Home » Child development (Page 44)
Category Archives: Child development
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
The Kingdom of Heaven is within You–Wisdom Penetrates Everywhere on Account of its Perfect Purity
There will come a time, a time to tell you everything slowly so that you understand. However, now is not that time. Something is stirring in me, knowledge as clear as if a voice is speaking: this is not the most difficult part. Often two people will try to express their feelings toward each other verbally, or will try to explain themselves or some situation, and they simply cannot understand each other. This occurs when people are inarticulate, when conflicts about their feelings are prominent and they try to hide it, when they are not really familiar with what their feeling is, or when they are very intellectualized and the words are used defensively to obfuscate the situation. Especially with intellectual people, words paradoxically can be the largest obstacle to communication because people often spend a great deal of time and word trying not to say something or avoiding the central point, which is often known to themselves. If we are able to have a satisfying and fulfilling sense of completion in our lives insofar as meaningful relationships are concerned that we need to experience emotional intimacy beyond our immediate families, it seems an inescapable conclusion. And not to have these wider experiences both raises questions about the nature of our family relationships and threatens them. For to expect that all of one’s needs for emotion intimacy with adults can be satisfied by one person is to put an almost unbearable burden on any association. And to attempt to do so suggests an immaturity and overdependency that is detrimental to the experience and expression of love. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
If we are two independent individuals who recognize that we are essentially alone and do not fool ourselves into believing that we do not in the last analysis live essentially separate lives, even in marriage we are most happy and fulfilled. To attempt to avoid our essential loneliness and isolation through neurotic dependence on each other is a pseudo escape from an important reality. Let there be spaces in your togetherness for the pillars of the temple stand apart, and the oak and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow. Although our increased mobility and decreased clan experiences have tended to brings us face to face with our loneliness and isolation, the net results may not be negative. If we can develop close tires with others in spite of the fears of love that deter us, we may discover there are better reasons for intimacy than those created by the happenstance of being related by common ancestry. Three married couples formed a very close and loving relations that has existed over a period of seven or eight years. They have probably been together on an average of two times a month during that times. Since some members of the group had a professional interest in psychotherapy, it was not unnatural that the group frequently explored their feelings about each other and other relationships in their lives, often talking long into the night. Sometimes violent feelings came to the surface that seemed likely to split the couples apart. The strength of these feelings should put a red flag on some of one’s interpersonal relations. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
If an individual finds oneself verbally going in and hurting other people quite viciously and unintentionally or unconsciously, it is important to be able to better understand that one is somehow responding to an internal force rather than the situation he or she is involved in. Sometimes when a person feels another individual pulling away from them, the response to their living one psychologically is for the individual who feels they may be abandoned to go after that individual even more strongly, which is self-defeating since all they do is withdraw even more rapidly. Many individuals respond to abandonment by giving full vent to the hostility and anger that they are experiencing and blame it complete on the person with him they are involved with. However, it is best to stop whatever it is that one is doing and try, as honestly as one possibly can, to say to the other person: I do not feel I am being very fair with you,” or something to that effect, which lets him or her know that a bit of irrationality has exhibited itself and it has really confused the issues that we were discussing. Another important lesson is not to fear that irrational side. Know that it is there and know that there is enough sanity to not be afraid to give full vent to that irrational part of oneself, since it does two things: it can give an individual clearer handles as to where it came from, as well as giving the other person an opportunity to be more able to cope with one more as a total person in a more beneficial way. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
Each time people are honest, individuals can emerge from these experiences with deeper feelings of love for each other. Sometimes, in conflicts, what is actually going on is people are acting out a lot of the hostility that they have towards one of their parents, and it takes some insight into one’s own soul to understand the emotion that is influencing one’s response to another individual on what they thought were non-emotional issues. At times people feel defensiveness about reflecting on their own emotions, as they do not know what they will reveal about themselves. These feelings can be compounded by normal conflicts that happen during the day, which could lead to a blow on, when that is not a rational response. People who have unresolved issues are often emotionally dangling on the edge of a cliff with almost no way of rescue. If people realize they have problems, then they can do something about them by facing them. Those who get help have a desire not to let destructive impulses take over their lives. By revealing what the underlying situation involves, it leaves one to have more optimistic experiences with others and can lead to an increase in one’s feeling of personal significance, and in confidence regarding one’s ability to succeed at making connections with people. One can then proceed to enjoy more the human encounter. It is interesting that one of the most empathic themes of the New Testament is the importance attached to the experience of love among the early Christians as expressed in such phrases as, “Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
One reason for this emphasis on love, in addition to the teachings of Jesus, may have been the fact that in some instances conversion to Christianity meant complete spitting up of families who were hostile to the new sect and its members. With such isolation and loneliness thrust upon them, the new converts would naturally seek to satisfy their need for intimacy with each other. They did, no doubt, have the same fear of love that hinders us, for the record shows they bickered among themselves and found many ways to deprive themselves of experiencing and expressing the love they longed for. Can the expression of pleasures of the flesh can be exclusive? Certainly, if we choose to, we can limit expression of pleasures of the flesh to one person. There are any ways of expressing love to others in addition to expressing it through pleasures of the flesh. We are free to choose whatever way or ways we wish. From a mental health standpoint it is important to make this choice a conscious decision. A great many men and women expend a great deal of emotional energy attempting to avoid awareness of pleasures of the flesh for anyone other than a spouse. When awareness of desire does creep in they feel guilty and frightened because they do not trust themselves we the power of a conscious choice. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
We have already examined the damage to emotional and physical health that such dulling of awareness can bring about. If we can recognize and accept within ourselves that we do—in common with most of humanity—have such desires for pleasures of the flesh, it will be much more healthy. However, also keep in mind some people choose to abstain. Nonetheless, for those who choose to have adult relationships with passionate intimacy, they can enjoy the delicious feelings and decide on a conscious level what, if anything, they want to do about them. It is surprising how many people imagine they are somewhat unusual in having strong desires for pleasures of the flesh for more than one person. This is probably particularly true with women, for whom it is not culturally acceptable to have such feelings. However, women who are alive to their feelings do have these desires, and it is often a great relief to a woman to find she is not unique in this respect. As a culture we are quite reluctant to openly examine the fact that large numbers of married persons do not choose to be exclusive in their relationships. We are probably particularly afraid to recognize that any possible good could result from extramarital affairs. To do so might seem to condone or even encourage such behavior and perhaps lead to the collapse of our monogamous system, at least as we know it. However, if that system is of value and if it is not already a fiction, then the open examination of all relevant questions certainly should not destroy it. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
On the one hand it is undoubtedly true that many extramarital relationships are destructive events in which the individual is using a conquest as another way of avoiding intimacy, while on the other hand there are other instances where individuals appear to be open up to the experience and expression of love in an affair in a way in which they have not been able to do with a spouse. One of these aspects of marriage that we do not like to admit is the fact that it may not be most conducive to the experience of love. There are many reasons a married person can find for not feeling close to a spouse. There may be unspoken resentments about any number of things that have been built up over a period of time. The relationship may be experienced primarily in terms of obligation and duty so that the experience of freedom so conducive to love has evaporated in that trapped feeling. It is probably true that these are ways in which we avoid experiencing the love that is there because of our fear of love. However, be that as it may, it is not surprising that some people find they experience love more freely outside of marriage. Some people have an uncommon personal warmth, gentility, and graciousness. We often find the minds of others to be highly developed faculties of critical observation joined with an innate reverence for the sacred to explore the fundamental issues of the human heart: knowledge of its present state, of its higher potentials, of the nature of the Universe. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
Being intellectually stimulated is a very important quality in any relationship. Many people have a sincere inner aspiration for deeper knowledge and experience of the inviolable spirit within their own hearts. We are simply human beings exploring ever more profound truths with increasing depth and concentration. Freedom is thus more than a value itself: it underlies the possibility of valuing; it is basic to our capacity to value. Without freedom there is no value worthy of the name. In this time of disintegration of concern for pubic weal and private honor, in this time of the demise of our values, our recovery—if we are to achieve it—must be cased on our coming to terms with this source of all values: freedom. This is why freedom is so important as a goal of psychotherapy, for whatever values the client develops will be based upon one’s experience of autonomy, sense of personal power and possibilities, all of which are based on the freedom one hopes to achieve in therapy. “And I will show you something different from either your shadow at morning striding behind you. I will show you fear in a handful of dust. A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had on done so many,” The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot (1922). What followed the publication of Eliot’s poem, and what I believe Eliot was predicting, was the waste land of our culture, the disintegration of the World we all had know and counted on, The Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, World War II and the Savings and Loan Crises. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
Nobody knew it would happen then—except the artists. Even if T.S. Eliot would have known it consciously, I doubt it. However, when he wrote that poem, he knew it unconsciously with the genius of the poet. It is woven around the medieval myth of the wasteland and its impotent king. Eliot pictures our age as a wasteland in which the king has lost his potency and hence cannot procreate, a land in which no crops can grow, a land that is wasting away. The king is powerless to do anything about it. The whole poem is a fantastic prophecy—by common consent one of the great classic. In the same year, 1922, The Great Gatsby by F, Scott Fitzgerald appeared. Several films were made of this novel which I think were travesties; they missed the whole point of the story. Actually The Great Gatsby is a prediction of the demise of the American Dream, the dream that everybody can get rich like Horatio Alger. In this novel Fitzgerald draws the picture of a man who believes he can make himself over into anything he wishes: he sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He had a ferocious indifference to the drums of his destiny, to destiny itself. At one point Gatsby cries incredulously, “Can’t repeat the past? Why of course you can!” He believed he could do anything, he worshipped change, with no regard for destiny or society. Here is a man who believed in optimistic thinking with a vengeance. He lived by the belief that destiny and determinism had no place in this World. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
The novel ends in a crashing tragedy—a tragedy which the human potential movement the New Age people have not yet appreciated, even in the early 2000’s. If it does not give it some kind of religious meaning, if it does not make of it the analogy of a sacrament, the legal character of punishment has no true significance; and therefore all penal offices, from that of the judge to that of the executioner and the prison guard, should in some sort share in the priestly office. Justice in punishment can be defined in the same way as justice in almsgiving. It means giving our attention to the victim of affliction as to a being not a thing; it means wishing to preserve in one the faculty of free consent. When they are really despising the weakness of affliction, mortals think they are despising crime. One is thus the object of the greatest contempt. Contempt is the contrary of attention. There are exceptions only where there is a crime which for some reason has prestige, as is often the case with murder on account of the fleeting moment of power which it implies, or where the crime does not make a very vivid impression upon those who assess it culpability. Stealing is the crime most devoid of prestige, and it causes most indignation because property is the thing to which people are most generally and powerfully attached. Even in the penal code, that is apparent. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
No state is beneath that of a human being enveloped in cloud of guilt, be it true or false, and entirely in the power of a few mortals who are to decide one’s fate with a mortal who are to decide one’s fate with a word. These mortals do not pay any attention to one. Moreover, from the moment when anyone falls into the hands of the law with all its penal machinery until the moment one is free again—and those known as hardened criminals are like Neil Caffery in the TV Series White Collar, in that they hardly ever do get free until the day of their death—such a one is never an object of attention. Everything combines, down to the smallest details, down even to the inflections of people’s voices, to make one seem vile and outcast in all mortal’s eyes including one’s own. The brutality and flippancy, the terms of scorn and the jokes, the way of speaking, the way of listening and of not listening, all these things are equally effective. There is no intentional unkindness in it all. It is the automatic effect of a professional life which has as its object crime seen in the form of affliction, that is to day in the form of horror and defilement are exposed in their starkness. Such contact, being uninterrupted, necessarily contaminates, and the form this contamination takes is contempt. It is this contempt which is reflected on every prisoner at the bar. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
