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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
How Long Will it Take for thy People to Come See thy Presence in this Beautiful Earth?
My mind goes back to those two Summers is 2005 and 2006 when, as the International School of Art, we traveled, painting and drawing as we went, through Europe. The bright colors now come back to me: the brilliant red and magenta of each nationality, the blue and yellow of designs, different as they were from each other but in another sense all similar. In Hungary, the dark red skirts which spun outward as the dancers swung around in their delightful whirls, each woman and man adored with black aprons embroidered with flowers in yellow and blue. Then in Czechoslovakia, the colors were lighter in pink and brilliant green, vests laced up the front, all embroidered through many Winters of whiling away the daylight and snow-bound hours crocheting. The Polish mountaineers showed the same fondness for bright colors and home-spun harmony, seemingly copied from the flowers every family had planted in their thatch-roofed house with its stork nests on its chimney. Everywhere the flowers were of similar varieties—sunflowers, lilies, hollyhocks, and many kinds I did not know. Everywhere the designs betokened a bond between the less affluent, no matter what flag the Treaty of Versailles had placed them under. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14
What does it mean that these less affluent people used symbolic forms, cones, circles in their designs as they sewed costumes for a marriage ceremony or when they painted flowers on the walls of their huts? It should come as no surprise that the basis of our culture is reflected in its art, even in the most fundamental of art’s formal elements—line. The young painters of Cezanne see nature in cones, rectangles, squares, circles, and likes which are the forms that make up abstract art. Depending on how these forms are employed, they can seem extremely intellectual and rational or highly express and emotional. These people, knowing nothing of Cezanne, had for untold centuries seen nature in these same abstract forms, as though they were inwardly commanded to interpret their view of nature in precisely Cezanne’s ways. When I looked at the designs on vases and drinking cups in Hungary or Poland, I recalled the friezes on the vases of ancient Greece which are the treasure of almost every museum in our civilized World. What does it mean that everywhere we find human being seeking art in the same kind of designs and forms, from the Navajo Indians of North America to the natives of Africa to ancient Greece to the less affluent of Europe? What is this thirst, the yearning in all peoples which cannot be denied to make something which gives them delight? #RandolphHarris 2 of 14
Is the art made to satisfy some unknown inner urge or to express objectively the way each person sees that World at its best? Or simply to brighten whatever corner he or she has and to make it livable? These people could not understand the language of their counterparts of other countries, but they could understand completely the language of designs on the vases which pleased their eyes everytime they used them. What does it mean that each of these nationalities of people develop its dance, unique but similar, to express their exhilaration and their hope for some happiness? Some of these similarities may be the cultural influence from one country to another, but the fundamental need of human beings to ornament their vases and their tools is surely not. From the flowers of Chis on their light green vases to the cherry blossoms on Japanese parchment to the designs on holy manuscripts in Tibet to the veils in India to the rugs in the near east woven to the songs of the leader, to the designs of the Navajo rings in the New World—everywhere we find human beings making ornaments on their clothes and armor and on everything that is meaningful to them. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14
The ancient Greeks could not use a vase for oil or wine without painting in black on the terra-cotta red of the vase the stories of Sirens chasing some youth or chariot races with lovely horses or the stories of the gods in Homer, all intricate and fascinating that it gives a person hours of delight tracing these tales in the Metropolitan Museum or in London or the Louvre or anywhere these vases are gathered. Even the death-dealing swords and other armaments show the owners’ love of design. The shields, the spears to protect one’s self and to terminate one’s opponents, are covered with designs which tell the ancient Homeric tales over and over again. And in the majority of cases this beauty has nothing in the World to do with function or utility. Indeed, an unadorned sword or spear would pierce the heart of the enemy more easily. The ancient Persian saying seems to be true for all of us, “If I have one penny, with half of it I buy some bread, and with the other half I buy a violet.” Perhaps even more puzzling is the fact that the primitive art—which our less affluent in central Europe and their ceremonies richly demonstrated—has such a pronounced influence on contemporary artists in New York City and London and Paris. Primitive art, the carved wood and painted totems from Africa to Alaska, from China to Australia, from New York to India, is the language a multitude of modern artists speak. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14
It seems that whenever art in our capital cities becomes dried up, exhausted in principle, reduced to copying previous matters, the artists are driven back to find again the primitive sources of beauty, to drink again the inspiration from the original forms of circle and cube and language which Gauguin and Van Gogh and their colleagues found. They find again what friends in the art World call honest forms; they drink again and deeply of the Pierian Springs. We realize now that our common human language is not Esperanto or computers or something having to do wit vocal cords and speech. It is, rather, our sense of proportion, our balance, harmony and other aspects of simple and fundamental form. Our universal language, in other words, is beauty. Beneath our loquacious chatter, there is a silent language of our whole being which years for art and the beauty form which art comes. For we find ourselves an integral part of this Universe is our breathing, our heart beat, our amazing balance in such a minor thing as taking one step on the path: the Earth comes up to meet us, and infinitesimally small distances, and our foot goes out to meet the Earth. From this fantastic balance of the human organism comes the art of walking and ultimately to making such forms as the ballet dancers which Degas shows us in his rich paintings. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14
Two things incline the heart to wonder, the starry sky above and the moral law within, and I wish to add a third. That is the amazing sense of balance that enables us to walk and run and to dance in the ways the peasants and other humans celebrate and express their ecstasy in all parts of the World. Art is the instrument by which beauty is actualized. Art is the eternal endeavor to realize beauty. Sometimes it is successful, sometimes a failure; but the poignancy of beauty will never let us go. As I write I fantasize that God had added an eleventh commandment, which Moses kept secret because he thought it would conflict with the second commandment which prohibited graven images since the Hebrews were living among idolatrous tribes. This shalt make thyself and thy World beautiful, for this is why I sent my gardeners, Adam and Eve, to cultivate the flowers in Eden. And this is why I have made the twilights and the springtime so radiant with splendor. An I fantasize that this is why Joan of Arc cried out from the stake when she was being burnt, “How long! O Lord, how long will it take for thy people to come see thy presence in this beautiful Earth?” #RandolphHarris 6 of 14
