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Our Eternal Life is Useless to Us if We Do Not See the Beauty Around Us, the Creation of Mortals Everywhere!
If the Mind is to Engage With Success in the Quest for Truth, it Must First be Unfettered and then Unprejudiced
Even his unusual beauty and unfailing charm were something of a secret to him. But I had always wanted many things. What accounted for the duration of the life many of us live? Why do we last so long? I purpose that there are five levels of power present as potentialities in ever human being’s life. The first is the power to be. This power can be seen in the newborn infant—he can cry and violently wave his arms as signs of discomfort within himself, demanding that his hunger or other needs be met. Whether we like it or not, power is central in the development in this infant of what we call personality. Every infant becomes an adult in ways that reflect the vicissitudes of power—that is, how one has been able to find his or her power and use it—indeed, how to be it. It is given in the act of birth, not by the culture as such but by the sheer fact that the infant lives. If the infant is denied the experience that one’s actions can get a response from those around him or her—as show in Rene Spitz’s studies of the pitiable infant orphans in Puerto Rico who were given no attention by nurses or other mother substitutes—the infant withdraws into a corner of his or her bed, does not walk or develop in other ways, and literally wither away physiologically and psychologically. The ultimate in impotence is death. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
The power to be is neither good nor evil; it is prior to them. However, it is not neutral. It must be lived out or neurosis, psychosis, or violence will result. The second phase is self-affirmation. Every being has the need not only to be but to affirm one’s own being. This is especially significant for the human organism, for it is gifted with, or condemned to, self-consciousness. This consciousness is not inborn but begins to develop in the infant after a few weeks, is not fully developed for several years, and, indeed continues developing throughout one’s life. The question of significance then emerges, and the long and crucially important quest for self-esteem or substitutes for it, accompanied by grief with the lack of it. With human beings, mere physical survival is now no longer the main issue, but survival with some esteem. The cry for recognition becomes the central cry in this need for self-affirmation. If significance and recognition are granted as a matter of course in the family, the child simply assumes them and turns one’s attention to other things. However, if—as too often the case in our disrupted day when parents as well as children are radically confused—self-affirmation is blocked, it becomes a compulsive need which drives the person all of one’s life. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
Or the child’s affirming of oneself may be made difficult in the face of one’s parents’ pattern of “We love you only if you obey us.” The child this get caught in the destructive aspects of competitiveness, the buying and selling of oneself and the World: one’s self-affirmation is taken by others to be a diminishing of them, and one is diminished in turn by theirs. In these or many other ways one’s self-affirmation is distorted or blocked outright. When self-affirmation meets resistance we make greater effort, we give power to our stance, making clear what we are and what we believe; we state it now against opposition. This is self-assertion, the third phase. It is a stronger form of behavior, more overt than self-affirmation. It is potentiality in all of us that we react to attack. We make it unavoidable that the others see us as we cry: “Here I am; I demand that you notice me!” The speech of Willy Loman’s wife in Arthur Miller’s play, Death of a Salesman, is a good example of this: “Attention must be paid…” Even though “Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the papers…he’s a human being…So attention must be paid.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
The fact that her assertion was nominally for someone else does not change the fact that she was doing the asserting. When we are doing it for someone else, some of us can assert ourselves more firmly. That is merely another form of self-assertion—often made necessary by canons of politeness or not “blowing one’s own horn.” The fourth phase is aggression. When self-assertion is blocked over a period of time—as it was for the Jewish people for many years, as it is for every underrepresented group of people—this stronger form of reaction tends to develop. When I spent three years in Salonika, I found that the 100, 000 Sephardic Jewish people living there—one third of the population of the city—actually made up the cultured intelligentia of the city. There was a complete absence of anti-Semitic prejudice such as existed in the rest of Europe and America. There was so a complete absence of the aggressiveness associated in this country with Jewish people Indeed, the motto in Salonika was: “It takes two Jews to outwit a Greek, and two Greek to outwit an Armenian.” The Armenians, the group less represented, were the ones in whom aggression and a sharp bargaining sense had developed. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
In contrast to self-assertion, which is drawing a line at a certain point and insisting “This is me; this is mine,” aggression is a moving into the positions of power or prestige or the territory of another and taking possession of some of it for one’s self. The motives may be righteous enough—to right an ancient wrong, as with the natives in Africa about whom Frantz Fanon, in his book The Wretched of the Earth, writes; or passion for liberation; or pride; or any one of a thousand other things. Motive does not concern us at the moment; we only emphasize that this is a phase of behavior that in every person exists a potentiality, and in the right situation it can be whipped into action. When aggressive tendencies are completely denied to the individual over a period of time, they take their toll in a zombielike deadening of consciousness, neurosis, psychosis, or violence. Finally, when all the efforts towards aggression are ineffective, there occurs the ultimate explosion known as violence. Violence is largely physical because the other phases, which can involve reasoning or persuasion, have been ipso facto blocked off. In typical cases, the stimulus transmitted from the environment to the individual is translated directly into violent impulse to strike, with the cerebrum being bypassed. This is why when a mortal erupts in a violent temper, one often does not fully realize what one has done until afterward. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
It is tragic, indeed, when whole peoples are placed in a situation where significance becomes almost impossible to achieve. The African Americans are, of has met with a lot of opposition. The central crime of the early Americans is that they placed the Africans, during several centuries of slavery and one century of physical freedom but psychological oppression, in situations where self-affirmation was impossible. In physical slavery, and later in psychological slavery, every one of the nonviolent phases was difficult or impossible. They were permitted to affirm themselves only as singer, dancers, and entertainers for the titillation of the majority group, or as tillers of fields owned by others, and later, in the construction of automobiles. That this would lead to widespread apathy and, later on, to radical explosions should no longer surprise anyone. An illustration comes from the remark of an African American man in Harlem: “When the times comes, it is going to be too late. Everything will explode because the people they live under tension now; they going to a point where they can’t stand it no more. When they get to that point…” #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
He dangles the end of the sentence, correctly letting us simply imagine what might come, because—as indicated above—before the violent explosion we cannot realize what may happen. For as long a people feel forced to remain in such a semihuman state, there will be aggression and violence. If the other phases of behavior are blocked, then the explosion into violence may be the only way individual or groups can get release from unbearable tension and achieve a sense of significance. We often speak of the tendency toward violence as a building up inside the individual, but it is also a response to the outside conditions. The source of violence must be seen in both its internal and external manifestations, a response to a situation which is felt to block off all other ways to response. However, it seems that people in positions of authority are not always willing to address nor resolve situations where people are being exposed to semihuman conditions because they are part of the problem and do not want to get in legal or civil trouble, so they hope that the person reaching out for help resorts to violence as a way to abdicate themselves of any illegal, unethical, or immoral ties to the situation. Their defense will be the person has a problem and erupted in violence and there was nothing we could do to prevent this from happening. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
The five phases above are ontological ones—that is, they are part of the human being as human. It is the endeavor of ontology to describe the characteristics of being as being—in our case the human beings as human. A child of three may erupt in violence that takes the form of a temper tantrum as many a mortal of sixty; and although we may judge the latter more harshly, the action is potentially present in both. The ontological view does not deny development, but takes its inquiry down to a deeper level. It is not to be identified with the nature theory of violence any more than with the nurture theories discussed earlier. Ontological inquiry is directed at the structure in which both nature and nurture are rooted. I believer that the psychotherapeutic approach provides one of the most fruitful avenues for the investigation of violence and aggression. When pondering the condition of Juan Carlos Chapa Jr., Adel Sambrano Ramos, or Dylann Storm Roof, we can see the seeds and roots of the madness and the violence in our nation. I am aware of the dangers of identifying too closely the society with the individual, but to entirely avoid a relationship between the two is just as erroneous. Social problems and psychological problems can no longer be isolated from each other. I believe it is valuable to try to understand modern social aggression and violence in the context, for example, that we can learn from Elliot Rodger and other persons in dire need of power. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
Medieval mortals were conscious of themselves only as a member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation—only through some general category. The duty of pioneers, if they are to be successful pioneers, it to realize they will need courage to forget outworn ideas and to free themselves from dying traditions so as to cope with the new conditions which are arising. In this connection, if it were practicable, the suggestion that it is also a duty to cooperate with existing spiritual movements would be acceptable; but experience will show that most of these movements are unable to enter that deep union of hearts which alone can guarantee success to any external union. Such a plan would end in failure and it is better for them to pursue their own independent course than waste time and force in attempting what would not succeed and is not really needed. With the Renaissance emerges the individual as we know them. If one’s entrance upon the scene was gradual rather than dramatic, it is indicated nonetheless clearly by important changes in language. In the Middle Ages the word “individual” means “inseparable”; and it was used chiefly in theological arguments about the Holy Trinity or to indicate a member of some group, kinds of species. The complexity of the term is at once apparent in this history, for it is the unit that is being defined, yet defined in terms of its membership of a class. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
The separable entity is being defined by a word that has meant inseparable. The crucial history of the modern description is a change in emphasis which enabled us to think of the individual as a kind of absolute, without immediate reference to the group of which one is a member. This change took pace in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; and since then we have come to speak of the individual in one’s own right, whereas previously to describe an individual was to give an example of the group of which one was a member, and so to offer a particular description of that group and of the relationships within it. This semantic change reflected profound changes in the social order after the medieval period, particularly the breakup of the feudal caste system. When mortals found that they could change their status and social mobility increased, the idea grew of being an individual apart from one’s social role. Also important, as we shall see, was mortal’s new detachment from power over nature: when mortal (as subject) divorced one’s self from nature (as object) in order to understand and control it, individualism was given further impetus. It is the historical emergence of the individual as we now know one, of mortal alone, that makes alienation so crucially a modern problem. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
In the past, as we saw, when they lost their status that identified them and offered them some security, mortals particularly felt anxiety or despair. However, when the medieval system collapsed, the likelihood of alienation increased appreciably. Indeed, only with the release of the individual from medieval bonds could alienation become a widespread social problem. The breakdown of the feudal order forced mortals to fall back upon themselves; they had to learn how to cope with countless problems and decision that were once taken care of my Worldly and spiritual hierarchies. However, together with the anxieties generated by this new autonomy mortals sensed a great promise, for in the period of the formation of the national state and the development of a mercantile economy one’s own future seemed to have infinite possibilities. At the end of the curve, in our own century, mortals begin to feel threatened by the encroachment of powerful social forces emanating not only from one’s own corner of the Earth but from every part of a contracting World. If mortals today fear freedom or wish to escape from it, this was not always so—certainly not for the optimistic of the political and scientific enlightenment. However, then alienation is not only an accompaniment of individualism. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
Perhaps above all, as we have suggested, alienation is a response to fearful new powers that mortals themselves have created and that threaten their hard-won freedom. Foremost among them are the machine and the social structures which administer it. The freedom to command one’s life in one’s own way can be got only by first getting the fearlessness to disregard the criticism and to ignore the expectations of other people. One who would follow an independent path must, to some extent, be fearless. One must refuse to be intimidated by the power, prestige, claims, or size of established organizations, just as one must refuse to be deluded by the idealizations of themselves which they hold before the public. Few people know what a free existence really is; most people live caged in by fear of, or enslavement to, the opinion of others. Even the rich do not know it for their cages are gilt and comfortable. Even the spiritual do not know it for they mere echo back what these others want them to think about God. Complete freedom is possible only to those who have special character, one that is devoid of tyrannizing ambitions and despotic cravings, and even of unworldly strivings. Such is the strange paradox of the quest that on the one hand one must foster determined self-reliance but on the other yield to a feeling of utter dependence on the power of God. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
Those who are self-sufficient and prefer to learn and develop by themselves, are those who especially need to practise this inward listening and waiting. What we mean is that modern mortals have to become more self-reliant, has to throw off the remnants of tribal consciousness which still rule one, has to learn to think for one’s self. However, it one must stand aloof to one’s own way, with one’s own free thoughts, it remains a benevolent, amiable independence. One wishes all beings well while knowing they receive, suffer, or enjoy the results of their own physical, emotional, or mental action. Ones desire to express individual views, character, and personality must be respected so long as one does not try to impose them aggressively or tyrannically on others. This is the only genuine guarantee of continuity. The genuine guarantee of duration is that the pure relation can be filled as the beings become You, as they are elevated to the You, so that the holy basic word sounds through all of them. Thus the time of human life cannot and ought not to overcome the It-relation, it then becomes so permeated by relation that this gains a radiant and penetrating constancy in it. The moments of supreme encounter are no mere flashes of lightning in the dark but like a rising Moon in a clear starry night. And thus the genuine guarantee of spatial constancy consists in this the mortal’s relations to their You, being radii that lead from all I-points to the center, create a circle. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
Not the periphery, not the community comes first, but the radii, the common relation to the center. That alone assures the genuine existence of a community. The anchoring of time in relation-oriented life of salvation and the anchoring of space in a community unified by a common center: only when both of these come to be and only as long as both continue to be, a human cosmos (shelter for mortals, a houselike World) comes to be and continues to be around the invisible altar, grasped in the spirit out of the World stuff on the eon. The encounter with God does not come to mortals in order that one may henceforth attend to God but in order that one may prove its meaning in action in the World. All revelation is calling and a mission. However, again and again mortals shun actualization and bends back toward the revealer: one would rather attend to God than to the World. Now that one has bent back, however, one is no longer confronted by a You; one can do nothing but place a divine It in the realm of things, believe that one knows about God as an It, and talk about him. It is not necessary to be surly and irritable in order to be an individualist. One can still be affable, genial, civil, and courteous—even radiant with good will It is a matter of inner equilibrium. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
One must refuse to violate one’s intellectual integrity or sacrifice one’s spiritual independence. Even as the egomaniac does not live anything directly, whether it be a perception or an affection, but reflect on one’s perceiving or affectionate I and thus misses truth of the process, thus the theomaniac (who incidentally, can get along very well with egomaniac in the very same soul) will not let the gift take full effect but reflects instead on that which gives, and misses both. When you are sent forth, God remains presence of you; whoever walks in one’s mission always has God before one: the more faith the fulfillment, the stronger and more constant the nearness. Of course, one cannot attention to God, touching oneself all over with God, but one can converse with God. Bending back, on the other hand, turns God into an object. It appears to be a turning toward the primal ground, but belongs in truth to the World movement of turning away, even as the apparent turning away of those who fulfill their mission belongs in truth to the World movement of turning toward. For the two basic metacosmic movement of the World—its expansion into its own being returning to association [with God]—attain their supreme and conciliation, their mixture and separation, in the history of mortal’s relation to God. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
It is in the return that the word is born on Earth; in spreading out it enter the chrysalis of religion; in a new return it is reborn with new wings. Not caprice is at work here, although the movement toward the It may at times go so far that it holds down the movement of going forth again t the You and threatens to suffocate it. The powerful revelations invoked by the religions are essentially the same as the quiet one that occurs everywhere and at all times. The powerful revelations that stand at the beginnings of great communities, at the turning points of human time, are nothing else than the eternal revelation. However, revelation does not pour into the World through its recipient as if one were a funnel: it confers itself upon one, it seizes one’s whole element in all of its suchness and fuses with it. Even the more who is mouth is precisely that and not a mouthpiece—not an instrument but an organ, an autonomous, sounding organ; and to sound means to modify sound. If one is unable to continue in this quest without the association, encouragement, or sympathies of others who are also following it, then one had better not enter it at all, for quite obviously one is not ready for it not sufficiently appreciative of its values. If being different is an honest result of the search for higher truth, it must be acceptable. However, when it is merely a disguised egocentric exhibitionism, it becomes reprehensible. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Whenever I Found the Living, there I Found the Will to Power—I Have Been through All the World and I Will Take You to Safe Places!
