are not obviously related, development depends upon the opportunity to explore freely the thoughts and feelings that the person experiences and to relate them to each other. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14
Emphasis on imaginative games lays the groundwork for more specific training in developing the skill of associating. However, when we are aware of anger, what then? It would appear that the most natural and spontaneous thing to do would be to express it. However, many of us find it difficult to be spontaneous at such moments. It may be desirable for us to examine some of the reasons we give ourselves for not expressing anger. Here are some of them. “I may say a lot of things I do not mean, and then I will feel terrible about it afterward.” What seem more likely is that we will say things we really do mean and do not accept in ourselves. If we say in anger, “I wish I had never met you,” or even, “I wish you never existed,” we may at that moment really feel that way—or at least part of us feels that way. It does not mean that five minutes or five hours later we may not be holding each other and intensely feeling our love for each other. For some people, humming the song that spontaneously comes into their head, and then reflecting on it, or associating to the words, can lead to a better understanding of the original puzzling situation. Either the title of the song, or the lines that the person has chosen to sing or hum, or the mood of the song, may contain the meaning of the association. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14
Humming is an enjoyable and simple method for uncovering hidden feelings that are not easily accessible to conscious thought. However, often we use fear of getting angry as an excuse because we dread the close involvement of anger. It this fear persists and the person finds one cannot loosen up and gradually express more of one’s anger, one should seek professional help, for suppressing anger increases, rather than decreases, the danger of violence. Everyone has the capacity to associate, most to a remarkable degree. However, the full use of this valuable ability requires realizing its presence, removing emotional blocks to letting it go without controls, practicing it, and gaining confidence that it works and can be a highly valuable assistant to thinking, creativity, and increased internal awareness. Internal thoughts and feelings must be expressed in some fashion. Scientific discoveries are written in technical language; music is written and played; other creative feelings are painted, sung, danced, spoken, acted. In some way a person must communicate one’s experience through the use or posture of one’s body or some part of it. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14
If they get mad at them, some people are afraid that they will damage their children’s lives. When you are angry at them the only alternative to expressing it is some form of phoniness. They can be trusted to handle your genuine feelings more than you think they can. If you are afraid that your anger is not justified that is a valid concern. Perhaps you are under some mistaken impression, but how are you going to find out if you stew in silence and do not talk about your feelings? And so we come to the knotty question, “How can we be creative in the expression of anger? Perhaps it can be stated as a general principle that anger is creative when a maximum of communication occurs with a minimum of destructiveness toward oneself and others. Like most other values, this ideal is one we will never achieve completely. However, the ideas that follow may help us grow toward it. Perhaps scientific and artistic creation differ in their relative emphasis on the expressive aspect of the creative process. In scientific creativity, the primary focus is on the first three phases of the creative process—acquisition, association, and expression. The great discoveries of Dr. Freud came through his sensitivity to and integration of the material of human personality. His writing about these discoveries was only in a minor way an integral part of his creativity. It served primarily as a vehicle for communicating these ideas. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14
A writer, poet, artist, or dancer, on the other hand, must concentrate more on the form in which one’s discoveries are expressed. We honor Browning, not simply for the conceptions behind is poetry, but for the very form of expression itself. When Katherine Dunham, Aaliyah Haughton, or Margot Fonteyn dance, the artistry is largely in the superb movement of their bodies, the mode through which their feelings are conveyed. Conscious, logical factors that enhance a person’s ability to express oneself involve a traditional educational area, the learning of skills. Learning to dance, or sing, or paint, or write is part of one’s ability to express oneself. Further, the development of skill in the use of symbolism, of expressing feelings derived form one medium in terms of another, is very central. A good example of this occurs in Walt Disney’s Fantasia, in which musical composition are represented in visual form. Unconscious factors that inhibit the expressive ability often derive form cultural or interpersonal censure. The belief that ballet dancing is not masculine, or that singing in public is uncouth, or that artists are irresponsible, or the actors are immoral, are all factors that may operate both consciously and unconsciously to inhibit the full expression of feelings in these areas. Also, the unwillingness to display oneself in front of others, as in public singing, is a major deterrent to free expression. To the degree that these inhibitions exist, self-realization is curtailed. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14