That which really is, as opposed to that which appears to be, behind all the countless objects of this varied Universe, is one alone, beginningless, endless, the source of all, the parent of the “I” -consciousness. This truth provides the final hope for mortals. Somewhere along one’s way one will discover it, act upon it, and be redeemed. This will be one’s last conversion, one’s final salvation, one best quest. Then only will the horrors one has contributed to the race’s history begin to fade out. All else is utopian chimera based upon wishful thoughts and fanciful imaginations. When mortals acquire proper values, whether by reflecting over their experience or by listening to their prophets, they will recognize this truth—that noting really matters except the search for the Overself. If this calls for the giving up of Earthly obstacles, then they are worth giving up for it. When one has become ripened by experience and reflection, one will accept this truth with the spontaneity of a biological reaction. If some are to be aroused to its importance they must first be given something of its meaning. Having a human body one must think with one’s heart on life’s end. This enterprise of the quest is the most serious in which a mortal can engage. We must treat it as such. However, let this not cause anyone to lose the sense of humour. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14
In pursuing this integral quest, they have the satisfaction of knowing that they are pursuing the only quest which can bring them to a truth which is all-embracing and all-explaining. The fact that so few have ventured on this quest offers no indication of what will happen in the future. If humankind could take any other way to its own self-fulfillment, this situation might remain. However, there is no other way. For one there must exist something more than merely being a member of the herd; there must be a higher direction leading to truth to satisfy the mind, to a nobler character to satisfy the conscience, to refined beautiful and gentler moods inspired by the arts, music, literature, and reverence. For one, there must be a Quest. This is the only way whereby mortals can impregnably demonstrate to oneself the illustrious dignity of one’s true being. This is the only way one can obtain the power of living in and by oneself, that is, of living the only real freedom possible on this Earth. If the consciousness is to be enlarged, if the mind’s dark places are to be lit up, if a blessed inspiration of living, work, or virtue is to be discovered, then this self-quest must be started. The Ideal in these critical days no longer a mere wish: it has become the necessary. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14
It is not enough to know with the intellect that God is everywhere and everywhen. It is also necessary to establish a practical working connection with God, if we are to obtain the actual benefit of this knowledge. Moreover this, and this alone, will give absolute assurance. One needs to recover one’s conscious relationship to the Overself: the subconscious one is never lost. The vision of the World and the understanding of life which one receives from the lips of books of others will never be so true nor so real as that which one makes one’s own. If one hears a thousand lectures or reads a thousand books but hath not found this Overself, what shall it profit a mortal? The student must advance to the next step and seek to realize within one’s own experience that which is portrayed to one by one’s intellect. And that is possible only by one’s entry upon the Quest. With ever day that passes, a mortal makes one’s silent declaration of faith in the way one spends it. It is a poor declaration that modern mortals makes when one brushes aside all through or prayer and meditation as something one has no time for. To become so lost in this World of appearances, as so many have become lost, is to shut the door on the World of reality. This is why the lost art of contemplation is a necessity and must be regained if we are to open that door and let truth in. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14
In general all the tastes of mortals from the guiltiest to the most innocent, from the most usual to the most peculiar, are related to a combination of circumstances or to a set of people or surroundings which they imagine can give them access to the beauty of the World. The advantage of this of that group of circumstances is due to temperament, to the memories of a past life, to causes which are usually impossible to recognize. There is only one case, which moreover is frequent, when the attraction of the pleasure of the senses is not possessed in the contact it offers with beauty; it is when, on the contrary, it provides an escape from it. The soul seeks nothing so much as contact with the beauty of the World, or at a still higher level, with God; but at the same time it flies from it. When the soul files from anything it is always trying to get away, ether from the horror of ugliness, or contact with what is truly pure. This is because all mediocrity flies from the light; and in all souls, except those which are near perfection, there is a great part which is mediocre. This part is seized with panic every time that a little pure beauty or pure goodness appears; it hides behind the flesh, it uses it as a veil. As a bellicose nation really need to cover its aggression with some pretext or other of it is to succeed in its enterprises, the quality of the pretext being actually quite indifferent, so the mediocre part of the soul needs a slight pretext for flying from the light. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14
The attraction of pleasure and the fear of pain supply this pretext. There again it is the absolute that dominates the soul, but as an object of repulsion and no longer as an attraction. Very often also in the search for carnal pleasure the two movements are combined; the movement of running toward pure beauty and the movement of flying far from it are indistinguishably tangled. However it may be, in every kind of human occupation there is always some regard for the beauty of the World seen in more or less distorted or soiled images. As a consequence there is not any department of human life which is purely natural. The supernatural is secretly present throughout. Under a thousand different forms, grace and mortal sin are everywhere. Between God and these incomplete, unconscious, often criminal searchings for beauty, the only link is the beauty of the World. Christianity will not be incarnated so long as there is not joined to it the Stoic’s idea of filial piety for the city of the World, for the country of here below which is the Universe. When, as the result of some misapprehension, very difficult to understand today, Christianity cut itself off from Stoicism, it condemned itself to an abstract and separate existence. Even the very the highest achievements of the search for beauty, in art or science for instance, are not truly beautiful. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14