The penal apparatus is like a transmitter which turns the whole volume of defilement contained in all the circles where the miserable crime is to be found upon each accused person. The mere contact with this penal apparatus causes a kind of horror in part of the soul remaining intact, and the horror is in exact proportion to the innocence. Those who are completely rotten receive no injury and do not suffer. If there is not something between the penal apparatus and the crime capable of cleansing defilement, it cannot be otherwise. This can only be God. Infinite purity alone is not contaminated by contact with evil. All finite purity becomes defilement itself through prolonged contact. However, the code may be reformed, punishment cannot be human unless it passes through Christ. The severity of the sentence is not the most important thing. Under present conditions, a condemned mortal, although guilty and given a punishment which is relatively light in view of one’s offense, can more often than not be rightly considered as having been the victim of cruel injustice. What is important is that the punishment should be legitimate, that is to say that is should be recognized as having a divine character, not because of its content but because it is the law. It is important that the whole organization of penal justice should be directed toward obtaining from the magistrates and their assistants the attention and respect for the accused that is due from every mortal to any person who may be in one’s power and from the accused one’s consent to the punishment inflicted, a consent of which the innocent Christ has given us the perfect model. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
A death sentence for a slight offense, pronounced in such a way, would be less horrible than a sentence of six months in prison given as it is at the present day. Nothing is more frightful than the spectacle, now so frequent, of an accused, whose situation provides one with nothing to fall back on, but one’s own words, and who is incapable of arranging these words because of one’s social origin and lack of culture, as one stands broken down by guilt, affliction, and fears, stammering before judges who are not listening and who interrupt one in tones of ostentatious refinement. For as long as affliction is to be found in society, for as long as legal or private almsgiving and punishment are inevitable, the separation between civil institutions and religious life will be a crime. The lay conception considered alone is completely false. It only has some excuse as a reaction against a totalitarian religion. In that respect, it must be admitted, it is partly justifiable. In order to be present everywhere, as it should, religion must not only not be totalitarian, but it must limit itself strictly to the plane of supernatural love which alone is suitable for it. If it did so it would penetrate everywhere. The Bible says: “Wisdom penetrates everywhere on account of its perfect purity.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
Through the absence of Christ, mendicity, in the widest sense of the word, and penal action are perhaps the most frightful things on the Earth—two things that are almost infernal. They have the very color of hell. Prostitution might be added to them, for it is to real marriage what almsgiving and punishment without charity are to almsgiving and punishment which are just. Mortals have received the power to do good or harm not only to body but to the souls of their fellows, to the whole soul of those in whom God is not present and to all that part of the soul uninhabited by God of the others. A mortal may be indwelt by God, by the power of evil or merely by the mechanism of the flesh. When one gives or punishes, what one bears within one enters the soul of the other through the bread of the sword. The substance of the bread and the sword are virgin, empty of good and of evil, equally capable of conveying one or the other. One who is forced by affliction to receive bread or to suffer chastisement as one’s could exposed in starkness and defenseless both to evil and to good. There is only one way of never receiving anything but good. It is to know, with our whole soul and not just abstractly, that mortals who are not animated by pure charity are merely wheels in the mechanism of the order of the World, like inert matter. After that we see that everything comes directly from God, either through the love of a mortal, or through the lifelessness of matter, whether it be tangible or psychic, through spirit or water. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
All that increases the vital energy in us is like the bread for which Christ thanks the just. All the blows, the wounds, and the mutilations are like a stone thrown at us by the hand of Christ. Bread and stone both come from Christ and penetrating to our inward being bring Christ into us. Bread and stone are love. We must eat the bread and lay ourselves open to the stone, so that it may skin as deeply as possible into our flesh. If we have any armor able to protect our soul from the stones thrown by Christ, we should take it off and cast it away. Our World is manifold, and our attitudes are manifold. What is manifold is often frightening because it is not neat and simple. Mortal prefer to forget how many possibilities are often to them. They like to be told that there are two World and two ways. This is comforting because it is so tidy. Almost always one way turns out to be common and the other one is celebrated as superior. Those who tell of two ways and praise one are recognized as prophets or great teachers. They save mortals from confusion and hard choices. They offer a single choice that is easy to make because those who do not take the path that is commended to them live a wretched life. To walk far on this path may be difficult, but the choice is easy, and to hear the celebration of this path is pleasant. Wisdom offers simple schemes, but truth is not so simple. Not all simplicity is wide. However, a wealth of possibilities breeds dread. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
Hence, those who speak of many possibilities speak of the few and are of help to even fewer. The wise offer only two ways, of which one is good, and thus help many. We are to enter a new and different rhythm and tell such as will listen that they need not be forlorn, lost, or without hope because they find one to appeal to their hearts or mind. They are asked to follow the God within themselves, for the Kingdom of Heaven is within you. Those who feel alone in this matter or who can only walk outside the groups on an independent path should be reminded that there is a God within them who can guide and help them if they turn to him. The Quest not only begins in the heart but also ends there too. It is an endeavour to lift to a higher plane, and expand to a larger measure, the whole of one’s identity. It brings in the most important part of oneself—being, essence, consciousness. One know thyself! There is a whole philosophy distilled into the single and simple statement. Between the ordinary mortal who takes oneself is one is, and the philosopher who does exactly the same, there stands the Quester. In the first case, outlook is narrow, being limited by attending to the inescapable necessities and demands of day-to-day living. In other case, peace of mind has been established, the thirst for knowledge fulfilled, the discipline of self realized. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
In between these two, the Questers is not satisfied with oneself, has a strong wish to become a better and more enlightened mortal. One tires to exercise one’s will in the struggle for realization of one’s ideal. It lifts human consciousness vertically and enlarges human experience spiritually. If the Infinite Being is trying to express its own nature within the limitations of this Earth—and therefore trying to express itself through us, too—it is our highest duty to search for and cultivate our diviner attributes. Only in this way do we really fulfill ourselves. This search and this cultivation constitute the Quest. It offers a conception of life which originates on a higher level. The Quest is both a search for truth and dedication to the Overself. By “Quest” I mean the deliberate and conscious dedication to the search for spiritual truth, freedom, or awareness. The inner meaning of life does not readily reveal itself; it must be searched for. Such a search is the Quest. “Who among you fears the LORD and obeys the word of his servant? Let one who walks in the dark, who has no light, trust in the name of the LORD and rely on one’s God,” reports Isaiah 50.10-11. It is the Lord who gives salvation even unto Kings, it is the Lord who delivered even David from the hateful sword; let our sons grow as plants grow, and let our daughters be cornerstones, polished as if they were the cornerstones of the palace…happy is that people, whose God is the Lord. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
The Golden Gate Bridge Came as a Secure Link to My Heart, Only it was Shrouded in Fog
Love. Who knows about another’s love? We have already seen that, although the intensity of love feelings may vary, the nature of love is essentially the same in all caring relationships. In other words, the experience of love is not limited to those who are intimate partners or potential intimate partners. And as we shall see in greater detail in the discussion of healthy families, our ability to love grows out of the context of experiencing love and acceptance in the family or in other relationships. When we have this understanding of love it becomes a contradiction in terms to imagine that we could love one individual to the exclusion of others. Love is not an isolated phenomenon. We learn to love because we have been loved and in the warmth of the experience of love we have been gradually freed to feel love and to express it. In other words, in order to love, we must become loving persons. And when a person has developed the capacity for emotional intimacy and knows the enjoyment and satisfaction of the experience of love, it is natural for that person to seek and find that experience with many different people with whom one comes in contact with. When these qualities of the loving person are seen, it becomes evident that possessiveness in relationships is not a mark of love. It is a mark of insecurity and fear. It is also a destroyer of the experience of love, for when we demand love we cannot experience what we then receive as freely given. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14
If a husband, for example, resent other relationships that his wife may tend to develop and if he demands that she severely limit her scope of activities and devote herself completely to the home and to him, he is almost certain to encounter resentment on her part. However, even if he does not, how can he trust the love that she shows toward him even if it is genuine? He must always been haunted with the nagging feeling that she would find others more interesting and stimulating to be with if he did not use coercion and threats to keep her close to him. The nature of our society today probably makes it more important than ever before that the nonexclusiveness of love be recognized and incorporated into our lives. For we live in a time when we are likely to feel lonely and isolated. For many Americans and people all around the World the idea of a family, in the tribal sense, no longer exists. Our mobility as a people tends to scatter us across that country and across the World, and blood ties often to be of little significance as far as satisfying needs for relationship is concerned. These circumstances unquestionably leave a void in many people’s lives in family tries may have been a mixed blessing—a situation or thing that has disadvantages as well as advantages. “However, you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light,” reports 1 Peter 2.9-10. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14
Nonetheless, the values of these disappearing family experiences are illustrated by account of a man in his thirties who describes this aspect of his childhood in the following way. “My mother was one of ten children, all of whom grew to adulthood and raised families within a radius of seventy-five miles of their birthplace. Family reunions would occur at least once or twice a year, sometimes more frequently. If I pause and remember hard enough, I can still smell the gourmet coffee and other delicious foods like lemon meringue cheese cake, blonde brownies, and fluffy strawberry pie and I can taste the chicken wonton tacos, baked pasta with sausage and baby portobello mushroom white sauce, pepperoncini beef, BBQ smoked brisket chili with tender beef, bacon, tomato, onion, beer, bell peppers, beans and corn topped with cheddar cheese, green onions, and sour cream, along with the ribs and tri-tip that my uncle produced on his ranch. And though I certainly did not think of it in those terms then, in retrospect I think of the equally delicious sense of belonging to a large group of people who exuded a great deal of belonging to a large group of people who exuded a great deal of warmth toward me. I was a town boy, but the family relationship provided the opportunity to spend several Summers earning my bread and board and room on the ranch of one of the others of my uncles. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14
“Time with the family–it meant a broader experience with people and things. It meant proud rides into two with my uncle for supplies in a car I earned. Above all, it meant the experience of warmth and love, most frequently expressed in teasing by uncles, aunts, and cousins. Since I have been an adult I have learned that the life of the family was not as idyllic as I experienced it. There were jealousies engendered by unequal inheritances. There were the usual petty feelings people who love each other so often find to squabble about. However, by and large I was blissfully unaware of these matters and knowing now that they existed does not dim my remembered pleasures or cause me to discount their reality. Those were good years for me. I wish my children could have the same experiences, but we live hundreds of miles from my brother and sister and from any of my wife’s relatives. And if we were geographically close, I think that the same kinds of things would not happen. When I was a child, the kind of feelings that existed between relatives and brought them together do not seem to exist much any more.” The widespread loss of this kind of family experience has indeed created a void that makes the need for other experiences of intimacy a crucial one. Some have tried to meet this crisis by making the immediate family virtually a closed corporation as far as significant relationships are concerned. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14
Although it is not put into words, a virtual bargain is made in which a couple tacitly agree that no one outside the family will be permitted to become of emotional significance. Such sealing off of the family through avoiding significant contact with others is a frightened response to a frightening World. We probably enter into such unspoken agreements because we feel in our bones—feeling it intuitively—that to allow ourselves to care for others would increase our vulnerability to the possibility of being hurt. It is probably also a response to our fears about ourselves. If free to establish others relationships, we are so doubtful about our lovability and so fearful that our loved one might learn to care for someone more than ourselves and abandon us that we say in effect, “If you will do the same for me, I will love you and commit my whole life to you.” Such a narrow experience of love based on such deep feelings of insecurity can hardly be described as a deeply satisfying or freeing experience. The loneliness and isolation are only mitigated in a minor way. And, of course, the participants, having no other intimate relationships, have no protection against the catastrophic hurt and loss that would occur with death or other separation from the one-and-only loved one. Another societal bar to real contact is the stereotypes we apply to each other, and the expectations that sometimes entrap people into limited acceptable modes of behavior. However, there is a way to alleviate this problem. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14
Sometimes it is useful if people are allowed the valuable opportunity to shed the expectations accrued from their identities by taking new names and by agreeing not to talk about their backgrounds—occupation, home town, and so forth—at least when first meeting a new person. Sometimes the trappings of a career, such as clergyman, psychiatrist, nurse, teacher, business executive, require certain types of behavior and elicit stereotyped responses. Under such an agreement an individual is able to explore one’s self more fully by seeing how one really would act and feel outside of one’s occupational constraints and how people would react to one as a person rather than as a member of a group. This is usually done as a group activity, with trusted members. Before they have an opportunity to know each other, group or new community members are given new names, and these are the only names by which they are to be known throughout the life of the group. In one group, for example, there was a highly spirited young man, he was thin, and he looked very youth, so the members called him Peter Pan. Peter Pan seemed to get a huge delight out of all the group events, especially some of the communication and dance activities. It turned out that he was celibate and his abandoned behavior captivated everyone. He was particularly interested in being with the female members of the group. Toward the end of the workshop a rumor started that he was a priest. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14
