If past history was all there was to life, the richest people would be those who did not progress. Your past is important, but as important as that is, it is not nearly as important to your present as the way you see the future. The function of a great soul is to store obscure ideas, and make sense of the World of information. We are the dwelling place of incredible opportunities. They live within us. With consciousness about who we are and what we are, with the awareness of the problems we are faced with, with a commitment not only to ourselves but to each other, we can make it work We will make it work Is this all too good to be true, too beautiful to be factual? Is it only a theory without grounds, a personal belief without evidence? No!—it is quite demonstrable to anyone who will undertake the work upon oneself.. When God made you, He threw away the mold. There never has been or ever will be another person just like you. So you are an original, a meticulously designed instrument. That is great! However, you will never perform, live, or achieve above the value you attribute to yourself. It is the supreme job of the soul to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge. The rewards of this quest are not primarily material ones, although these may come. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22

The only reward that can be guaranteed to the successful aspirant is that one will emerge out of the unregenerate state and come closer to God’s consciousness, that is to say, to the kingdom of Heaven. Whoever looks for more may be disappointed. However, to the being who through reflection or suffering, intuition or instruction, has got one’s values right, this will be enough. From the first momentary glimpse f the soul till the final rest in it, one is being led to accept the truth that the love which one wants and hopes to find outside of oneself must be found within oneself. The true beloved is not a person but a present. When genuine love in its most intense form utterly overwhelms one, one will find that its physical form is a mere caricature of it and that its human form is a pale reflection from it. Instead of having to bed some woman or some man for crumbs of affection from their table, one will find a veritable fountain of everflowing love deep within one’s heart, and therefore ever available to one in the fullest measure. This is that one beloved who can never desert one, the unique soul-mate who will forever remain with one, the only twin soul one can seek with the absolute certainty that it is truly one’s own. At the least there will be more outer harmony and less outer friction in day-to-day living, more inner peace and less inner anxiety. It leads to amity in human relationships and dissolves enmity. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22

When their lives have reached an impasse, people seek or should seek the help of a psychotherapist. The symptoms of the impasse are diverse, including physical suffering, inability to concentrate, anxiety, depression, boredom or guilt, inability to love another or participate in adult relationships, loneliness, obsession, antisocial behavior—the entire gamut of psychopathology as we know it. Diverse though the symptoms of misery might be, they share one feature. They are the inexorable outcome of adjusting to a way of life, a way of existing and behaving in the World, which an informed common sense would tell us must lead to neurosis or psychosis, to a checking out or a refusal to carry on further in that way. We know now that elaborate schemes for classifying symptoms of mental illness into neat categories is unprofitable for would-be helpers of others. When we label someone as a schizophrenic or a neurotic, we lull ourselves into thinking that we understand one before we actually do. The impasses in existence are only superficially described as illness, a term which at best is a metaphor, not an explanation. We spent centuries regarding people who do not fit, whose behavior we could neither understand nor accept as evil, as possessed by demons. It was indeed an advance toward greater compassion among beings when the illness-metaphor was applied to the people who would not play the game of social existence as it was supposed to be played. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22

However, not all who, though physically intact, cannot play the game are sick. Perhaps none are. Mental illness is a myth one that has an historical purpose, but which no longer helps beings regard and treat deviants as their kith and kin. Now, the persistent belief that people who check out are mentally ill and need to be cured of their disease symptoms beclouds understanding. Indeed, the belief that one’s patient or client or counselee is an exemplar of some category of disapproved humanity: schizophrenic, delinquent, neurotic, and so forth—leads the would-be helper to treat one as less than a full human being, less than a fellow traveler through this life. Anyone who has been treated by another, not as they very one he or she is, but as the embodiment of some category—disabled, same sex oriented, a professor, a psychotic—knows that one is not being addressed by the person who so regards him or her. If I am regarded as a patient by the doctor, and neither he or she nor I ever become acquainted with one another, we are doubtless both cheated; and it is questionable whether any enduring help can come out of so impersonal a transaction. It is more apt to regard the one in deed of help as a fellow seeker. One seeks relief from one’s suffering, to be sure, and more fundamentally (whether or not one can verbalize the ultimate goal of one’s quest), one is seeking a way to be in the World, a way to live with others, and a way of being oneself that is meaningful and rewarding. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22