The only true beauty, the only beauty that is the real presence of God, is the beauty of the Universe. Nothing less than the Universe is beautiful. In our mortal lives, we must have respect for all humans, and realize that parents are people, too! One of the problems inherent in talking about the importance of acceptance in family relationships is that parents are likely to demand of themselves that they be accepting 100 percent of the time, whether they feel like it or not, and that they are likely to define acceptance as meaning that the parents should never become angry, never be stern, never express a contrary opinion, and in general should become a nonentity in relation with one’s children. When this happens, the parent has become a second-class citizen in the home, one who encourages one’s children in the free expression of feeling but denies oneself the same right, for the fact is that we do not always feel accepting of our children. Sometimes the little darlings seem more like monsters. For parents to try to appear accepting wen they feel angry is to be phony and in reality to be unaccepting, for it betrays a lack of trust in the child to deal with us as we really are. It is quite possible for us to be very open with our children about our opinions and our feelings without demanding that they agree with us and without attempting to control their behavior. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14
One mother became very concerned about the clothes her daughter was wearing to high school. To her mind the girl was coming up with goofy combinations. In discussing the matter with a friend, she said, “Those getups she wears really bug me, but I do not say anything about them because I think it is important for her to be able to make her own decisions about these things. I know if I had to dressed like that when I was in high school, my mother would have said, ‘Get those clothes off and put these items from Draper James on right away!’ And I just do not feel like I want to boss my daughter around that way, but the clothes are so beautiful.” Apparently it had never occurred to her that she could express her feelings and opinion about her daughter’s clothing without robbing the girl of her right to make her own decisions, so she was adopting an attitude of studied indifference that might have given the girl the false impression that her mother had no interest or concern about her appearance. It is far better to be sufficiently self-accepting of our feelings as parents to be genuine with our children that it is to work at being accepting at the cost of suppressing our feelings. If we do not deal with it directly, our anger, hurt, or fear will be expressed indirectly in some way. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14
What comes with years and which is ascribed to mature people is the wisdom of practical living. This is merely information, knowledge from experience in practical affairs; it is not the wisdom which comes from the deeper being, the deeper self. That will arise only when one looks for it, aspires to it. The profound meaning of life is not put before our eyes. We have to search for it with much patience and perseverance. We must put a spiritual purpose in our lives and families. The first duty of mortals, which takes precedence over all other duties, is to become conscious of one’s Overself. This is the highest duty and every other duty must bow before it. When, and if, the two collide, even domestic happiness must not stand in the way of spiritual salvation. The training which makes this possible may be largely unpracticable in one’s particular circumstances but it is never entirely so. The difficulty of performing this duty is not enough excuse to relive one of it. The Universe is beautiful as a beautiful work of art would be if there could be one that deserved this name. Thus it contains nothing constituting an end or a good in itself. It has in it no finality beyond universal beauty itself. The essential truth to be know concerning this Universe is that it is absolutely devoid of finality. Nothing in the way of finality can be ascribed to it except through a lie or mistake. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14
Destiny Will Return to Haunt Us as Long as it is Not Acknowledged—Destiny is Eternally Present to Remind Us that We Exist as Part of a Community
Sorry to disappoint you, but since you do go and comes as you will, it seems I must get used to you. Almost all of us who are involved in families desire to create a family environment in which each member will grow in the ability to experience and express love. We want our children to learn how to love. We want them to develop a minimum of the fear of love that would cripple them in their ability to establish increasingly deep and meaningful relationships as they grow to maturity. We want them in adulthood to be able to look back at their homes as places where they felt secure and loved and at the same time felt encouraged to plunge into the mainstream of life. We are not particularly confused about what we want in our family life. We are, however, very likely confused about how to accomplish what we want. One of the reasons for our confusion is that we parents often tend to think in terms of techniques, a tendency that is encouraged by many writings on the rearing of children. We feel if we can just find the right way of handling situations as they arise in the family and avoid the wrong ways, we will be successful. One purpose of art, and the beauty which is its inspiration, is to counteract this experience of insignificance. People have to have a sense of transcendence of their boring, day-to-day existence, and to live with some adventure, joy, zest, and a sense of meaning and purpose in their existence. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
Family life is much more complex (and in some ways perhaps more deceptively simple) than that. If it were totally a matter of right and wrong techniques, these skills would long ago have been scientifically fretted out, written down, and we could all be successful Betty Crocker cookbook parents, measuring out just the right amounts of the appropriate reactions to our children. However, the quality of our family relationships counts much more than the techniques we use. And while it is certainly true that many worthwhile things can be, and have been, said about particular ways of handling family problems, it is also true that parents who are full of fears often subtly adapt the best techniques in the direction of unhealthy results. Family councils not infrequently provide an example of this. The council is formed for the expressed purpose of allowing the total family to have a voice in decisions that effect all the members. Very often the democratic nature of such councils is more apparent than real. The parents may in reality be afraid to turn any genuine decision-making power over to the children and yet at the same time they are uncomfortable with making arbitrary decisions. So they kid themselves into thinking they are being democratic by seeming to give the children a voice in family affairs while they subtly manipulate the family into doing what they wanted all along. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
