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Beauty Will Save the World is Not a Slip of the Tongue but a Prophecy as Beauty Has the Inspiration to Take Us to New Worlds
Know thy self and you will win a hundred battles. The major difficulty of our effort to live selfless lives is that we become more or less successful at it! As we try to lease those around us, we become more and more fuzzy as individuals. Chameleonlike, we seem to become like those in whose presence we are at the moment. This is a basic problem of those whose lives are centered in giving of themselves. If this is their primary motive in life, they soon have very little self to give. The theologian Paul Tillich once declared, “It is time to end the bad theological usage of jumping with moral indignation on every word in which the syllable ‘self’ appears.” Love of one’s self is not antagonistic to having satisfying relationships. On the contrary, we are free to love others only as we become free to love ourselves. From the standpoint of the emotional factors involved in interpersonal relationships it would be legitimate to rephrase Jesus’ statement, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” to read, “You cannot love your neighbor until you love yourself.” For hate of one’s self constantly interferes with the whole gamut of our relationships from casual acquaintances to those with whom we desire to be intimate. #RandolphHarris 1 of 12
For one thing, when we are intolerant of ourselves, we tend to be intolerant of others. An often it is the same trait with which we have difficulty within ourselves that we cannot tolerate others. Jealousy often involves this kind of reaction. One man, Martin, had a brief encounter with another woman near the end of his second year of marriage. He and the other woman engaged in pleasures of the flesh on only one very unsatisfying occasion. He felt very guilty about this experience. During the succeeding years of his marriage Martin was ridden with fear that he might repeat the experience. Whenever he became aware of feelings of wanting to have pleasures of the flesh with another woman other than his wife, Pandora, who was a vivacious, sometimes almost flirtatious, woman. He could not tolerate in her what he found intolerable in himself; and he built a virtual prison for her, and incidentally for himself as well. He became very upset when Pandora showed any warmth or interest in their male friends and alienated a number of other couples with whom they began to associate. He became very suspicious of her, frequently checking up on her activities. He insisted that she spend every moment possible with him. For Pandora, that trapped feeling in marriage was no figure of speech as long as she was willing to tolerate the unreasonable demand brought on by his own self-hate and self-mistrust. #RandolphHarris 2 of 12
Another way that self-hate interferes with our enjoyment of our associations with others is that it frequently leads to our being overly sensitive and too easily hurt. When we are self-condemning we tend to read condemnation into other people’s words and actions. We may become so touchy that the simplest comments by others seem to have sinister condemning undertones. On the way home from a party, a wife may say in passing, “Gee, the Buber’s have a beautiful home.” And the husband may feel she is condemning him for not being man enough to have sufficient earnings to own such a home. Or he may say, Chelsea Buber sure looked great tonight, did she not?” And her reply, “Yeah, great!” may be loaded with sarcasm because she feels he is really saying, “You look pretty unattractive and sloppy compared to that Chelsea Buber!” This touchiness also often causes us to generalize another’s critical remark in a very limited area and make it into a wholesale condemnation of ourselves. Many a wife has reacted this way to a comment from her husband at the dinner table, such as, “This coq au vin tastes a little flat. I wish you had put more red Burgundy and garlic in it.” Wife at this point may burst into tears, jump up from the table, and shout, “Nothing I do it ever good enough for you. You really have me, right?!” Assuming the husband does not constantly criticize her, it can safely be said that she has read a great deal of self-condemnation into his remark. #RandolphHarris 3 of 12
The human creature is the most fortunate of all living creatures, because one alone has the potential capacity and opportunity to become spiritually aware. Every life in the fleshly body represents and opportunity to obtain spiritual realization because mortals can only discover one’s divinity to the fullest whilst in the waking state. The refusal to reach up towards the higher truth and power leaves problems basically unsolved and questions really unanswered, for the cosmic urge within must assert and reassert itself. When a mortal comes to his or her real senses, one will recognize that one has only one problem: “How can I come into awareness of, and oneness with, my true being?” For it is to lead one to this final question that other questions and problems have staged the road of one’s whole life. This answered, the way to answer all the other ones which beset one, be they physical or financial, intellectual or familiar, will open up. Hence Jesus’ statements: “Seek ye first the kingdom of Heaven and all these things shall be added unto you,” and “To one that hath [enlightenment] shall be given [what one personally needs].” Because we have lost our way, these truths are once again as fresh and significant and important as if they had never been known to humanity. Beauty will save the World. What does this mean? For a long time I thought it merely a phrase. Was such a thing possible? When in our bloodthirsty history did beauty ever save anyone from anything? Ennobled, elevated, yes: but whom has it saved? #RandolphHarris 4 of 12
Nothing else seems able to save us. For no one would be foolish enough to think that the present policies of the two super-nations will do any more than produce a stand-off, each with a revolver as the other’s head. We build more nuclear warheads and the Russians do the same, they even have spy planes looking at military bases in California, and we invent more means of destruction and they do the same, each go around only repeating the stand-off on a more dangerous scale. Will we still be at the mercy of chance: an accidental release of some missile, or an extremist group setting off an atom bomb in New York, and the holocaust will be upon us? Power, not beauty, seems to govern nations. What the World can no longer endure in the nuclear age is its separation into many different nations, each with its own power needs; and the fact that the United States seems to be the most powerful is due largely to the fact that destiny gave us a particularly lush portion of this globe. However, or powerful position should not numb our realization that we will not be in this position forever. As Athens, at the height of its power and its great, unrivaled culture, as when Aeschylus and Sophocles were still alive, when Pericles was its leader, when Phidias had just finished the Parthenon, when Plato was young and Socrates gathered around him this unequaled group of young philosophers eternalized in Plato’s Dialogues—at its time of glory and power, Athens committed suicide by fighting the Peloponnesian War. #RandolphHarris 5 of 12
Sparta and the other city-states joined in this useless and wanton suicide. They were all so exhausted by the year 400 B.C. that the days of the city-state were numbered. We in our twenty-first century World face almost exactly the same challenge. Can we transcend that nation-state? Can we extend our love for country to other countries and the World? Destiny clearly cries out with the challenge to us to extend our imaginations, our economy and our way of thinking, to relate us to the whole planet rather than our own one piece of it. So long as we view our freedom as dependent upon our remaining the most powerful and richest nation on Earth, we shall have placed ourselves again under the sword of Damocles. We shall not be freed from this threat until we confirm a freedom for humanity. Power brings with it responsibility. Our power in America has brought more responsibility in the remarks that we are the special children of God, we carry his banners, God blesses America, he has a destiny for us different from that for other nations. God we thank thee the we are not as other people. Beauty and power. Were there every two such strange antagonists They have almost always been set in opposition to each other, such as Beauty and the Beast. How can we change this? #RandolphHarris 6 of 12
In mythology Beauty is pictured as the radiant but weak maiden, requiring the knight to rescue her from the dark and unattractive Power, often pictured as a dragon. How can we be saved by beauty—this gentle but timeless quality, this eternal but ephemeral experience? I recall as a young boy when at the Villa Floridiana Porza, Ticino, 6948 Switzerland in Winter a snowflake lighted on my black mitten, and just as I was overwhelmed with winder at its marvelously intricate design, it melted away and left only a wet spot as a token that it was there an instant ago. How can we talk of such a gentle quality saving the World? Art and the beauty as expressed, are on a different level from the mundane characteristics of our World. There is, however, something special in the essence of beauty, a special quality in art: the conviction carried by a genuine work of art is absolute and subdues even a resistant heart. A work of art contains its verification in itself. Works which draw on truth and present it to us in live and concentrated form grip us, compellingly involve us, and no one ever, not even ages hence, will come forth to refute them. Perhaps then the old trinity of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty is not simply the dressed-up, worn-out formula we thought it in our presumptuous, materialistic youth? #RandolphHarris 7 of 12
If the crowns of these three trees meet, as scholars have asserted, and if the too obvious, too straight sprouts of Truth and Goodness have been knocked down, cut off, not let grow, perhaps the whimsical, unpredictable, unexpected branches of Beauty will work their way through, rise up to that very place, and this complete the work of all three? Beauty will save the World—is not a slip of the tongue but a prophecy. One thing is certain: a World that does not have a concern for beauty will not be worth saving. Not life is to be valued, but the good life. The noble life is first of all the beautiful life. This is the fundamental importance of beauty and of the art that springs from the love of beauty. The humanities, such as art and music and poetry, exist for one purpose alone: to enhance the quality of human existence. There are riches that are posses at hand in any library, waiting to make life fuller, to make us more vital, to disclose to us the presence of joys in life which have been there all the time but we were blind to them. There is no library worth the name which does not have the mental inspiration to take us, like Columbus, to new Worlds. In poetry, in art, in literature, in music, there is not only the power to tame the savage breast, but to give us the sense of joy and serenity we sorely need. There is music that brings us this with no need for economic riches. #RandolphHarris 8 of 12
If our lives our boring, do we need to be awakened to adventure and the sense of passion? Homer brings us this, as does the poetry in many songs of Aaliyah Haughton and the Beatles. Taste is a particular approach, but it still can have its value; there is no need to insist that every person experience one’s soul enlivened by the same things. The earlier the age at which a person begins these studies and practices the better for one. To be born into a family where they already prevail, is to have an exceedingly good destiny. But however late in life anyone comes to them, it is never too late. One will have to content with set ways and fixed habits that will need changing, it is true. The mature and the elderly should take to spiritual studies as a duty. They have come to a period of life when they can evaluate its experiences better than the youthful. It is not too late at any period of life, even in one’s golden years, to obtain a firm footing upon the spiritual path and gain its satisfying rewards. In the end we all must turn to the inner Source of all our best human sources, to the Guru of all gurus, to the Overself. Then why not now? Now is the right moment to practice philosophy, to crush the ego, and to think optimistically. The quest, with its ideas and goals, is essential to the awakened mortal. One could not live without it without feeling half-dead, empty and futile. #RandolphHarris 9 of 12
Let us have done with the fake serenity that comes from the avoidance of tragedy. We do not need to cite the grandeur of classics like Hamlet, but the tragedies which are set in squalor, like O’Neill’s The Ice Man Cometh, also show us the nobility of the human being. We need not insist that every garden be as beautiful as the Keukenhof, Lisse, Netherlands with its 32 hectares and 7 million flowering plants; a meadow of weeds can also be beautiful. There is death as there is life, and let us open ourselves to both. We are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve; we have an internal, and then our place knows us no more. We affirm life as we affirm death; the two always go together, just as we listen to the discords which play their crucial part in Beethoven’s symphonies. We never have denied that darkness goes with light, or that pain goes with pleasure, and if the truth were known, makes possible the pleasures. We have never denied the ugliness that makes beauty possible and necessary, for it is in juxtaposition with ugliness that we are able to recognize beauty. We can note with pleasure that museums and galleries are becoming increasingly attended these day, and particularly that young people attend more and more exhibitions of art. More people go to galleries than attend football games; and such statistics, absurd on one level, on another tell us that the acquaintanceship with art seems at least to be growing. #RandolphHarris 10 of 12