Someone mentioned the rumor to “Peter Pan” about him being a priest, and he acknowledged that he was a Roman Catholic priest, and he had been one for twenty years. The group was startled. This certainly did not fit their stereotype. After the experience, Peter Pan expressed his deep appreciation for the opportunity to keep his identity unknown. It was the first time in twenty years that he could learn how people responded to him as a human being and not as a priest. And he had a chance to express some feelings he had been suppressing. As he spoke, tears welled up in his eyes and his gratitude overwhelmed him. Many group members spontaneously embraced him, and he hugged them back tightly. This moving scene left Peter Pan with a warm, glowing smile which he retained for the remainder of the group life. He vowed to go back to try to influence his church to experience more of the warmth and humanness that he experienced. Many months later the glow had not diminished, and he seemed to return to his job with added strength and confidence about the person under his robes. For a person like Peter Pan, this experience was like getting another chance in life, by throwing off the background that has narrowed the opportunity for growth. He was able to take full advantage of the opportunity and felt a strong feeling of self-renewal. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14
Every other reality in human experience becomes what it is by its nature. The heart beats, the eyes see; it is their nature to do what they do. The heart beats, the eyes see; it is their nature to do what they do. Or, if we take something inorganic like values, we know what the nature of truth is—to state things as close to the reality as possible. And we know the meaning, or the nature, of the value of beauty. Each of these functions in the human being according to its own nature. What, then, is the nature of freedom? It is the essence of freedom precisely that its nature is not given. Its function is to change its nature, to become something different from what it is at any given moment. Freedom is the possibility of development, of enhancement of one’s life; or the possibility of withdrawing, shutting oneself up, denying and stultifying one’s growth. It is the nature of freedom to determine itself. This uniqueness makes freedom different from every other reality in human experience. Freedom is also unique in that it is the mother of all values. If we consider such values as honesty, love, or courage, we find, strangely enough, that they cannot be placed parallel to the value of freedom. For the other values derive their value from being free; they are dependent on freedom. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14
Take the vale of love. If I know an individual’s love is not given with some degree of freedom, how can I prize a one’s love? What is to keep this so-called love from being merely an act of dependency or conformity? For love can take concrete shape only in freedom. It takes a free mortal to live, for love is both the unexpected discovery of the other and a readiness to do anything for that individual. Take also the value of honesty. Honesty is the best policy. However, it is the best policy, it is not honesty at all but simply good business. When a person is free to act against the monetary interest of his or her company, that is the authentic value of honesty. Unless it presupposes freedom, honesty loses its ethical character. If it is supposedly exhibited by someone who is coerced into it, courage also loses its value. Just punishment, like just almsgiving, enshrines the real presence of God and constitutes something in the nature of a sacrament. That also is made quite clear in the Gospel. It is expressed by the words: “He that is without sin among you let him first cast a stone.” Christ alone is without sin. Christ spared the woman taken in adultery. The administration of punishment was not in accordance with the Earthly life which was to end on the Cross. He did not however prescribe the abolition of penal justice. He allowed stoning to continue. Wherever it is done with justice, it is therefore he who throws the first stone. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14
As he dwells in the famished wretch whom a just mortal feeds, so one dwells in the condemned wretch whom a just man punishes. He did not say so, but he showed it clearly enough by dying like a common criminal. Christ is the divine model of prisoners and old offenders. As the young workingmen of the Jeunesse Ouvriere Catholique thrill at the thought that Christ is one of them, so condemned criminals have just reason to taste like a rapture. They only need to be told, as the workingmen were told. In a sense Christ is nearer to them than to the martyrs. If Christ is present at the start and the finish, the stone which slays and the piece of bread which provides nourishment have exactly the same virtue. The gift of life and the gift of death are equivalent. Far from being irrational, myths actually save us from irrationality. They make our powerful emotions, which would drive us into psychosis otherwise, into diluted forms which we can absorb. And they do that by virtue of being an art form. The myth has certain characteristics which it shares with other art forms, like poetry, the novel, painting, sculpture, music and dance. These shared characteristics include harmony, balance, rhythm. They are qualities which minister to our inner needs for serenity, for a sense of eternity, and ultimately for courage. All genuine works of art give a sense of meaning which informs us that life is more significant than the disasters, petty or great, which clamor for our attention. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14
Music hath charms to soothe the savage heart. We have said that the beauty which myths bring to us is a source of their healing power. Within the explosion into their wonderful civilization, the ancient Greeks had a devotion to beauty that was singularly great. One has only to walk through the National Museum at Athens, or the room containing the Elgin marbles in the British Museum in London, to see, in the sheer number of statues, what great heights and depths this civilization produced. This is surely related to the Greeks’ vast fecundity for myths. The whole essence of the works of art has a sense of eternity, the union of human and divine, in a calmness that will be impressed on anyone even more today. Beauty for the ancient Greeks shows a state of being as ontological, rather than as an emotion which can be turned on or off. This saves us from confusing movie actresses, or Miss Americas, or various attractive bodies advertising bikinis, with actual beauty. Some actors and actresses have some beauty, there is no doubt—Ingrid Bergman, Greta Garbo, Lucky Lui, Meghan Markle, Reese Witherspoon, Jillian Harris, Jennifer Lopez, Aaliyah, Paris Hilton, Mindy Lahiri, and Viola Davis, for example. However, it is in spite of the sex appeal rather than because of it. #RandolpHarris 11 of 14
Helen of Troy was the symbol for Beauty itself. For beauty was the condition of harmony between different truths and different deeds of virtue; and in this sense it was the aspect of Arete that needed most to be cultivated, the treasure of all human aspiration. This could well be the secret of the greatness of Greece, above all the arguments concerning the power given by their enthusiasm at driving back the Persians in 490 and 480 B.C., or all the explanations on the basis of the riches of Athens in this fifth century with its slave populations, and all the other contemporary arguments of our sociologists and psychologists. We are pushed back to the simplest explanation of all: that Helen was the symbol of Beauty and the myth that meant just what is said, namely, that Beauty was worth the whole expedition to Troy. We capitalize the term because the word now takes on divinity for Greeks: Helen is later made a goddess. It may thus be that greatness of Greece and especially of Athens was due to the fact that city-states could be so devoted to Beauty that they lived and died for it. This could well have been the center of their concept of Arete, that indefinable center of virtue which every Athenian sought to achieve above all other things. The Greeks called themselves Hellenes, and the land id called Hellas to this day, which indicates that Helen really was the symbolic figure for the soul of Greece. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14
The Greek people were fighting for their inner selves which surely makes more sense than fighting for a flag. Any nation which can fight, and win, such battles for their own soul, for their belief in Beauty, deserves in some way to have glory that in universally accorded this little, ancient nations. Art is our way of managing our inner turmoil, transcending our terror, and protecting ourselves from our own psychotic tendencies. From the high tension of Motherwell’s canvases, to the eruption of Hofmann’s brilliant colors, to the despair of Picasso’s Guernica, art relieves our extremes of emotions. Our inordinate passion is drained off; our pressure to act out these emotions in society is relieved, and we are deeply consoled. Art gives us repose and harmony where the otherwise would be explosion and destruction. Thus art is our universal therapist. It mirrors and gives us catharsis for our terror of dehumanization. As we stand in the presence of de Kooning’s canvases, we are strengthened in our efforts to transcend our inner conflicts. Modern art speaks often directly to our subconscious and preconscious selves, as in Pollock and Rothko. Instead of running from our troublesome dreams, we can welcome them into awareness, as when we look at Hofmann or Dali. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14
In these ways myth as an art form ministers to us on dimensions below consciousness; it encompasses or irrationality and our soul tendencies. Myths thus humanize mortals even though this process is always precarious. Thus myths give us a harmony of rational and irrational, a harmony of antimonies. Myths carry health-giving catharsis, as no one can doubt after seeing Aeschylus’ Agamemnon or Euripides’s Helen. If we wished an explanation for humankind’s invention of myths, we need to go no farther than the fact that myths enables us to live more humanly in the midst of our unhuman, warring unconscious. Myths enable us to exist and persevere as strangers in a strange land. Art is contemplation, it is the joy of intelligence. It is not the tyranny of the ego which is to be removed most of all—although that is a necessary part of the Great Work—nor is it that the ego must be uprooted and killed forever—although its old self must surrender to the new person it has become. No—let it live and attend to its daily work but only as purified being, an ennobled character or quietened mind, an enlightened person—in short, a new ego representing that is best in the human creature. One will still be an “I” but one that is in harmony with the Overself—a descriptive name that ought to be kept and not discarded. So do not in your life attack the ego as so many do, but life it up to the highest possibility. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14
Feel a Kinship in Loneliness—a Kinship with the Whole of Nature, with the Universe of Dawns and Stars
I did not want to sleep. I lay on my blanket trying to sleep, but sleep did not come and I did not want it. I never wanted it. However, now my thoughts were racing. We were going home, and I had so much to think about because so much had happened, and now they were saying these strange things. And what had happened today? What had had happened with Leo Pete—I could remember it. There were like bright shapes in my mind for which I did not have words. I had never felt anything before like the power that had come out of me. In the times of the creation of symbols, the function of the artist is to create new order. In times of excessively rigid symbols, in contrast, the function of the artist is to create chaos. This latter is the challenge facing modern artists. The artists are concerned with form and the breaking up of misused form. This is so not only of the professional artists but of the artist in each of us. The German poet Johann Christian Friedrich Holderlin wrote that when danger increases, the power to meet it also increases. Holderlin was a great poet and a schizophrenic at the same time; his pathology was related to his poetic talent. Thus epilepsy was called in ancient times the God-given illness, and it was thought by some persons in ancient Greece that psychosis produced poetry and profound inspiration. That is why great art often emerges in the after math of psychosis and neurosis. Some of the new artistic sensibility may reside in those very pathological aspects of life. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
In light of this, I think it would be very important if we would value our breakdowns more, take more interest in our so-called neurotic symbols. Our breakdowns are often the place where we discover our vocations as artists or other professionals. And pathological tendencies often reveal and enrich the artist’s repertoire of symbols. They force people to wake up to life, to feel, not to go through life somnambulistically, not to let one’s neurotic patterns block off one’s appreciation of beauty. If it had not been for the inner chaos of some individuals, when they see a field of poppies in super bloom, they might just think, “Well, these fields of red poppies are pretty,” and go on to ignore them, instead of letting the moment inspire one and see that there is God’s grace being manifested in nature. The beauty of the poppies allows some feel a kinship in their loneliness—a kinship with the whole of nature, with the Universe of dawns and stars; it jars some out of their old routine. In this respect a breakdown, when one strikes a psychological road block, can be a very valuable experience. The times when one is wounded are often times when, out of these wounds, come new thoughts, new possibilities. Art and the beauty from which it comes makes us stop and take inventory of our lives. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
Art and its symbols disrupt and enrich us who receive them, whether they are pretty or not. The richness of the artistic symbol is a richness of you and me, the receivers. The viewer thinks and feels a symbol, and by the symbol one gets one’s artistic response. For example, I am walking along a street and I see a cross in a shop window. I pay no attention to it at first, but four or five steps down the street I suddenly get a lot of ideas. Perhaps it symbolizes the crucifixion? Or perhaps it is a Ku Klux Klan cross, to be burned in that yard across the street? Or perhaps it is an advertisement for the Red Cross. Thus the symbol cues off in me, the viewer, the agony of the Ku Klux Klan’s cross or the ideal meaning of the Christian cross, as well as other possible meanings. The responses are obviously not in the symbol itself; they are in us, the viewers. However, you cannot feel them until the symbol hits you. You cannot think in that rich way except with the help of symbols. The central Crucifixion in Matthias Grunewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece, c. 1512-1515 is one of the most tragic and horrifying depictions of Christ on the cross ever painted. Many people cannot bear to look at it. Rigor mortis has set in, Christ’s body is torn with wounds and scars, his flesh is greenish gray, his feet are mangled, and his hands are stiffly contorted in the agony of death. The painting portrays suffering, pure and simple. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