One is seeking a way that produces satisfactions, hope, and meaning in expanding experience rather than pain, misery, stultification, and impotence. These latter outcomes are cries for help. They are, as well, proof that the seeker’s way of life up to the point of breakdown was not compatible with wellness. It seems futile for a physician, psychotherapist, or growth counselor to treat symptoms by anesthetizing the person with assorted drugs, or by reducing one in some way, and then to send one back to the very way of life that was inimical to truly human being. What is called for in addition to cure is to help the seeker find some way that will permit one to function more fully, more authentically, with a more liberating focus to one’s existence. The counthentically, with a more liberating focus to one’s existence. The counselor must aim to seek with one’s client and persist in the search until they jointly discover what changes in the client’s self and World will permit one to live a life compatible with wellness. The helper, if one is to me more than a first-aid technician, must grope with one’s client, to find healthy personality for one: that is, a healthy way of being a person in the World (the literal meaning of personality). Therefore, not everyone with a mental illness is broke or dangerous, but sometimes those who are not seeking help can be. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22

In real life a person knows that one’s behavior will have consequences. When people lack a complete feeling of reality, it may cause reactions that represent unconscious tendencies. No one knows the worth of innocence till one know it is gone forever, and that money cannot buy it back. Some people have a predisposing factor in the brain which is partly responsible for their mental illness. Often times, a paranoiac fall ill long before anyone suspects one’s illness and their pathological idea overwhelmed them at a psychological moment. This usually happens when one’s congenitally hypersensitive emotional life becomes warped, and the spiritual form which one’s emotions need in order to live finally break down. It did not break by itself, it was broken by the individual. It is usually because one’s feelings, which are woven out of moonshine are immature, and need prolonged incubation in order to grow strong and to withstand he unavoidable clash with reality. In themselves there is nothing reprehensible about them, but to the simple, straightforward mind they arouse suspicion. However, in the individual’s mind, when someone rejects them it has a devastating effect, because they believe there are no grounds for this harsh interpretation. One’s dream is destroyed, but this in itself would not have been harmful had it not also killed the individual’s feelings. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22

 A less passionate person can put up with sternness, and not hold before one the ideal of cold-blooded heartlessness, but the highly-strung, sensitive nature in need of affection will be broke. Gradually it will seem to the individual that one attained one’s ideal, when suddenly one discovered that the person they think they “fixed” was not on the same wavelength. This realization is usually followed by an arise of paranoia, and also a form of paranoid schizophrenia characterized by delusions and hallucinations, and indeed all other forms of schizophrenia. There will also usually be microscopic lesions of the brain. Milder cases do not usually lead to hospitalization, they can be cured by psychotherapeutic means. However, with regard to the possibility of a cure, one should not be too optimistic. Such cases are rare. They very nature of the disease, involving as it does the disintegration of the personality, rules out the possibility of psychic influences, which is the essential agent in therapy. Schizophrenia shares this peculiarity with obsessional neurosis, its nearest relative in the realm of the neuroses. Many cases of schizophrenics never are seen in psychiatric hospitals because these cases are partially camouflaged as obsessional neuroses, compulsions, phobias, and hysterias, and they are very careful never to go near an asylum. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22