These demons are mindless, immature, and deviant, but I had studied their conduct and I have learned from all the evidence why it is that they rage. They are maddened that they do not have bodies, that that cannot feel as we feel. They make the innocent scream filth because the rites of love and passion are things that they cannot possibly know. They can work the body parts but not truly inhabit them, and so they are obsessed with the flesh that they cannot invade. And with their feeble powers they bump upon objects, they make their victims twist and jump. This longing to be carnal is the origin of their anger, the indication of the suffering which is their lot. Power is essential for all living things. Mortals in particular, cast on this barren crust of Earth aeons ago with the hope and the requirement that one survive, finds one must use one’s powers and confront opposing forces at every point in one’s struggle with the Earth and with one’s fellows. Insecure as one has been through the ages, buffeted by limitations and weakness, laid low by illness and ultimately by death, one nevertheless asserts one’s powers in creativity. One product of this is civilization. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
The word power comes from the Latin posse, meaning to be able. We can see the vicissitudes of the emergence of power as soon as a baby is born into the World—in his cry and in the waving of his arms in demand that he be fed. The cooperative, loving side of existence goes hand in hand with coping and power, but neither the one nor the other can be neglected if life is to be gratifying. Our appreciation of the Earth and the support of our fellows are not gained by abdication of our powers, but by cooperative use of them. The infant’s capacity to cope with necessities becomes, in the growing adult, the struggle for self-esteem and for the sense of significance as a person. This latter is his psychological reason for living in contrast to the infant’s biological one. They cry for recognition becomes the central psychological cry: I must be able to say I am, to affirm myself in a World into which, by my capacity to assert myself, I put meaning, I create meaning. And I must do this in the face of nature’s magnificent indifference to my struggles. It is important that we remind ourselves that we mean neither will nor power in the competitive sense of the modern day, but rather self-realization and self-actualization. If we are freed from thinking of power only in the pejorative sense, we are better able to agree with others. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Far from treating power only as a term of abuse, one which is to be applied to our enemies (for instance, they are power-driven, but we are motivated only by benevolence, reason, and morality), I use it as a description of a fundamental aspect of the life process. It is not to be identified with life itself; there is much in human existence—like curiosity and love and creativity—that may be and normally is related to power but is not to called power in itself. However, if we neglect the factor of power, as is the tendency in our day of reaction against the destructive effects of the misuse of power, we shall lose values that are essential to our existence as human. A great deal of human life can be seen as the conflict between power on one side (for instance, effective ways of influencing others, achieving the sense in interpersonal relations of the significance of one’s self) and powerlessness on the other. In this conflict our efforts are made much more difficult by the fact that we block out both sides, the former because of the evil connotation of power drives, and the latter because our powerlessness is too painful to confront. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Indeed, the chief reason people refuse to confront the whole issue of power is that if they did, they would have to face their own powerlessness. As soon as powerlessness is referred to by its more personal name, helplessness or weakness, many people will sense that they are heavily burdened by it. Indeed, no social emotion is more widespread today then the conviction of personal powerlessness, the sense of being beset, beleaguered, and persecuted. Majority rule, for which mortals have struggled for centuries, has produced a situation in which mortals are more important, more powerless to influence their government then 200 years ago. The juggernaut of the state grinds on with no attention paid to you or me. And now multitudes are having to get used to living without their usual confidence that America is the World’s most powerful nation, a confidence to which, inadequate as it was, many people clung for their past sense of personal status. To admit our own individual feelings of powerlessness—that we cannot influence many people; that we count for little; that the values to which our parents devoted their lives are to us insubstantial and worthless; that we feel ourselves to be faceless others, insignificant to other people, and therefore, not worth much to ourselves—this is, indeed, difficult to admit. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
I cannot recall a time during the last four decades when there was so much talk about the individual’s capacities and potentialities and so little actual confidence on the part of the individual about one’s power to make a difference psychologically or politically. The talk is at least partially a compensatory symptom for our disquieting awareness of our very loss of power. It is, therefore, understandable in this transitional age, when we have at our fingertips the power to blow each other off the face of the planet, that certain persons should purpose we give up the human experiment. We live in times too dangerous to trust to human individual mood or choice…We can no longer control the people in power, and we therefore must resort to pacifying drugs to control our leaders. We can appreciate this despair, especially when we consider the powerlessness of the Blacks, out of which the impetus for this proposal arises. However, this does not prevent our also realizing, as we read with sinking heart of the new discoveries of chemicals that purport to cure modern mortals of their aggressiveness and develop in one a cooperative personality, that use of them goes with depersonalization and loss of our sense of personal responsibility. This alternative would mean, indeed, a gradual abdication of mortal’s humanity. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
Other psychologist, noting that we have not done very well in controlling ourselves, propose to do that controlling for us in the form of operant conditioning. We hear of new methods of bringing up our children which will train out of them aggressive tendencies and make them docile and placid. Have everyone forgotten this despair in which people are polarized into two groups, the majority domesticated into docile, sheeplike passivity, their flesh soft and tender, who are then eaten by a tougher group, the engineers of this social program? The failure of nerve theories arise out of the true observation that the exercise of power has done colossal harm in the modern World. The proposals have the double attraction of expressing the reaction against power and promising a utopia in the same breath. They will have a strong following among people threatened by importance and hoping against hope for some substitute for power. American’s concern about the possible misuse of power verges at times on a neurotic obsession. The important question, however, is not whether these theories are right or wrong. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
Rather it is whether or not we would, by trying to rid ourselves of our tendencies toward aggression, be discarding those values essential to our humanity—our self-affirmation and self-assertion, just to mention two. And would we not then be adding greatly to our feeling of powerlessness and this setting the stage for an eruption of violence that would dwarf everything so far? For violence has its breeding group in impotence and apathy. True, aggression has been so often and so regularly escalated into violence that anyone’s discouragement and fear of it can be understood. However, what is not seen is that the state of powerlessness, which leads to apathy and which can be produced by the above plans for the uprooting of aggression, is the source of violence. As we make people powerless, we promote their violence rather than its control. Deeds of violence in our society are performed largely by those trying to establish their self-esteem, to defend their self-image, and to demonstrate that they, too, are significant. Regardless of how derailed or wrongly used these motivations may be or how destructive their expression, they are still the manifestations of beneficial interpersonal needs. We cannot ignore the fact that, no matter how difficult their redirection may be, these needs themselves are potentially constructive. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
Violence arises not out of superfluity of power but out of powerlessness. Violence is the expression of impotence. Confused as to one’s place in the scheme of a World growing each day closer yet more impersonal, more densely populated yet in face-to-face relations more dehumanized; a World appealing ever more widely for one’s concern and sympathy with unknown masses of mortals, yet fundamentally alienating one even from one’s next neighbor, today Western mortals have become mechanized, routinized, made comfortable as an object; but in the profound sense displaced and thrown off balance as a subjective creator and power. This theme of the alienation of modern mortals runs through the literature and drama of two continents; it can be traced in the content as well as the form of modern art; it preoccupies theologians and philosophers, and to many psychologists and sociologists, it is the central problem of our time. In various ways they tell us that ties have snapped that formerly bound Western mortals to themselves and to the World about them. In diverse language they say that mortals in modern industrial societies are rapidly becoming detached from nature, from one’s old gods, from the technology that has transformed one’s environment and now threatens to destroy it. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
From one’s work and its products, and from one’s leisure; from the complex social institutions that presumably serve but are more likely to manipulate one; from the community in which one lives; and above all from oneself—from one’s body and one’s gender, from one’s feelings of love and tenderness, and from one’s art—one’s creative and productive potential. The alienated mortal is every mortal and no mortal, drifting in exercises no power, a stranger to oneself and to others. Alienation as we find it in modern society is almost total; it pervades the relationship of mortals to one’s self. An indefinable sense of loss; a sense that life has become impoverished, that mortals are somehow deracinate and disinherited, that society and human nature alike have been atomized, and hence mutilated, above all that mortals have been separated from whatever might give meaning to their work and their lives. Too frequently, there is a tyranny from above, imitated by followers, which forbids any independent thought and does not tolerate any real search. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
Mortal’s search for truth cannot be properly carried on unless one as full freedom in it. Where is the religious or religio-mystical institution which is willing to grant that to him? Is there a single one which lets one start out without being hampered by authoritarian doctrines, taboos, limitations, and traditions which it would impose upon one? Lectures, societies, and group-movements are of limited value: they can never replace nor achieve what is gained by one’s own individual efforts made in the right way. The seeker after truth will not find one’s way easy to travel. One may find that an institution, an authority, or an organization is suffocating one mentally or oppressing one emotionally. This may be the hour when one must claim one’s freedom. It is illusory to believe that, by blindly handing or humbly submitting one’s character and credo, one’s standards and values, one’s spiritual purposes and practices, to any organized group or established church, to a teacher, guide, or guru, to form and formulate, a mortal can evade the responsibility of judging them for oneself, accepting or rejecting by oneself. It is required of every fully human being that one be individual, not a parasite, and that one be oneself, not someone else. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
People speak of the religious mortal as one who can dispense with all relations to the World and to beings because the social stage that is allegedly determined from outside is supposed to have been transcended here by a force that works entirely from within. However, two basically different notions are confused when people use the concept of the social: the community built of relation and the amassing of human units that have no relation to one another—the palpable manifestation of modern mortal’s lack of relation. The bright edifice of community, however, for which one can be liberated even from the dungeon of sociability, is the work of the same force that is alive in the relation between mortals and God. However, this is not one relation among others; it is the universal relation into which all rivers pour without drying up for that reason. Sea and rivers—who would make a bold to separate here and define limits? There in only the one flood from I to You, ever more infinite, the one boundless flood of actual life. One cannot divide one’s life between an actual relationship to God and an inactual I-It relationship to the World—praying to God in truth and utilizing the World. Whoever knows the World as something to be utilized knows God the same way. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
One’s prayers are a way of unburdening oneself—and fall into the ears of the void. One—and not the atheist who from the night and longing of one’s garret window addresses the nameless—is God. And so we use them for a kind of pleasure which can be called fun. However, it is not the creative kind of fun often connected with play; it is, rather, a shallow, distracting, greedy way of having fun. And it is not by chance that it is that type of fun which can easily be commercialized, for it is dependent on calculable reactions, without passion, without risk, without love. Of all the dangers that threaten our civilization, this is on of the most dangerous ones: the escape from one’s emptiness through a fun which makes joy impossible. Rejoice! This Biblical exhortation is more needed for those who have much fun and pleasure than for those who have little pleasure and much pain. It is often easier to unite pain and joy than to unite fun and joy. Does the Biblical demand for joy prohibit pleasure? Do joy and pleasure exclude each other? By no means! The fulfillment of the center of our being does not exclude partial and peripheral fulfillments. And we must say this with the same emphasis with which we have contrasted joy and pleasure. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
We must challenge not only those who seek pleasure for pleasure’s sake, but also those who reject pleasure because it is pleasure. Mortals enjoy eating and drinking, beyond the mere terrestrial need of them. It is a partial ever-repeated fulfillment of one’s striving for life; therefore, it is pleasure and gives joy of life. Mortals enjoy playing and dancing, the beauty of nature, and the ecstasy of life. They fulfill some of one’s most intensive strivings for life; therefore, they are pleasure and give joy of life. Mortals enjoy the power of knowledge and the fascination of art. They fulfill some of one’s highest strivings for life; therefore, they are pleasure and give joy of life. Mortals enjoy the community of mortals in family, friendship, and the social group. They fulfill some fundamental strivings for life; therefore, they are pleasure and give joy of life. “And they had power given unto them, insomuch that they could not be confined in dungeons; neither was it possible that any mortal could slay them; nevertheless they did not exercise their power until they were bound in bands and cast into prison. Now, this was done that the Lord might show forth his power in them. And it came to pass that they went forth and began to preach and to prophesy unto the people, according to the spirit and power which the Lord had given them,” reports Alma 8.31-32. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
I Will Take Fate By the Throat, it Shall Not Wholly Overcome Me: Oh, it is So Beautiful to Live—to Live a Thousand Times!