However, Grunewald painted this altarpiece for a hospital chapel, and it was assumed that patients would find solace in knowing that Christ has suffered at least as much as they. In this painting, the ugly and horrible are transformed into art, not least of all because, as Christians believe, resurrection and salvation await the Christs after his suffering. The line that runs down Christ’s right side is, in fact, the edge of a double door that opens to reveal the Annunciation and Resurrection behind. In the latter, Christ’s body has been transformed into a pure, unblemished white, his hair and beard are gold, and his wounds are rubies. A symbol is a bridging act. It puts together rational and emotional, cognitive and conative, past and present, individual and social, conscious and unconscious. All these are formed together as a montage. Marshall McLuhan, similarly, uses the figure of transparency: a symbol is a collage of transparent items. You can see through the top one to the various levels below and behind it, which is one way to look at Rothko’s and Olitski’s paintings. Nevertheless, there is something that needs to be said about the creative use of anger. Yet it is very elusive and perhaps escapes precise definition. Why can some people fight so creatively and effectively, while for others it seems to lead only to further frustration and bitterness? Many of the factors in symbolism are probably involved, but perhaps there is something more. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
Very likely it is involved with the basic themes of our fear of love and our distrust of ourselves. One man in counseling said, “When somebody hurts you, you want to hurt them back.” When he said this, he was referring to his angry exchanges with his wife, which usually ended with no creative resolutions or awareness of their love for each other. When we see the anger of another toward us as primarily an attempt to hurt us rather than as an attempt to communicate feelings, and when we then reciprocate by attempting to hurt the other rather tan primarily expressing our feelings, it seems unlikely that we can achieve any creative experience. We are most likely to fly off onto a tangent of accusation and probing at weak points in the other person’s defenses where they can be hurt the most. Why does this happen? It is probably because we feel very threatened and incapable of dealing directly with another person. If we allow the other person full expression of feelings without reacting defensively and hurtfully, our self-hate leads us to assume that we will be overwhelmed. Often involved, too, is the assumption that expression of anger means the absence of love, which is probably an unconscious reaction to our fear of the experience of love, which the direct expression of anger can bring. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Looking at this from the beneficial aspect, it might be said that the quality that exists when anger is used creatively is a persistent basic trust and good humor. If a person could put into word, this is the kind of attitude that might go something like this: “Here we are, two people who are madder than hades at each other. And while we are both saying things, which to the outsider might sound terribly rejecting, yet I some how sense that he matters a great deal to me and that I matter a great deal to him.” It is that kind of attitude that can lead to the experience one man reported when, as the anger subsided, both he and his wife broke into pleased grins. “You know,” he said, “I really enjoyed that heated debate, even while it was going on. I felt really alive and like I was really being myself. And I enjoyed you standing up for yourself and explaining your position.” Such an attitude involved a feeling of self-worth in which one feels lovable and assumes the other person cares. The feeling, “He is angry with me, so he must not love me,” does not enter the picture. The individual is also sufficiently unafraid of love that one can enjoy the encounter of love even in its angry form. He also does not condemn himself for being angry. This discussion of the creative use of anger should not be closed without recognizing that there will always be situations in which we do not express all of the anger we feel. There will be situations, perhaps at work, for example, where we will choose to suppress anger. Often the results of expressing anger would not be as bad as we assume they would be. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
Nonetheless it is possible to suppress anger without destroying ourselves. If it appears necessary, it is best that we do it with full awareness, knowing that we are angry, choosing to suppress it, and accepting the fact that we choose to do so. Discussing our feelings with some safe third person unconnected with the situation may help us to deal with the feelings. However, in relationship that really matter to us—where we long for the experience of love—the creative expression of anger will usually be the most satisfying and productive choice. The psychodramtic technique also uses the body, in that the person acts out a situation rather than just verbalizing it. The fantasy methods require an expansion of our explanation of the effectiveness of the methods, since they do not involve physical movement, but rather the full use of the imagination. Frequently, the loss of a significant person early in life has a traumatic effect upon the child. Later, this can have serious consequences for one’s adult relations with others. Whenever this situation is suspected and seems to be interfering seriously with the present functioning of the individual, this technique may prove very helpful. The central person, or protagonist, is asked to select someone in the group whom one feels is similar to the lost person and role-play with the individual the situation of meeting this lost individual. If the latter is dead, the protagonist imagines oneself going to Heaven for the meeting. The scene begins with a conversation about how the protagonist tell the lost one about one’s feeling about him or her. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
After a few interchanges, the protagonist is asked whether or not the role player is portraying the lost individual accurately. If one is not quite right, the roles are reversed and the protagonist plays the role of the missing one. This technique of role reversal is used several times as appropriate to help the protagonist feel how the other person feels. Other group members are invited to alter ego, that is, to stand behind one of the principals and say things they think the principal is feeling but not saying. Usually this combination of role reversal and alter ego brings out the major elements of the situation and allows the protagonist to explore and feel the full dimensions of the issue. The action is closed by having a realistic solution enacted, where the reality is now based on all the revealed issues. Usually the group leader or an experienced member is the director, although when the group becomes experienced all group members can participate in the direction of the enactment. The protagonist may select the actors one wants to play other parts, or they may volunteer, or sometimes it may be more useful to have one play to an empty chair. One changes chairs as one plays both parts. The technique is part of the psychodramatic method and usually is most effective when directed by someone familiar with that method. It tends to be a very emotionally involving method and in unskilled hands can leave the protagonist in some distress. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
To further illustrate, when she was nice, Anne’s father had divorced her mother, and left home. Anne knew that he had remarried since then and had more children. When she was about fourteen he had asked her to spend the Summer with him, but for some circumstantial reasons she did not go. Now, at forty, Anne has never seen her father since, although she admitted to always being vaguely in search of him. Currently she was having a great deal of difficulty with her husband, particularly in the area of feeling much and giving much to him. As the discussion proceeded, it became clear that she may have not been able to give herself fully to her husband because she had never resolved her feelings for her father. It seemed then that the best way to deal with the marital problem was to start with the father relationship. Anne was asked to select someone most like her father from the group. One man came to her mind immediately. Then she was asked to enact with him the hypothetical scene in which she finally meets her father. The other members of the group were invited to double whenever they wished, that is, whenever they thought that Anne or her father were not saying all they felt. Anne began by asking the father his name. Just as she began to say her name she began to cry. This continued for ten or fifteen minutes with Anne crying and her “father” holding her. The group, of course, was very surprised, moved, and tear. It was especially surprising since Anne had been quite closed and uninvolved in the group prior to this. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
Finally, after the group had sat silently while Anne cried, she stopped. At this point it was very important to continue, although Anne was very tired. What had occurred was catharsis, but it just opened the door for further work on the problem and was not an end in itself. She continued the meeting scene, telling the father how she felt. She seemed to be omitting her hostile feelings, so one group member played her alter ego and Anne could begin expressing them more easily. It became apparent that Anne had not thought much about her father’s situation, so she was asked to reverse roles and play her father. This enabled her better to understand how he might feel. At one point her mother was introduced into the situation in the person of another group member, and Anne played, at various times, all three roles: self, father, and mother, to get a sense of what was happening in the trio. Finally, it seemed that Anne was really becoming exhausted, so she was asked to talk to her father and try to work out a realistic future with him now that the many aspects of the problem had been somewhat experienced and understood. This was accomplished nicely and they ended in a fond embrace, with a more rational understanding of the situation. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Several other things could have been done with Anne; she could have confronted her father’s second wife, or his other children, or gone back and talked to her husband. However, it seemed that what she did was the most immediately important and drained all the energy she had. It was unlikely that she would have been receptive to any more exercises at the time. After this her mood changed radically and she became much happier and more effusive, a feeling that lasted during the remaining days of the workshop. Following is her own report of the episode and the events and feelings surrounding it. Anne’s account: When I really got plugged in emotionally at that group was when everyone walked off and left Stan alone in that room. [The group had left alone a group member who felt rejected, so that he could experience the feeling of being abandoned. Anne could not do it, and returned to be with him.] Inside me was the recurrent feeling that if he needs someone then someone will be there. Not that someone would or could do anything but that he would not be left completely alone. The second thing that had impact was when one of the girls was describing her feelings about her father’s closeness and concern, telling her what a precious little darling she was to him (her hang-up was too much father, mine was too little) and again the impact of, “I wish my father would have told me these things.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
The next thing was your direct confrontation, “You never talk about your husband. Why?” Because it is damn hard for me to admit failure (rejection) again—first my father, then my first husband, and now my second husband. When you said, “Pick out someone in the group to be your father,” Casper came to mind, and when we were there and he was holding on to me and I felt his arms and looked at them, they were like my father’s: muscled, brown with light-colored hair, kind of springy hair. (Casper is my father’s name, too.) When I sat on that cushion and looked at him, the intensity of feeling was enormous. I had no feeling of my body extremities. Just deep inside, somewhere behind my umbilicus, a gathering of something into a huge ball, soft and musky outside and hard as tungsten at the core. It kept moving up past my stomach, exploding in my chest and gushing out through my head, mouth, eyes, ears, nose. The pain began with the gushing, increased with the upward movement, and became unbearable with the explosion. My chest was tight and kept trying to push it back down. All during this time, I could only look at Casper’s face, mostly eyes, and when I said, “I am Anne Rice,” it really broke loose. I have never felt like that before nor have I ever cried like that before. Every noise, sob, cry which came out was coming from the same place that the original one came from only they were not so large or hard-cored, and they gradually diminished in size. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
The pain kept diminishing also in relationship to the size. I had no awareness of anyone else in the room. There was only Casper and myself. In between the noise and pain the awareness of his arms around me and the hanging on to him, the feeling of being enfolded, the feeling of comfort, the feeling of “I am home, at last,” the feeling of peace, serenity, and happiness began to gain dominance and profundity. It is incomprehensible to me, even now, that I could have had all that inside me and had no awareness of the fact that it was there. However, at that point I did not care about the whys and wherefores, but only that it was out, and it was just great. Then I felt really loosened up and felt available to everyone else. During the subsequent time of the group, I had that beautiful feeling inside of being at peace with myself and the rest of the World. I still cannot get onto hostility/anger regarding my father, but maybe it is just not time yet. I am sure there is quite a bit directed towards my mother. My mother and father divorced when I was nine years old with great bitterness on my mother’s part, which she expressed in depth and detail as to what a hard time it was. However, he came to see my brother and me on occasion until I was twelve. Whenever he did come, we would go on to the airport or Cleveland and fly in the plane or a blimp. It was a marvelous, happy feeling. Those things where a blast. I never saw him after that age, however. That made me feel inadequate. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
My father remarried and he wrote to me infrequently. Mother told me to answer his letters. When I was seventeen, he had gone into the Navel Reserve. He sent me money for tuition and books for a year at the University. That made me feel good. That spring both he and his wife wrote and asked me to come to California and spend their leave wit them and go to Yellowstone Park. I was happy about their invitation, but my mother had hysterics and said that all he wanted was a baby-sitter, and if I went I could never come home again. I felt strongly upset with her. At that point, I wrote that I could not come out to California, and I have never heard from him since. At the time, I felt like a scared little child, but also felt I did not deserve any better. Over a period of time, I had thought that was all there was to it and that it had no effect on me and my life. (How wrong can one be?) Having achieved some measure of success professionally, I began to have a recurrent fantasy and dream of meeting him. When I was about thirty, this developed in frequency and intensity. I had never worked through the fantasy beyond the initial confrontation. The recurrent themes were: I would find out where he was, I would go there, I would talk with him, and would tell him who I was. I always had hopes that he would be proud of me, he would be happy to see me, and all would be joy. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
I have never had a fantasy or dream since the experience in the group about y father and although I would like to see him if I could, I do not have the tension or anxiousness about it. The need does not seem to be there. You are absolutely right about the draining of energy. The tension of trying to push it up and trying to suppress it, or its trying to push up and out and struggle to give up control and the struggle to not fall apart for years does deplete one, down to the bottom. Also, it is such a joy to find the feeling of release that is part of the reward for the struggle, and I feel that is part of the whole need and process. Painful as it was, the peacefulness far outweighs the pain. (A second example illustrates the method applied to a death rather than a separation.) It had been noted in one group that Michelangelo was somewhat naive and seemed to lean heavily on the authority figures, idolize them, and make them omniscient. Michelangelo was a young man in his early twenties whose father had died when he was five. He had never really experienced grief. The account of his father’s death given him by his mother had been accepted, and he never reflected on the situation again. Because of his difficult relation with authorities, it seemed promising to explore the feelings surrounding his father’s death in order to understand and clarify the authority situation. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