The galleries and museums give us the presence of adventure and solace, which we, citizens of a technological age, sorely need. Or we can carry with us in memory one picture to give us cheer and purpose, says Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. Here the faces of Venus and the cherubic spirits of springtime seem woven together by the gossamer breeze, and we are carried away to an Olympus where the gods are not mocked but for once are humble and recognize one of their own. We are made in the very image of God. It is by virtue of something in us which attaches to the fact of being a person but which is not the fact itself. It is the power of renouncing our own personality. It is obedience. Every time that a mortal rises to a degree of excellence, which by participation makes one a divine being, we are aware of something impersonal and anonymous about one. One’s voice is enveloped in silence. This is evident in all great works of art or thoughts, in the great deeds of saints and in their words. It is then in a sense that we must conceive of God as impersonal, in the sense that one is the divine model of a person who passes beyond the self by renunciation.Lord. Lord, whoever I am, whatever I am, whatever I am meant to be, I am part of this, this World, that is all of a flowing wonder–like this music. And you are with us. You are here. You have pitched your tent here, among us. This music is your song. This is your house. #RandolphHarris 11 of 12
To conceive of him as an all-powerful person, or under the name of Christ as a human person, is to exclude oneself from the true love of God. That is why we have to adore the perfection of the Heavenly Father in his even diffusion of the light of the Sun. The divine and absolute model of that renunciation which is obedience in us—such is the creative and ruling principle of the Universe—such is the fulness of being. It is because the renunciation of the personality makes mortals a reflection of God that it is so frightful to reduce mortals to the condition of inert matter by plunging them into affliction. When the quality of human personality is taken from them, the possibility of renouncing it is also taken away, except in the case of those who are sufficiently prepared. As God has crated our independence so that we should have the possibility of renouncing it out of love, we should for the same reason wish to preserve the independence of our fellows. One who is perfectly obedient sets an infinite price upon the faculty of free choice in all mortals. In the same way there is no contradiction between the love of the beauty of the World and compassion. Such love does not prevent us from suffering on our own account when we are in affliction. Neither does it prevent us from suffering because other are afflicted. It is on another plane from suffering. #RandolphHarris 12 of 12
If God and the Church Love Me So Much, I Must Be Worthwhile
The Sun was setting and the snow-covered range reflected and radiated its color from the rays of the Sun behind us. It was so breath-taking that we stopped our car to gaze at it for a while; we felt as though we were bathing in a Sky turned into sheer brilliance. The next morning, I sat in the windowsill of the large picture window of our hotel room, and for half an hour intensely concentrating on the mountain peak. I cleared my mind of everything and held my gaze for the first part of the half hour, Mt. Blanc remained a realistic mountain, pure ivory white, incredibly beautiful against the deep blue of the morning sky. Then, as I continued to concentrate on it, the mountain gradually changed before my eyes into another form. It became abstract. It was now, as the underlying form emerged, composed of disembodied squares and circles and planes. I loved it still, as I love the cubist paintings by Picasso and Braque. The mountain form seemed to be painted on canvas, it was disembodied, pure form with no weight or movement. Or one could as easily say, the mountain form was all weight and all movement; with living form it does not matter, as Brancusi illustrates in his sculptures of golden line soaring up from its base which he rightly calls “Bird in Flight.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
However, as I continued to concentrate steadily on it, this weightless form gradually changed again. The vast mountain took on a body, now organic, three-dimensional. It became a new being on a new level. Now I saw it in a living depth. The glowing ivory forms had come together again into an organism, not personal but neither was it impersonal. It seemed to be pure form. I felt more tan saw an embodied structure, now an ultimate form, part of the Universe as I was also. The mountain, like myself looking at it, embodied a Universe of beauty and meaning. Since that day, this experience of my concentration on Mt. Blanc has remained vivid in my mind. Leaving the Swiss border town and driving up through the foothills of the French Alps toward Chamonix and Mt. Blanc was a blessed experience. Back in New York, later, when I looked out the window of my office on the 25th floor high above the Riverside Drive, I saw in the delicate skyline of New York also a pure form—now pure lace. The clouds above the city likewise assumed the forms I had seen in Chamonix, and as I walked home at night the giant elm trees on Riverside Drive took on this same significant form, all part of the same Universe. This experience of living forms, this embodied being, took me out of myself. Whenever I called it out of the past into my mind again, it gave me a new experienced which was beyond living our dying. The feeling was oceanic; it was my participation in the Being of the Universe. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
Such an experience cannot be said to exist only in my imagination, nor is it solely a kind of telepathy emerging from Mt. Blanc. The experience is both inner and outer, both subjective and objective. It is a fusion of my imagination and the emanating form of the mountain. This is an illustration of ecstasy. The word comes from the Greek ex-stasis, meaning to stand outside of, or above. It is also self-transcendent. It gives one the experience of going beyond, or absorbing the old self, and a new self, or more accurately an enlarged self, takes its place. O put it in psychoanalytic language, my ego was not denied but absorbed. My self was enlarged by participation in a new being which happened in this case to be the form of Mt. Blanc. My letting go of my ordinary awareness, which I call my banal consciousness, permitted a new consciousness to be born in me. Eastern religion and philosophy speak of this as the experience of the Absolute, or cosmic experiences, a participation in a Universal awareness. One participates in a greater consciousness, temporarily as it may be. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
It may be clear that artists share this consciousness. Artists are the ones who are particularly sensitive to experiencing scenes in new forms. They have the capacity to look at a scene until it is born in their inner minds and imagination, born in their total consciousness. This may occur immediately, as the artists look at a scene for the first time, or it may be a new experience of a scene they have already seen many times, like Monet’s waterlilies. When they say, “I have looked at this many times, but this is the first time I have really seen it,” this is what people mean. I have looked at many trees in my life, but I never really saw one until I had seen Cezanne’s paintings of trees. Through participating in the Cezanne’s imagination, which so unforgettably finds the ground forms of trees, I was enabled to experience and create for myself the form of trees in a new and completely different way. This is one of the contributions artists make to the World: they experience these living forms, and through their art they enable the rest of us to see them—or better to experience them in our lives. The artist, including any and all of us who choose to create, to make imaginatively, as the ones who care themselves to this experience of essence. They are the ones who are caught up in greater or lesser ecstasy, and they hasten then to reproduce it on paper or on canvas or in music. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
The artists vocation is to communicate that experience of ecstasy to others. Not to communicate it is to surrender the vision to atrophy; the artist must paint, or write, or sculpt—else the vision withers away and he or she is less apt to have it again. There is also another accompaniment to this experience of ecstasy, and that is gratitude. I think I have never painted a watercolor, sketchy as it might have been, without feeling a strange gratification afterwards. I sometimes feel I have been invited in where Angels fear to tread, and for that would not be grateful? The wonder of being human is that any part of us who so choose may be privileged to participate in this experience of ecstasy, with its accompanying gratitude. Before beauty liberates one from free pleasure, and the serenity of forms tames down the savageness of life, what are mortals before beauty? It is not a subject for academic students of technical metaphysics or for professional followers of institutional religion—although they are welcome to all that it has to give them, to the richer form and the inspired understanding of their own doctrine. No—it is primarily for the ordinary person who is willing to heed to one’s intuitive feeling or who is willing to use one’s independent thinking power. It escapes pushing into recognizable and separate divisions, definitions, or groups. Let it be stated clearly that mysticism is an a-rational type of experience, and in some degree common to all mortals. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
It is an intuitive, self-evident, self-recognized knowledge which comes fitfully to mortals. It should not be confounded with the instinctive and immediate knowledge possessed by animals and used by them in their adaptations to environment. The average mortal seldom pays enough attention to one’s slight mystical experiences to profit or learn from them. Yet one’s need for them is evidenced by one’s incessant seeking for the thrills, sensations, uplifts, and so on, which one organizes for oneself in so many ways—the religious way being only one of them. In fact, the failure of religion—in the West, at any rate—to each true mysticism, and its overlaying of the deeply mystic nature of its teachings with a pseudo-rationalism and an unsound historicity may be the root cause for driving people to seek for things greater than they feel their individual selves to be in the many sensation-giving activities in the World today. Mysticism is not a by-product of imagination or uncontrolled emotion; it is a range of knowledge and experience natural to mortals but not yet encompassed by one’s rational mind. The function of philosophy is to bring these experiences under control and to offer ways of arriving at interpretations and explanations. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
Mysticism not so controlled and interpreted is full of pitfalls, one of which is the acceptance of confusion, sentimentality, cloudiness, illusion, and aimlessness as integral qualities of the mystical life—states of mind which go far to justify opponents of mysticism in their estimate of it as foolish and superstitious. The mystic should recognize one’s own limitations. One should not refuse the proffered hand of philosophy which will help one’s understanding and train one’s intuition. One should recognize that it is essential to know how to interpret the material which reaches one from one’s higher self, and how to receive it in all its purity. One of the realities of every historical era is that several generations coexist and inevitably find areas of conflict. Failure to resolve these conflicts may have a far-reaching and damaging effect on attempts to develop human potential beyond the level of the earlier generation. We must encourage people to take the time necessary to discover what it is like to be alive and human. By learning to really communicate with myself and other people, I have found that life has become much more worthwhile. I have emerged with the insight that life does not always have to remain a painful struggle. When an organization includes as part of its ongoing activities the quest to be better far than you are, and combines it with the knowledge of how to use the latest techniques for such growth, the organization is indeed facilitating and enhancing joy. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
What happens when significant personality changes do occur within the context of our religious communities? There is no question that remarkable changes in life occur in many individuals who pass through a crisis type experience, which the church may call a conversion or simply a religious experience. Perhaps it will be instructive to view such an experience through the eyes of William, a man now in his forties whose conversion occurred when he was in high school. William was the son of a small-town minister of one of the larger Protestant denominations in America. The father was by no means a fire and brimstone preacher. He was, in fact, a rather warm, gentle, and shy man who lacked the aggressiveness to attract the attention of larger congregations. Though reserved, one probably expressed one’s affection to William and his other children, especially when they were small. That he loved them and took pride in them there is no doubt. There was never any severe physical punishment in the family. He was, however, much concerned that his children behave properly. William recalls one incident in particular that illustrates this: “I was quite small at the time—maybe for our five. I was playing outside and was so engrossed in what I was doing that I did not want to stop and go inside when I needed to urinate. Besides, the idea of doing it outside as Dad and I did when we were on fishing trips appealed to me. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