If the children are fooled at all by this sham of democracy, so much the worse. If parents simply announced their decisions and dealt directly with any protests that arose, it would certainly be more honest and much less confusing to the children; yet a genuinely democratic family council might be a great thing. Another technique that may be good in theory but which is often abused is the idea that parents ought to be permissive in allowing the child a great deal of freedom and a wide range of activities unhindered by adult interruption. It is not unusual for parents who are afraid of deep emotional involvement to use this approach as a subtle excuse to withdraw from their children. Probably without being fully aware of what they are doing, they develop a relationship that to the children must appear to be of disinterest. When Jillian takes two-year-old son, Leo Pete, to visit Aunt Tori and Leo Pete starts cheering at the top of his lungs because he is so excited, Jillian may be a little embarrassed that he is not using his inside voice but may say nothing for fear of wounding the little tyke’s delicate feelings. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
Sometimes mothers want the father to give orders, which are stern because the male figure is usually known for being a little more direct, so the child’s feelings are less likely to be hurt. However, Jillian will also deprive, her son, Leo Pete of a genuine response. Even if it is given forcibly on the seat of his pants, it is that honest reaction that will be most helpful to Leo Pete’s ego. So the quality of our parenthood depends not so much on our skills but rather on our maturity and our emotional openness and freedom to be real people to our children. And this, of course, depends upon the total fabric of our life and experience. And improvement as parents will come not so much through acquiring new skills as in gaining a deeper understanding and acceptance of ourselves. Art is an antidote for aggression. It gives the ecstasy, the self-transcendence that could otherwise take the form of drug addiction, extremism, self-harm, or warfare. We have seen that both aggression and art—and the beauty which is the center of art—yield the experience of ecstasy and self-transcendence. However, art and aggression are directly opposite in their effects. We find, strangely enough, that the pursuit of art and beauty are what we have long sought, namely, the antidote to violence. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
I propose that this is the function of beauty and art in human experience. I do not overlook the pressing need to correct the faults of our society—our gross nationalism, our making human beings subordinate to technology, our failure to value human rights above property rights, our racial and gender injustice. However, I wish to go below these considerations, to a universal level where the sense of significance will be recognized as every person’s right because he or she is part of a Universe of beauty. First, art has the capacity to prevent violence in such a way that venom is taken out of the violence. This mysterious power is shown in its capacity to portray violence in forms that are a catharsis. Take, for example, Casper David Friedrich’s Woman in Morning Light (1818), the woman looking out at the rising Sun is literally larger than the mountains in the distance, and she blocks out our view of the Sun, overlapping it. However, we do not think of her as a giant. We simply recognize that she is closer than the mountain to the surface of the painting, which is called the picture place. Her position is, in fact, similar to our own as viewers, and together, we look out on the new day with all its possibility and promise. It presents humanity and beauty of the World to mortals more vividly than the reams of printed paper can do, and it presents the simply beauty which allows humans to reflect that even alone, we can enjoy this Universe of beauty. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
Art is catharsis. So Aristotle argued centuries ago. And so it is in our day and as long as human beings remain human. Whether we survive as human or we start over on our primordial trek; whether it is on our planet or one of the other billions in the Heavens, the regeneration goes on. It may be that the legend of Genesis will have to be re-enacted. However, faith is that renewal, which goes on eternally. This is precisely the thing which gives us consciousness in the first place. For art—and beauty the contemplation of which leads to art—is an inseparable part of our precious capacity to be conscious, to think. Art was invented out of the necessity of those original men and women to regenerate, to propagate, to renew the race of humankind. Our dimensions of hope we now need to extend to include the other solar bodies; the hope that springs eternal in the human heart can include other planets and Worlds. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries there had been the beginning of a Renaissance which would have been the real one if it had been able to bear fruit; it began to germinate notably in Languedoc. Some of the Troubadour poems on spring led one to think that perhaps Christian inspiration and the beauty of the World would not have been separated had it developed. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
Moreover the spirit of Languedoc left its mark on Italy and was perhaps not unrelated to the Franciscan inspiration. However, whether it be coincidence or more probably the connection of cause and effect, these germs did not survive the war of the Albigenses and only traces of the movement were found after that. Today one might think that the developed World has almost lost all feeling for the beauty of the World, and that they have taken upon them the task of making it disappear from all the continents where they have penetrated with their armies, their trade, and their religion. As Christ said to the Pharisees: “Woe to you, for ye have taken away the key of knowledge; ye entered not in yourselves and them that were entering in ye hindered.” And yet at the present time, in the developed nations, the beauty of the World is almost the only way by which we can allow God to penetrate us, for we still farther removed from the other two. Real love and respect for religious practices are rare even among those who are most assiduous in observing them, and are practically never to be found in others. Most people do not even conceive them to be possible. As regards the supernatural purpose of affliction, compassion and gratitude are not only rare but have become almost unintelligible for almost everyone today. They very idea of them has almost disappeared; the very meaning of the words has been debased. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
On the other hand a sense of beauty, although it is sometimes mutilated, distorted, and soiled, remains rooted in the heart of mortals as a powerful incentive. It is present in all the preoccupations of secular life. If it were made true and pure, it would sweep all secular life in a body to the feet of God; it would make the total incarnation of the faith possible. Moreover, speaking generally, the beauty of the World is the commonest, easiest, and most natural way of approach. Just as God hastens into every soul, and immediately it opens, even a little, in order through it to love and serve the afflicted, so he descends in all haste to love and admire the tangible beauty of his own creation through the soul that opens to him. However, the contrary is still more true. The soul’s natural inclination to love beauty is the trap God most frequently uses in order to win it and open it to the breath from on high. This was the trap which enticed Cora. All the Heavens above were smiling at the scent of the narcissus; so was the entire Earth and all the swelling ocean. Hardly had the poor girl stretched out her hand before she was caught in the trap. She fell into the hands of the living God. When she escaped she had eaten the seed of the pomegranate which bound her forever. She was no longer a virgin; she was the spouse of God. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