Concomitantly, the individual needs to excel, to achieve success, prestige, or recognition in any form, they need to feel “accepted.” Strivings in this direction are partly oriented toward power, inasmuch as success and prestige lend power in a competitive society. However, they also make for a subjective feeling of strength through outside affirmation, outside acclaim, and the fact of supremacy. Here the center of gravity is possessed outside the person oneself; only the kind of affirmation wanted from others differs. Factually the one is as futile as the other. When people wonder why success has failed to make the individual feel any less insecure, they only show their psychological ignorance, but the fact that they do so indicates the extent to which success and prestige are commonly regarded as yardsticks. A strong need to exploit others, to outsmart them, to play them, to make them of use to oneself, is part of the picture. Any situation or relationship is looked at from the standpoint of “What can I get out of it?”—whether it has to do with money, prestige, contact, or ideas. The person is consciously or semiconsciously convinced that everyone acts this way, and so what counts is to do it more efficiently than the rest. One becomes hard and tough, or gives that appearance. One regards all feelings, one’s own as well as others’, as sloppy sentimentality. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22

In love relationships the neurotic’s tendencies to defeat, subdue, and humiliate the partner play an enormous role. They usually want a mate who is eminently desirable, one through whose attractiveness, social prestige, or wealth can enhance one’s own position. One sees no reason to be considerate of other. The neurotic usually attaches him or herself to others so they can subdue and degrade and humiliate that individual, and this attitude is usually traceable to feelings the individual has about his or her parent, by whom one felt humiliated and whom one wished to humiliate in returned, but out of fear hid this impulse being an exaggerated devotion—a situation which is often described as a fixation. These individuals are usually bad losers and undeniably want victory. One is always ready to accuse others, and the consideration of guilt does not play a role in the thought process. One does not assume the other person is wrong; just one assumes one is right because one needs this ground for subjective certainty in as much the same way as an army needs a safe ground to launch an attack. If not an arrant foolishness, to admit an error when it is not absolutely necessary sees to one as an unforgivable display of weakness. It is consistent with one’s attitude of having to fight against a malevolent World that one should develop a keen sense of realism—of its kind. A need for reassuring affection is often the reason for clinging to a partner of the same sex. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22

Admiration or love may serve as a compensation for the defeating drives as follows: by keeping the destructive impulses from awareness; by eliminating competitiveness altogether by creating an unsurpassable distance between self and competitor; by providing a vicarious enjoyment of success or participation in it; by propitiating the competitor and thus warding off one’s vindictiveness. One will never be so naïve as to overlook in others any manifestation of ambition, greed, ignorance, or anything else that might obstruct one’s own goals. Since in a competitive civilization attributes like these are much more common than real decency, one feels justified in regarding oneself as only realistic. Another facet of one’s realism is one’s emphasis on planning and foresight. Like any good strategist, in every situation one is careful to appraise one’s own chances, the forces of one’s adversaries, and the possible pitfalls. Because one is driven always to assert oneself as the strongest, shrewdest, or most sought after, one tries to develop the efficiency and resourcefulness necessary to being so. The zest and intelligence one puts into one’s work may make one a highly esteemed employee or a success in a business of one’s own. However, the impression one gives of having an absorbing interest in one’s work is only a means to an end. One has no love for what one is doing and take no real pleasure in it—a fact consistent with one’s attempt to exclude feelings from one’s life altogether. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22

This chocking off of all feelings has a two-edged effect. On the one hand it is undoubtedly expedient from the standpoint of success in that it enables one to function like a well-oiled machine, untiringly producing the goods that will bring one ever more power and prestige. Here feelings might interfere. They could conceivably lead one into a line of work with fewer opportunistic advantages; they might cause one to shy away from the techniques so often employed on the road to success; they might tempt one away from one’s work to the enjoyment of nature or art, or to the companionship of friends instead of persons merely useful to one’s purpose. On the other than the emotional barrenness that results from a throttling of feeling will do something to the quality of one’s work; certainly it is bound to detract from one’s creativity. The moment of the outbreak of neurosis is not just a matter of chance; as a rule it is most critical. It is usually the moment when a new psychological adjustment, that is, a new adaptation, is demanded. Such moments facilitate the outbreak of a neurosis, as every experienced neurologist knows. You may ask why the neurotic has a special tendency not to accomplish one’s necessary tasks. Here let me point out that no living creatures adjusts itself easily and smoothly to new conditions. The law of inertia is valid everywhere. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22