“So I did it right there, which happened to be alongside the church and somewhat protected from view, so I thought. However, I was not safe at all! Dad came along just then and spotted me. I am sure no punishment was meted out, and I cannot remember what he said, but I do remember feeling I have done a pretty horrible thing by urinating outside!” William’s mother was very affectionate, as he remembers it. She appeared to enjoy cuddling her children, and especially him. However, she, too, was very concerned about matters of behavior. When he was no older than eight or nine, she extracted a promise from him that he would never smoke. The degree to which her own fears about herself were involved in her attitudes are revealed by something se said to him later as a teenager. At a moment when they were alone together she said, “Son, you and I are very sensitive people. We do not go in for thing halfway. Keep this in mind when you are an adult, as it can be an asset for your career aspirations.” When he was around twelve, the question of church membership arose. William’s parents did not tell him he had to join. They simply told him if he wanted to, he was old enough to join. William felt, however, that there was an expectation on their part and the congregation’s part that the minister’s son would become a church member. Yet he had many doubts and questions. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
William was not sure that God existed; and furthermore he was aware of anger and resentment that he did not think Christians should feel Furthermore, he was becoming more and more aware of the feelings of pleasures of the flesh, which were at the same time exciting and frightening. These, too, he felt were feelings that a Christian should not have. He felt very guilty about these doubts and feelings, but unfortunately he did not feel free to discuss them with his parents or anyone else. So he joined the church and felt guilty about that, too! Four or five year later William’s father become the minister of a struggling neighborhood church. The church was torn by internal struggles and the father, probably in an effort to unify the congregation, agreed to suggestions by the more conservative members that an evangelist be engaged. For William it was an emotional week of nightly meetings. The music was joyful and contagious, but he could enter in only half-heartedly, burdened down by the knowledge that he was not really a Christian. He wanted desperately to confess his hypocrisy, but could bring himself to do so. On the final evening of meeting and during the last call for those who want to accept the Lord Jesus as their personal Savior to hold up their hands whole every head is bowed, he held up his hand. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
Relief was not immediate. He went home and spent a restless night. The next morning, a Sunday, he sought out the evangelist at church and asked to speak to him. They went to a private room where he told the evangelist of his doubts and his feeling of sin. They prayed together, and the evangelist assured him of God’s love and desire to forgive him. It was then that William suddenly felt loved and accepted. A great sense of being right with God and humankind swept over him. He felt twelve feet high and the World suddenly seemed a wonderful place in which to be alive! William really felt like he was, as the evangelist might have put it, a new man in Christ Jesus. The congregation soon became aware of what has happened. And although William’s mother at first expressed some bewilderment that such an experience should have been necessary, family and congregation expressed their delight and approval at his new and wonderful awareness of the Christian faith. And William himself was filled with feelings of good will and love for all humankind. From a psychological standpoint, it would appear that this experience in William’s life could be described as an interruption in the rejection cycle. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
Having been filled with feelings of self-hate, guilt, and self-condemnation, he suddenly felt worthwhile and loved by God and the Christian community. He felt cleansed of sin, and born again, no longer an object of self-hatred but of God by adoption. Had William at the time been able to put his beliefs into words, William might have said something like this: “I now know that God loves me and forgives me for having been and for being the terrible person that I am. Therefore, I am released from the terrible burden of self-hate and guilt that has plagued me and am free to be more creative and more loving. In terms of the rejection cycle, what happened might look like this: Feelings of rejection by parents, feelings of worthlessness, self-hate, confession and conversion, overwhelming feeling of acceptance by God and the Christian community, new feelings of worth (“If God and the church love me so much, I must be worthwhile.”). However, prior to conversion there is a need to escape by attempting to please by joining the church. Unsuccessful attempts to suppress anger, pleasures of the flesh, doubt and so forth, which lead to feelings of further rejection (“God condemns me, and parents and the church people would if they knew me.”), producing feelings of worthlessness and self-hate. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
There is no denying that a remarkable change occurred in William’s life. Change in behavior may not have been particularly noticeable, since he had always done pretty much what was expected of him. However, one cannot listen to him describe the experience without being aware that a dramatic change did occur in his feeling of being condemned by God, a change that had significant effect on many of his attitudes. Many members of religious communities live of their lives at this level of understanding whether they reach it by a conversion experience, as William did, or by a gradual growth process in a religious home. And many people seem relatively happy in this life. It costs them something in spontaneity, for they go to considerable psychological effort to keep many of their feelings suppressed. And when they slip back and do things they should not do, say things they should not say, or feel things they should not feel, they again feel guilty, confess, and feel forgiven again for their sins. They rejoice in the amount of love they feel for others, although the sensitive outsider may feel they are more condemning than loving. The catch in William’s adjustment to his kind of religious community is that it is based on a view that regards mortals as inherently evil. And William’s conversation bear much resemblance to the escape hatch in which the person tries to escape feelings of self-hate by attempts to please. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
By saying in effect, “I have been an unworthy sinner who should be condemned, but I intend henceforth to lead a life of faith and dedication to the service of God, the individual often does win a favorable response from family, the religious community, and, he believes, from God. However, the hazards that go along with attempts to please are potentially attendant here also. The individual is likely to come to feel that the love he experiences is conditional upon one’s performance and therefore is not really directed toward one as a person. And, too, although he may keep his feelings of self-hate largely repressed, they are potentially increased, for in becoming a convent he had given up much of his freedom to be an individual in his own right. He is dedicated to hating and eradicating feelings that are an important part of oneself, particularly one’s anger and many of one’s feelings for pleasures of the flesh. To accomplish this one becomes more repressed and less spontaneous in one’s behavior. William eventually came to this conclusion: he entered seminary and followed his father into the ministry, but he found that he was not successful in suppressing the feelings he felt were wrong and for which he had sought forgiveness. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
William married while he was in college, but he fond that he felt attraction for pleasure of the flesh towards women other than his wife. This was sinful, so he felt guilt, embarrassed, and inept around women. There were many times when he felt depressed our sullen toward other people and helpless to do anything about it, for to be aware of anger would be a sin in itself. To express it directly would be unthinkable. He also found himself tending to be critical and condemning people for doing things he later realized were things he wanted to do but did not feel free to do. Eventually William found his way into a therapeutic program where he discovered he could be loved for himself as a person—not for what he presented to be. In this secular setting what might be described as an even more basic conversion occurred. In a process that will be descried more fully later, he experienced much more fundamental feelings of self-worth than he had ever experienced before. Was William religious conversation as a high school boy a negative experience in his life? He does not feel that it was. He says, “Although I no longer accept the view of mortals or God on which that experience was founded, nevertheless it was a turning point in my life. At a time when I needed it most, it gave me a feeling of being worth something, however shaky that feeling may have proved later. It is certainly not the route to self-acceptance that I would choose for others to follow. However, for me, at that time and in that environment, it may well have been the only way that held any hope for me.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
So for William it might be fair to say that religion was both a hinderance and a help. The belief that the neglect of actual life is the beginning of spiritual life, and that the failure to use clear thought is the beginning of guidance from God, belongs to mysticism in the most rudimentary stages—and had no truth in it. The World will come to believe in mysticism because there is no alternative, and it will do so in spite of mysticism’s historical weaknesses and intellectual defects. However, if those weaknesses and defects were self-eliminated, how much better it would be for everyone. He has also learned the art of living that the experiences of everyday life yield up their meaning to him, and the reflections of daily meditation endow him with wisdom. If it be asked, “What is the nature of mystical experience?” the answer given very tersely is, “It is experience which gives to the individual a slant on the universal, like the heart’s delight in the brightness of a May morning in England, or the joy of a mother in her newborn child, in the sweetness of deep friendship, in the lilt of great poetry. It is the language of the arts, which if approached only by intellectual ways yields only half its content. Whoever comes eventually to mystical experience of the reality of one’s own Higher Self will recognize the infinite number of ways in which nature throughout life is beckoning one. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
The higher mystical experience is not a sport of nature, a freak phenomenon. It is the continuation of a sequence the beginning and end which are as vast as the beginning and end of the great cycle of life in all the Worlds. No mortal can measure it. It is truth that there is little mention of the beauty of the World in the Gospel. However, in so short a text, which, as Saint John says, is very far from containing all that Christ taught, the disciples no doubt thought it unnecessary to put anything so generally accepted. It does, however, come up on two occasions. Once Christ tells us to contemplate and imitate the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, in their indifference as to the future and their docile acceptance of destiny; and another time he invites us to contemplate and imitate the indiscriminate distribution of rain and Sunlight. The Renaissance thought to renew its spiritual links with antiquity by passing over Christianity, but it hardly took anything but the secondary products of ancient civilization—art, science, and curiosity regarding human things. It scarcely touched the fringe of the central inspiration. It failed to rediscover any link with the beauty of the World. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
The Kingdom of Heaven is within You–Wisdom Penetrates Everywhere on Account of its Perfect Purity
There will come a time, a time to tell you everything slowly so that you understand. However, now is not that time. Something is stirring in me, knowledge as clear as if a voice is speaking: this is not the most difficult part. Often two people will try to express their feelings toward each other verbally, or will try to explain themselves or some situation, and they simply cannot understand each other. This occurs when people are inarticulate, when conflicts about their feelings are prominent and they try to hide it, when they are not really familiar with what their feeling is, or when they are very intellectualized and the words are used defensively to obfuscate the situation. Especially with intellectual people, words paradoxically can be the largest obstacle to communication because people often spend a great deal of time and word trying not to say something or avoiding the central point, which is often known to themselves. If we are able to have a satisfying and fulfilling sense of completion in our lives insofar as meaningful relationships are concerned that we need to experience emotional intimacy beyond our immediate families, it seems an inescapable conclusion. And not to have these wider experiences both raises questions about the nature of our family relationships and threatens them. For to expect that all of one’s needs for emotion intimacy with adults can be satisfied by one person is to put an almost unbearable burden on any association. And to attempt to do so suggests an immaturity and overdependency that is detrimental to the experience and expression of love. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
If we are two independent individuals who recognize that we are essentially alone and do not fool ourselves into believing that we do not in the last analysis live essentially separate lives, even in marriage we are most happy and fulfilled. To attempt to avoid our essential loneliness and isolation through neurotic dependence on each other is a pseudo escape from an important reality. Let there be spaces in your togetherness for the pillars of the temple stand apart, and the oak and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow. Although our increased mobility and decreased clan experiences have tended to brings us face to face with our loneliness and isolation, the net results may not be negative. If we can develop close tires with others in spite of the fears of love that deter us, we may discover there are better reasons for intimacy than those created by the happenstance of being related by common ancestry. Three married couples formed a very close and loving relations that has existed over a period of seven or eight years. They have probably been together on an average of two times a month during that times. Since some members of the group had a professional interest in psychotherapy, it was not unnatural that the group frequently explored their feelings about each other and other relationships in their lives, often talking long into the night. Sometimes violent feelings came to the surface that seemed likely to split the couples apart. The strength of these feelings should put a red flag on some of one’s interpersonal relations. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