When I awoke, I was on board a ship. I could hear the creak of the boards, smell the sea. I could smell the scent of those who manned the ship. And I knew that it was the galley because I could hear the rhythm of the oars under the low rumbling of the giant canvas sails. I could not open my eyes, could not make my limbs move. Yet I was calm. I did not thirst. In fact, I experienced an extraordinary sense of peace. My body was warm as if I had only just fed, and it was pleasant to lie there, to dream waking dreams on the gentle undulation of the sea. The mind began to clear. I knew that we were slipping very fast through rather still waters. And that the Sun had just gone down. The early evening sky was darkening, the wind was dying away. And the sound of the oars dipping and rising was as soothing as it was clear. My eyes were open now. I did not turn away from life toward some mystical Nirvana. I forgot none of the joy, the effort, or the pain. I abandoned nothing. What I achieved was something much more wonderful than an old man’s serenity. I will take fate by the throat. It shall not wholly overcome me. Oh, it is so beautiful to live—to live a thousand times! #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
God is the only true sense of the World: he does not have to copy others, only to express one’s own individuality, most his higher spirituality. God takes care to remain what he is, he is true to himself, high holy self. However, insofar as we let our happiness depend on another person and lose our independence, one becomes weakened. Even if the other gives one knowledge or love or support, one should still not cease to look within as deeply as one can for the idyllic Peace. In the end a mortal must come to oneself, one’s diviner self, one’s essential being. And where shall one look for it if not there where Jesus pointed within? Not outside, not to some other mortal, however high one’s repute as guru, not to some book, however sacrosanct its scriptural authority. Both mortal and book must, if loyal to the highest, also direct one inward. The Kingdom is within you, not somewhere else, not in an ashram, not even at the feet of a guru: Jesus’ declaration is literally accurate. One of the reasons we are so reluctant to confront the aspects of destiny called fate is that we are afraid it will lead us into despair. We Americans are taught always to wear a garment of optimism, and we believe that with despair all hope is lost. So we cling to any false hope we can conjure up to serve as a bulwark against despair, unaware that a hope that has to be striven for is no hope at all. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong things. This beginning for some hope opens us to exploitation by any psychoreligious charlatan who appears on the horizon. All to escape the demon of despair! However, suppose that despair were basically a constructive emotion? Suppose despair is often a necessary prelude to the greatest achievement? Not all seeing has this character of union. If we look at things and observe them merely to control and to use them, no real union takes place. We keep them at a distance. We try to bring them into our power, to use them for our purposes, as means for our ends. There is no long in this kind of seeing. We glimpse the beings that shall serve us coldly; we have for those which we use a look, curious or indifferent, sensational or aggressive, hostile or cruel. There is abuse in the looking at those which we use. It is a seeing that violates and separates. This is the look of masses who in medieval paintings are looking at the Crucified. However, even this kind of seeing creates some union, though union through separation. However, it is the seeing that really unites is different. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Our language has a word for seeing that really unites: Intuition. This means seeing into. It is an intimate seeing, a grasping and being grasped. It is a seeing shaped by love. Plato, the teacher of the centuries, whose visions and words have deeply influenced the Fourth Gospel and the Church, knew about the seeing which unites. He called the love which drives us to a genuine intuition the child of poverty and abundance. It is the love which fills our want with the abundance of our World. However, it fills us in such a way that the disrupted multitude is not the last we see—a view which disrupts ourselves. The last we see lies in that which unites, which is eternal in and above the transitory things. Into this view Plato wanted to initiate his followers. The individual seeker should take one’s own soul—one’s higher self—as one’s guide. By prayer and reading of the holy scriptures, one may attain glimpses of it occasionally and receive the needed guidance. This is safer than bonding oneself to any institution or a so-called master. If one can put as much faith in the existence and power of one’s soul as most seekers put into their blind following of these masters, one’s efforts should prove sufficiently effective. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
When we annul suffering, it is a way of saying we are becoming and passing away—the salvation from the wheel of rebirth. Henceforth there is no recurrence is to be the formula for those who had liberated themselves from the desire for existence and thus from the compulsion to become again ceaselessly. We do not know whether there is a recurrence; the line of this dimension of time in which we live we do not extend beyond this life; and we do not try to uncover what will reveal itself to us in its own time and law. However, if we do not know that there is recurrence, then we should not seek to escape from it: we should desire not crude existence but the chance to speak in every existence, in its appropriate manner and language, the eternal I of the destructible and the eternal You of the indestructible. Whether people will obtain the goal of redemption from having to recur, we do not know. Certainly one leads to an intermediate goal that concerns us, too: the unification of the soul. However, one leads there not only, as is necessary, away from the jungle of opinions, but also away from the deception of forms—which for us is no deception but (in spite of all the paradoxes of intuition that make for subjectivity but for us simply belong to it) the reliable World. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
One’s path, too, is a way of ignoring something, and when one bids us become aware of the processes in our body, what one means is almost the opposite of our sense-assured insight into the body. Nor does one lead the unified being further to that supreme You-saying that is open to it. One’s inmost decision seems to aim at the annulment of the ability to say You. Saying You to a mortal—that is clear from one’s greatly superior, but also greatly direct, intercourse with one’s disciples—but one does not teach it: to this love, which means boundless inclusion in the heart of all that has become, the simple confrontation of being by being remains alien. In the depths of one’s silence one certainly knows, too, the You-saying to the primal ground, transcending all the gods whom one treats like disciples; it was from a relation process the became substance the one’s deed came, clearly as an answer to the You; but of this one remains silent. One’s following among the nations, however, the great vehicle, denied one gloriously. They addressed the eternal You of mortals—using the name of God. And they expect as the coming of God, the last one of his eon, him, that shall fulfill love. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
All doctrines of immersion are based on the gigantic delusion of human spirit bent back into itself—the delusion that spirit occurs in mortals. In truth it occurs from mortal—between mortal and what one is not. As the spirit bent back into itself renounces this sense, this sense of relation, one must draw into mortal that which is not mortal, one must psychologize World and God. This is the psychical delusion of the spirit. In this fathom-sized, feeling-afflicted ascetic’s body dwell the World and the origin of the World and the annulment of the World and the path that leads to the annulment of the World. That is true, but ultimately it is no longer true. Certainly, the World dwells in me as a notion, just as I dwell in it as a thing. However, that does not mean that it is in me, just I am not in it. The World and I include each other reciprocally. This contradiction for thought, which inheres in the It-relation, is annulled by the You-relation which detaches me from the World in order to relate me to it. The self-sense, that which cannot be included in the World, I carry in myself. The being-sense, that which cannot be included in any notion, the World carries in itself. However, this is not a thinkable will but the whole Worldliness of the World, just as the former is not a knowing subject but the whole I-likeness of the I. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
No further reduction is valid here: whoever does not honor the ultimate unities thwarts the sense that is only comprehensible but not conceptual. The origin of the World and the annulment of the World are not in me; neither are they outside me; they simply are not—they always occur, and their occurrence is also connected with me, with my life, my decision, my work, my service, and also depends on me, on my life, my decision, my work, and my service. However, what it depends on is not whether I affirm or negate the World in my soul, but how I let the attitude of my soul toward the World come to life, life that affects the World, actual life—and in actual life paths coming from very different attitudes of the soul can cross. However, whoever merely has a living experience of one’s attitude and retains it in one’s soul may be as thoughtful as can be, one is Worldless—and all the games, arts, intoxications, enthusiasm, and mysteries that happen within one do not touch the World’s skin. As long as one attains redemption only in one’s self, one cannot do any good or harm to the World; one does not concern it. Only one that believes in the World achieves contact with it; and if one commits oneself one also cannot remain Godless. Let us love the actual World that never wishes to be annulled, but love it in all its terror, but dare to embrace it with our spirit’s arms—and our hands encounter the hands that hold it. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
I know nothing of a World and of Worldly life that separate us from God. What is designated that way is life with an alienated It-World, the life of experience and use. Whoever goes forth in truth to the World, goes forth to God. Concentration and going forth, both in truth, the one-and-the-other which is the One, are what is needful. God embrace but is not myself. On account of this which cannot be spoken about, I can say in my language, as all can say in theirs: You. For the sake of this there are I an You, there is dialogue, there is language, and spirit whose primal deed language is, and there, in eternity, the word. Let us look at the experience of a young man named Britain. He came into therapy feeling sad, hopeless, lonely, lost. He felt everybody had died—his mother, his sister Britney—and the relation with Celeste was nearly dead, and now, at the end of therapy, the relation with the therapist was dying. He was in clear, unadulterated despair. However, halfway through the session he began his recovery. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
The despair was essential in bringing Britain to the point where he could give up his previous neurotic ways of behaving in his overwork and in his failure to have full relationships with other people. This experience when he had been a young man had been one turning point in his life, just as he and I believed this therapy, ten concluding, would be a turning point in one’s overcoming his love bind with Celeste. Thus, despair can lead to highly constructive action. It can be a flushing out of the Augean stables. Despair can be a giving up and a letting go of neurotic problems that had been solidifying since one was an infant. In this sense despair plays the constructive role reserved for it in every psychotherapy. I am speaking of despair not as a cosmic pout nor as any kind of intellectual posture. If it is a mood put on to impress somebody or to express resentment toward anybody, it is not genuine despair. Authentic despair is that emotion which forces one to come to terms with one’s destiny. It is the great enemy of pretense, the foe of playing ostrich. It was once thought that when an ostrich was in danger it hid its head in the ground believing that if it could not see anyone, no one could see it. That has led to the idea that is people refuse to face painful facts or unpleasant truths, they play ostrich. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
We have imposed on us a demand to face the reality of one’s life. The letting go that we noted in despair is a letting go of false hopes, of pretended loves, of infantilizing dependency, of empty conformism which serves only to make one behave like sheep huddling in a flock because they fear the wolves outside the circle. Despair is the smelting furnace which melts out the impurities in the ore. Despair is not freedom itself, but is a necessary preparation for freedom. The Grand Inquisitor is right: we would not choose to go into despair if we consulted only our rational choices. However, there is no denying destiny or fate, and reality comes marching up to require that we drop all halfway measures and temporary exigencies and ways of being dishonest with ourselves and confront our natural lives, uninhibited by external influences, which may be toxic. It is well known that in successful therapy sessions, that organizations which are far and away the most effective in treating people, state frankly that the assistant for the injured or disabled or an individual with special needs cannot be cured until he or she is in complete despair. It is only then that the individual can give up the need for the source of their dependence as a solace for his or her forlorn hopes or to bolster his or her false expectations. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
Those who have been through a rehabilitation program and then help new members simply laugh outright at the predespair of unrealistic grandiosity, one’s pompous I-am-the-master-of-my-fate-attitude, and one’s vain resolutions to control one’s dependency by one’s own will power, come to understand that one has to find a higher faith in the power of God to resolve and heal situations. Then the Lord will let one see why there is none upon the Earth that can speak to my condition, namely, that one might give God all the glory. Because sometimes we hope for the wrong things, and hopes themselves can become the most seductive delusions. When a person reached the lowest point, state, or condition, for instance, when one has reached ultimate despair—one can then surrender to eternal forces; this process as giving up the delusion of false hopes and, thus, acknowledging fully the facts of destiny. Then and only then can this person begin to rebuild oneself. It is superb demonstration of the hypothesis that freedom begins only when we confront destiny. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
The same was true of Synanon, the drug rehab turned violent cult, as the system became a nest for fraud. There was failure to define and enforce clear ethical standards governing their business practices, an it rendered the treatment program to become field of predator’s paradise. Synanon started in Santa Monica, California by Charles Dederich, and morphed into a utopian community, then a religion and a cult with more than $30 million in assets and upward of 1,300 followers. True believers shaved their heads, wore overalls, and lived together at Synanon compounds, professing and almost slavish obedience to Charles Dederich, no matter how brutal his methods. They were said to even kidnap people. Despite all the high idealistic talk of oneness, fraternity, and egolessness, each of us is still an individual, still has to dwell in a body of one’s own, to use a mind of one’s own and experience feelings of one’s own. To forget this is to practice self-deception. Each will come to God in the end but one will comes as a purified transformed and utterly changed person, lived in and used by God as one will live in and be conscious of the presence of God. “And Christ hath said: If ye will have faith in me ye shall have power to do whatsoever thing is experiment in me,” Moroni 7.33. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
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Justice Without Love is Always Injustice Because it Does Not Do Justice to the Other One, Nor to Oneself, Nor to the Situation in Which We Meet!