When an atmosphere of mutual exploration of creative expression can be established, wherein the whole group is attempting to support the creative efforts of each, remarkable progress can be made. Frequently, expressing the unexpressible provides such a boost in self-confidence that an individual may permanently increase one’s repertoire of modes of expression. Many of us have developed long fuses to or anger. We have learned to wait until later, probably wen we are no longer with the person, to be aware that we are angry. However, as we become more able to accept these feelings and more confident about expressing them, the fuse becomes shorter. Dealing with anger right aware will save us the wear and tear of carrying it around and will give both parties a chance to react while the situation is fresh. If married couple, for example, could follow the biblical suggestion not to let the Sun set on their anger, it would be a good thing. On the other hand, if, for example, bedtime became a time to search through their experiences of the day looking for outstanding irritations, it might quickly become a ritual to help them avoid intimacy. There are probably more fun ways of ending most days. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14
It is tricky to suggest that we express anger without being condemning, for there is a subtlety here that also defies description. Word used do not always seem to be a safe criteria. Some couples, for example, can in moments of anger call each other all kinds of names and come out of it feeling refreshed and neither condemned nor unloved. Others can be much more controlled in their choice of words and yet carry the feeling that they are condemning each other as worthless. And all of us have probably seen unsophisticated, but affectionate, mothers who in a moment of exasperation could give a child a swat on the rear and say, “Get out of here, you stupid no-goodnik, and let me get my work down,” without raising any question in the child’s mind about being loved. Sarcasm is a frequently used, indirect expression of anger that carries the feeling of condemnation since it implies contempt for the other person. Suppose, for example, that wife Anne replies sarcastically when her husband Stan says to her, “I am just so tired of the way things are between us that I sometimes feel like packing up and moving out.” Her reply is, “That is just fine. You pack your precious belongings and get out, because I just could not care less!” Anne’s response would be difficult for stand to deal with creatively even if he did not become very upset by the contempt in Anne’s comment. For by being sarcastic Anne managed to protect herself by concealing all of her feelings except the hostility. She has not allowed him to see that it does matter very much to her, as it undoubtedly does, whether he stays with her or leaves. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14
One principle which arises in our discussion of form is the transforming of one’s self which occurs in the creation of beauty. In all our creativity, we destroy and rebuild the World, and at the same time we inevitably rebuild and reform ourselves. We do this not at all in the sense of the tragedy of The Great Gatsby, who only changed the externals, such as his wardrobe, his accent, his bank account. We do it rather by grasping a deeper level of the form in the Universe which is also in our own selves. We see the scene before us in our imagination, and that means to some extent we see our own selves. This is a very curious paradox but it is present in all creative persons. Often the creative persons in their work see the perspective of a lifetime endeavor, are themselves creating a cosmos of their own. It is as though each mind is progressively unfolding itself as one goes through life. The creative individual is the one who not only attempts to make some order out of one’s music or art but to make some order in one’s own life. A continual searching for one’s forms occurs in art, and this can be automatically a search for one’s own integrity. A clear example is the life of Beethoven. He has a horrendous childhood, but his biographers relate that his creative genius was related to precisely these ordeals he suffered. His father was constantly inebriated, his mother returned to Heaven when he was young, and he had to take charge of the whole family at the age of eighteen. He never married though he passionately wanted to. However, he could create fantastic music! #RandolphHarris 8 of 14