If an individual finds oneself verbally going in and hurting other people quite viciously and unintentionally or unconsciously, it is important to be able to better understand that one is somehow responding to an internal force rather than the situation he or she is involved in. Sometimes when a person feels another individual pulling away from them, the response to their living one psychologically is for the individual who feels they may be abandoned to go after that individual even more strongly, which is self-defeating since all they do is withdraw even more rapidly. Many individuals respond to abandonment by giving full vent to the hostility and anger that they are experiencing and blame it complete on the person with him they are involved with. However, it is best to stop whatever it is that one is doing and try, as honestly as one possibly can, to say to the other person: I do not feel I am being very fair with you,” or something to that effect, which lets him or her know that a bit of irrationality has exhibited itself and it has really confused the issues that we were discussing. Another important lesson is not to fear that irrational side. Know that it is there and know that there is enough sanity to not be afraid to give full vent to that irrational part of oneself, since it does two things: it can give an individual clearer handles as to where it came from, as well as giving the other person an opportunity to be more able to cope with one more as a total person in a more beneficial way. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
Each time people are honest, individuals can emerge from these experiences with deeper feelings of love for each other. Sometimes, in conflicts, what is actually going on is people are acting out a lot of the hostility that they have towards one of their parents, and it takes some insight into one’s own soul to understand the emotion that is influencing one’s response to another individual on what they thought were non-emotional issues. At times people feel defensiveness about reflecting on their own emotions, as they do not know what they will reveal about themselves. These feelings can be compounded by normal conflicts that happen during the day, which could lead to a blow on, when that is not a rational response. People who have unresolved issues are often emotionally dangling on the edge of a cliff with almost no way of rescue. If people realize they have problems, then they can do something about them by facing them. Those who get help have a desire not to let destructive impulses take over their lives. By revealing what the underlying situation involves, it leaves one to have more optimistic experiences with others and can lead to an increase in one’s feeling of personal significance, and in confidence regarding one’s ability to succeed at making connections with people. One can then proceed to enjoy more the human encounter. It is interesting that one of the most empathic themes of the New Testament is the importance attached to the experience of love among the early Christians as expressed in such phrases as, “Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
One reason for this emphasis on love, in addition to the teachings of Jesus, may have been the fact that in some instances conversion to Christianity meant complete spitting up of families who were hostile to the new sect and its members. With such isolation and loneliness thrust upon them, the new converts would naturally seek to satisfy their need for intimacy with each other. They did, no doubt, have the same fear of love that hinders us, for the record shows they bickered among themselves and found many ways to deprive themselves of experiencing and expressing the love they longed for. Can the expression of pleasures of the flesh can be exclusive? Certainly, if we choose to, we can limit expression of pleasures of the flesh to one person. There are any ways of expressing love to others in addition to expressing it through pleasures of the flesh. We are free to choose whatever way or ways we wish. From a mental health standpoint it is important to make this choice a conscious decision. A great many men and women expend a great deal of emotional energy attempting to avoid awareness of pleasures of the flesh for anyone other than a spouse. When awareness of desire does creep in they feel guilty and frightened because they do not trust themselves we the power of a conscious choice. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
We have already examined the damage to emotional and physical health that such dulling of awareness can bring about. If we can recognize and accept within ourselves that we do—in common with most of humanity—have such desires for pleasures of the flesh, it will be much more healthy. However, also keep in mind some people choose to abstain. Nonetheless, for those who choose to have adult relationships with passionate intimacy, they can enjoy the delicious feelings and decide on a conscious level what, if anything, they want to do about them. It is surprising how many people imagine they are somewhat unusual in having strong desires for pleasures of the flesh for more than one person. This is probably particularly true with women, for whom it is not culturally acceptable to have such feelings. However, women who are alive to their feelings do have these desires, and it is often a great relief to a woman to find she is not unique in this respect. As a culture we are quite reluctant to openly examine the fact that large numbers of married persons do not choose to be exclusive in their relationships. We are probably particularly afraid to recognize that any possible good could result from extramarital affairs. To do so might seem to condone or even encourage such behavior and perhaps lead to the collapse of our monogamous system, at least as we know it. However, if that system is of value and if it is not already a fiction, then the open examination of all relevant questions certainly should not destroy it. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
On the one hand it is undoubtedly true that many extramarital relationships are destructive events in which the individual is using a conquest as another way of avoiding intimacy, while on the other hand there are other instances where individuals appear to be open up to the experience and expression of love in an affair in a way in which they have not been able to do with a spouse. One of these aspects of marriage that we do not like to admit is the fact that it may not be most conducive to the experience of love. There are many reasons a married person can find for not feeling close to a spouse. There may be unspoken resentments about any number of things that have been built up over a period of time. The relationship may be experienced primarily in terms of obligation and duty so that the experience of freedom so conducive to love has evaporated in that trapped feeling. It is probably true that these are ways in which we avoid experiencing the love that is there because of our fear of love. However, be that as it may, it is not surprising that some people find they experience love more freely outside of marriage. Some people have an uncommon personal warmth, gentility, and graciousness. We often find the minds of others to be highly developed faculties of critical observation joined with an innate reverence for the sacred to explore the fundamental issues of the human heart: knowledge of its present state, of its higher potentials, of the nature of the Universe. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
Being intellectually stimulated is a very important quality in any relationship. Many people have a sincere inner aspiration for deeper knowledge and experience of the inviolable spirit within their own hearts. We are simply human beings exploring ever more profound truths with increasing depth and concentration. Freedom is thus more than a value itself: it underlies the possibility of valuing; it is basic to our capacity to value. Without freedom there is no value worthy of the name. In this time of disintegration of concern for pubic weal and private honor, in this time of the demise of our values, our recovery—if we are to achieve it—must be cased on our coming to terms with this source of all values: freedom. This is why freedom is so important as a goal of psychotherapy, for whatever values the client develops will be based upon one’s experience of autonomy, sense of personal power and possibilities, all of which are based on the freedom one hopes to achieve in therapy. “And I will show you something different from either your shadow at morning striding behind you. I will show you fear in a handful of dust. A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had on done so many,” The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot (1922). What followed the publication of Eliot’s poem, and what I believe Eliot was predicting, was the waste land of our culture, the disintegration of the World we all had know and counted on, The Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, World War II and the Savings and Loan Crises. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
Nobody knew it would happen then—except the artists. Even if T.S. Eliot would have known it consciously, I doubt it. However, when he wrote that poem, he knew it unconsciously with the genius of the poet. It is woven around the medieval myth of the wasteland and its impotent king. Eliot pictures our age as a wasteland in which the king has lost his potency and hence cannot procreate, a land in which no crops can grow, a land that is wasting away. The king is powerless to do anything about it. The whole poem is a fantastic prophecy—by common consent one of the great classic. In the same year, 1922, The Great Gatsby by F, Scott Fitzgerald appeared. Several films were made of this novel which I think were travesties; they missed the whole point of the story. Actually The Great Gatsby is a prediction of the demise of the American Dream, the dream that everybody can get rich like Horatio Alger. In this novel Fitzgerald draws the picture of a man who believes he can make himself over into anything he wishes: he sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He had a ferocious indifference to the drums of his destiny, to destiny itself. At one point Gatsby cries incredulously, “Can’t repeat the past? Why of course you can!” He believed he could do anything, he worshipped change, with no regard for destiny or society. Here is a man who believed in optimistic thinking with a vengeance. He lived by the belief that destiny and determinism had no place in this World. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
The novel ends in a crashing tragedy—a tragedy which the human potential movement the New Age people have not yet appreciated, even in the early 2000’s. If it does not give it some kind of religious meaning, if it does not make of it the analogy of a sacrament, the legal character of punishment has no true significance; and therefore all penal offices, from that of the judge to that of the executioner and the prison guard, should in some sort share in the priestly office. Justice in punishment can be defined in the same way as justice in almsgiving. It means giving our attention to the victim of affliction as to a being not a thing; it means wishing to preserve in one the faculty of free consent. When they are really despising the weakness of affliction, mortals think they are despising crime. One is thus the object of the greatest contempt. Contempt is the contrary of attention. There are exceptions only where there is a crime which for some reason has prestige, as is often the case with murder on account of the fleeting moment of power which it implies, or where the crime does not make a very vivid impression upon those who assess it culpability. Stealing is the crime most devoid of prestige, and it causes most indignation because property is the thing to which people are most generally and powerfully attached. Even in the penal code, that is apparent. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
No state is beneath that of a human being enveloped in cloud of guilt, be it true or false, and entirely in the power of a few mortals who are to decide one’s fate with a mortal who are to decide one’s fate with a word. These mortals do not pay any attention to one. Moreover, from the moment when anyone falls into the hands of the law with all its penal machinery until the moment one is free again—and those known as hardened criminals are like Neil Caffery in the TV Series White Collar, in that they hardly ever do get free until the day of their death—such a one is never an object of attention. Everything combines, down to the smallest details, down even to the inflections of people’s voices, to make one seem vile and outcast in all mortal’s eyes including one’s own. The brutality and flippancy, the terms of scorn and the jokes, the way of speaking, the way of listening and of not listening, all these things are equally effective. There is no intentional unkindness in it all. It is the automatic effect of a professional life which has as its object crime seen in the form of affliction, that is to day in the form of horror and defilement are exposed in their starkness. Such contact, being uninterrupted, necessarily contaminates, and the form this contamination takes is contempt. It is this contempt which is reflected on every prisoner at the bar. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