I stood on the hilltop in the Moonlight and I tried not to see this paradise. I tried to picture those I loved. Were they gathered still together in that fairy-tale wood of beautiful trees? If only I could see their faces or hear their voices. I looked on these verdant green valley, now patched with beautiful contracted Cresleigh homes, a picture book World with flowers blooming in profusion, the red poinsettia as tall as trees. And the clouds, ever changing, borne like the tall sailing ships on brisk winds. What had the first Europeans thought when they looked upon this fecund land surrounded by the sparkling sea? That this was the Garden of God? Even the most uneducated people would not dare to affirm that compassion, gratitude, love of the beauty of the World, love of religious practices, and friendship belonged exclusively to those centuries and countries that recognize the Church. These forms of love are rarely found in their purity, but it would even be difficult to say that they were met with more frequently in those centuries and countries than in the others. To think that love in any of these forms can exist anywhere Christ is absent is to belittle him so grievously that it amounts to an outrage. It is impious and almost sacrilegious. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
These kinds of love are supernatural, and in a sense they are absurd. They are the height of folly. So long as the soul has not had direct contact with the very person of God, they cannot be supported by any knowledge based either on experience or reason. They cannot therefore rest upon any certainty, unless the word is used in a metaphorical sense to indicate the opposite of hesitation. In consequence it is better that they should not be associated with any belief. This is more honest intellectually, and it safeguards our love’s purity more effectively. On this account it is more fitting. In what concerns divine things, belief is not fitting. Only certainty will do. Anything less than certainty is unworthy of God. During the period of preparation, these indirect loves constitute an upward movement of the soul, a turning of the eyes, not without some effort, toward higher things. After God has come in person, not only to visit the soul as he does for a long time beforehand, but to possess it and to transport its center near to his very heart, it is otherwise. The chicken has cracked its shell; it is outside the egg of the World. These first loves continue; they are more intense than before, but they are different. One who has passed through this adventure has a deeper love than every for those who suffer affliction and for those who help one in one’s own, for one’s friends, for religious practices, and for the beauty of the World. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
However, one’s love in all these forms had become a movement of God himself, a ray merged in the light of God. That at least is what we may suppose. These indirect loves are only the attitude toward beings and things here below of the soul turned toward the Good. They themselves have not any particular good as an object. There is no final good here below. Thus strictly speaking we are no longer concerned with forms of love, but with attitudes inspire by love. In the period of preparation the soul loves in emptiness. It does not know whether anything real answers its love. It may believe that it knows, but to believe is not to know. Such a belief does not help. The soul knows for certain only that it is hungry. The important thing is that it announces its hunger by crying. If we suggest to a child that perhaps there is no bread, the child does not stop crying. It goes on crying just the same. The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry. It can only persuade itself of this by lying, for the reality of its hunger is not a belief, it is a certainty. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
We all know that there is no true good here below, that everything that appears to be good in this World is finite, limited, wears out, and once worn out, leaves necessity exposed in all its nakedness. Every human being has probably had some lucid moments in one’s life when one has definitely acknowledged to oneself that there is no final good here below. However, as soon as we have seen this truth we cover it up with lies. Many people even take pleasure in proclaiming it, seeking a morbid joy in their sadness, without ever having been able to bear facing it for a second. Mortals feel that there is a mortal danger in facing this truth squarely for any length of time. That is true. Such knowledge strikes more surely than a sword; it inflicts a death more frightening than that of the body. After a time it kills everything within us that constitutes our soul. In order to bear it we have to love the truth more than life itself. Those who do this turn away from the fleeting things of time with their souls. They do not turn toward God. When they are in total darkness, how could they do so? God himself sets their faces in the right direction. He does not, however, show himself to them for a long time. It is for them to remain motionless, without averting their eyes, listening ceaselessly, and waiting, they know not for what; deaf to entreaties and threats, unmoved by every shock, unshaken in the midst of every upheaval. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
If after a long period of waiting God allow them to have an indistinct intuition of his light or even reveals himself in person, it is only for an instant. Once more they have to remain still, attentive, inactive, calling out only when their desire cannot be contained. If God does not reveal this reality, it does not rest with the soul to believe in the reality of God. In trying to do so it either labels something else with the name of God, and that is idolatry, or its belief in God remains abstract and verbal. Such a belief prevails wherever religious doctrines are taken for granted, as is the cause with those centuries and countries in which it never enters anyone’s head to question it. The state of nonbelief is then what Saint John of the Cross calls a night. The belief is verbal and does not penetrate the soul. At a time like the present, if the unbeliever loves Go, if one is like the child who does not know whether there is bread anywhere, but cries out become one is hungry, incredulity may be equivalent to the dark night of Saint John of the Cross. When we are eating bread, and even when we have eaten it, we know that it is real. We can nevertheless raise doubts about the reality of bread. Philosophers raise doubts about the reality of the World of the senses. Such doubts are however purely verbal; they leave the certainty intact and actually serve only to make it more obvious to a well-balanced mind. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
In the same way one to whom God has revealed his reality can raise doubts about this reality without any harm. They are purely verbal doubts, a form of exercise to keep one’s intelligence in good health. What amounts to criminal treason, even before such a revelation and much more afterward, is to question the fact that God is the only thing worthy of love. That is a turning away of our eyes, for love is the soul’s looking. It means that we have stopped for an instant to wait and to listen. Queen Akasha did not seek Lestat, she waited for him. When she was convinced that he no longer existed, and that nowhere in the whole World was there anything that could be Lestat, she did not on that account return to her former associates. She drew back from them with greater aversion than ever. She preferred the absence of Lestat to the presence of anyone else. Lestat awakened her from her statue state, from her cold slumber. She no longer hoped for that. However, never for an instant did dream of employing another method which could obtain a luxurious and honored life for her—the method of reconciliation with her kith and kin. Akasha did not want wealth and consideration unless they came with Lestat. She did not even give a thought to such things. However, she wanted to turn Earth into a Heaven. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
At that moment Lestat could hold out no longer. He could not help declaring himself. He gave certain proof that he was Lestat. Akasha saw him, she heard him, she touched him. There would be no more question for her not as to whether her savior was in existence. One who has had the same adventure as Akasha, one whose soul has seen, heard, and touched for itself, one will recognize God as the reality inspiring all indirect loves, the reality of which they are as it were the reflections. God is pure beauty. This is incomprehensible, for beauty, by its very essence, has to do with the senses. To speak of an imperceptible beauty must seem a misuse of language to anyone who has any sense of exactitude: and with reason. Beauty is always a miracle. However, when the soul receives an impression of beauty which, while it is beyond all sense perception is no abstraction, but real and direct as the impression caused by a song at the moment it reached our ears, the miracle is raised to the second degree. Everything happens as though, by a miraculous favor, our very sense themselves had been made aware that silence is not the absence of sound, but something infinitely more real than sounds, and the center of a harmony more perfect than anything which a combination of sounds can produce. Furthermore there are degrees of silence. When compared with the silence of God, there is a silence in the beauty of the Universe which is like noise. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
God is, moreover, our real neighbor. The term of person can only be rightly applied to God, and this is also true of the term impersonal. God is one who bends over us, afflicted as we are, and reduced to the state of being nothing but a fragment of inert and bleeding flesh. Yet at the same time he is not some sort of victim of misfortune as well, the victim who appears to us as an inanimate body, incapable of thought, this nameless victim of whom nothing is known. The inanimate body is this created Universe. If we were able to attain it, the love we owe to God, this love that would be our crowning perfection is the divine model both of gratitude and compassion. God is also the perfect friend. So that there should be between him and us, bridging the infinite distance, something in the way of equality, he had chosen to place an absolute quality in his creatures, the absolute liberty of consent, which leaves us free to follow or swerve from the God-ward direction he has communicated to our souls. He has also extended our possibilities of error and falsehood so as to leave us the faculty of exercising a spurious rule in imagination, not only over the Universe and the human race, but also over God himself, in so far as we do not know how to use his name aright. He has given us this faculty of infinite illusion so that we should have the power to renounce it out of love. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
In fact, contact with God is the true sacrament. We can, however, be almost certain that those whose love of God has caused the disappearance of the pure loves belonging to our life here below are no true friends of God. After the soul has had direct contact with God, our neighbor, our friends, religious ceremonies, and the beauty of the World do not fall to the level of unrealities. On the contrary, it is only then that these things become real. Previously they were half dreams. Previously they had no reality. “In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of Heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all peoples, nations, and mortals of every language worshipped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed,” reports Daniel 7.11. Could God possibly forgive people without at least demanding their conversation and some ritual observances? People, at any time, can return and be accepted by God. God can at any time forgive those who repent. Many people say we live in a sick society—and the quality of life might be changed radically by the development of a new sense of community. If every person returns from one’s evil way and from the violence on one’s hands, who knows, God may return. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
Modern mortals are voracious readers who have never learned to read well. Part of the trouble is that one is taught to read drivel that is hardly worth reading well. (There was a time when children learned to read by reading the Bible.) One ends up by reading mainly newspapers and magazines—ephemeral, anonymous trash that one scans on its way to the garbage can. One has no wish to remember it for any length of time; it is written as if to make sure that one will not; and one reads it in a manner that makes doubly sure. There is no person behind what one reads; not even a committee. Somebody wrote it in the first place—if one can call that writing—and then various other people took turns changing it. For the final result no one is responsible; and it rarely merits a serious response. It cries out to be forgotten soon, like the books on which one is learned to read, in school. They were usually anonymous, too; or they should have been. In adolescence students are suddenly turned loose on books worth reading, but generally do not know how to read them. And if, untaught, some instinct prompts them to read well, chances are that they are asked completely tone-deaf questions as soon as they have finished their assignment—either making them feel that they read badly after all or spoiling something worthwhile for the rest of their lives. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
We must learn to feel addressed by a book, by the human being behind it, as if a person spoke directly to us. A good book or essay or poem is not primarily an object to be put to use, or an object of experience: it is the voice of You speaking to me, requiring a response. “So whatever you wish that mortals would do to you, do so to them; for this is the law and the prophets,” reports Matthew 7.12. Recently I have had to think about the relation of love to justice. And it occurred to me that among the words of Jesus there is a statement of what is called the “Golden Rule.” The Golden Rule was well known to Christians and Greeks, although mostly in a negative form: What you do not want that mortal should do to you, do not so to them. Certainly, the absolute for is richer in meaning and nearer to love, but it is not love. It is calculating justice. How, then, is it related to love? How does it fit the message of the kingdom of God and the justice of the kingdom as expressed in the Sermon on the Mount where the Golden Rule appears? Let us think of an ordinary day in our life and of occasions for the application of the Golden Rule. We meet each other in the morning, we expect a friendly face or word and we are ready to give it although our minds are full of anxious anticipation of the burdens. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
Somebody wants a part of our limited time, we give it, having asked somebody else to give us a part of one’s time. We need help and we give it if we are asked, although it includes sacrifice. We are frank with others, expecting that they will be frank with us even if it hurts. We are fair to those who fight against us expecting fairness from them. We participate in the sorrows of our neighbors, certain that they will participate in ours. All this can happen in one day. All this is Golden Rule. And if somebody has violated this rule, consciously or unconsciously, we are willing to forgive as we hope to be forgiven. It is not astonishing that for many people the Golden Rule is considered as the real content of Christianity. It is not surprising that in the name of the Golden Rule criticism is suppressed, independent action discouraged, serious problems avoided. It is even understandable that statesmen ask other nations to behave toward their own nations according to the Golden Rule. And does not Jesus himself say that the Golden Rule is the law and the prophets? However, we know that this is not the answer of the New Testament. The great commandment as Jesus repeats it and the descriptions of love in Paul and John’s tremendous assertion that God is love, infinitely transcend the Golden Rule. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
The Golden Rule must be transcended, for it does not tell us what we should wish that mortal would do to us. We wish to have freedom from heavy duties. We are ready to give the same freedom to others. However, someone who loves us refuses to give it to us, and one oneself refuses to ask us for it. And if one did, we should refuse to give it to one because it would reduce our growth and violate the law of love. We wish to receive a fortune which makes us secure and independent. We would be ready to give a fortune to a friend who asks us for it, if we had it. However, in both cases love would be violated. For the gift would ruin us and the other individual. We want to be forgiven and we are ready to do the same. However, perhaps it is in both cases an escape from the seriousness of a personal problem, and therefore against love. The measure of what we shall do to mortals cannot be our wishes about what they shall do to us. For our wishes express not only our right but also our wrong and our foolishness more than our wisdom. This is the limit of the Golden Rule. This is the limit of calculating justice. Only for one who knows what one should wish and who actually wishes it, is the Golden Rule ultimately valid. Only love can transform calculating justice into creative justice. Love makes justice just. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
Justice without love is always injustice because it does not do justice to the other one, nor to the oneself, nor to the situation in which we meet. For the other one and I and we together in this moment in this place are unique, unrepeatable occasion, calling for a unique unrepeatable act of uniting love. If this call is not heard by listening love, it is not obeyed by the creative genius of love, injustice is done. And this is true even of oneself. One who loves listens to the call of one’s own innermost center and obeys this call and does justice to one’s own being. For love does not remove, it establishes justice. It does not add something to what justice does but it shows justice what to do. It makes the Golden Rule possible. For we do not speak for a love which swallows justice. This would result in chaos and extinction. However, we speak for a love in which justice is the form and structure of love. We speak for a love which respects the claim of the other one to be acknowledged as what one is, and the claim of ourselves to be acknowledged as what we are, above all as persons. Only distorted love, which is a cover for hostility or self-disgust, denies that which united love. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
Love makes justice just. The divine love is justifying love accepting and fulfilling one who, according to calculating justice, must be rejected. This justification of one who is unjust is the fulfillment of God’s creative justice, and of God’s reuniting love. Knowing that the ultimate meaning of freedom will elude us, let us still endeavor to define the term as best we can. The first definition is on the psychological level, the domain of everyday actions: Freedom is the capacity to pause in the face of stimuli from many directions at once and, in this pause, to throw one’s weight toward this response rather than that one. This is the freedom we experience in a store when we pause over the purchase of a necktie or a shirt. We summon up in our imaginations the image of how we will look in this or that tie, what so-and-so will say about it, or how the color will fit such and such a suit. And then we buy the tie or we move on to something else. This is freedom of doing, or existential freedom. This freedom is shown most interestingly in the supermarket, when we push our carts through the aisles between the tumultuous variety of packages and cans of food on the shelves, each one silently shouting through its bright-colored label “Buy me!” We see the shoppers with expressions of hesitancy, vacuity, wonder, pausing for some inspiration as to which of all these foods will be good for dinner tonight. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
The shopper seems hypnotized, charmed, preoccupied. Like patients on a ward in a mental hospital, they do not see me as I walk directly across their line of vision. The expressions of wonder and hesitancy are a readiness, an invitation, an openness to some stimulus on the shelves to persuade them to throw the balance this way of that in making their choice. This first freedom is experienced by each of us hundreds of times every day. It is decked up in respectable terms like decision/choice when we discuss freedom in psychology classes—if we ever discuss freedom in psychology classes at all. The most profound illustration of this kind of freedom is our ability to ask questions. Take, for example, my asking a question after listening to a lecture. The very fact that the question comes up in my mind at all implied that there is more than one answer. Otherwise there would be no point in asking the question in the first place. This is freedom; it implies that there is some possibility, some freedom of selection in what I ask. The speaker then pauses for a few seconds after I have asked it, turning over in his or her mind the possible answers. We sense that there is, in asking and answering questions, a good deal more going on, and it is of a richer nature, than the mere responding to various stimuli and selecting a response. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
Each person who lights this candle within one’s own mind will soon begin to attract other mortals like moths to a flame burning by a fire—not all mortal nor many mortals but only those who are groping for a way out of their darkness. Can a scrupulously impartial search through World-thought and experience lead to discovery of truth? “Wilt thou be made whole?” asked Jesus. Questioning implies some value judgment, some investment of the person’s life, some invitation to share, to make contact, some challenge to consider a new idea. Regrettably, in recent decades our very idea of freedom has been diminished and grown shallow in comparisons with previous ages; it has been relegated almost exclusively to freedom from outside pressure, to freedom from state coercion—to freedom understood on the juridical level, and no higher. Only when this search for a higher life has becomes an absolute necessity to a mortal, has one found even the first qualification needed for the Quest. “And the Lord God doth work by means to bring about his great and eternal purposes; and by very small means the Lord doth confound the wise and bringeth about the salvation of many souls,” reports Alma 37.7. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
If they Do Not Even Know Why they are Standing Upon it at All, What is the Use of their Running from Point to Point on this Earth?