A sensitive and somewhat unbalanced person, as a neurotic always is, will meet with special difficulties and perhaps with more unusual tasks in life than a normal individual, who as a rule has only to follow the well-worn path of an ordinary existence. For the neurotic there is no established way of life, because one’s aims and tasks are apt to be of a highly individual character. One tries to go the more or less uncontrolled and half-conscious way of normal people, not realizing that one’s own critical and very different nature demands of one more effort than the normal person is required to exert. There are neurotics who have shown their heightened sensitiveness and their resistance to adaptation in the very first weeks of life, in the difficulty they have in taking the mother’s breast and in their exaggerated nervous reactions, and so forth. For this peculiarity in the neurotic predisposition it will always be impossible to find a psychological aetiology, because it is anterior to all psychology. This predisposition—you can call it congenital sensitiveness or what you like—is the cause of the first resistances to adaptation. As the way to adaptation is blocked, the biological energy we call libido does not find its appropriate outlet or activity, with the result that a suitable form of adaptation is replaces by an abnormal or primitive one. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22

Neurosis is not primary a phenomenon based on a perverted sexual disposition, but merely secondary and a consequence of failure to apply the stored-up psyche in a suitable way. The psychological trouble in neurosis, and the neurosis itself, can be formulated as an act of adaption that has failed. A neurosis is, in a sense, an attempt at a self-cure—a view which can be and has been applied to many other illnesses. The aggressive type looks like an exquisitely uninhibited person. One can assert one’s wishes, one can orders, express anger, defend oneself. One’s feelings about oneself is that one is strong, honest, and realistic, all of which is true if you look at things from one’s way. According to one’s premises one estimate of oneself is strictly logical, since to one ruthlessness is strength, lack of consideration for others, honesty, and a callous pursuit of one’s own ends, realism. One’s attitude on the score of one’s honesty comes partly from a shrewd debunking of current hypocrisies. Enthusiasm for a cause, philanthropic sentiments, and the like one sees as sheer pretense, and it is not hard for one to expose gestures of social consciousness or Christian virtue for what they so often are. One’s set of values is built around the philosophy of the jungle. Might makes right. Away with humanness and mercy. Homo himini lupi. Here we have values not very different from those with which the nazis have made us so familiar. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22

This behavior could be labeled as Pseudoneurotic schizophrenic. Schizophrenia literally means “split personality,” referring to portions of the psyche that are contradictory; it does not mean multiple personality disorder, which is the presence of distinct, autonomous alternate personalities. Pseudoneurotic schizophrenia is a form characterized by all-pervasive anxiety and a wide variety of neurotic symptoms that initially mask underlying psychotic tendencies, which may be manifest as occasional, brief psychotic episodes. By adapting the terminology to that of early Middle Ages, it is all devils and witchcraft. Healthy personality is growing personality. It is a way for a person to function in one’s World, a way that yields growth without placing other important values in jeopardy. People commit themselves to a repertoire of values; they live for them One who is a healthy personality seeks to fulfill them, and one defends them when they are under threat. A healthy personality is to oneself as a dedicated farmer is to one’s farm—one does everything in its time. The abundance of the crops, that state of one’s livestock, and the condition of one’s outbuildings are testimony to the farmer’s alert and responsive care. The healthy personality likewise shows evidence, in one’s very being and presence, of one’s alert and responsive care of oneself. One finds one’s life meaningful, with satisfactions and some accepted suffering; one loves and is loved; one is can fulfill reasonable social demands upon one. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22

And one is in no doubt as to who one is, what one’s feeling and convictions are. One does not apologize for being the very person one is. One can look out on the World and see it from the standpoint of how it presently is (according o social consensus); but one can also see oneself, the World, and the people in it from the standpoint of possibility. One can regard the World as a place in which one can bring into being some possibilities that exist only in one’s imagination. The World, the other person, and oneself—none of these are seen by a healthy personality as sclerosed, frozen, finished, or defined once for all. Such a person has free access to a dimension of human being much neglected by the square, the hyper-conformist, the modal personality. I am referring here to something that has been called the unconscious, experiencing. Transcendental experiences, spiritual experience. This hidden dimension of the self, sought for centuries by beings who have longed for personal fulfillment beyond rationalism, is usually dreaded by the average person. It could be called experiencing possibility. It sometimes peeps out when one permits oneself to be unfocused and aimless, unintegrated, not going anywhere or doing anything; but is tamped back in anxious haste, for it is experiences like the contents of Pandora’s box. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22