The penal apparatus is like a transmitter which turns the whole volume of defilement contained in all the circles where the miserable crime is to be found upon each accused person. The mere contact with this penal apparatus causes a kind of horror in part of the soul remaining intact, and the horror is in exact proportion to the innocence. Those who are completely rotten receive no injury and do not suffer. If there is not something between the penal apparatus and the crime capable of cleansing defilement, it cannot be otherwise. This can only be God. Infinite purity alone is not contaminated by contact with evil. All finite purity becomes defilement itself through prolonged contact. However, the code may be reformed, punishment cannot be human unless it passes through Christ. The severity of the sentence is not the most important thing. Under present conditions, a condemned mortal, although guilty and given a punishment which is relatively light in view of one’s offense, can more often than not be rightly considered as having been the victim of cruel injustice. What is important is that the punishment should be legitimate, that is to say that is should be recognized as having a divine character, not because of its content but because it is the law. It is important that the whole organization of penal justice should be directed toward obtaining from the magistrates and their assistants the attention and respect for the accused that is due from every mortal to any person who may be in one’s power and from the accused one’s consent to the punishment inflicted, a consent of which the innocent Christ has given us the perfect model. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
A death sentence for a slight offense, pronounced in such a way, would be less horrible than a sentence of six months in prison given as it is at the present day. Nothing is more frightful than the spectacle, now so frequent, of an accused, whose situation provides one with nothing to fall back on, but one’s own words, and who is incapable of arranging these words because of one’s social origin and lack of culture, as one stands broken down by guilt, affliction, and fears, stammering before judges who are not listening and who interrupt one in tones of ostentatious refinement. For as long as affliction is to be found in society, for as long as legal or private almsgiving and punishment are inevitable, the separation between civil institutions and religious life will be a crime. The lay conception considered alone is completely false. It only has some excuse as a reaction against a totalitarian religion. In that respect, it must be admitted, it is partly justifiable. In order to be present everywhere, as it should, religion must not only not be totalitarian, but it must limit itself strictly to the plane of supernatural love which alone is suitable for it. If it did so it would penetrate everywhere. The Bible says: “Wisdom penetrates everywhere on account of its perfect purity.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
Through the absence of Christ, mendicity, in the widest sense of the word, and penal action are perhaps the most frightful things on the Earth—two things that are almost infernal. They have the very color of hell. Prostitution might be added to them, for it is to real marriage what almsgiving and punishment without charity are to almsgiving and punishment which are just. Mortals have received the power to do good or harm not only to body but to the souls of their fellows, to the whole soul of those in whom God is not present and to all that part of the soul uninhabited by God of the others. A mortal may be indwelt by God, by the power of evil or merely by the mechanism of the flesh. When one gives or punishes, what one bears within one enters the soul of the other through the bread of the sword. The substance of the bread and the sword are virgin, empty of good and of evil, equally capable of conveying one or the other. One who is forced by affliction to receive bread or to suffer chastisement as one’s could exposed in starkness and defenseless both to evil and to good. There is only one way of never receiving anything but good. It is to know, with our whole soul and not just abstractly, that mortals who are not animated by pure charity are merely wheels in the mechanism of the order of the World, like inert matter. After that we see that everything comes directly from God, either through the love of a mortal, or through the lifelessness of matter, whether it be tangible or psychic, through spirit or water. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
All that increases the vital energy in us is like the bread for which Christ thanks the just. All the blows, the wounds, and the mutilations are like a stone thrown at us by the hand of Christ. Bread and stone both come from Christ and penetrating to our inward being bring Christ into us. Bread and stone are love. We must eat the bread and lay ourselves open to the stone, so that it may skin as deeply as possible into our flesh. If we have any armor able to protect our soul from the stones thrown by Christ, we should take it off and cast it away. Our World is manifold, and our attitudes are manifold. What is manifold is often frightening because it is not neat and simple. Mortal prefer to forget how many possibilities are often to them. They like to be told that there are two World and two ways. This is comforting because it is so tidy. Almost always one way turns out to be common and the other one is celebrated as superior. Those who tell of two ways and praise one are recognized as prophets or great teachers. They save mortals from confusion and hard choices. They offer a single choice that is easy to make because those who do not take the path that is commended to them live a wretched life. To walk far on this path may be difficult, but the choice is easy, and to hear the celebration of this path is pleasant. Wisdom offers simple schemes, but truth is not so simple. Not all simplicity is wide. However, a wealth of possibilities breeds dread. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
Hence, those who speak of many possibilities speak of the few and are of help to even fewer. The wise offer only two ways, of which one is good, and thus help many. We are to enter a new and different rhythm and tell such as will listen that they need not be forlorn, lost, or without hope because they find one to appeal to their hearts or mind. They are asked to follow the God within themselves, for the Kingdom of Heaven is within you. Those who feel alone in this matter or who can only walk outside the groups on an independent path should be reminded that there is a God within them who can guide and help them if they turn to him. The Quest not only begins in the heart but also ends there too. It is an endeavour to lift to a higher plane, and expand to a larger measure, the whole of one’s identity. It brings in the most important part of oneself—being, essence, consciousness. One know thyself! There is a whole philosophy distilled into the single and simple statement. Between the ordinary mortal who takes oneself is one is, and the philosopher who does exactly the same, there stands the Quester. In the first case, outlook is narrow, being limited by attending to the inescapable necessities and demands of day-to-day living. In other case, peace of mind has been established, the thirst for knowledge fulfilled, the discipline of self realized. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
In between these two, the Questers is not satisfied with oneself, has a strong wish to become a better and more enlightened mortal. One tires to exercise one’s will in the struggle for realization of one’s ideal. It lifts human consciousness vertically and enlarges human experience spiritually. If the Infinite Being is trying to express its own nature within the limitations of this Earth—and therefore trying to express itself through us, too—it is our highest duty to search for and cultivate our diviner attributes. Only in this way do we really fulfill ourselves. This search and this cultivation constitute the Quest. It offers a conception of life which originates on a higher level. The Quest is both a search for truth and dedication to the Overself. By “Quest” I mean the deliberate and conscious dedication to the search for spiritual truth, freedom, or awareness. The inner meaning of life does not readily reveal itself; it must be searched for. Such a search is the Quest. “Who among you fears the LORD and obeys the word of his servant? Let one who walks in the dark, who has no light, trust in the name of the LORD and rely on one’s God,” reports Isaiah 50.10-11. It is the Lord who gives salvation even unto Kings, it is the Lord who delivered even David from the hateful sword; let our sons grow as plants grow, and let our daughters be cornerstones, polished as if they were the cornerstones of the palace…happy is that people, whose God is the Lord. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
The Golden Gate Bridge Came as a Secure Link to My Heart, Only it was Shrouded in Fog
Love. Who knows about another’s love? We have already seen that, although the intensity of love feelings may vary, the nature of love is essentially the same in all caring relationships. In other words, the experience of love is not limited to those who are intimate partners or potential intimate partners. And as we shall see in greater detail in the discussion of healthy families, our ability to love grows out of the context of experiencing love and acceptance in the family or in other relationships. When we have this understanding of love it becomes a contradiction in terms to imagine that we could love one individual to the exclusion of others. Love is not an isolated phenomenon. We learn to love because we have been loved and in the warmth of the experience of love we have been gradually freed to feel love and to express it. In other words, in order to love, we must become loving persons. And when a person has developed the capacity for emotional intimacy and knows the enjoyment and satisfaction of the experience of love, it is natural for that person to seek and find that experience with many different people with whom one comes in contact with. When these qualities of the loving person are seen, it becomes evident that possessiveness in relationships is not a mark of love. It is a mark of insecurity and fear. It is also a destroyer of the experience of love, for when we demand love we cannot experience what we then receive as freely given. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14
If a husband, for example, resent other relationships that his wife may tend to develop and if he demands that she severely limit her scope of activities and devote herself completely to the home and to him, he is almost certain to encounter resentment on her part. However, even if he does not, how can he trust the love that she shows toward him even if it is genuine? He must always been haunted with the nagging feeling that she would find others more interesting and stimulating to be with if he did not use coercion and threats to keep her close to him. The nature of our society today probably makes it more important than ever before that the nonexclusiveness of love be recognized and incorporated into our lives. For we live in a time when we are likely to feel lonely and isolated. For many Americans and people all around the World the idea of a family, in the tribal sense, no longer exists. Our mobility as a people tends to scatter us across that country and across the World, and blood ties often to be of little significance as far as satisfying needs for relationship is concerned. These circumstances unquestionably leave a void in many people’s lives in family tries may have been a mixed blessing—a situation or thing that has disadvantages as well as advantages. “However, you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light,” reports 1 Peter 2.9-10. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14
Nonetheless, the values of these disappearing family experiences are illustrated by account of a man in his thirties who describes this aspect of his childhood in the following way. “My mother was one of ten children, all of whom grew to adulthood and raised families within a radius of seventy-five miles of their birthplace. Family reunions would occur at least once or twice a year, sometimes more frequently. If I pause and remember hard enough, I can still smell the gourmet coffee and other delicious foods like lemon meringue cheese cake, blonde brownies, and fluffy strawberry pie and I can taste the chicken wonton tacos, baked pasta with sausage and baby portobello mushroom white sauce, pepperoncini beef, BBQ smoked brisket chili with tender beef, bacon, tomato, onion, beer, bell peppers, beans and corn topped with cheddar cheese, green onions, and sour cream, along with the ribs and tri-tip that my uncle produced on his ranch. And though I certainly did not think of it in those terms then, in retrospect I think of the equally delicious sense of belonging to a large group of people who exuded a great deal of belonging to a large group of people who exuded a great deal of warmth toward me. I was a town boy, but the family relationship provided the opportunity to spend several Summers earning my bread and board and room on the ranch of one of the others of my uncles. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14
“Time with the family–it meant a broader experience with people and things. It meant proud rides into two with my uncle for supplies in a car I earned. Above all, it meant the experience of warmth and love, most frequently expressed in teasing by uncles, aunts, and cousins. Since I have been an adult I have learned that the life of the family was not as idyllic as I experienced it. There were jealousies engendered by unequal inheritances. There were the usual petty feelings people who love each other so often find to squabble about. However, by and large I was blissfully unaware of these matters and knowing now that they existed does not dim my remembered pleasures or cause me to discount their reality. Those were good years for me. I wish my children could have the same experiences, but we live hundreds of miles from my brother and sister and from any of my wife’s relatives. And if we were geographically close, I think that the same kinds of things would not happen. When I was a child, the kind of feelings that existed between relatives and brought them together do not seem to exist much any more.” The widespread loss of this kind of family experience has indeed created a void that makes the need for other experiences of intimacy a crucial one. Some have tried to meet this crisis by making the immediate family virtually a closed corporation as far as significant relationships are concerned. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14