Your faith touches me as always, but do not be my acolyte just now. They were already legends—filled with love for all they saw around them, beings who understood the word joy. How can we learn to love ourselves? Perhaps we can start by admitting that it is impossible! It is not possible in the same sense that we will never become completely self-accepting (not in this life anyway!). Like others values worth wanting, loving one’s self is an ideal never fully realized. However, moving in that direction is a fascinating and worthwhile, lifelong adventure. If we can become more self-aware, it will help us to become more loving toward ourselves. It is not possible to love someone profoundly whom one does not know, and many of us are virtually strangers to ourselves, so deadened have we become to any awareness of our deeper feelings. And since we have spent many years cutting ourselves off from awareness of hated parts of ourselves, the recovery of awareness is usually not easily accomplished. We are frightened of what we may find and resist awareness in multitudes of ways. Frequently, the help of a professional therapist is needed to help us overcomes these resistances. Often in the early stages of recovering self-awareness it will seem as though we are learning to hate ourselves, not love ourselves. This happens because one of the first things we become aware of is our hidden self-hate, which has been building up over the years and of which we have likely had only vague intimations, and feelings that have been too unacceptable for us to allow ourselves to experience some to the surface. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14
We may begin to feel more hate then we thought it was possible for us to feel. Self-loathing, deeply experienced hurt, disgust about pleasures of the flesh, and other frightening feelings may burst into awareness. This is a crisis in personal growth, but it is often a necessary crisis. Advocates of self-actuating thinking approach mental health frequently do a disservice at this point. Too often they short-circuit this process by encouraging individuals to think optimistically about themselves without taking into account their need to first experience their self-hatred. Under the influence of this advice individuals are likely to cover up something bad about apparent self-acceptance and self-affirmation over the tomb of their inner deadness to themselves and their self-hate. In this way they may talk themselves into being more successful insurance salesmen or less disagreeable husbands, while they have only cut themselves off even farther from contact with themselves and the ultimate possibility of genuine self-acceptance and self-affirmation. Gradually, when we allow ourselves to experience self-hate, this crisis will pass. We discover that it is not so bad after all to have very human feelings. A young woman who has been shocked and scandalized by accounts of promiscuity feels profound disgust as she becomes aware that she, too, has desires for pleasures of the flesh that are not limited to one man. However, she begins to enjoy and cherish her feelings for pleasures of the flesh. As is usually the case, he disgust masked an unaccepted appetite. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14
Khayman was a young man addicted to working long and hard hours and he was considerably bugged by his father’s lack of ambition. He could not understand how his father could go off for a day of fishing when he was having business difficulties and financial pressures. When the young man examined his feelings more closely, it became evident that he did not allow himself to experience his own desire to take off and get away from it all occasionally. He was afraid he would like it too much and become a drifter. So he drove himself constantly, no allowing himself the pleasure of relaxation. And it is not surprising that once Khayman was able to experience this desire to loaf within himself, he not only moved in the direction of greater self-acceptance but was able to experience more love for his father. If we can keep our goals realistic, it will also help us in our efforts to learn to love ourselves. Many of us make severe demands on ourselves. We think we ought to be perfect, and we think we ought to achieve that perfection immediately. When we fail to do so, as we certainly must, we are burdened with unproductive feelings of guilt and worthlessness. With this kind of perfectionist cycle operating we might easily make even the search for self-acceptance a new vehicle for feelings of worthlessness! #RandolphHarris 3 of 14
Perhaps the secret is possessed in learning to relax and enjoy what we are right now—every feeling, every urge, every idiosyncrasy that is a part of us. Then if we really want to be what we have always told ourselves we ought to be, we may be freer to move in that direction. In other words, we dare not wait until we are perfect to start loving ourselves. We would wait forever. Let us learn to love ourselves in our imperfections. This attitude toward ourselves might be compared to the attitude of a warmly affectionate father toward his son. When the boy makes mistakes, he does not stop loving his son. He recognizes that failures and probably will express his concerns and perhaps may even become angry. However, somehow, there is communication from father to son of steadfast love and encouragement that is no destroyed or even threatened by these occasional crises. A similar attitude toward ourselves is very desirable. There will, of course, be times when we feel we have goofed. We may be angry and say to ourselves, “Oh, you meathead, you have done it again.” However, if there is a basic underlying sense of personal worth that is not shaken by the recognition that we have made a mistake, we can be much more effective about doing what we want to do in the future; for we will not be wasting the days of our lives in self-recrimination. Often this self-accepting attitude involves a sense of humor in which we can laugh at ourselves in our errors, give ourselves a good kick in the britches, and move on to the next moment of living. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14
Ideally, religious faiths might play an important part in helping their believers to learn to love themselves. Perhaps they do, but frequently they tend to create self-hate. Often religion says, “You are unworthy and condemnable in God’s sight. However, if you confess your unworthiness, God is willing to forgive you. You will then be a new creature, and God will give you strength to feel and act in more acceptable ways.” It cannot be denied that individuals who accept such a belief in God often experience a profound relief as they feel released from the burden of self-hate. And often they live greatly changed lives. However, the question remains whether the basic problem of self-hate has been adequately dealt with or whether a veneer of self-acceptance has simply been laid over the self-condemnation. It would appear that a new and better repressive technique is often acquired whereby the individual can somewhat better avoid dealing with the desires and feelings that are still felt to be so condemnable in God’s eyes. On the other hand, religion sometimes says, “God knows how often you get into messes you regret. He also knows how ugly and brutal you can sometimes seem. However, he also knows how frightened you are and understands why you do the things you do. He loves and accepts you as you are. Because God loves you, he really wants you to enjoy life and the experience of love to the fullest. He enjoys being a partner in your quest.” It seems likely that faith in this kind of God would add to the experience of love for one’s self. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14
Millions of humans come into the World and after a relatively short existence disappear. No of us are an exception, our turn to vanish will also come. Thought, confronted with this fact, must either despair, take refuge in the hopes of religion, or resolve to find out the truth behind the tremendous cosmic drama. It is better to accept the loneliness of the quester than the complacency of the Worldling who lives without any understanding of life’s inner purpose. Men and women try various ways to overcome their innate loneliness and with various results in the end. So long as the expedient used is something or someone outside themselves, their victories turn out to be illusions. There is no final way other than the Way which everyone has had to tread at last who ever succeeded in this objective, and which leads inwards to the Overself. In their search for satisfaction outside of and apart from the Overself, men and women are really fugitives from it. The response provoked in you by the entry of these ideas will determine your future. We suffering from stagnation and imagine that existence in the intellect and body is enough; it is not. The primary emphasis must be laid on the living principle of our being, the central self which creates both body and intellect. Here it is, the human creature put upon this round planet and left to make nothing from life, merely survive, or to make something out of it, and hold the great vision of the World-Idea, in company with the gods. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14
The making of money, the earning of a livelihood, and the attainment of professional or business success have their proper place in life and should be accorded it but—in comparison with the fulfilment of spiritual aspiration—out to be regarded as having quite a secondary place. Some people throw their clothes away after they wear them, they rent million-dollar apartments and forget where they are. No scientific technological advance, buy sports and luxury cars and cannot remember where they parked them. These individuals have an endless parade of sports coats, pants, robes, silk foulards. mink-lined raincoats, and dinner jackets for Monte Carlo, and jeweled cuff links. When they awake, their clothes are already laid out for them. Heaven help them if they were to change a single time, from the linen handkerchief to the black silk socks. Breakfast awaits them in the immense kitchen with its beautiful windows. The Greeks as always were a splendid people, gentle and trusting though they were darker of hair and skin now on account of their Turkish blood. The power to communicate varies. To listen to the thoughts of others is often to be heard oneself. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14
They are sane, but they are so busy, and have so much money, and travel so much that it is like finding a tree in the forest without a map of which one you are looking for. Gold watch on his wrist, one of those high-tech numbers he so adored. Think of that thing flashing its digits inside his office. No scientific technological advance, no political gain, no economic improvement will ever be enough in and of itself to provide a proper goal for human endeavour. It is easy to forget this in certain favourable periods, and if we do we come close to disaster in the end. We use every possible moment to cultivate the uncertain fields of commerce or to grow the perishing flowers of pleasure, but we are unable to spare one moment to cultivate the certain fields of the spirit within ourselves or to grow the enduring asphodels of divine devotion. The goals of progress are but imagined ones. There is only one goal which is undeniably real, completely certain, and authentically true—and that is an unchanging one, an eternal one. Yet it is also the one that has escaped humankind! #RandolphHarris 8 of 14
Our self-hate is developed primarily from experiences of feelings of rejection by others. Learning to love ourselves also involves relationships with people. We need the experience of emotional intimacy with others so that we can learn that we can be accepted as we are and thus can grow in self-acceptance. A very real predicament faces us at this point. We are desperately afraid of intimacy because we assume that deep involvement with another person will lead only to further rejection and hurt, and further confirmation of our feelings of worthlessness and unlovableness. Yet the experience of intimacy is almost a prerequisite for moving in the direction of the greater self-acceptance that would free us to enter into intimate relationships. The only solution to this dilemma seems to be to move gradually into increasing intimacy in spite of our fear. We will probably act somewhat like a wild deer leading to trust a would-be human friend. Because of our fear, our seeking of intimacy will undoubtedly proceed slowly and cautiously and our forward progress will include many frightened strategic withdrawals. However, if we can overcome our fear sufficiently to begin to talk about our inner feelings with another human being we will begin to learn that we are not unique. And out of the mutual acceptance will begin to assert itself. When we feel hurt, angered, misunderstood, and above all else, frightened, of course such a relationship will have its difficult moments, both for ourselves, and the other person. This will happen because we are both so frightened of self-disclosure that we constantly seek to avoid it. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14
If we can persist in spite of our fears, the rewards in satisfaction and growing self-acceptance will be great. If we are sufficiently motivated toward changing ourselves, if we have not been so emotionally damaged that we cannot make a start, the suggestions described above for breaking through the cycle of rejection and our self-hatred and learning to love ourselves will probably be helpful. Here in this country, mortals are more eager to better their manufactures than themselves. They will accept their own imperfections quite smugly and contentedly, but the imperfections of their automobiles—never! Yet, if they do not even know why they are standing upon it at all what is the use of their running from point to point on this Earth? Mortals as scientists have put under observation countless objects on Earth, in sea and sky. They have thoroughly examined them. However, mortal as mortal has put oneself under a shallower observation. One has limited one’s scrutiny first to the body, second to what thinking can find. Yet a deeper level exists, where a deeper hidden self can be found. One will discover that it is not enough to regard as good only that which is favourable to one’s physical life. One must complete the definition and sometimes even contradict it by adding that which is favourable to one’s spiritual life. There is nothing more important in life than the Quest, and the time will come when the student discovers that there is nothing more enjoyable as well. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14
This is inevitable in a Quest whose essential nature is one of infinite harmony and unbroken peace. No Worldly object, person, or pleasure can ever bestow the satisfaction experienced in uniting with the Overself. It is not the primal needs and their gratification but the realization of our divine possibilities which is the hidden justification of our presence in this World. The ceaseless longing for person happiness which exists in every human being is a right one, but is generally mistake in the direction along which satisfaction is sought. For all outward objects and beings can yield only a transient and imperfect delight that can never be equivalent to the uninterrupted happiness of life in the Overself. An existence which has no higher aims than purely physical ones, no nobler activities than merely personal ones, no inner references to a spiritual purpose, has to depend only on its own small resources. It has failed to benefit by its connection with the power behind the Universe. That the truth of life must be deeper than what we see and hear and touch, is suspected by intuitive persons, believed or felt by pious persons, and directly known by wise persons. What the surface story tells us is not the whole of it, they say. The love of institutional religion, although the name of God necessarily comes into it, is not in itself an explicit, but an implicit love of God, for it does not involve direct, immediate contact with him. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14
When they are pure, God is present in religious practices, just as he is present in our neighbor and in the beauty of the World; in the same way and not any more. The form that the love of religion takes in the soul differs a great deal according to the circumstances of our lives. Some circumstances prevent the very birth of this love; others kill it before it has been able to grow very strong. In affliction some mortals, in spite of themselves, develop a hatred and contempt for religion because the cruelty, pride, or corruption of certain of its ministers have made them suffer. There are others who have been reared from their earliest youth in surrounding impregnated with a spirit of this sort. If they are sufficiently strong and pure, we must conclude that in such cases, by God’s mercy, the love of our neighbor and the love of the beauty of the World will be enough to raise the soul to any height. The love of institutional religion normally has as its object the prevailing religion of the country or circle in which a mortal is brought up. As a result of an inborn habit, everyone thinks first of that each time one thinks of a religious service. The whole virtue of religious practices can be conceived of from the Christian tradition concerning the recitation of the name of the Lord. Our goal is to raise ourselves in a land of purity, and the Bible reminds of that the Lord really has the power of transforming the soul. Religion is supposed to truly be nothing else but this promise of God. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14
Every religious practice, every rite, all liturgy is a form of the recitation of the name of the Lord and in principle should have a real virtue, the virtue of saving whoever devotes oneself to performing it with desire. All religions pronounce the name of God in their particular language. As a rule it is better for a mortal to name God in one’s native language rather than one that is foreign to the culture. When it has to make the slight effort of seeking for the words in a foreign language, even when this language is well known, except in special cases, the soul is not able to abandon itself utterly. A writer whose native language is poor, difficult to manipulate, and not widely known throughout the World is very strongly tempted to adopt another. There are a few like Joseph Conrad who have done so with startling success. However, they are very rare. Except in special cases such a change does harm, both thought and style suffer, the writer is always ill at ease in the adopted language and cannot rise above mediocrity. A change of religion is for the soul like a change of language for a writer. All religion, it is true, are not equally suitable for the recitation of the name of the Lord. Some, without any doubt, are very imperfect mediums. However, religion is known only from inside. Catholics say this of Catholicism, but it is true of all religions. Religion is a form of nourishment. It is difficult to appreciate the flavor and food value of something one has never eaten. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14
The comparison of religions is only possible, in some measures, through the miraculous virtue of sympathy. If at the same time as we observe them from outside, we can know mortals to a certain extent, as we manage by sympathy to transport our own soul into theirs for a time. In the same way the study of different religions does not lead to a real knowledge of them unless we transport ourselves for a time by faith to the very center of whichever one we are studying. Here, moreover, this word faith is used in its strongest sense. This scarcely ever happens, for some have no faith, and the others have faith exclusively in one religion and only bestow upon the others the sort of attention we give to strangely shaped shells. There are others again who think they are capable of impartiality because they have only a vague religiosity which they can turn indifferently in any direction, all our faith, all our love to a particular religion in order to think of any other religion with the high degree of attention, faith, and love that is proper to it. In the same way, only those who are capable of friendship can take a real heartfelt interest in the fate of an utter stranger. If we do not love our fellow travelers on this mortal journey, we cannot truly love God. We are all spirit children of our Heavenly Father and, as such, are brothers and sisters. As we keep this truth in mind, loving all of God’s children will become easier. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14
Who Has Not Found Heaven for Where Your Treasure is Will be Your Heart?