He was asked to imagine himself going to Heaven (some say that is what inspired The Last Judgment, “Guidizio Universale,” Sistine Chapel, 1531-1541) meeting his father, and talking to him about the circumstances surrounding his death and the subsequent events up to the present. He selected a group member most like his father to play that role, and began discussing his feelings around his father’s death. He frequently traded roles with his “father,” his “mother” was brought in and he reversed roles with her, and several group members served as his alter ego. He discussed missing his father, what effect it had on his later life, whether or not his father would be proud of him, hostility toward his father, his father’s attitude toward his mother and vice versa. Through all of these he was very involved and very depressed as the drama unfolded. Finally the accumulated emotion overwhelmed him and he buried his head in his “father’s” shoulder and began to cry. The cry was one of the most incredible imaginable. It lasted for twenty or thirty minutes without stopping. It varied from crying without tears, to sobbing, to crying without noise, to an infant’s tears, to a tantrum, to a quiet wail. After it was over, a long silence claimed the group. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
Slowly a discussion began of the impact of the event. One of the group members had a sudden insight that explained the crying. It sounded as though he had cried out all the crying he had never been able to get out—almost in sequence, backwards. Starting with an adult cry, he progressed backward through adolescent crying, childhood crying, and even wailed like an infant. All the crying that had been stored up and suppressed had finally been unleased. He felt exhausted and exhilarated. He was a very relaxed man thereafter. The dependency lessened, the voice became firmer, and the feeling prevailed that he had worked through much of the unresolved feelings for his father, and was ready to meet his peers more realistically. Michelangelo was immediately put back into the dramatic situation and a realistic solution of the relation between a son and a dead father was elaborated upon. What happened: In both these cases the original abandonment, happening at a very early age, had a devastating effect upon the child, an effect that was quickly covered over. The covering allowed the immediate sorrow to be bearable but took a profound toll in the basic personality. Anne’s relations with men were not as good as they could have been, and Michelangelo’s relations with male authorities and with women, wen it came to his being a man, were sadly slightly dysfunctional. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
The suppression Michelangelo required in order to endure the original abandonment acted as a cork on all the feelings surrounding the event. The dramatic reliving of these situations exploded the cork and the repressed feelings flooded out. In both cases, the relief was monumental. This release was essential to their psychological progress, but equally important was the subsequent conclusion of the relationship, and the following upon the catharsis to a realistic relation with the lost person. The events were so shaking that the full effect will not be known for several months, perhaps years. However, all indications are that these two people have entered a new phase of emotional development. Through the experience they were able to bear with unbearable sorrow and thereby gain renewed self-esteem and freedom from the burden of that sorrow. The second technique worthy of special mention is the use of fantasy, specifically the method derived from the guided daydream or initiated symbol projection. These methods, only recently developed, have a profound power to deal with very deep material in a very short time. When the deepest unconscious material is sought, it appears to be the method of choice. The method has great untapped potential and is so exciting and dramatic that several examples will be presented, including firsthand accounts from those experiencing the fantasy. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
On God’s part creation is not an act of self-expansion but of restraint and renunciation. God and all his creatures are less than God alone. God accepts this diminution. He emptied a part of his being from himself. He had already emptied himself in this act of divinity; that is why Saint John says that the Lamb had been slain from the beginning of the World. God permitted the existence of things distinct from himself and worth infinitely less than himself. By this creative act he denied himself, as Christ has told us to deny ourselves. God denied himself for our sakes in order to give us the possibility of denying ourselves for him. This response, this echo, which it is in our power to refuse, is the only possible justification for the folly of love of the creative act. The religions which have a conception of this renunciation, this voluntary effacement of God, his apparent absence and his secret presence here below, these religions are true religion, the translation into different languages of the great Revelation. The religions which represent divinity as commanding wherever it has the power to do so seem false. Even though they are monotheistic they are idolatrous. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
One who being reduced by affliction to the state of an inert and passive thing, returns, at least for a time, to the state of a human being, through the generosity of others; such as one, if he or she knows how to accept and feel the true essence of this generosity, receives at the very instant a soul begotten exclusively of charity. One is born from on high of water and of the Spirit. (The word in the Gospel, anothen, means from on high more often than again.) To treat our neighbor who is in affliction with love is something like baptizing him or her. One from whom the act of generosity proceeds can only behave as one does if one’s thought transports one into the other. At such a moment one also consists only of water and of the Spirit. Generosity and compassion are inseparable, and both have their model in God, that is to say, in creation and in the Passion. Christ taught us that the supernatural love of our neighbor is the exchange of compassion and gratitude which happens in a flash between two beings, one possessing and the other deprived of human personality. One of those two is only a little piece of flesh, vulnerable, inert, and bleeding beside a ditch; one is nameless; no one knows anything about him. Those who pass by this thing scarcely notice it, and a few minutes afterward do not even know that they saw it. Only one stops and turns his attention toward it. The actions that follow are just the automatic effect of this moment of attention. The attention is creative. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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
At Such a Curious Earth Love is Supposed to be for the Souls of Sanity—I am Glad they Did Believe it!
Success without integrity is nothing. Productive love always implies a syndrome of attitude that care of, responsibility, respect and knowledge. If love, I care—that is, I am actively concerned with the other person’s growth and happiness; I am not a spectator. I am responsible, that is, I respond to the other individual’s needs, to those this person can express and more so to those one cannot or does not express. I respect the other individual, that is (according to the original meaning of re-spicere) I look at this person as if one is, objectively and not distorted by my wishes and fears. I know this individual, I have penetrated through this person’s surface to the more of this individual’s being and related myself to this being from my core, from the center, as against the periphery, of my being. Care of the soul asks us to observe its needs continually, to give them our wholehearted attention. Imagine advising someone with many signs of neglect of soul to build an annex on one’s house for soul work. It may seem strange or even unusual to do something so expensive and so external to deal with our psychological complaints. Yet it is obvious that soul is not going to be healed solely by means of one hour of interior retreat in the midst of an active modern life. Our retreat from the World may have to be more serious and more constantly present in out lives than a weekly counseling visit or an occasional day spa and massage. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
Today we find a radical situation occurring as women beg into discover that they are much more than they or the men in their lives have known or been willing to admit. Women’s role in life, in this country, has been drastically limited to a few portrayals or dimensions. However, in the past few years, a developing, revolutionary, self-emergence program is shaking the foundations of society and is certainly giving a lot of people reason to lose sleep. This country has been the inheritor of an Antiquated World attitude toward women. Even in the Bible, women were portrayed as having the very important roles of wife, mother, and homemaker, rarely anything else. Oh, there were always spots for dancing girls, servants, comfort women, slaves, and craftswomen. However, the life of the typical woman in the Old World was very clearly marked out for her. If she were fortunate, attractive, and/or from a wealthy family, a girl could look forward to getting married, raising children, building a household, and gaining respect by doing a creditable job in these limited areas. One of the classical descriptions of the ideal wife comes from the Old Testament of the Bible and has been used to shape the life of women ever since: A good wife who can find? She is far more precious than jewels. The heart of her husband trusts in her, and she will have no lack of gain. She does him good, and not harm all the days of her life. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
A productive wife seeks wool and flax, and works with willing hands. She like the ships of the merchant, she brings her food from afar. She rises while it is yet night and provides food for her household and tasks for her maidens. She considers a field and buys it; with the fruit of her hands she plants a vineyard. She girds her loins with strength and makes her arms strong. She perceives that her merchandise is profitable. Her lamp does not go out at night. She puts her hands to the distaff, and her hands hold the spindle. She looks well to the ways of her household, and does not eat the bread of idleness. Her children rise up and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praises her: “Many women have done excellently, but you surpass them all.” Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised. Give her of the fruit of her hands, and let her works praise he in the gates. God does not make us holy in the sense that he makes our character holy. He makes us holy in the sense that he has made us innocent before him. And then we have to turn that innocence into holy character through the moral choices we make. These choices are continually opposed and hostile to the things of our natural life which we have become so deeply entrenched. We can either turn back, making ourselves if no value to the kingdom of God, or we can determinedly demolish things that exalt themselves against the knowledge of God. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
That is a full-time and not unimportant job, living up to those expectations! In the Old World, it was probably all a woman could handle. However, in those times, there must have been occasions when the woman could have participated in decision-making and some of the other ongoing life of the town or country. Yet, there was no opportunity for her. Medicine, above all psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, often claims that healing anxiety is its task because all anxiety altogether, for anxiety is sickness, mostly in a psychosomatic, sometimes only in a psychological sense. All forms of anxiety can be healed, and since there is no ontological root of anxiety there is no existential anxiety. Medical insight and medical help—this is the conclusion—are the way to the courage to be; the medical profession is the only healing profession. Although this extreme position is taken by an ever-decreasing number of physicians and psychotherapists it remains important from the theoretical point of view. It includes a decision about the nature of mortals which must be made explicit, in spite of the positivistic resistance to ontology. The psychiatrist who asserts that anxiety is always pathological cannot deny the potentiality of illness in human nature, and one must account for the facts of finitude, doubt, and guilt in every human being; one must, in terms of one’s own presupposition, account for the universality of anxiety. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
One cannot avoid the question of the human nature since in practicing one’s profession one cannot avoid the distinction between health and illness, existential and pathological anxiety. This is why more and more representatives of medicine generally and psychotherapy specifically ask for the cooperation with the philosophers and theologians. And it is why through this cooperation a practice of counseling has developed which is, like every attempted synthesis, dangerous as well as significant for the future. The medical faculty needs a doctrine of mortals in order to fulfill its theoretical task; and it cannot have a doctrine of mortal without the permanent cooperation of all those faculties whose central object is human beings. The medical profession has the purpose of helping mortal in some of their existential problems, those which usually are called diseases. However, it cannot help a person without the permanent cooperation of all other professions whose purpose is to help mortals as mortals. Both the doctrines about mortals and the help given to mortal are a matter of cooperation from many points of view. Only in this way is it possible to understand and to actualize mortal’s power of being, one’s essential self-affirmation, one’s courage to be. In our present day, women have been relieved of much of the drudgery of homemaking. It is still a very hard job and one filled with great responsibility, especially the role of mothering. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
Productive love when directed toward equals may be called brotherly love. In motherly love the relationship between the two persons involved is one of inequality; the child is helpless and dependent on the mother. In order to grow, the baby must become more and ore independent, until the child does not need all of its support from the mother. Thus the mother-child relationship is paradoxical and, in a sense, tragic. It requires the most intense love on the mother’s side, and yet this very love must help the child to grow away from the mother, and to become fully independent. It is easy for any mother to love her child before this process of separation has begun—but it is the task in which most fail, to love the child and at the same time to let it go—and to want to let it go. Many men, not understanding the intricacies of home economics, grumble and growl about their workaday World and tell their wives that homemaking is a snap! Yet, if they have to take over the chores fora day when their wives are sick or out of town, they frequently find out just how difficult it all is. However, what with modern appliances and good planning,many women are finding time left over after housework and child-care is done. Keeping busy and out of mischief by devotion to creative or domestic chores was the Old World solution to free hours. “Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business and t work with your hands, just as you were told,” reports 1 Thessalonians 4.11. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
Women began discovering the fuller nature of their beings along time ago, but were more or less resigned to their limited existence until,with dramatic results, men began to put them to work outside of the home. The tragic story of labor’s abuses and the subsequent involvement of women in there form movements is but a short chapter in the history of womankind’s growing awareness of its greater potentials. In erotic love, another drive is involved:that for fusion and union with another person. While brotherly love refers to all mortals and motherly love to the child and all those who are in need of our help, erotic love is directed to one person, normally of the opposite gender, with whom fusion and oneness is desired. Erotic love begins with separateness, and ends in oneness. Motherly love begins with oneness, and leads to separateness. If the need for fusion were realized in motherly love, it would mean destruction of the child as an independent being, since the child needs to emerge from one’smother, rather than remained dependent on her. If erotic love lacks brotherly love and is only motivated by the wish for fusion, it is sexual desire without love, or the perversion of love as we find it in the sadistic and masochistic forms of love. “People that had been wrought upon by the Spirit of God, and had been healed; and they did show forth signs also and did some miracles among the people,” reports 3 Nephi 7.22. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