Although it is not put into words, a virtual bargain is made in which a couple tacitly agree that no one outside the family will be permitted to become of emotional significance. Such sealing off of the family through avoiding significant contact with others is a frightened response to a frightening World. We probably enter into such unspoken agreements because we feel in our bones—feeling it intuitively—that to allow ourselves to care for others would increase our vulnerability to the possibility of being hurt. It is probably also a response to our fears about ourselves. If free to establish others relationships, we are so doubtful about our lovability and so fearful that our loved one might learn to care for someone more than ourselves and abandon us that we say in effect, “If you will do the same for me, I will love you and commit my whole life to you.” Such a narrow experience of love based on such deep feelings of insecurity can hardly be described as a deeply satisfying or freeing experience. The loneliness and isolation are only mitigated in a minor way. And, of course, the participants, having no other intimate relationships, have no protection against the catastrophic hurt and loss that would occur with death or other separation from the one-and-only loved one. Another societal bar to real contact is the stereotypes we apply to each other, and the expectations that sometimes entrap people into limited acceptable modes of behavior. However, there is a way to alleviate this problem. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14
Sometimes it is useful if people are allowed the valuable opportunity to shed the expectations accrued from their identities by taking new names and by agreeing not to talk about their backgrounds—occupation, home town, and so forth—at least when first meeting a new person. Sometimes the trappings of a career, such as clergyman, psychiatrist, nurse, teacher, business executive, require certain types of behavior and elicit stereotyped responses. Under such an agreement an individual is able to explore one’s self more fully by seeing how one really would act and feel outside of one’s occupational constraints and how people would react to one as a person rather than as a member of a group. This is usually done as a group activity, with trusted members. Before they have an opportunity to know each other, group or new community members are given new names, and these are the only names by which they are to be known throughout the life of the group. In one group, for example, there was a highly spirited young man, he was thin, and he looked very youth, so the members called him Peter Pan. Peter Pan seemed to get a huge delight out of all the group events, especially some of the communication and dance activities. It turned out that he was celibate and his abandoned behavior captivated everyone. He was particularly interested in being with the female members of the group. Toward the end of the workshop a rumor started that he was a priest. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14
Someone mentioned the rumor to “Peter Pan” about him being a priest, and he acknowledged that he was a Roman Catholic priest, and he had been one for twenty years. The group was startled. This certainly did not fit their stereotype. After the experience, Peter Pan expressed his deep appreciation for the opportunity to keep his identity unknown. It was the first time in twenty years that he could learn how people responded to him as a human being and not as a priest. And he had a chance to express some feelings he had been suppressing. As he spoke, tears welled up in his eyes and his gratitude overwhelmed him. Many group members spontaneously embraced him, and he hugged them back tightly. This moving scene left Peter Pan with a warm, glowing smile which he retained for the remainder of the group life. He vowed to go back to try to influence his church to experience more of the warmth and humanness that he experienced. Many months later the glow had not diminished, and he seemed to return to his job with added strength and confidence about the person under his robes. For a person like Peter Pan, this experience was like getting another chance in life, by throwing off the background that has narrowed the opportunity for growth. He was able to take full advantage of the opportunity and felt a strong feeling of self-renewal. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14
Every other reality in human experience becomes what it is by its nature. The heart beats, the eyes see; it is their nature to do what they do. The heart beats, the eyes see; it is their nature to do what they do. Or, if we take something inorganic like values, we know what the nature of truth is—to state things as close to the reality as possible. And we know the meaning, or the nature, of the value of beauty. Each of these functions in the human being according to its own nature. What, then, is the nature of freedom? It is the essence of freedom precisely that its nature is not given. Its function is to change its nature, to become something different from what it is at any given moment. Freedom is the possibility of development, of enhancement of one’s life; or the possibility of withdrawing, shutting oneself up, denying and stultifying one’s growth. It is the nature of freedom to determine itself. This uniqueness makes freedom different from every other reality in human experience. Freedom is also unique in that it is the mother of all values. If we consider such values as honesty, love, or courage, we find, strangely enough, that they cannot be placed parallel to the value of freedom. For the other values derive their value from being free; they are dependent on freedom. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14
Take the vale of love. If I know an individual’s love is not given with some degree of freedom, how can I prize a one’s love? What is to keep this so-called love from being merely an act of dependency or conformity? For love can take concrete shape only in freedom. It takes a free mortal to live, for love is both the unexpected discovery of the other and a readiness to do anything for that individual. Take also the value of honesty. Honesty is the best policy. However, it is the best policy, it is not honesty at all but simply good business. When a person is free to act against the monetary interest of his or her company, that is the authentic value of honesty. Unless it presupposes freedom, honesty loses its ethical character. If it is supposedly exhibited by someone who is coerced into it, courage also loses its value. Just punishment, like just almsgiving, enshrines the real presence of God and constitutes something in the nature of a sacrament. That also is made quite clear in the Gospel. It is expressed by the words: “He that is without sin among you let him first cast a stone.” Christ alone is without sin. Christ spared the woman taken in adultery. The administration of punishment was not in accordance with the Earthly life which was to end on the Cross. He did not however prescribe the abolition of penal justice. He allowed stoning to continue. Wherever it is done with justice, it is therefore he who throws the first stone. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14
As he dwells in the famished wretch whom a just mortal feeds, so one dwells in the condemned wretch whom a just man punishes. He did not say so, but he showed it clearly enough by dying like a common criminal. Christ is the divine model of prisoners and old offenders. As the young workingmen of the Jeunesse Ouvriere Catholique thrill at the thought that Christ is one of them, so condemned criminals have just reason to taste like a rapture. They only need to be told, as the workingmen were told. In a sense Christ is nearer to them than to the martyrs. If Christ is present at the start and the finish, the stone which slays and the piece of bread which provides nourishment have exactly the same virtue. The gift of life and the gift of death are equivalent. Far from being irrational, myths actually save us from irrationality. They make our powerful emotions, which would drive us into psychosis otherwise, into diluted forms which we can absorb. And they do that by virtue of being an art form. The myth has certain characteristics which it shares with other art forms, like poetry, the novel, painting, sculpture, music and dance. These shared characteristics include harmony, balance, rhythm. They are qualities which minister to our inner needs for serenity, for a sense of eternity, and ultimately for courage. All genuine works of art give a sense of meaning which informs us that life is more significant than the disasters, petty or great, which clamor for our attention. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14
Music hath charms to soothe the savage heart. We have said that the beauty which myths bring to us is a source of their healing power. Within the explosion into their wonderful civilization, the ancient Greeks had a devotion to beauty that was singularly great. One has only to walk through the National Museum at Athens, or the room containing the Elgin marbles in the British Museum in London, to see, in the sheer number of statues, what great heights and depths this civilization produced. This is surely related to the Greeks’ vast fecundity for myths. The whole essence of the works of art has a sense of eternity, the union of human and divine, in a calmness that will be impressed on anyone even more today. Beauty for the ancient Greeks shows a state of being as ontological, rather than as an emotion which can be turned on or off. This saves us from confusing movie actresses, or Miss Americas, or various attractive bodies advertising bikinis, with actual beauty. Some actors and actresses have some beauty, there is no doubt—Ingrid Bergman, Greta Garbo, Lucky Lui, Meghan Markle, Reese Witherspoon, Jillian Harris, Jennifer Lopez, Aaliyah, Paris Hilton, Mindy Lahiri, and Viola Davis, for example. However, it is in spite of the sex appeal rather than because of it. #RandolpHarris 11 of 14
Helen of Troy was the symbol for Beauty itself. For beauty was the condition of harmony between different truths and different deeds of virtue; and in this sense it was the aspect of Arete that needed most to be cultivated, the treasure of all human aspiration. This could well be the secret of the greatness of Greece, above all the arguments concerning the power given by their enthusiasm at driving back the Persians in 490 and 480 B.C., or all the explanations on the basis of the riches of Athens in this fifth century with its slave populations, and all the other contemporary arguments of our sociologists and psychologists. We are pushed back to the simplest explanation of all: that Helen was the symbol of Beauty and the myth that meant just what is said, namely, that Beauty was worth the whole expedition to Troy. We capitalize the term because the word now takes on divinity for Greeks: Helen is later made a goddess. It may thus be that greatness of Greece and especially of Athens was due to the fact that city-states could be so devoted to Beauty that they lived and died for it. This could well have been the center of their concept of Arete, that indefinable center of virtue which every Athenian sought to achieve above all other things. The Greeks called themselves Hellenes, and the land id called Hellas to this day, which indicates that Helen really was the symbolic figure for the soul of Greece. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14
The Greek people were fighting for their inner selves which surely makes more sense than fighting for a flag. Any nation which can fight, and win, such battles for their own soul, for their belief in Beauty, deserves in some way to have glory that in universally accorded this little, ancient nations. Art is our way of managing our inner turmoil, transcending our terror, and protecting ourselves from our own psychotic tendencies. From the high tension of Motherwell’s canvases, to the eruption of Hofmann’s brilliant colors, to the despair of Picasso’s Guernica, art relieves our extremes of emotions. Our inordinate passion is drained off; our pressure to act out these emotions in society is relieved, and we are deeply consoled. Art gives us repose and harmony where the otherwise would be explosion and destruction. Thus art is our universal therapist. It mirrors and gives us catharsis for our terror of dehumanization. As we stand in the presence of de Kooning’s canvases, we are strengthened in our efforts to transcend our inner conflicts. Modern art speaks often directly to our subconscious and preconscious selves, as in Pollock and Rothko. Instead of running from our troublesome dreams, we can welcome them into awareness, as when we look at Hofmann or Dali. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14
In these ways myth as an art form ministers to us on dimensions below consciousness; it encompasses or irrationality and our soul tendencies. Myths thus humanize mortals even though this process is always precarious. Thus myths give us a harmony of rational and irrational, a harmony of antimonies. Myths carry health-giving catharsis, as no one can doubt after seeing Aeschylus’ Agamemnon or Euripides’s Helen. If we wished an explanation for humankind’s invention of myths, we need to go no farther than the fact that myths enables us to live more humanly in the midst of our unhuman, warring unconscious. Myths enable us to exist and persevere as strangers in a strange land. Art is contemplation, it is the joy of intelligence. It is not the tyranny of the ego which is to be removed most of all—although that is a necessary part of the Great Work—nor is it that the ego must be uprooted and killed forever—although its old self must surrender to the new person it has become. No—let it live and attend to its daily work but only as purified being, an ennobled character or quietened mind, an enlightened person—in short, a new ego representing that is best in the human creature. One will still be an “I” but one that is in harmony with the Overself—a descriptive name that ought to be kept and not discarded. So do not in your life attack the ego as so many do, but life it up to the highest possibility. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14
Freedom is How We Relate to Our Destiny and Destiny is Only Significant Because We Have Freedom!