There is no point in Beethoven’s life, where a marked development or transformation in musical styles takes place which is also not the point where an equal spiritual development and musical style go hand in hand. The transformation of the other is also the transformation of ourselves. Sometimes this transformation may not be good in the eyes of the artists’ contemporary World. Such was the situation with Rembrandt. When he was a young man his paintings were sold on all sides; he was then what we call an outstanding success. However, as he grew older and more profound, the tragic experiences in his life—the death of his children, the death of his wife—caused his paintings to take on a more somber and profound quality and made them less saleable to his fellow Hollanders. His self-portraits reflect this: each one looks more tragic than the one before it. His popularity as a painter waned, for he would not toady to the younger generation that was coming into vogue with the glossier and more readily saleable productions. He followed undeviatingly the path of his own genius. These later creative contributions make him now recognized as the greatest painter of his age. He died in sorrow and in poverty. The people in that day considered Rembrandt a failure. We now recognize him as one of the greatest painters of all time precisely because the transformation of himself and his art went hand and hand. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14
There is another question the relation between creativity and values. Certainly values have a great deal to do with psychotherapy, but they may seem to have very little to do with art or beauty. The studies of creative people indicate that the creative persons, so far as values go, are amoral, not immoral. They are not concerned with the generally conformist mortal rules that most of us are brought up with. At the same time—and perhaps because of this freedom from conventional morality—creative persons reveal another kind of ethics. It is not rules learned by rote but rather it is integrity itself. It is not marriage licenses on paper but authenticity of the relationship. It is not rules of health but reverence for nature and reverence for the human body. The artist seeks to overthrow existing values…to sow strife and ferment, so that by the emotional release those who are dead may be restored to life. Then I run wit joy to the great and imperfect ones, their confusion nourishes me, their stuttering is like divine music to my ears. As part of an art exhibit in New York, a wrecked car was dragged to the corner of a park in front of the building which housed my office. This still life was an entry in a show going on inside the building, but was obviously too large to drag indoors. The artist had draped a cow’s intestines over the seats. The conservative people living in the neighborhood were incensed and called the police, and in a couple of hours the wreck was hauled away. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14
However, the artists were simply trying to cry out, in as forceful a language as they could find, “This is what your technology is doing to you—take in our message!” A great deal of modern art could be captioned under the cry, “Wake up, humanity! Be alive! Look at this World in front of you!” This is restoring the emotionally dead, resuscitating the feelingless robot, the mechanical condition into which we have been forced by adjusting to a hyper-technological civilization. There is, on a deeper level, a very powerful relationship between beauty and ethical values. Beauty is that form in which everything is in harmony; and is that not also a definition of ethics? A final consideration, and perhaps the most important, is that art can dispense grace. Art is part of mortal’s quest for grace. Art and the beauty which it reflects enable us to integrate ourselves. We can make a synthesis between what Dr. Freud called primary and the secondary processes. The function of art can also be described by the term revelation. Art is a constant revealing of beauty as well as truth in a sense parallel to science but in the quite different form. Art produces new knowledge, new forms, often catastrophic in its endeavor to awaken people. The revelation in art comes as an immediate and unique experience. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14
We look at a picture and it immediately reveals a new Universe, a new form of experience. This is even true of a picture we have seen hundred of times. The Miro lithograph hanging in my living room brings me a new experience almost every time I look at it. The World is something different from what I had assumed. There is a grace that comes in such moments; a new depth of experience in ourselves is awakened. When persons say a particular piece of music carries them into another World, they are testifying to the revelation that is in this music. Beethoven himself once remarked, “Whoever understand my music will henceforth be free of the misery of the World.” Grace comes as a gift. It is something we do not ask for and cannot command. Indeed, we do not know the new revelation even exists until it opens itself to us. We were living in a narrow World; now, with the grace that comes in art, we suddenly find ourselves in a new World we did not know was there. I recall once, on leaving an exhibit of Hans Hofmann’s work, with the words singing in my mind like a Hallelujah chorus, “If a human being has the courage to paint such paintings, life surely has meaning!” It is the reverse of Dostoyevsky’s sentence in the Brothers Karamazou, “If God is dead, everything is permitted.” If such beauty exists and gives us it grace, then life must be ultimately good. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14