The beauty of the World is the manifestation of a labyrinth. The unwary individual who on entering takes a few steps is soon unable to find the opening. Worn out, with nothing to eat or drink, in the dark, separated from his dear ones, and from everything he loves and is accustomed to, he walks on without knowing anything or hoping anything, incapable even of discovering whether he is really going forward or merely turning round on the same spot. However, this affliction is as nothing compared with the danger threatening him. For if he does not lose courage, if he goes on walking, it is absolutely certain that he will finally arrive at the center of the labyrinth. And there God is waiting to eat him. Later he will go out again, but he will be changed, he will have become different, after being eaten and digested by God. Afterward he will stay near the entrance so that he can gently push all those who come near into the opening. The beauty of the World is not an attribute of matter in itself. It is a relationship of the World to our sensibility, the sensibility that depends upon the structure of our body and our soul. The Micromegas of Voltaire, a thinking infusorian organism, could have had no access to the beauty on which we live in the Universe. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
We must have faith that, supposing such creatures were to exit, the World would be beautiful for them too; but it would be beautiful in another way. Anyhow we must have faith that the Universe is beautiful on all levels, and more generally that is has a fullness of beauty in relation to the bodily and psychic structure of each of the thinking beings that actually do exist and of all those that are possible It is this very agreement of an infinity of perfect beauties that gives a transcendent character to the beauty of the World. Nevertheless the part of this beauty we experience is designed and destined for our human sensibility. In our Declaration of Independence, there is a joyful enthusiasm for the self evident and inalienable right of individual freedom, which most of us lapped up with our mother’s milk. However, we find even there a pronounced lack of awareness of the social problems of responsibility and community—that is, a lack of realization of what I call destiny. True, there is the reference to the Creator and the phrase in this declaration “we acquiesce in the necessity” after the long list of the oppressions of the British king. True, also, that in our Constitution the Supreme Court is charged with providing the necessary limits. However, dictation is not enough. The British historian Macaulay wrote to President Madison half a century after the Declaration was adopted that he was worried about the American Constitution because it was “all sail and no rudder.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
Thus, we have, marking the birth of our nation, the cheering for full speed ahead but with a lack of guiding limits. In the condition of all sail and no rudder freedom is in continual crisis; the boat may easily capsize. Freedom has lost its solid foundation because we have seen it without its necessary opposite, which gives it viability—namely, destiny. People in America imagine that their whole destiny is in their own hands. The woof of time is every instant broken and the track of generations effaced. Those who went before are soon forgotten; of those who will come after, no one has any idea: the interest of mortal is confined to those in close propinquity to one’s self. I know no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America. In European nations like France, where the monarchy stood against the legislature, one could exercise freedom of mind since if one power sides against the individual, the other sides with one. However, in a nation where democratic institutions exist, organized like those in the United States, there is but one authority, one element of strength and success, with nothing beyond it. There is tyranny of the majority in America, which I call conformism of mind and spirit. We have recently seen this exhibited in the last election in California in the power of what is called the moral majority. There the body is left free and the soul enslaved. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
The master no longer says, “You shall think as I do, or you shall die”; but he says, “You are free to think differently from me, and to retain your life, your property, and all that you possess; but you are henceforth a stranger among your people. You will retain your civil right, but they will be useless to you.” Other people “will affect to scorn you.” The person who thinks freely is ostracized, and the mass of people cannot stand such alienation. Have we not too easily and readily seized upon freedom as our birthright and forgotten that each of us must rediscover if for ourselves? Have we forgotten Goethe’s words: “He only earns his freedom and existence/Who daily conquers them anew”? Yet destiny will return to haunt us as long as it is not acknowledged. We cannot afford to ignore those who went before, and those who will come after. If we are ever to understand what Milton meant when he cried “Ah, Sweet Liberty,” or what the Pilgrims sought in landing at Plymouth rock in search of religious freedom, or any one of the other million and one evidences of freedom, we must confront this paradox directly. The paradox is that freedom owes its vitality to destiny, and destiny owes its significance to freedom. Our talents, our gifts, are on loan, to be called in at any moment by death, by illness, or by any one of the countless other happenings over which we have no direct control. Freedom is that essential to our lives, but it is also that precarious. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
It may help, for example, if we can become aware of and accept the fact that as parents we are frightened. One reason we are afraid is that we live in rapidly changing times. We may feel the changes are for the better or for the worse, or, more likely, we will feel that some of the change represents improvement while some represents backward steps. However, in any case we are frightened, because changes from old patterns of life in which we felt relatively secure and comfortable are always frightening. This is not new, of course. Every generation has its tensions with the preceding and succeeding generations. However, the rapidity of technological change in these days probably increases the problem. We who grew up without the television, for example, are frightened about the effect of this instrument on the lives of our children. We may feel that there are ways in which it is potentially harmful, and we may feel guilty that we are not doing more about it, and yet we do not know just what to do. We are confused and frightened. Another reason we are likely to be frightened as parents is that we are afraid our children are like us and have the same feelings and desires within themselves that we find unacceptable in ourselves. So if we have not learned to accept anger within ourselves, our fear may lead us to squelch our children’s expression of anger even when it may be natural and appropriate. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