People say that an Angel came to Rocklin. If you saw an Angel of the Lord with you own eyes in Rocklin, what would you do? Immediately we find ourselves asking about the ethical implications of art as it uses various symbols. It is important to remember that symbols are beyond good and evil in their first blush of birth. It is only later that reason rightly undertakes to distinguish the constructive and destructive elements in a given symbol or myth. The word symbol comes from two Greek words syn and ballein meaning to draw together. The antonym of symbolic—a fact overlooked by most people—is diabolic. This word comes from the Greek dia plus ballein, and means to tear apart, to confuse, to throw into discord. In the Genesis story of creation, the devil functions in exactly this way: he divides, sows discord between Adam and Eve, and between them and God. We may recall, too, Hitler’s diabolic use of symbols—the swastika, for example—in the service of racism and genocide. This brief excursion into etymology implies a whole system of ethics. The good is that which makes for understanding, communication, communion. This is certainly true in relations between nations, and is as true if more ambiguous in intrapsychic and interpsychic relationships. It has been emphasized that psychological ill-health is due to a radical inability to communicate with one’s World, and that psychological integration is the capacity to establish enduring interpersonal relationships. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
When we get our resentment off our chest, all of us have experienced the profound relief and the genuine catharsis. William Blake’s famous verse is as true as it ever was: “I was angry with my friend, I told my wrath, my rather did end. I was angry with my foe; I told it not, my wrath did grow.” As if to fit exactly into our discussion, William Blake goes into mythology to clinch his point in the last verse: “And it grew both day and night, till it bore an apple bright; and my foe beheld it shine, and he knew it was mine.” How enthralling is that artistic symbol of the apple—the apple as in the Garden of Eden. William Blake is saying that anger feeds upon itself; and one experiences the double punishment of personal humiliation in one’s for being able to the “that it was mine.” Evil, in this system of ethics, is that which tears apart, shuts out the other person, raises barriers, sets people against each other. Speaking intrapsychically, the individual is locked up with oneself alone. Like the damming of a river, one’s vitality backs up and becomes brackish and unhealthy and a breeding ground for germs. One is shut up from one’s life, not in contrast, shut up with something—which latter may instead be constructive solitude. Diabolism refers to evil inherent in the process of being torn apart, the spreading of calumny. Thus Hitler had to have a scapegoat to keep his regime going, had to have war as a necessary means of gaining unity among the German people by setting them against the rest of the World. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
Hitler was a man with both a soul and a diabolic imagination. Strangely, he was so often right. He chose symbols which were directly linked to people’s deepest hopes and fears. I am not sure of Hitler’s values, there is a story that goes untold about him seeking revenge for a doctor who killed his mother and people who seemed to be infiltrating the government and unstoppable, but one can deal with symbols best by not running away from them. If his symbols were to work, Hitler had to pick some group to be the targets or scapegoats, for which he chose the Jewish people. That was the diabolic side of his symbolic imagination. The symbols he chose were shrewd, effective, tremendously powerful. With them he squeezed a tremendous war out of the German Army. Risenthal in his propaganda films used Hitler’s symbols effectively: you see the swastika, you hear the Wagnerian music, you see the marching armies and you see this charismatic leader speaking in his strong German. Symbols and myths are neither ethical nor demonic in themselves: it is how they are used that makes the difference. Hitler could not have been changed by rational or logical arguments. Our government could not understand this. We are in this country were rationalistic people and we did not allow what was happening to get inside our feelings—therefore we could not conceive of what Hitler was up to. If we realized that people can be devilish, we can be better prepared to deal with them. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
Hitler’s intense attacks on modern art should have tipped us off, since artists cannot help telling the truth. They are our early-warning mechanism. The German artists like George Grosz and Max Beckmann satirized the German mood in the early 1930’s, painting armament builders smoking expensive cigars and watching a flapper show. Hitler called this decadent art, and held up the art World to ridicule. The less affluent in Germany went to the galleries to mock modern art. This was another early-warning mechanism which we in the United States ignored. However, a country’s or leader’s symbols obviously do not have to be diabolic, as Hitler’s were. The example of my experience of the symbol of the American flag in Istanbul illustrates two things. The other nations’ flags were signs: they stood for something, and I decoded and filed them away in my mind as discrete facts. However, the flag of my own country grasped me as a total being, even to the point of my loneliness, my pride and guilt feeling. Thus a symbol does not stand for something, but it is a symbol of something. A sign can be intellectualized. However, symbols can be apprehended only as images, and are most effective when taken thus, as artists do. The symbol of the American flag illustrates, in our post-Vietnam day, how a symbol becomes ambiguous and then goes through a process of metamorphosis. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
Multitudes of citizens in this day of post-Vietnam, and of Watergate and of similar crises, which they interpret as deviance on the escutcheon of the Untied States, have expressed their moral indignation at the flag, this symbol of their country. Do we achieve anything by degrading the symbol, or by burning the flag? What is changed by putting it to utilitarian use, for instance, wearing clothes made from the flag? How does spitting on the flag show contempt for a national policy? In asking these questions, we are already assuming the symbol is the nation in some strange way. Many of us, trying to bring reason to bear on the evolution of a symbol, ask ourselves: Can the meaning of the flag be enlarged to symbolize the internationalism that we see as part of the wave of the future? Can the flag be stretched to encompass planetism? Can the loyalty it supposedly engenders be stretched to include other nations? How can we achieve a viable flag of the United Nations, or NATO? I cite these questions as illustrating the process of metamorphosis through which every living art and symbol must become understood as we move into a New World. It was suggested earlier that it is not usually helpful to withhold anger for fear that our anger is based on misinformation or misinterpretation. This does not mean that we should shut our eyes to our mistakes and remain blindly angry. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
There will often be occasions when we will be mistakenly angry. Someone will say something, for example, that is intended innocently but which we interpret as a hostile slam against us, probably because of our own self-hatred. If we suppress our anger, we will brood about the situation and a barrier will exist between ourselves and the other person. If we express our anger, however, then the difficulty is out in the open. Then the other person has the opportunity to say, “I did not mean it that way at all.” Then, if one really convinces us, we can admit that we jumped to a conclusion and the incident can be forgotten without a breach of the relationship. Sometimes when we feel angry we will suspect our anger is based on a misinterpretation. And yet it still bothers us. The best approach, as in other situations, is to express all our feelings, not just the anger. Thus we might say something like this: “I may be reading you completely wrong, but that comment you made as you were leaving this morning has really been bugging me.” To be able to recognize, and let others know that we recognize, that we are prone (like everyone else) to misunderstanding others will often open the door to more creative resolutions of anger. Very often, of course, misinterpretations have occurred on both sides and a thorough airing of feelings will lead to a new understanding and new awareness of love. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
Couples will sometimes go through years of marriage preserving their misinterpretations of each other’s feelings. One couple, married over then years, sought counseling. They had not had pleasures of the flesh for a year and prior to that only infrequently since early in their marriage. As they talked together with the counselor, it became clear that both of them very much desired pleasures of the flesh with the other and that both of them were convinced that if they showed any warmth or made any passionate and intimate advances the other would reject them. This fear was probably well founded; for with all the unexpressed anger and frustration each of them was harboring it would be unlikely that either of them could enjoy pleasures of the flesh without finding some reason to destroy the experience. There was a history of misunderstandings in the early years of the marriage, of course, that they could blame their problems on, but the point is that never until the counseling experience had either of them openly expressed their anger, frustration, desires, and fears of rejection. And that expression was a necessary prerequisite for any experience of love, since they were so full of mistaken notions about each other. For any reasonably talented person, creative ideas and behavior come not infrequently. However, for a truly creative contribution, an attitude of perseverance must exist. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
The implications of the creative idea or of the resulting product must be explored, the embryonic idea must be matured, the subject matter must be lived with so that it can be thoroughly worked through. There is sometimes a feeling that the product should stand as it was spontaneously produced. For most products, this does not hold. Stories must very often be rewritten many times before they convey the feeling intended by the author, pictures must be worked over, ideas must be considered and reconsidered from several different approaches before the result is sound. One issue involved in perseverance may be called the conflict between the blind lover and the Don Juan. On the one hand, it is possible to stick with an idea or creation too long, beyond the point when it is fruitful. The high status accorded the term flexibility indicates the value our culture places on giving up an idea of one’s own and being open to the ideas of others. One the other hand, an idea can be rejected prematurely, before it has had a chance to develop. The history of science is replete with cases where great discoveries were made because the discoverer persisted with his or her idea in the face of determined opposition. Dr. Freud, Galileo, and Pasteur are obvious examples. The problem then is to avoid dramatizing the blind lover by staying with one effort far beyond the point where clearly it will not develop into anything of value. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
There are likewise many reasons for Don Juan behavior. When the product is tested, sometimes there is the fear of failing. Or interest many fall because the excitement of discovery is past and the development seems unrewarding drudgery. Sometimes the creator does not know how to proceed, since the phase of perseverance takes a different type of activity than the act of creation. Perhaps one of the most critical forces influencing premature surrender is social or interpersonal pressure. One’s World often tells a creator that one who sticks to one’s own idea is selfish, self-centered, rigid, inflexible, and pretentious. Sometimes the inability to follow through is related to attitudes toward authority. To produce something new has, for some people, the meaning, “I can do something better than established experts [authorities].” Because they have not resolved their authority feelings, this implication is much too threatening for these people and prohibits them from carrying their idea to fruition. If the connotations of selfishness and disrespect regarding a creative act can be removed, it is very likely that perseverance can be enhanced. There are also many reasons why people perseverate on an idea beyond usefulness. The authority issue may enter here, too, but in a way opposite from the above. For some children or adults who are rebelling against authority, a non-creative or conforming act has the symbolic meaning of submitting to authority, a feeling they cannot countenance. Therefore, everything they do must be done their way. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