And then the room was empty. Perfectly empty. I turned, disconsolate and shuddering, and put my head down on my arm, as if I could go to sleep on my desk. I was considering William James, that psychologist-philosopher American-man-of-genius, who struggled all his life with the problem of his will. One of my esteemed colleagues, writing of James’s severe depression and the fact that for a number of years he was on the verge of suicide, asks us not to judge him harshly for those aspects of maladjustment. I take a different view. I believe that understanding the depressions James suffered and the way he dealt with them increases our appreciation and admiration for him. True, all his life he was plagued by vacillation and an inability to make up his mind. In his last years, when he was struggling to give up his lecturing at Harvard, he would write in his diary one day, “Resign,” the next day, “Don’t resign,” and the third day, “Resign” again. James’s difficulty in making up his mind was connected with his inner richness and the myriad of possibilities for him in every decision. However, it was precisely James’s depressions—in which he would often write of his yearning for “a reason for wishing to live four hours longer”—which forced him to be so concerned with will, and precisely in the struggle against these depressions that he learned so much about human will. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
William James believed—and, as a therapist, I believe that his judgment here is clinically sound—that it was own discovery of the capacity to will which enabled him to live a tremendously fruitful life up to his death at sixty-eight, despite his depressions and hos continual affliction with insomnia, eye troubles, back disorders, and so on. In our own “age of this disordered will,” as it has been termed, we turn to William James with eagerness to find whatever help he can give us with our own problem of will. He begins his famous chapter on will, published in 1890, by summarily dismissing wish as what we do when we desire something which is not possible for achievement, and contrast it with will, which exists when the end is within our power. If with the desire there is a sense that attainment is not possible, we simply wish. I believe that this definition is one of the places where James’s Victorianism shows through; wishes are treated as unreal and immature. Obviously, no wish is possible when we first wish it. It becomes possible only as we wish it in many different ways, and through considering it from this side and that, possibly over a great period of time, we generate the power and take the risk to make it happen. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
However, then James launches into what turns out to be one of the most thrilling treatises on will in literature, which I can only touch on. There is, first, the primary type, which is distinguished by the fact it does not require a whole series of decisions. We desire to change our shirt or begin to write on paper, and once we start, a whole series of movements is set going by itself; it is ideomotor. This primary will requires absence of conflict. James is here trying to preserve spontaneity. He is taking his stand against Victorian Will power, the exercise of the separate faculty called will power which must have failed him dismally in his own life and led him into the paralysis which expressed itself in his depressions. Now we know in our day a lot more about this so-called absence of conflict, thanks chiefly to psychoanalysis, and that infinitely more is going on in states which seem without conflict. He then touches on the healthy will which he defines as action following vision. The vision requires a clear concept and consists of motives in their right ratio to each other—which is a fairly rationalistic picture. Discussing unhealth will, he rightly focuses on the obstructed will. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
Obstructed will, one illustration of this that James cites is the state that exists when our eyes lose focus and we are unable to rally our attention. We sit blankly staring and do nothing. The objects of consciousness fail to touch the quick or break the skin. Great fatigue or exhaustion marks this condition; and an apathy resembling that then brought about is recognized in asylums under the name of abulia as a symptom of mental disease. It is interesting that he relates this apathy only to mental disease. I, for one, believe this is the chronic, endemic, psychic state of our society in our day—the neurotic personality of our time. The question then boils down to: Why does not something interest me, reach out to me, grasp me? And James then comes to the central problem of will, namely attention. I do not know whether he realized what a stroke of genius this was. When we analyze will with all the tools modern psychoanalysis brings us, we shall find ourselves pushed back to the level of attention or intention as the seat of will. The effort which goes into the exercise of the will is really effort to attention; the strain in the willing is the effort to keep the consciousness clear, for instance, the strain of keeping the attention focused. The once-born type of well-adjusted person does not a lot. This leads one to a surprising, though very keen, statement of an identity between belief, attention, and will. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
Will and belief, in short, meaning a certain relation between objects and the Self, are two names for one and the same psychological phenomenon. The most compendious possible formula perhaps would be that our belief and attention are the same fact. James then beguiles us with one of his completely human and Earthly illustrations. I cite it in detail because I wish to come back to it in discussing the unfinished aspects of James’ concept of will: We know what it is to get out of bed on a freezing morning in a room without a fire, and how they very vital principle within us protests against the ordeal. [The scene is New England before the advent of central heating.] Probably most persons have lain on certain mornings for an hour at a time unable to brace themselves to the resolve. We think how late we shall be, how the duties of the day will suffer; we say, “I must get up, this ignominious,” and so on. However, still the warm couch feels too delicious, and the cold outside too cruel, and resolution faints away and postpones itself again and again just as it seemed on the verge of the decisive act. Now how do we get up under such circumstances? If I may generalize from my own experience, we more often than not get up without any struggle or decision at all. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
We suddenly find that we have got up. A fortunate lapse of consciousness occurs; we forget both the warmth and the cold; we fall into some revery connected with the day’s life, in the course of which the idea flashes across us, “Hollo! I must lie here no longer” and idea which at that lucky instant awakens no contradictory or paralyzing suggestions, and consequently produces immediately its appropriate motor effects. It was our acute consciousness of both the warmth and the col during the period of struggle which paralyzed our activity. James concludes that the moment the inhibition ceases, the original idea exerts its effect, and up we get. He adds, with typical Jamesian confidence, that “This case seems to me to contain in miniature form the data for an entire psychology of volition.” Let us now take, for our special examination, James’s own example. We note that then he gets to the heart of the problem of will in this illustration there comes a remarkable statement. He writes, “We suddenly find that we have got up.” That is to say, he jumps over the whole problem. No decision at all occurs, but only a fortunate lapse of consciousness. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
However, I ask, what went on in that fortunate lapse of consciousness? True, the paralyzing bind of his ambivalence was released. However, that is a negative statement and does not tell us why anything else happened. Surely we cannot call this just a lucky instant, as James does, or a happenstance! If our basis for will rests on the mere luck or happenstance, our house is built upon the sands indeed, and we have no basis for with at all. Now I do not mean to imply that so far James, in this example, has not said something. He has, and it is very important: the whole incident shows the bankruptcy of Victorian will power, will consisting of a faculty which is based upon our capacity to force our bodies to act against their desires. Victorian will power turned everything into a rationalistic, moralistic issue, for instance, the attraction of the warmth of the bed, the giving in to of which is ignominious, as opposed to the so-called supergo pressure to be upright, that is, up and working. Dr. Freud described at length the self-deceit and rationalization involved in Victorian will power and I believe, dethroned it once and for all. The example shows James’s own struggle against the paralyzing effects of Victorianism, in which the goal becomes twisted into a self-centered demonstration of one’s own character and the real moral issue get entirely lost in the shuffle. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
So we return to our crucial question. What went on in that fortunate lapse of consciousness? James only tells us that we fall into some revery connected with the day’s life. Ah, here lies our secret! Psychotherapy has brought us a good deal of data about that revery which James did not have—and I do not believe that we fall into it at all. For purposes of clarity, I shall state here my own argument concerning unfinished business in James’s concept of will. I as it is also omitted by us in contemporary psychology. The answer does not lie in James’s conscious analysis or in Dr. Freud’s analysis of the unconscious, but in a dimension which cuts across and includes both conscious and unconscious, and both cognition and conation. Along with rediscovering our feelings and wants, we also should recover our relation with the subconscious aspects of ourselves. As modern mortals have given up sovereignty over their bodies, so also have they surrendered the unconscious side of their personality, and it has become almost alien to them. When we cut off an exceedingly great and significant portion of the self, we are then no longer able to use much of the wisdom and power of the unconscious. It puts us in the position of trying to drive a BMW 5 series with the reins attached to only one wheel. Though the tendencies and intuitions in the unconscious are blocked off from our conscious awareness, they are still part of the self and accessible in various degrees to being made conscious. The sooner we recover sovereignty in that portion of the kingdom the better. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
Understanding dreams is of course a subtle and complex matter—though it is not so complex as one would think when one reads about the esoteric symbols in much modern dream interpretation. These esoteric symbols put the whole problem back into a foreign language again—and that is another way, perhaps the typically modern way, of surrendering our sovereignty over the unconscious aspects of ourselves. As though we were saying the authorities and those who know the magic answers can understand our dreams, but we cannot ourselves! Dr. Erich Froom’s book, The Forgotten Language, points out that dreams, like myths and fairy tales, are not all a foreign language, but are in reality part of the one universal language shared my all humankind. Dr. Fromm’s book is to be recommended to the nontechnical reader who wishes to relearn something about this subconscious language of his fatherland. Dreams are expressions not only of conflicts and repressed desires, but also of previous knowledge that one has learned, possibly many years before, and thinks one has forgotten. Even the unskilled person, if one takes the attitude that what one’s dreams tell one is not simply to be rejected as silly, may get occasional useful guidance from one’s dreams. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
And the person who has become skillful in the understand of what one is saying to oneself in one’s dreams can get from them, from time to time, marvelously valuable hints and insights into solutions to problems. The more self-awareness a person has, the more alive one is. The more consciousness, the more self. Becoming a person means this heightened awareness, this heightened experiences of “I-ness,” this experience that it is I, the acting one, who is the subject of what is occurring. This view of what it means to become a person, in conclusion, saves us from two errors. The first is passivism—letting the deterministic forces in one’s experience take the place of self-awareness. It must be admitted that some tendencies in the older forms of psychoanalysis can be used to rationalize passivism. It was the epoch-making discovery of Dr. Freud to show how much every person is pushed by unconscious fears, desires and tendencies of all sorts, and that mortal is really much less a master in the household of one’s own mind than in the Victorian mortal of will power fondly believed. However, a harmful implication was carried along with this emphasis on the determinism of unconscious forces, which Dr. Freud himself partly succumbed to. The early psychotherapist Dr. Grodeck, for example, wrote, “We are lived by our unconscious,” and Dr, Freud in a letter commended him for his emphasis on the passivity of the ego. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
However, we must underline to correct a partial misunderstanding, that the over-all purpose of Dr. Freud’s exploration of the unconscious forces was to help people bring these forces into consciousness. The goal of psychoanalysis, as he said time and again, was to make the unconscious conscious: to enlarge the scope of awareness; to help the individual become aware of the unconscious tendencies which have tended to push the self around like mutinous sailors who have seized power below the deck of the ship; and this to help the person consciously direct one’s own ship. Hence the emphasis on the heightened awareness of one’s self, and the warning against passivism, have much in common with the over-all purpose of Dr. Freud’s thought. The other error of this view of the person enables us to avoid is activism—that is, using activity as a substitute for awareness. By activism we mean the tendency, so common in this country, to assume that the more one is acting, the more one is alive. It should be clear that when we have used the term “the active I,” we have not meant busyness or merely doing things. Many people keep busy all the time as a way of covering up their anxiety; their activism is a way of running from themselves. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
People who are busy so they have something to focus on and as a result are distracted from their problems get a pseudo and temporary sense of aliveness by being in a hurry, as though something is going on if they are but moving, and as though being busy is a proof of one’s importance. Chaucer has a sly and astute comment about this type, represented in the merchant in Canterbury Tales, “Methinks he seemed busier than he was.” It is true, however, when life is not going the way you like it and you have a lot of problems that you cannot resolve on your own, being busy gives you a sense of purpose, it makes life worth living and it makes the days rip by life a vampire speed reading a novel. You wake up, stay busy, and before you know it is bed time, you are one day closer to being free. Keeping busy is the only reason some people are still alive. Our emphasis on self-awareness certainly includes actin as an expression of the alive, integrated self, but it is the opposite to activism—the opposite, that is, to acting as an escape from self-awareness. Aliveness often means the capacity not to act, to be creatively idle—which may be more difficult for most modern people than to do something. To be idle requires a strong sense of personal identity. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
Self-awareness, as we have proposed it, brings back into the picture the quieter kinds of aliveness—the arts of contemplation and meditation for example, which the Western World, to its peril, has all but lost. It brings a new appreciation for being something rather than merely doing something. With such a relation to oneself, work for us modern mortals—who are the great toilers and producers—will not be an escape from ourselves or a way of trying to prove our worth, but a creative expression of the spontaneous powers of person who has consciously affirmed one’s relatedness to one’s World and one’s fellow mortals. The nature of faith justifies the history of religion and makes it understandable as a history of mortal’s ultimate concern, of one’s response to the manifestation of the holy in many places in many ways. A divine figure ceases to create reply, it ceases to be a common symbol and loses its power to move for action. Symbols which for a certain period, or in a certain place, expressed truth of faith for a certain group now only remind of the faith of the past. They have lost their truth, and it is an open question whether dead symbols can be revived. Probably not for those to whom they have died! A symbol of faith is infinite because it is not idolatrous. However, the human mind is a continuously working factory of idols. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
Everything said about faith is derived from the experience of actual faith, of faith as a living reality, or in a metaphoric abbreviation, of the life of faith. Without the manifestation of God in mortals the question of God and faith in God are not possible. There is no faith without participation. Since the life of faith is life in the state of ultimate concern and no human being can exist completely without such a concern, we say: Neither faith nor doubt can be eliminate from mortals as mortals. Faith and doubt have been contrasted in such a way that the quiet certainty of faith has been praised as the complete removal of doubt. There is, indeed, a serenity of the life in faith beyond the disturbing struggles between faith and doubt. To attain such a state is a natural and justified desire of every human being. Doubt is not overcome by repression, but by courage. Courage does not deny that there is doubt, but it takes the doubt into itself as an expression of its own finitude and affirms the content of an ultimate concern. Courage does not need the safety of an unquestionable conviction. It includes the risk without which no creative life is possible. All this is declared about living faith, of faith as actual concern, and not of faith as a traditional attitude without tensions, without doubt and without courage. Faith in this sense, which is the attitude of many members of the churches as well as of society at large. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
In mystical literature the vision of God is described as the stage which transcends the state of faith either after the Earthly life or in rare moments within it. In the complete reunion with the divine ground of being, the element of distance is overcome and with it uncertainty, doubt, courage and risk. The finite is taken into the infinite; it is not extinguished, but it is not separated either. This is not the ordinary human situation. To the state of separated finitude belong faith and the courage to risk. The risk of faith is the concrete content of one’s ultimate concern. Jesus and Satan appear as representative of two opposite principles. Satan is the representative of material consumption and of power over nature and mortals. Jesus is the representative being, and his manifestation is a symbol of the Savior of humanity. The World has followed Satan’s principles, since the time of the gospels. Yet even the victory of these principles could not destroy the longing for the realization of full being, expressed by Jesus as well as by many other great Masters who lived before him and after him. When you use things with a hardened heart, you use what is alien to you, and that indulgent, selfish use is avarice, which is the root of all evil. Some people hold to their selfish nature, and they may have the name of being saintly on the basis of the external appearances, but inside they are asses, because they do not grasp the meaning of divine truth. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
However, this does not mean that we should not have anything, it just means that we should not be bound by anything. God wants to act in the soul, and he himself must be in the place in which he acts—and that he would like to do. Everything and anything can become an object of craving: things we use in daily life, property, rituals, good deeds, knowledge, and thoughts. While they are not in themselves bad, they become bad; that is, when we hold onto them, when they become chains that interfere with our freedom, they block our self-realization. People need to uncover their most hidden secrete ties of selfishness, of intentions, and opinions. However, the fact of the matter is most people will not analyze their behavior nor recognize their own errors until they are faced with extreme hardship. It is not a character building exercise, but it reveals your truth self. Some people walk away from their trials and tribulations a much better person, others walk away from their trials and tribulations with a spirit of lack and limitation and will do whatever they can to prosper, even if it means hurting their own family to get ahead in the World. Therefore, people should not consider so much what they are to do as what they are. Thus take care that your emphasis is laid on being good and not on the number or kind of things to be done. Emphasize rather the fundamentals on which your work rests. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
Our being is the reality, the spirit that moves us, the character that impels our behavior; in contrast, the deeds or opinions that are separated from our dynamic core have no reality. We are to be active in the classic sense of the productive expression of one’s human powers, not in the modern sense of being busy. Activity means to go out of oneself. Run into peace. The person who is in the state of running, of continuous running into peace is a Heavenly person. One continually runs and moves and seeks peace in running. The active vessel is alive and it grows and it is filled and never will be full. Out of this criterion comes the message which is the very heart of Christianity and makes possible the courage to affirm faith in the Christ, namely, that in spite of all forces of separation between God and mortals this is overcome from the side of God. One of the forces of separation is a doubt which tries to prevent the courage to affirm one’s faith. Although we are never able to bride the infinite distance between the infinite and the finite from the side of faith, this alone makes the courage of faith possible. The risk of failure, of error and of idolatrous distortion can be taken, because the failure cannot separate us from what is our ultimate concern. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