Creativity gives us a grace in the sense that it is a balm for our anxiety and a relief from our alienation. It is grace by virtue of its power to reconcile us to our deepest selves, to lead us to our own depths where primary and secondary functions are unified. Here is the right brain and the left brain working together in seeing the wholeness of our World. And thus my painting and the creative sketching—indeed, everyone’s creative acts, whatever they may be—make constructive form out of the apparent formlessness of our lives. Since the commandment “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God” is laid upon us so imperatively, it is to be inferred that the love in question is not only the love a soul can give or refuse when God comes in person to take the hand of his future bride, but also a love preceding this visit, for a permanent obligation is implied. This previous love cannot have God for its object, since God is not present to the soul and has never yet been so. It must then have another object. Yet it is destined to become the love of God. We can call it the indirect or implicit love of God. This holds good even when the object of such love bears the name of God, for we can then say either that the name is wrongly applied or that the use of it is permissible only on account of the development bound to follow later. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14
The implicit love of God can have only three immediate objects, the only three things here below in which God is really though secretly present. These are religious ceremonies, the beauty of the World, and our neighbor. Accordingly there are three loves. To these three loves friendship should perhaps be added; strictly speaking it is distinct from the love of our neighbor. These indirect loves have a virtue that is exactly and rigorously equivalent. It depends on circumstances, temperament, and vocation which is the first to enter the soul; one or other of them is dominant during the period of preparation. It is not necessarily the same one for the whole of this period. It is probably that in most cases the period of preparation does not draw toward its end, the soul is not ready to receive the personal visit of its Master, unless it has in it all three indirect loves to a high degree. The combination of these loves constitutes the love of God in the form best suited to the preparatory period, that is to say a veiled form. When the love of God in the full sense of the word wells up in the soul, they do not disappear; they become infinitely stronger and all loves taken together make only a single love. The veiled form of love necessarily come first however and often reigns alone in the soul for a very long time. Perhaps, with a great many people, it may continue to do so till death. Veiled love can reach a very high degree of purity and power. At the moment when it touches the soul, each of the forms that such love may take has the virtue of a sacrament. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14
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
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
Continue to Grow Mentally—Grow in Wisdom—Grow in truth!
The World has always loved the saint as being the nearest possible approach to the perfection of God. It is unscientific and unscholarly to waste time attempting to prove or disprove things that have already been established beyond question. The true scientist no longer attempts to disprove the pull of gravity, for instance, nor the rotation of the Earth, nor the motion of Heavenly bodies, nor the sequences of the seasons, nor human’s need for food and water, nor the function of the heart. These things are established, and for each individual to bring them into question and insist on going through all the experimentation whereby they have been established would be costly, wasteful, and unfeasible. It is just as unscientific, unscholarly, and even more costly for each individual to insist upon personally conducting the experiments that have proved that sin brings sorrow, that disbelief brings emptiness and unrest, that things forbidden of God are not good for human, that the use of illegal substances are enslaving habits, that unchastity brings unhappiness, and so forth. Religion and science have sometimes appeared in conflict. Yet, the conflict can only be apparent, not real, for science seeks truth, and true religion is truth. There can never be conflict between revealed religion and true science. #RandolphHarris 1 of 10
Truth is truth, whether labeled science or religion. All truth is consistent. There is no conflict—only in the interpretation of fact. Studies of high-altitude residents have greatly contributed to our understanding of physiological adaptation. As you would expect, altitude studies have focused on inhabited mountainous regions, particularly in the Himalayas, Andes, and Rocky Mountains. Of these three areas, permanent human habitation probably has the longest history in the Himalayas. Today, perhaps as many as 25 million people live at altitudes above 10,000 feet. In Tibet, permanent settlements exist above 15,000 feet, and in the Andes, they can be found as high as 17,000 feet. Because the mechanisms that maintain homeostasis in human evolved at lower altitudes, they are compromised by the conditions at higher elevations. At high altitudes, many factors produce stress on the human body. These include hypoxia (reduced available oxygen), more intense solar radiation, cold, low humidity, wind (which amplifies cold stress), a reduced nutritional base, and rough terrain. Of these, hypoxia exerts the greatest amount of stress on human physiological systems, especially the heart, lungs, and brain. #RandolphHarris 2 of 10