In all probability we are also frightened that our children will not accept us as we are. Many words are written about children’s feelings of rejection by their parents. Little is said about our feelings that we may not be accepted by our children. And yet this fear is probably a strong force operating in parent-child relationships. As parents we often wear masks that prevent our children from seeing us as we really are. Often it becomes increasingly difficult as the children grow older for us to be open and genuine with them. For example, many young adults report that their most basic fear is probably their fear of love and the vulnerability that love involves. We have discovered through many experiences that it is risky to love deeply and openly, and we find ways of withdrawing from our children. One mother in her twenties whose children are still under school ages says, “I find myself holding back some of my feelings of love for my children. I do not want them to become too important to me. All around me I see children growing up and leaving their parents alone with nobody to care about them. I do not want that to happen to me.” So her conscious resolution to this problem of eventual separation s to cheat herself out of eighteen to twenty years of the emotional enjoyment of love so that the shock of parting will be cushioned by her studied indifference! #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
Although most of us are not so aware of needing to withdraw, we probably find many ways to just avoid simply relaxing and enjoying our kids just as they are here now. We pick and nag about relatively unimportant bits of behavior, or we become so preoccupied with their future and their scholastic achievement that we continually hound them. It is likely that it all stems from our fear of letting ourselves and them know how much we really care for them and how vulnerable our love makes us. This tormenting feeling of the lack of a spiritual state in one’s own experience, will drive one to continual search for it. However, one’s whole life must constitute the search and one’s whole being must engage in it. If you take the widest possible view, all the different sections of one’s action and thought are inseparable from the amount of spirituality is in a mortal. The truth must pass from one’s lips to one’s life. And this passage will only become possible when life itself without the quest will become meaningless. It is only the beginner who needs to think of the quest as separate from the common life, something special, aloof, apart. The more proficient knows that it must become the very channel for that life. The Quest is not anything apart from Life itself. We cannot dispense with common sense and balance in relation to it. No single element in life can be take too solemnly, as if it constituted the whole of life itself, without upsetting balance. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
The Golden Gate Bridge Came as a Secure Link to My Heart, Only it was Shrouded in Fog
Love. Who knows about another’s love? We have already seen that, although the intensity of love feelings may vary, the nature of love is essentially the same in all caring relationships. In other words, the experience of love is not limited to those who are intimate partners or potential intimate partners. And as we shall see in greater detail in the discussion of healthy families, our ability to love grows out of the context of experiencing love and acceptance in the family or in other relationships. When we have this understanding of love it becomes a contradiction in terms to imagine that we could love one individual to the exclusion of others. Love is not an isolated phenomenon. We learn to love because we have been loved and in the warmth of the experience of love we have been gradually freed to feel love and to express it. In other words, in order to love, we must become loving persons. And when a person has developed the capacity for emotional intimacy and knows the enjoyment and satisfaction of the experience of love, it is natural for that person to seek and find that experience with many different people with whom one comes in contact with. When these qualities of the loving person are seen, it becomes evident that possessiveness in relationships is not a mark of love. It is a mark of insecurity and fear. It is also a destroyer of the experience of love, for when we demand love we cannot experience what we then receive as freely given. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14
If a husband, for example, resent other relationships that his wife may tend to develop and if he demands that she severely limit her scope of activities and devote herself completely to the home and to him, he is almost certain to encounter resentment on her part. However, even if he does not, how can he trust the love that she shows toward him even if it is genuine? He must always been haunted with the nagging feeling that she would find others more interesting and stimulating to be with if he did not use coercion and threats to keep her close to him. The nature of our society today probably makes it more important than ever before that the nonexclusiveness of love be recognized and incorporated into our lives. For we live in a time when we are likely to feel lonely and isolated. For many Americans and people all around the World the idea of a family, in the tribal sense, no longer exists. Our mobility as a people tends to scatter us across that country and across the World, and blood ties often to be of little significance as far as satisfying needs for relationship is concerned. These circumstances unquestionably leave a void in many people’s lives in family tries may have been a mixed blessing—a situation or thing that has disadvantages as well as advantages. “However, you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light,” reports 1 Peter 2.9-10. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14
Nonetheless, the values of these disappearing family experiences are illustrated by account of a man in his thirties who describes this aspect of his childhood in the following way. “My mother was one of ten children, all of whom grew to adulthood and raised families within a radius of seventy-five miles of their birthplace. Family reunions would occur at least once or twice a year, sometimes more frequently. If I pause and remember hard enough, I can still smell the gourmet coffee and other delicious foods like lemon meringue cheese cake, blonde brownies, and fluffy strawberry pie and I can taste the chicken wonton tacos, baked pasta with sausage and baby portobello mushroom white sauce, pepperoncini beef, BBQ smoked brisket chili with tender beef, bacon, tomato, onion, beer, bell peppers, beans and corn topped with cheddar cheese, green onions, and sour cream, along with the ribs and tri-tip that my uncle produced on his ranch. And though I certainly did not think of it in those terms then, in retrospect I think of the equally delicious sense of belonging to a large group of people who exuded a great deal of belonging to a large group of people who exuded a great deal of warmth toward me. I was a town boy, but the family relationship provided the opportunity to spend several Summers earning my bread and board and room on the ranch of one of the others of my uncles. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14