When one’s unconscious threatens to speak, when direct experience of self or World invades one’s consciousness, one becomes overwhelmed with anxiety and may temporarily feel one is losing one’s mind and sanity. Indeed, one is on the point of going out of one’s ego. One’s present self-concept and concept of things and people are shattered by implosions and explosions of raw experience from within and without. One experiences one’s being in dimensions presently unfamiliar to one, hence frightening. However, a healthier personality recognizes that one’s unconscious, this persistent but usually drowned out dream, this source of new truth, is the voice of one’s true, real self—a statement of how one has mistreated oneself (if the message is dysphoric) or an invitation to new possibilities of being for which one has become sufficiently grown and secretly, unconsciously prepared. We look upon these possibilities from this delicious mess of insanities and realities, strivings, and deadnesses, hopes and fears, agonies and exultations, which forms our present state, and realize that the more a being becomes acquainted with the true sources of one’s inner life—both good and bad sides—the better it will be for one’s outer life. One will expand the meaning of one’s own habitual life-experience as one expands the awareness of the divine in oneself. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22

The idea that one can learn without effort, without frustration, may be good as an advertising slogan, but is certainly not true in the acquisition of major skills. Without the capacity to accept frustration humans would hardly have developed at all. And does not everyday observation show that many times people suffer frustrations without having an aggressive response? People waiting in line in order to obtain a theater ticket, religious people who fast, people in war who have to do without adequate food—in these and hundreds of other cases frustration does not produce aggression in healthy people. What can, and often does, produce aggression is what the frustration means to the person, and the psychological meaning of frustration differs according to the total constellation in which the frustration occurs. If a child, for instance, is forbidden to eat candy, this frustration, provided the parent’s attitude is genuinely loving and free from pleasure in controlling, will not mobilize aggression; but if this prohibition is only one of many manifestations of the parent’s desire for control, or if, for instance, a sibling is permitted to eat it, considerable anger is likely to be the result. What produces the aggression is not the frustration as such, but the injustice of rejection involved in the situation. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22

The most important factor in determining the occurrence and intensity of frustration is the character of a person. A very greedy person, for instance, will react angrily when one does not get all the food one wants, and a miserly person, when one’s wish to buy something inexpensive is frustrated; the narcissistic person feels frustrated when one does not get the praise and recognition one expects. The character of the person determines in the first place what frustrates one, and in the second place the intensity of one’s reaction to frustration. Practical wisdom in overcoming the most difficult situations and perfect skill in managing the most delicate ones, are qualities which should emerge from the balanced training given by this quest for truth. It becomes the background, unknown to other persons, of all one’s activities. This is a considerable achievement, a consequence of applying to them what one perceived in prayer, learnt in study, and understood in reflection. It is a teaching whose conceptions give the mind a reasonable understanding of life and whose practice gives the heart repose. It is a gross mistake to believe that this is a path to Worldly misery and material destitution. Whoever turns oneself into a jewel-case of philosophic wisdom, perfect devotion, and faultless conduct, to one comes success in all one’s enterprises. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22

When the healthy love of life is on one, and all its forms and its appetites seems so unutterably real; when the most brutal and the most spiritual things are lit by the same Sun, and each is an integral part of the total richness—why, then it seems a grudging and sickly way of meeting so robust a Universe to shrink from any of its facts and wish them not to be. Rather take the strictly dramatic point of view, and treat the whole thing as a great unending romance which the spirit of the Universe, striving to realize its own content, is eternally thinking out and representing to itself. After the pure and classic truths, the exciting and rancid ones must be experienced because our minds have become clogged with the dullness and heaviness of our native pursuits. Still, the facts of human sensibility are the most worthy of attention. However, what is the essence of this philosophy of objective conduct, so old-fashioned and finite, but so chaste and sane and strong, when compared with its rival? It is the recognition of limits, foreign and opaque to our understanding. It is the willingness after bringing about some external good, to feel at peace; for our responsibility ends with the performance of that duty, and the burden of the rest we may lay on higher powers. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22