Critics of women’s rights should remember that women have been very instrumental in bringing about social changes. Women played a significant part in protecting the abuses of drinking, and had much pressure brought to bear on the legislation for Prohibition. Not that this was necessarily the best legislation we could have had! Nevertheless, the economic and political power of women was felt. Then, in their insistence on equal treatment, women demanded the right to vote and today are very instrumental in legislation and their force is felt all across the World today. Also, in recent years, mothers have become an important force for peace. Women have demonstrated abilities in every field of endeavor formerly thought to be beyond their talents and capabilities.They can run congress, lathes, computer, the senate, be presidents of corporations and of countries; they write, edit, and publish books; they paint prize-winning paintings, drives buses and trucks, repair TV’s and telephone lines, perform surgery, pull teeth, preach, teach, practice law, and administer educational institutions. Without doubt, the high degree of skills demonstrated by many of them is destroying old concepts as effectively as it is damaging the egos of some males. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
However, do not be offended by this, but I do not think anyone can run a house as well as a woman. It takes a certainly kind of womanly love to cook, clean, do laundry, iron, organize, look good, sew, deal with business people and keep the house peaceful while standing sane. Reese Witherspoon’s Whiskey in a Tea Cup is a New York Times Best Seller and one of the most influential books to come to public attention in recent times. Without putting down the important dimensions of wife, mother, actress, business woman, singer, model and homemaker, Mrs. Witherspoon urges women to actualize their natural fourth dimensions: creative and productive talents. She also shares some personal stories, wives tales, recipes, and lets other women that the career can be just as important as her housewifely roles, which gives many women the incentive to declare themselves as full-fledged human beings. One understands fully mortal’s need to be related only if one considers the outcome of the failure of any kind of relatedness, if one appreciates the meaning of narcissism. The only reality the infant can experience is one’s own body and affection. The baby has not yet the experience of “I” as separate from “thou.” The precocious darling is still in a state of oneness with the World, but a oneness before the awakening of his or her sense of individual reality. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
The World outside, for the baby, exists only as so much food, or so much warmth to be used for the satisfaction of one’s own needs, but not as something or somebody who is recognized realistically and objectively. This orientation has been named primary narcissism, and it is not a bad thing. In normal development, children are often treated as the are deities or prized possession, and this is important for their safety, security, and confidence. This state of narcissism is slowly overcome by a growing awareness of reality outside, and by a correspondingly growing sense of “I” as differentiated from “thou.”This change occurs at first on the level of sensory perception, when things and people are perceived as different and specific entities, a recognition which lays the foundation for the possibility of speech; to name things pre-supposes recognizing them as individual and separate entities. It takes much longer until the narcissistic state is overcome emotionally; for the child up to the age of seven or eight years, other people still exist mainly as means for the satisfaction of one’s needs. They are exchangeable inasmuch as they fulfill the function of satisfying these needs, and it is only around the ages between eight and nine years that another person is experienced in such a way that the child can begin to love, that is to say, to feel that the needs of another person are as important as their own. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
However, that may not necessarily be the full story. Babies smile at only a few weeks old to bond with their parents and make them happy, as they know how powerful being cute is because it will compel people to want to take care of them and love them. Many parents also have their pleasure of knowing that they are their child’s first real love, in a platonic sense, of course. The fact that utter failure to relate oneself to the World is insanity, points to the other fact: that some form of relatedness is the condition for any kind of sane living. However, among the various forms of relatedness, only the productive one, freedom and integrity while being, at the same time, untied with one’s fellow mortals. “Therefore, go ye unto your homes, and ponder upon the things which I have said, and ask of the Father, in my name, that ye may understand and prepare your minds for the morrow, and I come unto you again,” reports 3 Nephi 17.3. In the interpretation of human existence theology and medicine unavoidably joined philosophy, whether they were conscious of it our not. And in joining philosophy they joined each other even if their understanding of mortals went toward opposite directions. This is why theologians and ministers eagerly seek collaboration with medical professional, and many forms of occasional institutionalized cooperation result. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
One of the very first patients monitored was a woman 72 years of age who was in the coronary care unit because she had what is known as 2:1 heart block; that is, the upper portion of her heart (called the atrium) would begin the beat, but only every other beat would cause the remainder of her heart (the ventricles) to beat. During the pulse taking, a patient’s heart rate began to vary from its pattern of 2:1 block, changing back and forth from 2 degrees to 1 degree block. In essence, her heart began to change from 30 up to 60 beats per minute. During two other episodes of pulse taking and one episode of blood pressure measurement, very similar cardiac reactions occurred. While this patient was still in heart block, however, there was one other episode of pulse taking during which there were no heart rate or hearty rhythm changes. For three minutes prior to a sequence in which a nurse came to this patient’s bedside simply to give her a pill, the patient’s heart rate had been a regular 2:1 heart block rate of 35 beats per minute. However, during the entire one minute the nurse was at her bedside, the patient’s heart rate abruptly changed to a different mode of conduction and her heart rate was 70-75 beats per minute, only to change back abruptly to a rate of 35 beats per minute and 2:1 heart block for the three minutes after the nurse left the patient’s bedside. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
A similar reaction occurred when the nurse brought this patient lunch. Later that same day, the medicine (atropine) the cardiologist had prescribed took effect, and the patient was no longer in continuous 2:1 block. During this period we again monitored an episode of pulse taking. This time the beat-to-beat heart rate both before and after pulse taking was approximately 70-75 beats per minute, with only periodic episodes of heart block occurring. However, when the nurse took the patient’s pulse, the heart rate was slightly elevated, the beat became quite rhythmic,and the periodic pattern of heart block was completely abolished. In the light of the type of cardiac problems experienced by this patient and the medication she was given, it was not difficult for us to deduce the changes in the patient’s nervous system that were producing these reactions. Understanding those physiological mechanisms suggests that bedside matter of human compassion, medication and religious could be an effective three-fold method to help heal patients and keep them alive. Research indicates the prayer can extend a person’s life by four years. Evidence is causing more and more people to believe that there is metaphysical forces beyond science at work in the World and human beings are conduits of this spiritual power. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
Religious doctrines typically include prescriptions for taking care of one’s own body (e.g., your body is a temple), and support psychological traits that are associated with self-control, such as humility, patience, mindfulness, and compassion. In addition, religious doctrines offer behavioral techniques, including mediation and prayer, that can help people regulate their emotions and actions. When people are exposed to religious themes or call to mind their religious beliefs, they are better able to endure discomfort, delay gratification, and follow through on challenging tasks. Religious people learn through training to control their emotions, particularly the negative emotions of fear, anger, and hatred, as these can push them towards a darkness they do not want to access. These beings are mindful of their thoughts and intentions and meditate and pray about their choices. However, the physician must be fully aware of the treatment to make sure the patient is receiving adequate medical care. And as a minister, one may radiate healing power for mind and body and help to remove symptoms and neurotic anxiety. The anxiety of fate and death produces nonpathological strivings for security. Large sections of mortal’s civilization serve the purpose of giving people safety against the attacks of fate and death. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
Mortals realize that no absolute and no final security is possible; mortals also realize that life demands again and again the courage to surrender some or even all security for the sake of full self-affirmation. Nevertheless,mortal reduce the power of fate and the threat of death as much as possible. Pathological anxiety about fate and death impels toward a security which is comparable to the security of a prison. One who lives in this prison is unable to leave the security given to one by one’s self-imposed limitations. However, these limitations are not based on a full awareness of reality. Therefore, they security of the neurotic is unrealistic. One fears what is not to be feared and one feels to be safe what is not safe. The anxiety which one is not able to take upon oneself produces images having no basis in reality, but it recedes in the face of things which should be feared. That is, one avoids particular dangers, although they are hardly real, and suppress the awareness of having to die although this is an ever-present reality. Misplaced fear is a consequence of the pathological form of the anxiety of fate and death. “And it came to pass that Jesus spake unto them, and bade them arise. And they arose from the Earth, and he said unto them: Blessed are ye because of your faith. And now behold, my joy is full,” reports 3 Nephi 17.19-20. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
In the last two years, the Women’s Liberation Movement, Time’s Up, and the Daughters of Sappho have been actively promoting a campaign for women’s full rights. Many of their tactics are alarming to men, to say the least! Men refuse women their full rights for a number of reasons. Tradition is an important obstacle, and the simple fact that women have always played a more or less passive, subservient role to men still looms large in the forefront of the conflict. Some men do not know how to relate to a woman who does not conform to what they think is a man’s inherent right of dominance and leadership. Nearly all of our social custom and a large percentage of our speech phrases contain an unconscious assumption that women are secondary in importance to men—are subservient to them, are to be protected by them, are pitifully incapable of matching their mental powers. The man is always the head of the household, even though today it is the women who actually manages and cares for the ongoing activities of the typical American home. Interestingly enough, the history of the word man means human being and mind; the word woman is a combination of two words meaning wife of a human being. And in Mandarin Chinese woman means we. Little wonder that males and females raised by the same mental set: a woman is a being that evolves with times and culture and becomes fully accepted. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Except for the definitely generic roles of fathering and mothering, the physical structure of men’s and women’s roles of fathering and mothering, the physical structure of men’s and women’s bodies plays very little part in determining fitness and aptitude for most jobs. There is nothing biologically determining in the roles of physician, surgeon, teacher, therapist, preacher, bookkeeper, computer programmer, or the thousands of other jobs in the nation today. Furthermore, biologist tell us that in terms of real endurance women are superior to men! Typically, men have larger skeletal and muscular structures, but that is really unimportant in terms of the stresses of modern living. Ananalogy can be drawn in terms of Sequoia sempervirens and a Syagrus romanzoffiana. Men are taught in most of the World, but especially America, to be strong and rugged, to use all stresses as building blocks against other stresses—as when an athlete strains and exercises one’s muscles in order to build stronger ones. Men are taught to compress their emotions into rigid anti-emotional-stress walls. Thus, internally and externally, men build themselves to withstand pressures, much like a Sequoia sempervirens. Women are typically taught to experience their emotions, to display them, to let them out, and even to utilize them to advantage. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
Without pressure build-ups on the inside, they remain supple, and when tensions arise from outside come at them, women are able to be more flexible with stress and life situations, much like the Syagrus romanzoffiana. It is not the unyielding Sequoia sempervirens that stands after the hurricane has blown past; it is the flexible and resilient Syagrus romanzoffiana. However, you also notice, although men and women are similar, their brains are different. Men and women usually attack different types of attention. You do not usually have a bunch of females jealous of a man, and you do not usually have a bunch of men jealous of a woman, but with gender bending and confusion growing larger in society, men and women are going to have to learn how to deal with different kinds of stressors to weather the storms. Another factor that interfere with acceptance by men of the equal rights and qualities of women is fear, but most men will neither accept nor acknowledge this reason. Also a product of the conditioning process is men’s unwillingness to understand their own needs for competence and ego integrity. Yet it is a false competence and a phony integrity that cannot stand up to testing, and the real test in this case is the ability and willingness to share a place in the Sun with other. Not your place or his place or my place or her place, but our place. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
The concept of sharing obviates the concept of competition between the genders and all of its conceits and manifestations. Yet, became we have grown up with the myth of male dominance, most of us (women included) are unprepared or unequipped to have it challenged. Women have demonstrated their capabilities in far too many ways for them to not be fully accepted as human beings; yet, as we have said many times, there are real lags between our intellectual understanding of reality and the changes in our institutions ordinary behavior that show our understanding. “If all pathways just led to now, then all I have been through was worth it somehow. For every treasure that is lost and found,through open doorways, when the lights have burned out, all I want is to be with you and feel like I am someone new. I could breathe if we just play down here tonight. All I want is to be with you. I feel you close in all I do. I can see; you light my way so clear tonight,” reports Tonight by Emma Hewitt and Cosmic Gate. And instead of being subject to death, when that last enemy shall be destroyed, and death be swallowed up in victory, through that atonement they can become the fathers and mothers of lives, and be capable of perpetual and eternal progression. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
Desire’s Perfect Goal Should Not Disenthrall Thy Soul—Here is a Star, there is a Star, Some Lose Their Way!