Hypoxia results from reduced barometric pressure. It is not that there is less oxygen overall in the atmosphere at high altitudes; rather, it is less concentrated. Therefore, to obtain the same amount of oxygen at 9,000 feet as at sea level, people must make certain physiological alterations aimed at increasing the body’s ability to transport and efficiently use the oxygen that is available. At high altitudes, reproduction, in particular, is affected through increased infant mortality rates, miscarriage, low birth weights, and premature birth. An early study reported that in Colorado, infant deaths are almost twice as common above 8,200 feet (2,500 meters) as at lower elevations. One cause of fetal and maternal death is preeclampsia, a severe elevation of blood pressure in pregnant women after the twentieth gestational week. People born at lower altitudes and high-altitude natives differ somewhat in how they adapt to hypoxia. Upon exposure to high altitude people born at low elevation become acclimatized. The responses may be short-term modifications, depending on duration of stay, but they begin within hours of the altitude change. These changes include an increase in respiration rate, heart rate, and production of red blood cells. (Red blood cells contain hemoglobin, the protein responsible for transporting oxygen to organs and tissues.) #RandolphHarris 3 of 10
A more permanent, developmental acclimatization occur in high-altitude natives during growth and development. This type acclimatization is present only in people who grow up in high-altitude areas, not in those who moved there as adults. Compared with populations at lower elevations, life-long residents of high altitudes display slowed growth and maturation. Other differences include larger chest size, associated, in turn, with greater lunch volume and larger heart. In addition to greater lung capacity, people born at high are more efficient than migrants at diffusing oxygen from blood to body tissues. Developmental acclimatization to high-altitude hypoxia serves as a good example of physiological plasticity by illustrating how, within the limits set by genetic factors, development can be influenced by environment. There is evidence that entire populations have also genetically adapted to high altitudes. Indigenous peoples of Tibet who have inhabited regions higher than 12,000 feet for around 25,000 years may have made genetic (i.e,. evolutionary) accommodations to hypoxia. Altitude does not appear to affect reproduction in these people to the degree it does in other populations. Infants have birth weights as high as those of lowland Tibetan groups and higher than those of recent (20 to 30 years) Chinese immigrants. This fact may be the result of alterations in maternal blood flow to the uterus during pregnancy. #RandolphHarris 4 of 10
Another line of evidence concerns how the body processes glucose (blood sugar). Glucose is critical because it is the only source of energy used by the brain, and it is also used, although not exclusively, by the heart. Both highland Tibetans and the Quechua (inhabitants of high-altitude regions of the Peruvian Andes) burn glucose in a way that permits more efficient use of oxygen. This implies the presence of genetic mutations in the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA directs how cells use glucose). It also implies that natural selection has acted to increase the frequency of these advantageous mutations in these groups. As yet, there is no certain evidence that Tibetans and Quechua have made evolutionary changes to accommodate high-altitude hypoxia (since specific genetic mechanisms that underlie these populations’ unique abilities have not been identified). However, current data strongly suggest that selection has operated to produce evolutionary change in these two groups. If further study supports these findings, we have an excellent example of evolution in action producing long-term adaptation at the population level. “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. It all thy ways acknowledge God, and he shall direct thy paths,” reports Proverbs 3.5-6. #RandolphHarris 5 of 10
Speaking of high elevations, Cosmonauts that spend long months aboard the International Space Station lose bone strength faster than previously thought and have a higher risk of breaking their hips later in life. A survey of 13 space station cosmonauts found that their bone strength dipped by at least 14 percent on the average during their half-year stays aboard the orbiting laboratory. Three of the cosmonauts lost up to 30 percent of their bone strength during their long-duration spaceflights, putting them on par with the bone strength of elderly people with osteoporosis on Earth. If preventive measures are not taken, some of our cosmonauts may be at increased risk for age-related fractures decades after their missions. When in space, bone mineral density can decrease by between 0.6 percent and 5 percent each month. Cosmonauts gradually lose muscle strength and bone density over time while on long-duration spaceflights because their bodies float in microgravity, rather than work against the tug of Earth’s gravity each day. To lessen the effects, space station cosmonauts must exercise at least two hours every day and undergo weeks of rehabilitation after their return to Earth. #RandolphHarris 6 of 10