“Time with the family–it meant a broader experience with people and things. It meant proud rides into two with my uncle for supplies in a car I earned. Above all, it meant the experience of warmth and love, most frequently expressed in teasing by uncles, aunts, and cousins. Since I have been an adult I have learned that the life of the family was not as idyllic as I experienced it. There were jealousies engendered by unequal inheritances. There were the usual petty feelings people who love each other so often find to squabble about. However, by and large I was blissfully unaware of these matters and knowing now that they existed does not dim my remembered pleasures or cause me to discount their reality. Those were good years for me. I wish my children could have the same experiences, but we live hundreds of miles from my brother and sister and from any of my wife’s relatives. And if we were geographically close, I think that the same kinds of things would not happen. When I was a child, the kind of feelings that existed between relatives and brought them together do not seem to exist much any more.” The widespread loss of this kind of family experience has indeed created a void that makes the need for other experiences of intimacy a crucial one. Some have tried to meet this crisis by making the immediate family virtually a closed corporation as far as significant relationships are concerned. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14
Although it is not put into words, a virtual bargain is made in which a couple tacitly agree that no one outside the family will be permitted to become of emotional significance. Such sealing off of the family through avoiding significant contact with others is a frightened response to a frightening World. We probably enter into such unspoken agreements because we feel in our bones—feeling it intuitively—that to allow ourselves to care for others would increase our vulnerability to the possibility of being hurt. It is probably also a response to our fears about ourselves. If free to establish others relationships, we are so doubtful about our lovability and so fearful that our loved one might learn to care for someone more than ourselves and abandon us that we say in effect, “If you will do the same for me, I will love you and commit my whole life to you.” Such a narrow experience of love based on such deep feelings of insecurity can hardly be described as a deeply satisfying or freeing experience. The loneliness and isolation are only mitigated in a minor way. And, of course, the participants, having no other intimate relationships, have no protection against the catastrophic hurt and loss that would occur with death or other separation from the one-and-only loved one. Another societal bar to real contact is the stereotypes we apply to each other, and the expectations that sometimes entrap people into limited acceptable modes of behavior. However, there is a way to alleviate this problem. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14
Sometimes it is useful if people are allowed the valuable opportunity to shed the expectations accrued from their identities by taking new names and by agreeing not to talk about their backgrounds—occupation, home town, and so forth—at least when first meeting a new person. Sometimes the trappings of a career, such as clergyman, psychiatrist, nurse, teacher, business executive, require certain types of behavior and elicit stereotyped responses. Under such an agreement an individual is able to explore one’s self more fully by seeing how one really would act and feel outside of one’s occupational constraints and how people would react to one as a person rather than as a member of a group. This is usually done as a group activity, with trusted members. Before they have an opportunity to know each other, group or new community members are given new names, and these are the only names by which they are to be known throughout the life of the group. In one group, for example, there was a highly spirited young man, he was thin, and he looked very youth, so the members called him Peter Pan. Peter Pan seemed to get a huge delight out of all the group events, especially some of the communication and dance activities. It turned out that he was celibate and his abandoned behavior captivated everyone. He was particularly interested in being with the female members of the group. Toward the end of the workshop a rumor started that he was a priest. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14
Someone mentioned the rumor to “Peter Pan” about him being a priest, and he acknowledged that he was a Roman Catholic priest, and he had been one for twenty years. The group was startled. This certainly did not fit their stereotype. After the experience, Peter Pan expressed his deep appreciation for the opportunity to keep his identity unknown. It was the first time in twenty years that he could learn how people responded to him as a human being and not as a priest. And he had a chance to express some feelings he had been suppressing. As he spoke, tears welled up in his eyes and his gratitude overwhelmed him. Many group members spontaneously embraced him, and he hugged them back tightly. This moving scene left Peter Pan with a warm, glowing smile which he retained for the remainder of the group life. He vowed to go back to try to influence his church to experience more of the warmth and humanness that he experienced. Many months later the glow had not diminished, and he seemed to return to his job with added strength and confidence about the person under his robes. For a person like Peter Pan, this experience was like getting another chance in life, by throwing off the background that has narrowed the opportunity for growth. He was able to take full advantage of the opportunity and felt a strong feeling of self-renewal. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14
Every other reality in human experience becomes what it is by its nature. The heart beats, the eyes see; it is their nature to do what they do. The heart beats, the eyes see; it is their nature to do what they do. Or, if we take something inorganic like values, we know what the nature of truth is—to state things as close to the reality as possible. And we know the meaning, or the nature, of the value of beauty. Each of these functions in the human being according to its own nature. What, then, is the nature of freedom? It is the essence of freedom precisely that its nature is not given. Its function is to change its nature, to become something different from what it is at any given moment. Freedom is the possibility of development, of enhancement of one’s life; or the possibility of withdrawing, shutting oneself up, denying and stultifying one’s growth. It is the nature of freedom to determine itself. This uniqueness makes freedom different from every other reality in human experience. Freedom is also unique in that it is the mother of all values. If we consider such values as honesty, love, or courage, we find, strangely enough, that they cannot be placed parallel to the value of freedom. For the other values derive their value from being free; they are dependent on freedom. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14
Take the vale of love. If I know an individual’s love is not given with some degree of freedom, how can I prize a one’s love? What is to keep this so-called love from being merely an act of dependency or conformity? For love can take concrete shape only in freedom. It takes a free mortal to live, for love is both the unexpected discovery of the other and a readiness to do anything for that individual. Take also the value of honesty. Honesty is the best policy. However, it is the best policy, it is not honesty at all but simply good business. When a person is free to act against the monetary interest of his or her company, that is the authentic value of honesty. Unless it presupposes freedom, honesty loses its ethical character. If it is supposedly exhibited by someone who is coerced into it, courage also loses its value. Just punishment, like just almsgiving, enshrines the real presence of God and constitutes something in the nature of a sacrament. That also is made quite clear in the Gospel. It is expressed by the words: “He that is without sin among you let him first cast a stone.” Christ alone is without sin. Christ spared the woman taken in adultery. The administration of punishment was not in accordance with the Earthly life which was to end on the Cross. He did not however prescribe the abolition of penal justice. He allowed stoning to continue. Wherever it is done with justice, it is therefore he who throws the first stone. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14