Sometimes One Can Mistake Gratitude for Love—Dogs are Hardly an Article of Faith
Love or the lack of it is at the root of everything. Guard your children. Weigh wisdom of intervention if such is even possible. Ponder the question of inevitability. To cease wishing is a contemporary emotional and spiritual wasteland, almost like inhabiting the land of the dead. Another characteristic is satiety; if wishes are thought of only as pushed toward gratification, the end consisting of the satisfying of the need, the reality is that emptiness and vacuity and futility are greatest where all wishes are met. For this means one stops wishing. Without faith we cannot want anymore, we cannot wish. The truth of faith consists in true symbols concerning the ultimate. And the faithful is one human being with the power of thought and the need for conceptual understanding. There is a dimension of meaning expressed in the symbolism of the whish, this is what gives the wish its specifically human quality, and without this meaning, the emotional and spiritual aspects of wanting become dried up. When we have faith, it is a symbol that peace and prosperity are just around the corner and it is only a matter of time until all our need will be met. However, the relation to the ultimate is not the same in each case. The philosophical relation is in principle a detached description of the basic structure in which the ultimate manifests itself. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
The relation of faith is in principle an involved expression of concern about the meaning of the ultimate for the faithful. The difference is obvious and fundamental. However, it is, as the phrase “in principle” indicates, a difference which is not maintained in the actual life of philosophy and of faith. It cannot be maintained, because the philosopher is a human being with an ultimate concern, hidden or open. And the faithful one is a human being with the power of thought and the need for conceptual understanding. This is not only a biological fact. It has consequences for the life of philosophy in the philosopher and or the life of faith in the faithful. An analysis of philosophical systems, essays or fragments of all kinds shows that the direction in which the philosopher asks the question and the preference one gives to special types of answers is determined by cognitive consideration and by a state of ultimate concern. The historically most significant philosophies show not only the greatest power of thought but the most passionate concern about the meaning of the ultimate whose manifestations they describe. The philosophy, in its genuine meaning, is carried on by people in whom passions of an ultimate concern is united with a clear and detached observation of the way ultimate reality manifests itself in the process of the Universe. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
At most general faith means much the same as trust. Therefore, we are being asked to have faith as knowledge of specific truths revealed by God. Faith is a practical commitment beyond the evidence to one’s belief that God exists. We are to have a firm and certain knowledge of God’s benevolence towards us, founded upon the truth of the freely given promise in Christ, both revealed to our minds and sealed upon our hearts through the Holy Spirit. It is this element of ultimate concern behind the philosophical ideas which supplies the truth of faith in them. Our vision of the Universe and our predicament within it unites faith and conceptual work. We may hold that in our sinful state we will inevitably offer a resistance to faith that may be overcome only by God’s grace. It is, however, a further step for individuals of faith to put their revealed knowledge into practice by trusting their lives to God and seeking to obey his will. Humans contain the potentialities of these creative principles, and can choose to make their lives an ascent towards and then a union with the intuitive intelligence. The One is not a being, but infinite being. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
Thus Christian and Jewish philosophers who held to a creator God could affirm such a conception that God is infinite, and created the World. God, as the creator of all, is not far from any one of us. Philosophy is not only the mother’s womb out of which science and history have come, it is also an ever-present element in actual scientific and historical work. The frame of reference within which the great physicists have seen and are seeing the Universe of their inquiries is philosophical, even if their actual inquiries verify it. In no case is it a result of their discoveries. It is always a vision of the totality of being which consciously or unconsciously determines the frame of their thought. Because this is so one justified in saying that even in the scientific view of reality an element of faith is effective. Scientific view of reality an element of faith is effective. Scientists rightly try to prevent these elements of faith and philosophical truth from interfering with their actual research. This is possible to a great extent; but even the most protected experiment is not absolutely pure—pure in the sense of the exclusion of interfering factors such as the observer, and as the interest which determines the kind of question asked of nature in an experiment. What we said about the philosopher must also be said about the scientist. Even in one’s scientific work one is a human being, grasped by an ultimate concern, and one asks the question of the Universe as such, the philosophical question. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
Intellectual inquiry into the faith is to be understood as faith seeking understanding (fides quaerens intellectum). To believe is to thin with assent (credere est assensione cogitare). It is an act of the intellect determined not by the reason, but by the will. Faith involves a commitment to believe in a God, to believe God, and to believe in God. What is eternal is unchanging. In the same way the historian is consciously or unconsciously a philosopher. It is quite obvious that every task of the historian beyond finding of the facts is dependent on evaluation of historical factors, especially the nature of mortals, one’s freedom, one’s determination, one’s development out of nature and so forth. It is less obvious but also true that even in the fact of finding historical facts philosophical presuppositions are involved. This is especially true in deciding, out of the infinite number of happenings in every infinitely small moment of time, which facts shall be called historically relevant facts. The historian is further forced to give one’s evaluation of sources and their reliability, a task which is not independent of one’s interpretation of human nature. Finally, in the moment in which a historical work gives implicit or explicit assertions about the meaning of historical events for human existence, the philosophical presuppositions of history are evident. Where there is philosophy there is an expression of an ultimate concern; there is an element of faith, however hidden it may be by the passions of the historian for pure facts. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
God does not possess anything superadded to his essence, and his essence includes all his perfections. No one can attain to truth unless one philosophizes in the light of faith. Our faith in eternal salvation shows that we have theological truths that exceed human reason. And if one could attain truths about religious claims without faith, these truths would be incomplete. Higher truths are attained through faith. All these consideration show that, in spite of their essential difference, there is an actual union of philosophical truth and the truth of faith in every philosophy and that this union is significant for the work of the scientist and the historian. This union has been called philosophical faith. The term is misleading, because it seems to confuse the two elements, philosophical truth and the truth of faith. Furthermore, the term seems to indicate that there is one philosophical faith, a philosophia perennis, as it has been termed. However, only philosophical questions are perennial, not the answers. There is a continuous process of interpretation of philosophical elements and elements of faith, not one philosophical faith. Revealed theology is a single speculative science concerned with knowledge of God. Because of its greater certitude and higher dignity of subject matter, it is nobler than any other science. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
Philosophical theology, though, can make demonstrations using the articles of faith as its principles. Moreover, it can apologetically refute objections raised against the faith even if no articles of faith are presupposed. There is truth of faith in philosophical truth. And there is philosophical truth in the truth of faith. In order to see the latter point we must confront the conceptual expression of philosophical truth with the symbolical expression of truth of faith. Now, one can say that most philosophical concepts have mythological ancestors and that most mythological symbols have conceptual elements which can and must be developed as soon as the philosophical consciousness has appeared. In the idea of God the concepts of being, life, spirit, unity and diversity are implied. In the symbol of the creation concepts of finitude, anxiety, freedom and time are implied. The symbol of the “fall of Adam” implies a concept of mortal’s essential nature, of one’s conflict with oneself, of one’s estrangement from oneself. Only because every religious symbol has conceptual potentialities is theo-logy possible. There is a philosophy implied in every symbol of faith. However, faith does not determine the movement of the philosophical thought, just as philosophy does not determine the character of one’s ultimate concern. Symbols of faith can open the eyes of the philosopher to qualities of the Universe which otherwise would not have been recognized. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
Faith is the starting point, scripture offers the data, and philosophy is a supplement not a competitor. Faith, philosophy, and scripture help make sense of each other. However, faith does not command a definite philosophy, although churches and theological movements have claimed and used Platonic, Aristotelian, Kantian or Humean philosophies. The philosophical implications of the symbols of faith can be developed in many ways, but the truth of faith and the truth of philosophy have no authority over each other. In the past few years, a number of persons in psychiatry and related fields have been pondering and exploring the problems of wishing and willing. We may assume that this confluence of concern must be in answer to a strong need in out time for a new light on these problems. It is not wishing that cases illness but lack of wishing. The problem is to deepen people’s capacity to wish, and one side of our task in therapy is to create the ability to wish. Wish is an optimistic picturing in imagination. It is a transitive verb—to wish involves an act. Wishing is similar to faith because it allows us to see beyond our experience and knowledge and hope that something good may happen, and so we send out more beneficial vibrations into the Universe. Every genuine wish is a creative act. I find support for this in therapy: it is indeed a beneficial step when the patient can feel and state strongly, for example, “I wish to buy a beautiful Cresleigh home and feel safe and secure in my community.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
That wish, in effect, moves the conflict from a submerged, unarticulated plane in which one takes no responsibility but expects God and parent to read his or her wishes by telepathy, to an overt, healthy conflict over what one wants. On the basis of theological myth of creation God exults when mortals come through with a wish of one’s own. The wish in interpersonal relationship requires mutuality. This is a truth shown in its breach in many myths, and brings the person to one’s doom. Peer Gynt in Ibsen’s play runs around the World wishing and acting on his wishes; the only trouble is that is wishes have noting to do with the other person he meets but are entirely egocentric, encased in cask of self, sealed up with a bung of self. In The Sleeping Beauty, by the same token, the young princes who assault the briars in order to rescue and awaken the slumbering girl before the time is ripe, are exemplars of behavior which tries to force the other in love and pleasures of flesh before the other is ready; they exhibit a wishing without mutuality. The young princes are devoted to their own desires and needs without relation to Thou. If wish and will can be seen and experienced in this light of autonomous, imaginative acts of interpersonal mutuality, there is profound truth in St. Augustine’s dictum, “Love and do what you will.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
We cannot be naïve about human nature. We know full well that this wishing is stated in ideal terms. We know that the trouble is precisely that mortals do wish and will against their neighbor, that imagination is not only the source of our capacity to form the creative mutual wish but it is also bounded by the individual’s own limits, convictions, and experience; and, thus, there is always in our wishing an element of doing violence to the others as well as to ourselves, no matter how well analyzed we may be or how much the recipient of grace or how many times we have experienced satori. This is called the willful element, willful here being the insistence of one’s own wish against the reality of the situation. Willfulness is the kind of will motivated by defiance, in which the wish is more against something than for its object. The defiant, willful is correlated with fantasy rather than with imagination, and is the spirit which negates reality, whether it be a person or an aspect of impersonal nature, rather than sees it, forms it, respect it, or takes joy in it. There are two realms of will, the first consisting of an experience of the self in its totality, a relatively spontaneous movement in a certain direction. In this kind of willing, the body moves as a whole, and the experience is characterized by a relaxation and by an imaginative, open quality. This is an experience of freedom which is anterior to all talk about political or psychological freedom; it is a freedom, presupposed by the determinist and anterior to all the discussions of determinism. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
In contrast, the will of the second realm is that in which some obtrusive element enters is that in which some obtrusive element enters, some necessity for a decision of an either/or character, a decision with an element of an against something alone with a for something. If one uses the Freudian terminology, the “will of the Super-Ego” would be included in their realm. We can will to read but not to understand, we can will knowledge but not wisdom, we can will scrupulosity but not mortality. This is illustrated in creative work. In the second realm of will is the conscious, effortful, critical application to creative endeavor, in preparing a speech for meeting or revising one’s manuscript, for example. However, when actually giving the speech, or when hopefully creative inspiration takes over in our writing, we are engrossed with a degree of forgetfulness of self. In this experience, wishing and willing become one. One characteristic of the creative experience is that it makes for a temporary union by transcending the conflict. The temptation is for the second ream to take over the first; we lose our spontaneity, our free flow of activity, and will become effortful, controlled and so forth, Victorian will power. Our error, then, is that will tries to take over the work of imagination. This is very close to a wish. Will is the capacity to organize oneself so that movement in a certain direction or toward a certain goal may take place. Wish is the imaginative playing with the possibility of some act or state occurring. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
Will and wish may be seen as operating in polarity. Will requires self-consciousness; wish does not. Will implies some possibility of either/or choice; wish does not. Wish gives the warmth, the content, the imagination, the innocence’s play, the freshness, and the richness of the will. Will gives the self-direction, the maturity, to wish. Will protect wish, permits it to continue without wish, will loses its life-blood, its viability, and tends to expire in self-contradiction. If you have only will and no wish, you have the dried-up, Victorian, neopuritan mortal. If you have only wish and no will, you have the driven, unfree, infantile person who, as an adult-remaining-an-infant, may become the robot mortal. Awareness of one’s feelings lays the groundwork for knowing what one want. This point may look very simple at first glance—who does not know what one wants? However, the amazing thing is how few people actually do. If one looks honestly into oneself, does one not find that most of what one thinks one wants is just routines like fresh fish on Friday; or what one wants is what one thinks one should want—like being a success in his or her work; or wants to want—like loving one’s neighbor? One can often see clearly the expression of direct and honest wants in children before they have been taught to falsify their desires. The child exclaims, “I like ice cream, I want a cone,” and there is no confusion about who wants what. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
Such directness of desire often comes like a breath of fresh air in a murky land. It may not be best that one has the cone at the time, and it is obviously the parents’ responsibility to say Yes or No if the child is not mature enough to decide. However, let the parents not teach the child to falsify one’s emotions by trying to persuade him or her that he or she does not want the cone! To be aware of one’s feelings and desires does not at all imply expressing them indiscriminately wherever one happens to be. Judgment and decision are part of any mature consciousness of self. However, how is one going to have a basis for judging wat one will or will not do unless one first knows what one wants? For an adolescent to be aware that one wants to drive a brand-new BMW 3 Series, does not mean that one acts on this impulse. However, suppose he never lets his impulses reach the threshold of awareness because they are not socially acceptable? How is he then to know years later, when he buys a care, whether he wants to drive it or not, or whether because thus is then the acceptable and expected act, the routine thing to do? People who voice with alarm the caution that unless desires and emotions are suppressed they will pop out every which way, and everyone, will experience neurotic emotions. As a matter of fact, we know that it is precisely the emotions and desires which have been repressed which later return to drive the person compulsively. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
The Victorian gyroscope kind of person had to control his or her emotions rigidly, for, by virtue of having locked them up in jail, one had turned them into lawbreakers. However, the more integrated a person is, the loses compulsive become one’s emotions. In the mature person feelings and wants occur in a configuration. In seeing a dinner as part of a drama on the stage, to give a simple example, one is not consumed with desires for food; one came to see a drama and not to eat. Or wen listening to a concert singer, one is not consumed with pleasures of the flesh even though she may be very attractive; the configuration is set by the fact that one chose in coming to hear music. Of course, as we have indicted, none of us escape conflicts from time to time. However, these are different from being compulsively driven by emotions. Every direct and immediate experience of feeling and wanting is spontaneous and unique. That is to say, the wanting and feeling are uniquely part of that particular situation at the particular time and place. Spontaneity means to be able to respond directly to the total picture—or, as it is technically called, to respond to the figure-ground configuration. Spontaneity is the active “I” becoming part of the figure ground. In a good portrait painting the background is always an integral part of the portrait; so an act of a mature human being is an integral part of the self in relation to the World around it. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
Spontaneity, thus, is very different from effervescence or egocentricity, or letting out one’s feelings regardless of the environment. Spontaneity, rather is the acting “I” responding to a particular environment at a given moment. The originality and uniqueness which is always part of spontaneous feeling can be understood in this light. For just as there never was exactly that situation before and never will be again, so the feeling one has at that time is new and never to be exactly repeated. It is only neurotic behavior which is rigidly repetitive. God’s great plan of happiness provide a perfect balance between eternal justice and the mercy we can obtain through the Atonement of Jesus Christ. It also enables us to be transformed into new creatures in Christ. A loving God reaches out to each of us. We know that through his love and because of his Atonement of his only begotten Son, all humankind may be saved, by obedience to the laws and ordinances. Eternal relationships are also fundamental to our theology. The family is ordained of God. Under the great plan of our loving Creator, the mission is to achieve the supernal blessing of exaltation in the celestial kingdom. Finally, God’s love is so great that, except for the few who become people of perdition, God has provided a destiny of glory for all his children, including those who have passed away. Our loving Heavenly Father wants us to have joy. “Do not tell secrets to those whose faith and silence you have not already tested,” reports Kate Atkinson. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
Continue to Grow Mentally—Grow in Wisdom—Grow in truth!