And what sense can there be in condemning ourselves for taking the wrong way, unless we need have done nothing of the sort, unless the right way was open to us as well? I cannot understand the willingness to act, no matter how we feel, without the belief that acts are really good and bad. I cannot understand the belief that an act is bad, without regret at it happening. I cannot understand regret without the admission of real, genuine possibility in the World. Only then is it other than a mockery to feel, after we have failed to do out best, that an irreparable opportunity is gone from the Universe, the loss of which it must forever after mourn. The World is vulnerable, and liable to be injured by certain of its parts if they act wrong. And it represents their acting wrong as a matter of possibility or accident, neither inevitable nor yet to be infallibly warded off. In all this, it is a theory devoid either of transparency or of stability. It gives us a pluralistic, restless Universe, in which no single point of view can ever take in the whole scene; and to a mind possessed of the love of unity at any cost, it will, no doubt, remain forever inacceptable. One who is sufficiently ready to recognize the Higher Purpose of Life, and who has the courage to change and improve one’s way of thinking, thereby replacing the negative thoughts by optimistic ones, will certainly be rewarded by improved circumstances and greater happiness than one may already enjoy. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22

And if I still wish to think of the World as a totality, it lets me feel that a World with a chance in it of being altogether good, even if the chance never comes to pass, is better than a World with no such chance at all. A little of this knowledge saves from much danger. Even a few years’ study of philosophy will bring definite benefit into the life of a student. It will help one in all sorts of ways, unconsciously, here on Earth and it will help one very definitely after death during one’s life in the next World of being. Although its promises and experience may not appear glamorous in a Worldly sense, the Quest reveals itself to be the best pf all possible ways of living. If it exacts the highest possible price in human satisfactions it gives in return the highest possible spiritual satisfactions. “For the Lord God hath said that: Inasmuch as ye shall keep my commandments ye shall prosper in the land; and inasmuch as ye will not keep my commandments ye shall be cut off from my presence,” reports 2 Nephi 4.4. Blessed art Thou, Almighty Master, Who hast reach the beginning of the night. Hear our prayers, and those of all Thy people; and forgive us our sins voluntary and involuntary, and accept our evening supplications, and send down on Thine inheritance the fulness of Thy mercy Thy compassion. Compass us about with Thy holy Angels, arm us with the armour of Thy righteousness, fence us round with Thy truth, guard us with Thy power. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22

Deliver us from every assault and every device of the adversary; and grant us to pass this evening and the ensuing night, and all the days of our life, in fullness of peace and holiness, without sin and stumbling. For it is Thine to pity and to save, O Christ our God. “Behold, my soul delighteth in the things of the Lord; and my heart pondereth continually upon the things which I have seen and heard,” reports 2 Nephi 4.16. Grant us,  Lord, to rejoice in beholding the bliss of Thy Jerusalem, and to be carried in her bosom with perpetual gladness; that as she is the home of the multitude of the Saints, we also may be counted worthy to have our portion within her; and that Thine Only-begotten Son, the Prince and Saviour of all, may in this World graciously relieve His afflicted, and hereafter in His Kingdom be the everlasting Comfort of His redeemed. Stir up, O Lord, Thy power, and come; and mercifully fulfill that which Thou hast promised to Thy Church unto the end of the World. Stir up, we beseech Thee, O Lord, our hearts to prepare the ways of Thine Only-begotten Son; that by Hid Advent we may be enabled to serve Thee with purified minds; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. We beseech Thee, O Lord, to purify our consciences by The daily visitation; that when Thy Son our Lord cometh, He may find in us a mansion prepared for Himself; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22

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