As he dwells in the famished wretch whom a just mortal feeds, so one dwells in the condemned wretch whom a just man punishes. He did not say so, but he showed it clearly enough by dying like a common criminal. Christ is the divine model of prisoners and old offenders. As the young workingmen of the Jeunesse Ouvriere Catholique thrill at the thought that Christ is one of them, so condemned criminals have just reason to taste like a rapture. They only need to be told, as the workingmen were told. In a sense Christ is nearer to them than to the martyrs. If Christ is present at the start and the finish, the stone which slays and the piece of bread which provides nourishment have exactly the same virtue. The gift of life and the gift of death are equivalent. Far from being irrational, myths actually save us from irrationality. They make our powerful emotions, which would drive us into psychosis otherwise, into diluted forms which we can absorb. And they do that by virtue of being an art form. The myth has certain characteristics which it shares with other art forms, like poetry, the novel, painting, sculpture, music and dance. These shared characteristics include harmony, balance, rhythm. They are qualities which minister to our inner needs for serenity, for a sense of eternity, and ultimately for courage. All genuine works of art give a sense of meaning which informs us that life is more significant than the disasters, petty or great, which clamor for our attention. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14
Music hath charms to soothe the savage heart. We have said that the beauty which myths bring to us is a source of their healing power. Within the explosion into their wonderful civilization, the ancient Greeks had a devotion to beauty that was singularly great. One has only to walk through the National Museum at Athens, or the room containing the Elgin marbles in the British Museum in London, to see, in the sheer number of statues, what great heights and depths this civilization produced. This is surely related to the Greeks’ vast fecundity for myths. The whole essence of the works of art has a sense of eternity, the union of human and divine, in a calmness that will be impressed on anyone even more today. Beauty for the ancient Greeks shows a state of being as ontological, rather than as an emotion which can be turned on or off. This saves us from confusing movie actresses, or Miss Americas, or various attractive bodies advertising bikinis, with actual beauty. Some actors and actresses have some beauty, there is no doubt—Ingrid Bergman, Greta Garbo, Lucky Lui, Meghan Markle, Reese Witherspoon, Jillian Harris, Jennifer Lopez, Aaliyah, Paris Hilton, Mindy Lahiri, and Viola Davis, for example. However, it is in spite of the sex appeal rather than because of it. #RandolpHarris 11 of 14
Helen of Troy was the symbol for Beauty itself. For beauty was the condition of harmony between different truths and different deeds of virtue; and in this sense it was the aspect of Arete that needed most to be cultivated, the treasure of all human aspiration. This could well be the secret of the greatness of Greece, above all the arguments concerning the power given by their enthusiasm at driving back the Persians in 490 and 480 B.C., or all the explanations on the basis of the riches of Athens in this fifth century with its slave populations, and all the other contemporary arguments of our sociologists and psychologists. We are pushed back to the simplest explanation of all: that Helen was the symbol of Beauty and the myth that meant just what is said, namely, that Beauty was worth the whole expedition to Troy. We capitalize the term because the word now takes on divinity for Greeks: Helen is later made a goddess. It may thus be that greatness of Greece and especially of Athens was due to the fact that city-states could be so devoted to Beauty that they lived and died for it. This could well have been the center of their concept of Arete, that indefinable center of virtue which every Athenian sought to achieve above all other things. The Greeks called themselves Hellenes, and the land id called Hellas to this day, which indicates that Helen really was the symbolic figure for the soul of Greece. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14
The Greek people were fighting for their inner selves which surely makes more sense than fighting for a flag. Any nation which can fight, and win, such battles for their own soul, for their belief in Beauty, deserves in some way to have glory that in universally accorded this little, ancient nations. Art is our way of managing our inner turmoil, transcending our terror, and protecting ourselves from our own psychotic tendencies. From the high tension of Motherwell’s canvases, to the eruption of Hofmann’s brilliant colors, to the despair of Picasso’s Guernica, art relieves our extremes of emotions. Our inordinate passion is drained off; our pressure to act out these emotions in society is relieved, and we are deeply consoled. Art gives us repose and harmony where the otherwise would be explosion and destruction. Thus art is our universal therapist. It mirrors and gives us catharsis for our terror of dehumanization. As we stand in the presence of de Kooning’s canvases, we are strengthened in our efforts to transcend our inner conflicts. Modern art speaks often directly to our subconscious and preconscious selves, as in Pollock and Rothko. Instead of running from our troublesome dreams, we can welcome them into awareness, as when we look at Hofmann or Dali. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14
In these ways myth as an art form ministers to us on dimensions below consciousness; it encompasses or irrationality and our soul tendencies. Myths thus humanize mortals even though this process is always precarious. Thus myths give us a harmony of rational and irrational, a harmony of antimonies. Myths carry health-giving catharsis, as no one can doubt after seeing Aeschylus’ Agamemnon or Euripides’s Helen. If we wished an explanation for humankind’s invention of myths, we need to go no farther than the fact that myths enables us to live more humanly in the midst of our unhuman, warring unconscious. Myths enable us to exist and persevere as strangers in a strange land. Art is contemplation, it is the joy of intelligence. It is not the tyranny of the ego which is to be removed most of all—although that is a necessary part of the Great Work—nor is it that the ego must be uprooted and killed forever—although its old self must surrender to the new person it has become. No—let it live and attend to its daily work but only as purified being, an ennobled character or quietened mind, an enlightened person—in short, a new ego representing that is best in the human creature. One will still be an “I” but one that is in harmony with the Overself—a descriptive name that ought to be kept and not discarded. So do not in your life attack the ego as so many do, but life it up to the highest possibility. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14
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 