The hip and spine of long duration cosmonauts typically experience the greatest amount of bones loss. Hip fractures nearly always require hospitalization or major surgery, while vertebra fractures in the spine can lead to loss of height, severe back pain and deformity. When people make new discoveries in their energetic search for truth, it is well to remember these will always be in harmony with all fundamental and eternal truths. Yes, truth is always consistent, whether it is revealed directly from God to humans, through his inspired prophets, or comes from the laboratory through diligent searching of his children and through the influence of the Spirit of the Lord upon them. This quest for wisdom or intelligence, which the Lord defines as light and truth, is a glorious challenge. We have been assured by the Author of Eternal Life that whatever principle of intelligence we attain unto this life, it will rise with us in the resurrection. So there seems to be a motive to learn all we can while on Earth. “And if a person gains more knowledge and intelligence in this life through one’s diligence and obedience than another, one will have so much the advantage in the World to come,” reports Doctrines and Covenants 130.18-19. #RandolphHarris 7 of 10
We are in a changing World beset with many perplexities. However, while change is all about us, and will continue to be, in the physical World, we must recognize that there are certain Heaven-sent verities, principles, and values that are eternal. These never change. As we travel life’s highway, we will encounter theories, proposals, and programs that have wide appeal. One of many fascinating concepts is marginal benefit. Marginal benefit is an increase in an activity’s overall benefit that is caused by a unit increased in the level of that activity, all other factors remaining constant. Marginal decision making can help explain some otherwise puzzling economic phenomena. For instance, why is water so inexpensive, while gold is so expensive? Humans, animals, and plants need water to survive, while gold is relatively unnecessary; but for some reason, people are willing to pay much more for a bar of gold than for a cup of water. The reason is that a person’s willingness to pay for any good is based on the marginal benefit that an extra unit of the good would yield. The marginal benefit, in turn, depends on how many units a person already has. Although water is essential, the marginal benefit of an extra cup is small because water is plentiful. By contrast, no one needs gold to survive, but because gold is so rare, people consider the marginal benefit of an extra bar of gold to be large. #RandolphHarris 8 of 10
Be not mislead. A rational decision maker takes an action if and only if the marginal benefit of the action exceeds the marginal cost. This principle can explain why people are more willing to pay more for diamonds than for water, or why some builders are willing to sell a house below average cost. It can take some time to get used to the logic of marginal thinking, but the study of economics will give one ample opportunity to practice. Remember that ideas and theories are either sound or unsound; their soundness does not depend upon which people hold them. Be mindful that there are also many phenomena in God’s Universe that cannot, to our present human understanding, be explained. There will always be those little minds who, out of vanity or intellectual display, will attempt to destroy faith in the very foundations of life. Be assured, however, that no one, worthy of the name, who has been humped and awed before the unexplainable wonders of this marvelous Universe, will ever scoff at sacred things or try to rob you of your faith in the unseen. Our inability to explain things, like spirituality, in terms of our materialism does not disprove its reality. #RandolphHarris 9 of 10
By yielding obedience to your faith in God and the laws of the Universe, both spiritual and physical, there will come a soul-satisfying security that is priceless. You will need this anchor as you face a doubting World. Advance unafraid! Meet the challenge of a modern World. In doing so, beware of the philosophy which suggests that morality is out of date—that virtue, chastity, marriage, and honorable family life are throwbacks to a Victorian age. These are eternal principles—as eternal as life itself. Remember, it is truth that endures. It is truth that makes people courageous enough to become Christlike. It is the truth that makes people and nations free. Yes, be intelligent. Intelligence is wise and judicious use of knowledge. Continue to grow mentally—to grow in wisdom—to grow in truth. Desire it! Pray for it! Study! Practice it! Do all this and you will find true; it cannot be denied you. Having found it, never forget its source. “The glory of God is intelligence, or, in other words light and truth,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 93.36. Be worthy trustees of Earth. Continue to grow in stature. Be cheerful in all that you do. Live joyfully. Live happily. Live enthusiastically, knowing that God does not dwell in gloom and melancholy, but in light and love. #RandolphHarris 10 of 10
Randolph Harris II International Institute 