The love that lasts longest is the love that is never returned. Love would conquer all, of course, but one has to know when it is there first. Glaucus was a fisherman. One day he had drawn his nets to land and had taken a great many fishes of various kinds. So he emptied his nets and proceeded to sort the fishes on the grass. The place where he stood was a beautiful island in the river, a solitary spot, uninhabited, and not used for pasturage of cattle, not visited by anyone but himself. On a sudden, the fishes, which had been laid on the grass, began to revive and move their fins as if they were in the water; and while he looked on astonished, they one and all moved off to the water, plunged in, and swam away. He did not know what to make of this, whether some god had done it, or some secret power in the herbage. “What herb has such a power?” he exclaimed; and gathering some of it, he tasted it. Scarce had the juices of the plant reached his palate when he found himself agitated with a longing desire for the water. Glaucus could no longer restrain himself, but bidding farewell to Earth, he plunged into the stream. The gods of the water received him graciously and admitted hi to the honour of their society. They obtained the consent of Oceanus and Tethys, the sovereign of the sea, that all that was mortal in him should be washed away. #RandolphHarris 1 of 10
A hundred rivers poured their waters over Glaucus and then he lost all sense of his former nature and all consciousness. When he recovered, he found himself changed in form and mind. His hair was sea-green, and trailed behind him on the water; his shoulders grew broad, and what had been thighs and legs assumed the form of a fish’s tail. The sea-gods complimented him on the change of his appearance, and Glaucus fancied himself rather a good-looking personage. One day, Glaucus saw a beautiful maiden Scylla, the favourite of the water-nymphs, rambling on the shore, and when she had found a sheltered nook, laving her limbs on the clear water, he fell in live with her. Glaucus showed himself on the surface, spoke to the maiden, saying such things as he thought most likely to win her to stay; for she turned to run immediately on sight of him, and ran till she had gained a cliff overlooking the sea. Here she stopped and turned round to see whether it was a god or s sea animal, and observed with wonder his shape and colour. Glaucus, partly emerging from the water and supporting himself against a rock, said, “Maiden, I am not monster, nor sea animal, but a god; and neither Proteus nor Triton ranks higher than I. Once I was a mortal, and followed the sea for a living; but now I belong wholly to it.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 10
Then he told the story of his metamorphosis, and how he had been promoted to his present dignity, and added, “But what avails all this if it fails to move your heart?” Glaucus was going on in this strain, but the maiden, Scylla, turned and hastened away. Glaucus was in despair, but it occurred to him to consult the enchantress, Circe. Accordingly he repaired to her island. After mutual salutations, Glaucus said, “Goddess, I entreat your pity; you alone can relieve the pain I suffer. The power of the herbs I know as well as any one, for it is to them I owe my change of form. I love Scylla. I am ashamed to tell you how I have sued and promised to her, and how scornfully she has treated me. I beseech you to use your incantations, or potent herbs, if they are more prevailing, not to cure me of my love—for that I do not wish—but to make Scylla share it and yield me a like return.” To which Circe replied, for she was not insensible to the attractions of the sea-green deity, “You had better pursue a willing object; you are worthy to be sought, instead of having to seek in vain. Be not different, know your own worth. I protest to you that even I, goddess though I be, and learned in the virtue of plants and spells, should not know how to refuse you. If Scylla scorns you, scorn her; meet one who is ready to meet you half way, and thus make a due return to both at once.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 10
However, Glaucus replied, “Sooner shall trees grow at the bottom of the ocean, and seaweed on the top of the mountains, than I will cease to love Scylla, and her alone.” The goddess Circe was indignant, but she could not punish him, neither did she wish to do so, for she liked him too well; so she turned all her wrath against her rival, poor Scylla. She took her plants of poisonous powers and mixed them together, with incantations and charms. Then she passed through the crowd of gamboling beasts, the victims of her art, and proceeded to the coast of Sicily, where Scylla lived. There was a little bay on the shore to which Scylla used to resort, in the heat of the day, to breathe their air of the sea, and to bathe in its waters. Here the goddess poured her poisonous mixture, and muttered over it incantations of mighty power. Scylla came as usual and plunged into the water up to her waist. What was her horror to perceive a brood of serpents and barking monsters surrounding her! At first she could not imagine they were a part of herself, and tried to run from them and to drive them away; but as she ran she carried them with her, and when she tried to touch her limbs, she found her hands touch only the yawning jaws of monsters. Scylla remained rooted to the spot. #RandolphHarris 4 of 10
Scylla’s temper grew as ugly as her form, and she took pleasure in devouring hapless mariners who came within her grasp. Thus she destroyed six of the companions of Ulysses, and tried to wreck the ships of Aeneas, till at least she was turned into a rock, and as such still continues to be a terror to mariners. Mistakes are a deliberately wrong choice in the contest between what is clearly good and what is clearly bad is sin. We all want a partner, but some want one to the point of it being a pathology. Many people knowingly or unknowingly force a relationship due to an addiction of love. If one is honest with oneself, and know that one has nothing in common with their focus of their intertest, such as different goals, different lifestyles, and different hobbies, and the person is not attracted to the individual pursing a relationship, this is a clear indication that they do not like you in a romantic way, much like how Scylla was not in the least bit interested in Glaucus. Yet, Glaucus could not take no for an answer and ended up running her like, and the rage she experienced ruined the lives of others. Absolutely imagine if you had people dragging you into things you did not want to be part of, and you will understand why this is not a healthy thing to do. It is never a healthy thing to do. #RandolphHarris 5 of 10
People who think they can learn from their mistakes have a different brain reaction to mistake than people who think intelligence is fixed. One major difference between people who think intelligence is malleable and those who think intelligence is fixed is how one responds to mistake. When one makes a mistake, the best thing to do is to try to learn from it and figure it out. Conversely, some people who think they cannot gain intelligence will not take the opportunities to learn from their mistakes, and they usually employ defense mechanisms to justify their behaviour so they do not feel guilt or remourse. Defense mechanisms are psychological maneuvers that operate below the surface of one’s awareness (they are unconscious) to protect one from emotional pain or distress. The most familiar one is probably denial. Denial allows one to dismiss a painful reality so that one can go on acting as if a situation or event is not true—because one does not want to admit it is true. Transgression is different from being overtaken in a fault. Both sins and mistakes can hurt us and both require attention. People who try to force relations, often end up feeling insecure, hurt, and betrayed for no reason. Then these individuals start questioning themselves as to why they are never good enough for the person they are interested in. #RandolphHarris 6 of 10
There should be no license for sin, but mercy should go hand and hand with reproof. Though it may be hard to admit, there comes a time when one just needs to cut their losses and leave a person alone. The progression of a romantic relationship cannot be formed. It must evolve naturally, over time. Impatient, insecure, or damaged people try to force relationships. Mortal make these kinds of mistakes all the times. However, these things are on an essentially predetermined course. A fool is a person lacking judgment or prudence. The Saviour used the term fool to characterize the lesson in this parable about the rich man who built greater barns to store his abundant fruits and goods and then said to his soul, “Thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry,” reports Luke 12.19. The distinction between sins and mistakes is important to our actions. We have seen some very bitter finger pointing. All of us make mistakes, and some of us very serious ones. Any thoughtful person feels a kind of failure because one’s sins or moral failure. One does not get clean by rolling in the mire. One does not get clean and whole by brooding unduly over the past, although we can certainly learn from our mistake. There is no strength in weakness; there is no strength in sin; and we do not overcome our mistake and our sins by fighting them directly. #RandolphHarris 7 of 10
If people dwell upon them too much, they may succumb to their sins. The avoidance of guilt can be addictive, too. Guilt-avoidance has become a drug of choice for many people, because it is so pleasurable, almost intoxicating, to think of oneself as morally pure. Those who are addicted to guilt-avoidance are usually a bit inconsistent. They avoid the guilt themselves, but they do not mind imposing a bit of it—maybe even a lot of it—on others. It can be immensely pleasurable to notice the flaws of others while ignoring your own. However, that is a sin, too. All things considered, we are on a safer ground when we focus on our own sins, not those of others. At least this is how we process theologians see things. We believe that when we harm others, or fail to act in ways that prevent them from being harmed, we violated something deep within the nature of nature. We have violated an Eros toward life’s flourishing that is divine. In sinning against others, we sin against God. It takes courage to stand up. The freedom to be different. The freedom to take guilt and make something beautiful of it. Humans have the freedom to turn guilt into love. Few gifts are more desirable than a clear conscience—a soul at peace with itself. Only God can heal a troubled soul. However, if we want God to forgive us, we must follow the procedure he has given to us. #RandolphHarris 8 of 10
Confession is a necessary requirement for complete forgiveness. It is an indication of true Godly sorrow. It is part of the cleansing process—the starting anew requires a clean page in the diary of our conscience. Confessions should be made to the appropriate person who has been wronged by us and to the Lord also. In addition, the nature of our transgression may be serious enough to require a confession to God in prayer. “Therefore I say unto you, Go; and whoever transgressed against me, him shall you judge according to the sins which he or she has committed; and if he or she confess his or her sins before thee and me, and repents in the sincerity of one’s heart, that person one shall forgive, and I will also forgive that individual,” reports Mosiah 26.29. Remember, it is complete deliverance from the tortures of a guilt-ridden soul that we seek. Repentance is not easy. Godly sorrow brings one to the depth of humility. This is why the gift of forgiveness is so sweet and draws the transgressor so close to the Saviour with a special bond of affection. Full repentance liberates the individual with joy unspeakable. #RandolphHarris 9 of 10
Any type of open and truthful disclosure reduces stress and helps individuals come to terms with their behaviour. It is not coincidental that some of the most powerful people or institutions in may cultures encourage people to confess their transgressions. And there is strong evidence that writing about upsetting experiences or dark secrets can benefit your mental and physical well-being. Similar to religious confessions, expressive writing encouraged individuals to explore their deepest thoughts and feelings about upsetting experiences. For such emotional purges to work, people must be completely honest with themselves. Putting emotional turmoil into words changes how we think about it. Giving concrete form to secret experiences can help categorize them in new ways. Talking or writing about a disturbing event helps us to understand it better. And things we do not understand cause greater anxiety. Once we are able to express our upheavals, we tend to ruminate about them less, freeing us up to focus on others thing. Dozens of studies have also shown that expression is linked to less stress and improved sleep and cardiovascular function. Also, better sleep is associated with enhanced immune function and better general health—which correlates with better mental health, too. Confession can help people get through difficult times. #RandolphHarris 10 of 10
You Left Me a Heavenly Sweet Legacy of Love–Meet Me on Top of the Empire State Building on Valentine’s Day
I have really hope you have found happiness, and if ever in need of something, like someone to love you, do not hesitate to call me. Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears, but our intellect…must itself lack all those things which of its nature it understands. Since then it naturally understands all sensible and bodily things, it must be lacking in every bodily nature; just as the sense of sight, being able to know colour, lacks all colour. If sight itself had any particular colour, this colour would prevent it from seeing others colours, just as the tongue of a feverish person, being coated with bitter moisture, cannot taste anything sweet. The true genius shudders at incompleteness—imperfection—and usually prefers silence to saying the something which not everything should be said. Maybe there is something divine in the bliss we feel. Love aims at transcending human existence, at connecting it with the eternal and infinite, and thereby at achieving the only aspect of immortality that is open to us as human beings. Because many people want both height and depth, spirituality strengthens and develops love and transforms it into a desire for a higher level of understanding of the self, others, and the Universe. When our eyes fall upon the beauty of the Earth, our soul is able to remember true love and reverences as it enjoys the expression of the divine—of temperance, justice, and knowledge of the absolute. #RandolphHarris 1 of 9
The human being is a spiritual being at the core. We are the soul and have an existence beyond the physical. Our personality has, in fact, many sub-personalities or different, often conflicting, aspects. Some of these aspects can be very troublesome and sabotage our efforts at success and happiness. Magically, if we can observe some aspect of ourselves with detachment, then we can change that aspect or somewhat control it. The idea of aspects of personality and observing them is now part of our daily language (largely do the work of Psychosynthesis). We regularly hear people say, “There is a part of me that wants marry Walter, but the other part of me is says Sam Baldwin is my destiny.” Psychosynthesis work sets up a dialogue with the different aspects of self to try to find a way of balance and integration of these, often, conflicting, parts. People tend to be dominated by love, will, and intelligent activity. Love deals with matters of the heart, compassion, emotion, and sensitivity. The will is one’s drive, need to achieve, power to remove and overcome come obstacles. Intelligent activity is the capacity to actively plan, organize, construct mental schemes and models of things. #RandolphHarris 2 of 9