The World has always loved the saint as being the nearest possible approach to the perfection of God. It is unscientific and unscholarly to waste time attempting to prove or disprove things that have already been established beyond question. The true scientist no longer attempts to disprove the pull of gravity, for instance, nor the rotation of the Earth, nor the motion of Heavenly bodies, nor the sequences of the seasons, nor human’s need for food and water, nor the function of the heart. These things are established, and for each individual to bring them into question and insist on going through all the experimentation whereby they have been established would be costly, wasteful, and unfeasible. It is just as unscientific, unscholarly, and even more costly for each individual to insist upon personally conducting the experiments that have proved that sin brings sorrow, that disbelief brings emptiness and unrest, that things forbidden of God are not good for human, that the use of illegal substances are enslaving habits, that unchastity brings unhappiness, and so forth. Religion and science have sometimes appeared in conflict. Yet, the conflict can only be apparent, not real, for science seeks truth, and true religion is truth. There can never be conflict between revealed religion and true science. #RandolphHarris 1 of 10
Truth is truth, whether labeled science or religion. All truth is consistent. There is no conflict—only in the interpretation of fact. Studies of high-altitude residents have greatly contributed to our understanding of physiological adaptation. As you would expect, altitude studies have focused on inhabited mountainous regions, particularly in the Himalayas, Andes, and Rocky Mountains. Of these three areas, permanent human habitation probably has the longest history in the Himalayas. Today, perhaps as many as 25 million people live at altitudes above 10,000 feet. In Tibet, permanent settlements exist above 15,000 feet, and in the Andes, they can be found as high as 17,000 feet. Because the mechanisms that maintain homeostasis in human evolved at lower altitudes, they are compromised by the conditions at higher elevations. At high altitudes, many factors produce stress on the human body. These include hypoxia (reduced available oxygen), more intense solar radiation, cold, low humidity, wind (which amplifies cold stress), a reduced nutritional base, and rough terrain. Of these, hypoxia exerts the greatest amount of stress on human physiological systems, especially the heart, lungs, and brain. #RandolphHarris 2 of 10
Hypoxia results from reduced barometric pressure. It is not that there is less oxygen overall in the atmosphere at high altitudes; rather, it is less concentrated. Therefore, to obtain the same amount of oxygen at 9,000 feet as at sea level, people must make certain physiological alterations aimed at increasing the body’s ability to transport and efficiently use the oxygen that is available. At high altitudes, reproduction, in particular, is affected through increased infant mortality rates, miscarriage, low birth weights, and premature birth. An early study reported that in Colorado, infant deaths are almost twice as common above 8,200 feet (2,500 meters) as at lower elevations. One cause of fetal and maternal death is preeclampsia, a severe elevation of blood pressure in pregnant women after the twentieth gestational week. People born at lower altitudes and high-altitude natives differ somewhat in how they adapt to hypoxia. Upon exposure to high altitude people born at low elevation become acclimatized. The responses may be short-term modifications, depending on duration of stay, but they begin within hours of the altitude change. These changes include an increase in respiration rate, heart rate, and production of red blood cells. (Red blood cells contain hemoglobin, the protein responsible for transporting oxygen to organs and tissues.) #RandolphHarris 3 of 10
A more permanent, developmental acclimatization occur in high-altitude natives during growth and development. This type acclimatization is present only in people who grow up in high-altitude areas, not in those who moved there as adults. Compared with populations at lower elevations, life-long residents of high altitudes display slowed growth and maturation. Other differences include larger chest size, associated, in turn, with greater lunch volume and larger heart. In addition to greater lung capacity, people born at high are more efficient than migrants at diffusing oxygen from blood to body tissues. Developmental acclimatization to high-altitude hypoxia serves as a good example of physiological plasticity by illustrating how, within the limits set by genetic factors, development can be influenced by environment. There is evidence that entire populations have also genetically adapted to high altitudes. Indigenous peoples of Tibet who have inhabited regions higher than 12,000 feet for around 25,000 years may have made genetic (i.e,. evolutionary) accommodations to hypoxia. Altitude does not appear to affect reproduction in these people to the degree it does in other populations. Infants have birth weights as high as those of lowland Tibetan groups and higher than those of recent (20 to 30 years) Chinese immigrants. This fact may be the result of alterations in maternal blood flow to the uterus during pregnancy. #RandolphHarris 4 of 10
Another line of evidence concerns how the body processes glucose (blood sugar). Glucose is critical because it is the only source of energy used by the brain, and it is also used, although not exclusively, by the heart. Both highland Tibetans and the Quechua (inhabitants of high-altitude regions of the Peruvian Andes) burn glucose in a way that permits more efficient use of oxygen. This implies the presence of genetic mutations in the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA directs how cells use glucose). It also implies that natural selection has acted to increase the frequency of these advantageous mutations in these groups. As yet, there is no certain evidence that Tibetans and Quechua have made evolutionary changes to accommodate high-altitude hypoxia (since specific genetic mechanisms that underlie these populations’ unique abilities have not been identified). However, current data strongly suggest that selection has operated to produce evolutionary change in these two groups. If further study supports these findings, we have an excellent example of evolution in action producing long-term adaptation at the population level. “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. It all thy ways acknowledge God, and he shall direct thy paths,” reports Proverbs 3.5-6. #RandolphHarris 5 of 10
Speaking of high elevations, Cosmonauts that spend long months aboard the International Space Station lose bone strength faster than previously thought and have a higher risk of breaking their hips later in life. A survey of 13 space station cosmonauts found that their bone strength dipped by at least 14 percent on the average during their half-year stays aboard the orbiting laboratory. Three of the cosmonauts lost up to 30 percent of their bone strength during their long-duration spaceflights, putting them on par with the bone strength of elderly people with osteoporosis on Earth. If preventive measures are not taken, some of our cosmonauts may be at increased risk for age-related fractures decades after their missions. When in space, bone mineral density can decrease by between 0.6 percent and 5 percent each month. Cosmonauts gradually lose muscle strength and bone density over time while on long-duration spaceflights because their bodies float in microgravity, rather than work against the tug of Earth’s gravity each day. To lessen the effects, space station cosmonauts must exercise at least two hours every day and undergo weeks of rehabilitation after their return to Earth. #RandolphHarris 6 of 10
The hip and spine of long duration cosmonauts typically experience the greatest amount of bones loss. Hip fractures nearly always require hospitalization or major surgery, while vertebra fractures in the spine can lead to loss of height, severe back pain and deformity. When people make new discoveries in their energetic search for truth, it is well to remember these will always be in harmony with all fundamental and eternal truths. Yes, truth is always consistent, whether it is revealed directly from God to humans, through his inspired prophets, or comes from the laboratory through diligent searching of his children and through the influence of the Spirit of the Lord upon them. This quest for wisdom or intelligence, which the Lord defines as light and truth, is a glorious challenge. We have been assured by the Author of Eternal Life that whatever principle of intelligence we attain unto this life, it will rise with us in the resurrection. So there seems to be a motive to learn all we can while on Earth. “And if a person gains more knowledge and intelligence in this life through one’s diligence and obedience than another, one will have so much the advantage in the World to come,” reports Doctrines and Covenants 130.18-19. #RandolphHarris 7 of 10
We are in a changing World beset with many perplexities. However, while change is all about us, and will continue to be, in the physical World, we must recognize that there are certain Heaven-sent verities, principles, and values that are eternal. These never change. As we travel life’s highway, we will encounter theories, proposals, and programs that have wide appeal. One of many fascinating concepts is marginal benefit. Marginal benefit is an increase in an activity’s overall benefit that is caused by a unit increased in the level of that activity, all other factors remaining constant. Marginal decision making can help explain some otherwise puzzling economic phenomena. For instance, why is water so inexpensive, while gold is so expensive? Humans, animals, and plants need water to survive, while gold is relatively unnecessary; but for some reason, people are willing to pay much more for a bar of gold than for a cup of water. The reason is that a person’s willingness to pay for any good is based on the marginal benefit that an extra unit of the good would yield. The marginal benefit, in turn, depends on how many units a person already has. Although water is essential, the marginal benefit of an extra cup is small because water is plentiful. By contrast, no one needs gold to survive, but because gold is so rare, people consider the marginal benefit of an extra bar of gold to be large. #RandolphHarris 8 of 10
Be not mislead. A rational decision maker takes an action if and only if the marginal benefit of the action exceeds the marginal cost. This principle can explain why people are more willing to pay more for diamonds than for water, or why some builders are willing to sell a house below average cost. It can take some time to get used to the logic of marginal thinking, but the study of economics will give one ample opportunity to practice. Remember that ideas and theories are either sound or unsound; their soundness does not depend upon which people hold them. Be mindful that there are also many phenomena in God’s Universe that cannot, to our present human understanding, be explained. There will always be those little minds who, out of vanity or intellectual display, will attempt to destroy faith in the very foundations of life. Be assured, however, that no one, worthy of the name, who has been humped and awed before the unexplainable wonders of this marvelous Universe, will ever scoff at sacred things or try to rob you of your faith in the unseen. Our inability to explain things, like spirituality, in terms of our materialism does not disprove its reality. #RandolphHarris 9 of 10
By yielding obedience to your faith in God and the laws of the Universe, both spiritual and physical, there will come a soul-satisfying security that is priceless. You will need this anchor as you face a doubting World. Advance unafraid! Meet the challenge of a modern World. In doing so, beware of the philosophy which suggests that morality is out of date—that virtue, chastity, marriage, and honorable family life are throwbacks to a Victorian age. These are eternal principles—as eternal as life itself. Remember, it is truth that endures. It is truth that makes people courageous enough to become Christlike. It is the truth that makes people and nations free. Yes, be intelligent. Intelligence is wise and judicious use of knowledge. Continue to grow mentally—to grow in wisdom—to grow in truth. Desire it! Pray for it! Study! Practice it! Do all this and you will find true; it cannot be denied you. Having found it, never forget its source. “The glory of God is intelligence, or, in other words light and truth,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 93.36. Be worthy trustees of Earth. Continue to grow in stature. Be cheerful in all that you do. Live joyfully. Live happily. Live enthusiastically, knowing that God does not dwell in gloom and melancholy, but in light and love. #RandolphHarris 10 of 10
Randolph Harris II International Institute 