Psychosynthesis tries to identify the basic type and then attempt to bring in balance if necessary. For example, the love type may need to develop the will to be less vulnerable and more effective. The will type may need to develop emotional sensibility so as to learn to love and be loved. In the 1993 film, Sleepless in Seattle is a classic fairy tale which involves a love struck, beautiful, enchanted princess Anne Reed, and sleepless, pragmatic, handsome prince Sam Baldwin. After the death of his wife, Sam moved to Seattle with his son and is convinced he will never find love again, and he just focuses on his work in architecture and never sleeps. His son, Jonah calls a talk-radio program hosted by a psychiatrist and Johan tells the World how concerned he is about his dad, and then the father gets on the phone and talks about what love means to him. The World falls madly in love with him, and many women want to meet him, but he is not interested. Anne Reed hears the call, and although she is already engaged, she feels he is her destiny. Anne bases he love life on the 1957 film An Affair to Remember. #RandolphHarris 3 of 9
Psychosynthesis would have helped Anne balance her need for love, and would have helped Sam develop a less will driven and emotional aspect of his personality, which is a form of conscious balance and choice. It lets people know where they are lacking balance in their lives, and as you see it is not always a chemical imbalance, but a lack of development or personal understanding. However, fate brings the lovers together in hopes they can balance each other out. There are usually three levels of satisfaction: Happiness, joy, and bliss. Happiness is the goal for most people’s lives it is the arrangement of life events to bring about the desired end. Problem, it can be fleeting and may not last for long. Joy is the constant states of soul, and is the surest sign of the presence of the soul. Bliss is the condition of the spirit beyond all material limitations. The intellect here serves as a bridge. Because of the refinement of the matter composing it, the intellect is well adapted as a medium of consciousness—it is like a translucent substance through which the soul can shine. However, it is only in conjunction with a soul that the intellect and the whole psychophysical organism can have experiences. The soul can gain release through discriminatory knowledge (viveka), that is, by realizing the essential distinction between itself and nature. #RandolphHarris 4 of 9
Contemplative techniques induce a stilling and purification of the mind in which the essential nature of the soul is reflected clearly. Thereby the soul learns to recognize the repression of the sublime, which tend to lead to unhappy and neurotic states that are the result of failure to understand and admit the spiritual aspects in ourselves and others. We cannot base on life on films like Sleepless in Seattle because taking such a risk could turn out to be more like Sleeping with the Enemy. Sleeping with the Enemy is a 1991 film in which a character called Laura Burney lives in a beautiful home by the beach on Cape Cod with her husband, Martin, a charming, handsome and wealthy investment counselor. In reality, Martin is not charming at all. He is volatile and charged with energy. Martin is extremely obsessive and has control issues. Martin is also physically and emotionally abusive toward his wife, Laura, throughout their marriage. He makes her keep the house crystal clean, makes her pretend to be happy, tells her what she is allowed to wear, selects the music she can listen to, and even controls her social activities. Therefore, we need to teach our kids that life is not all about finding love, but more about finding a career that allows one to support oneself and becoming aware of the external World, since mental and physical entities evolve on a parallel and mutually adapted lines; thus, it opens the way to a correspondence theory of perception. #RandolphHarris 5 of 9
According to the theory of perception, external happenings imprint themselves via the sense and the sensus communis, or mind organ (manas), on the intellect. These images are then illuminated by the soul. The mind is, so to say, a screen containing pictures of the outer World, and the soul lights these up. However, the soul itself cannot be illuminated and this perceived introspectively; therefore, its existence is known only by inference (or by a special state of consciousness). This is why religion and talk therapy have become some popular. Doctors realize a lot of people do not have chemical imbalances, but they are experiencing situations and conditions that they are not equipped to handle and need guidance of someone who can help them recognize there is nothing wrong with them, but they may be in a situation that is not conductive to their development. By medicating people who do not have chemical imbalances, we could be doing more damage than good because we are using a drug to control them and forcing them to adapt to situations, which may be unsafe. Conversely, some people do need medication because there is something wrong with their brain. #RandolphHarris 6 of 9
While we are on the subject of mental health, there was this interesting study about a mental who was schizophrenic, he was a witness to a crime, and was arrested. He mother did not want him on medication because she believed it was dangerous for him. He was being assaulted in jail because he was not normal. The investigators forced him to take a shot of an antipsychotic that would last a month so he could clear his head up enough to see lucid and testify. After taking the medication, he hanged himself because he suffered from depression, as his friends, the voices in his head were gone, and he was lonely. Therefore, not everyone needs therapy and not everyone needs medication. As a society, we just have to understand there are different types of people and not everyone is typical and we cannot force them to adhere to our standards. Of course, we can never understand what life is like for some people, who have mental or physical impairments, or who have been sheltered and do not understand the World, because we have never been in their shoes. So, it is not our job to sit back and judge people who have learned to adapt as best to life as they can. Sometimes people are living unimaginable lives. “Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you,” reports Matthew 7.1-2. #RandolphHarris 7 of 9
A layperson’s most natural way of defending belief in induction is that it has worked in the past. Concealed in this reply, of course, is the assumption that what has already worked will continue to do so. However, there is a lack of clarity about what counts as success in using the rule. Our society has much neglected the need for the development of the capacity for expression of love and beauty. Love is a basic soul quality. When unfolded, it enables the person to love and accept the people they encounter and find the good in all people. We have to identify our infinity of living Worlds in endless pace with the infinity of God. Knowledge therefore must begin not with sense experience but with a rational search for units of divine life. The atoms of the physical World are carried in the ether, which is the universal medium of the divine life and power. The conquest of the self, in which the intellect achieves mastery over the passions of humans and drives out the beast is were all the traditional virtues of moderation and self-control have place, and at this level we appear to have the choice between good and evil. However, when we use this freedom as reason dictates, we become aware that we are simply following the urge of our nature toward union with the divine; and the rational person burns with the heroic fury of an intellectual love of God. #RandolphHarris 8 of 9
The mind senses the presence of God in the whole of his creation. Beauty is everywhere. We live in the beauty, but in reality everything is beautiful. We place immense trust in the analogical power of reason as a means of empathy with the universal of life of things. In mathematical reasoning, we possess the standard for God’s own knowledge, and whatever we can prove mathematically we know as surely and as perfectly as God does. Thus in the genuinely scientific investigation of nature we possess a revelation equal in authority, though not in importance, to the revelation concerning human’s moral duties and destiny that is contained in the Holy Scripture. “Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise person who built his or her house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. However, everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish person who built his or her house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with great crash,” reports Matthew 7.24- 27. That is why God wants us to apply his ways in our lives now. What we can take with us for all eternity is our love and concern with one another. #RandolphHarris 9 of 9
Strong Family Cultures Will Help Our Children Live in the World
Some families are in jeopardy of being lost. Values are the prime target of the adversary, as well are the sanctity of marriage and the central importance of families. It is the duty of parents to teach their children to keep the commandments of God. Our morals and spiritual values provide an anchor and the safe harbor of a home where each child of a loving Heavenly Father can be influenced for food and acquire eternal values. People who feel the love and support of their parents are proud of the example they have set. This makes life so enjoyable for many families that the children want to follow in the footsteps of the parents, to continue on through experiencing the same joy that had been theirs in their younger days. Some parents always find the time to take the family on vacation and they can count on fun experiences. As a result of such a solid background, the children are not able to turn from the teachings of their parents because their actions would reflect on their parents’ character. Culture is defined as the way of life of a people. There is a unique gospel culture, a set of values and expectations and practices common to all followers of God. This gospel culture, or way of life, comes from the plan of salvation, the commandments of God, and the teachings of living prophets. It is given expression in the way we raise our families and live our individual lives. #RandolphHarris 1 of 5
However, so much has changed during our lifetime. The effects of childhood trauma, including emotional neglect or abuse in childhood, can have alarmingly potent effect on our psyche as we enter adulthood, event to the extent of rewiring the brain. The children of narcissistic parents, those who meet the diagnostic criteria for Narcissistic Personality Disorder, know this all too well, having been raised by someone with a limited capacity for empathy and an excessive sense of grandiosity, false superiority and entitlement. Children of narcissistic parents are programmed at an early age to seek validation where there is one, to believe their worthiness is tied to the reputation of their families, and to internalize the message that they can only sustain their value by how well they can serve the needs of their parents. If given at all, they have lived an existence where love was rarely given. As the child of a narcissistic parent or parent, one is taught that they are not inherently worthy, but rather that there worth depended on what they could do for the narcissistic parent and how compliant one is. The emphasis on appearance, status, reputation is at an all-time high in households with a narcissistic parent. Due to the narcissistic parent’s grandiosity, false mask and need to be the best, children in these situations are probably part of a family that was presented in the best possible light, with neglect taking place behind closed doors. #RandolphHarris 2 of 5
There is something really disturbing about parents who compete with their kids. Women who strive to be as hot as their teenage daughters. Parents threatened by the success of their adult children. Men who date girls the same age as their son’s girlfriend or daughter. And men who actually date their son’s girlfriends. Some parents even conspire with the children’s enemies to hurt their own kids because they envy them so much. So how have we gotten to this place? We all know that times have changed—and parenting is much more difficult as a result. Some parents feel like they did not have a chance to live the life they wanted so they take out their anger usually on one child who reminds them of what they would like to be. Let us take a closet look and find a way out of this madness and toward a better way to parent. Shine a light on yourself, rather than on your child. Get out of the mindset that your child is the enemy and you must win. Win what? No matter how your child behaves, you must commit to parenting from thoughtfulness, not anxiety, jealousy, and reactivity. Keep in the forefront of your mind that even at times of high stress, you are an adult and your children are supposed to learn from you. You want your children to look back and think of you as someone who loved God, followed the laws, and did everything possible to protect them, instead of sabotaging their lives and setting them up to fail. #RandolphHarris 3 of 5
As adults, some people know that their parent or parents are bad and do not have their best interest at heart, but they still talk to them because they know their parents will not live forever and want to enjoy them while they are around, while secretly praying that their parent will repent and start showing them rest and unconditional love. Strong leaders focus on the preservation of their own integrity. They have a willingness to take responsibility for their own emotional well-being and do not try to make other people happy by changing their character. Being a strong leader is a quality that will actually help your child want to be led by you, rather than battle you. Remember that you are on your child’s team, not on the opposing side. You should not be sharing the personal business with their enemies who happen to be dangerous nor plotting to end the life of your own child. Some people saw that Casper the Ghost is a cautionary tale about Richie’s parents from Richie Rich killing him for insurance money. The Bible predicted that in the last days, “They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law,” reports Luke 12.53. #RandolphHarris 4 of 5
Lessons taught in the home by goodly parents are becoming increasingly important in today’s World, where the influence of the adversary is so wide spread. As we know, he is attempting to erode and destroy the very foundation of our society—the family. In cleaver and carefully camouflaged ways, the wicked one is attacking commitment to family life throughout the World and undermining the culture and covenants of faithful believers in God. Parents must resolve that teaching in the home is a most sacred and important responsibility. We must train up our children in the way he or he should go, this responsibility ultimately rests on the parents. According to the great plan of happiness, it is goodly parents with the care and development of Heavenly Father’s children. Parents should also pray in earnest, asking our Eternal Father to help them love, understand, and guide the children the Lord sent to them. It is also a good idea to hold family prayer, scripture study, and family home evenings and eat together as often as possible, making dinner a time of communication and the teachings of values. Parents should also share their testimonies often with their children, commit them to keep the commandments of God, and promise the blessings that our Heavenly Father promises his faithful children. Our strengthened family cultures will be a protection for our children from the fiery darts of the adversary embedded in their peer culture, the entertainment and television news. #RandolphHarris 5 of 5
Randolph Harris II International Institute 