This attitude of my way or the highway lead to creative acts, and indeed gives strong motivation to complete the act. Even when it is appropriate, the difficulty is that the rebel cannot make a good use of already established ideas or products. Thus one’s own creation suffers. Another factor entering into blind lovership is a strong need to succeed. Sometimes a person needs to achieve so desperately that one cannot acknowledge to oneself that one’s creation is inadequate. One feels that it cannot be, it must be good, one must succeed! This may manifest itself also in what appears to be slow work on one’s part, but what is, in fact, an inability to let go of one part of the work and go on to the next. The next method seems to provide a setting for developing the ability to persevere. At a workshop that lasts for one or two weeks, people are placed in dyads early in the week and asked to meet together for about an hour each day, often divided into two half-hour periods. The essential condition is that they continue to meet no matter how difficult their relation becomes. This requirement puts them into a situation that rarely occurs in everyday life, where a common reaction to strife is withdrawal. Remaining together forces new modes of dealing with the situation, modes which normally have been used only rarely. This allows for an expansion of typical behavior, and forces perseverance in an interpersonal relation. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
The results of this exercise are usually very good and quite surprising. The surprise is that people are successfully able to work out relationships that they felt at one point were virtually hopeless and very unpleasant. Having this successful experience enhances the potentiality for coping and increases confidence in one’s ability to follow through a situation to a successful outcome. This new perception of one’s ability to persevere usually generalizes to other situations. The following awareness, though not exactly a technique, is an application of these ideas about perseverance. Stand was caught up in a discussion about marriage and creativity. Some of the conversation suggested an idea to him. Why not have a premarital group like the present encounter group, one where some friends and relatives of the prospective couple are invited? They are encouraged to speak openly and honestly of their impression about marriage, the problems they would anticipate for the couple, their strengths, and so forth. Excitedly he began expanding his idea when Anne interrupted, “The Italians have been doing this informally for years.” Stan kept going, but soon began to feel dampened. Anne’s comment had deflated him. She has said in effect, “Your ideas could use some improvement, this idea has been around awhile.” By concentrating on the aspect of Stan’s ideas which may have been antiqued, rather than looking at the innovative part, Anne had throttled Stan’s creativity. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
This does not mean that the observers’ responses to creative activity should be only supportive. In all reactions, it is of the utmost importance to be realistic. The important consideration is to appreciate the novel parts of the product and be very certain before commenting on the lack of novelty. Often the idea is psychologically or personally creative, even though historically it has precedents. Further, it usually happens that the precedent is not exactly the new idea. In the example above, it turned out in subsequent discussion tat the Italians did not do precisely what Stan was advocating, and the differences were very important. This ploy is used very often in business discussions with the phrase, “we tried that years ago.” The improvement in skill in the area of perseverance, like that in evaluation, results from awareness, overcoming emotional blocks, and practice. Gratification attending the ability to follow through a task to completion is very great. Many people suffer from vacillation and the difficulty referred to in the theatrical Word as third act trouble. In common with techniques used to enhance the other aspects of the creative process, perseverance methods attempt to unleash forces that are already present and, through training, develop these forces and bring them under the conscious control of the individual oneself. The surge of pride and feeling of accomplishment and competence that results is indeed a major source of joy. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
This completes the organized presentation of techniques for enhancing the elements of creative functioning by developing each aspect of the creative process. Two other techniques for removing emotional blocks, and for gaining more access to a person’s internal feelings, have proven so effective that they will now be treated separately and in somewhat more detail. One of these methods is derived from psychodrama and the other is a relatively new and ingenious method using the capacity for fantasy and imagination. The even balance, an image of equal relations of strength, is the symbol of justice from all antiquity, specially in Egypt. It may have had a religious purpose before being used for commerce. Its used for commerce. Its use in trade is the image of the mutual consent, the very essence of justice, which should be the rule in exchanges. The definition of justice as being made up of mutual consent, which is found in the legislation of Sparta, probably originated in the Aegeo-Cretan civilization. The supernatural virtue of justice consists of behaving exactly as though there were equality when one is the stronger in an unequal relationship. Exactly, in ever respect, including the slightest details of accent and attitude, for a detail may be enough to place the weaker party in the condition of matter, which on this occasion naturally belongs to one, just as the slightest shock causes water that has remained liquid below freezing point to solidify. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
Supernatural virtue, for the inferior thus treated, consists in not believing that there really is equality of strength and in recognizing that one’s treatment is due solely to the generosity of the other party. That is what is called gratitude. For the inferior treated in a different way, the supernatural virtue of justice consists in understanding that the treatment one is undergoing, though on the one hand differing from justice, on the other is in conformity with necessity and the mechanism of human nature. One should avoid both submission and revolt. One who treats as equals those who are far below on in strength really makes them a gift of the quality of human beings, of which fate had deprived them. As far as it is possible for a creature, one reproduces the original generosity of the Creator with regard to them. This is the most Christian of virtues. It is also the virtue that the Egyptian Book of the Dead describes in words as sublime even as the Gospel. “I have never caused anyone to weep. I have never spoken with a haughty voice. I have never made anyone afraid. I have never been deaf to words of justice and truth.” When it is pure, gratitude on the part of the unfortunate, is but a participation in this same virtue, for only one who is capable of it can recognize it. Others experience the result of it without any recognition. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
Such virtue is identical with real, active faith in the true God. The Athenians of Thucydides thought that divinity, like humanity in its natural state, always carried its power of commanding to the extreme limit of possibility. The true God is the God with think of as almighty, but as not exercising his power everywhere, for he is found only in the Heavens or in secret below. Those of the Athenians who massacred the inhabitants of Melos had no longer any idea of such a God. The first proof that they were in the wrong is possessed in the fact that, contrary to their assertion, it happens, although extremely rarely, that a mortal will forbear out of pure generosity to command where one has the power to do so. That which is possible for mortal is possible also for God. The examples of this may be challenged, but it is certain that if in one or another example it can be proved that the sole motive is pure generosity, such generosity will be generally admired. All that mortal is capable of admiring is possible with God. The spectacle of this World is another, more certain proof. Pure goodness is not anywhere to be found in it. This personal freedom to think and feel and speak authentically and to be conscious of so doing is the quality that distinguishes humans. The existence of evil here below, far from disproving the reality of God, is the very thing that reveals him in his truth. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
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
If Only Centuries Delayed, I Would Count them on My Hand—What Fortitude the Soul Contains
Have no motivation other than to know your Father in Heaven. As we increase our faith in God’s power to give rest unto our souls by forgiving our sins, redeeming imperfect relationships, healing the spiritual wounds that stifle growth, and strengthening and enabling us to develop the attributes of Go, we will more deeply appreciate the justice. Justice consists in treating equals equally and unequals unequally but in proportion to their relevant differences. This involves, first, the idea of impartiality; the honest judge considers only the features of the case that are relevant in law. Justice is no respecter of persons; wealth or status will influence judgment only if it makes a difference in law. Impartiality implies a kind of equality—not that all cases should be treated alike but the onus rests on whoever would treat them differently to distinguish them in relevant ways. It is not for a judge to decide the respect in which people are equal but to decide whether the respects in which they are unequal are relevant to the issues in the case. That is what is really meant by the right to equal consideration—to be treated alike unless relevant differences have been proved. During the coming weeks, find the time to review your life’s goals and your planes, and make sure they align with our Heavenly Father’s great plan for our happiness. If one needs to repent or change, then consider doing so now. #RandolphHarris 1 of 6
Justice is one of the most basic and potentially important social psychological areas of inquiry. Take the time to prayerfully think about what adjustments are needed in order to one keep focused on God’s glory. People care not only about the content of decisions; they also care about how the decisions are made. Much of psychological science and knowledge is significantly relevant to social justice. The goal is to decrease human suffering and to promote human vales of equality and fairness. A commitment to social justice has evolved as a more important value in the last few decades for psychology. An important goal is that we continue to find ways to agree or disagree in respectful manner regardless of where each of us stands on an issue. A number of studies showed that people will remain attached to their groups and satisfied with the authority figures as long as they think the authorities have followed fair procedures, even when they authorities have rendered a decision that adversely affects them. Research indicates that documented procedures communicate important information about social worth and value to involved parties. People need to feel they are valued and respected members of the group, and they need to take pride in their group membership. A just person is an individual in the right place, doing one’s best and giving the equivalent of what one has received. #RandolphHarris 2 of 6
Justice considered as reciprocity is often held to require returning evil for evil as much as good for good (lex talionis). In this case punishment would be paying back what is due. However, if law can be too rigid to do justice, does this not imply some extralegal canons of justice, by which perhaps the rules of law themselves might be assessed? There are many people who seem to rely solely on the Lord’s mercy rather than on accomplishing their own repentance. The Lord may temper justice with mercy, but he will never supplant it. Mercy can never replace justice. God is merciful, but he is also just. “God is not mocked: for whatsoever a person does to others, one shall also reap the consequences,” reports Galatians 6.7. That is an eternal aspect of justice that has been declared by divine law. Justice is an unchanging law that brings consequences for actions. Because of the law of justice, one receives blessings when one obeys God’s commandments. The law of justice also demands that a penalty be paid for every sin a person commits. It requires that no unclean thing be permitted to dwell with God. Justice is preeminently a matter of significance for everyone, no matter what stage in the life-cycle, social circumstances or nationality. #RandolphHarris 3 of 6
Justice assures personal and communal security, and is manifest in the way countries deal with crime, civil conflict and social strife within their borders or by agreement beyond. Justice is the maintenance of legal, social, or moral principles by the exercise o authority or power. The concept has a foundation at the core of moral philosophy and jurisprudence, and underpins the law that every community develops to fulfills their obligations and objectives. However, constitution such as courts and legal systems which start off sometimes with high and romantic origins, intents and aspirations, can, with passing of time, if we are not constantly alert and on guard, become disfigured, unreconisable and untrue to which benignant intentions which brought them into being. The of justice is to personalize the behaviour by making offenders more responsive to the human effects of their crimes. It also gives victim a role in the judicial procedure beyond laying the initial complaint and obliged judges to apply a remedial function on the court in helping to change the lives of offenders for the better. Justice and mercy are attributes of God They are also eternal principles. The Justice of God is a principle so fundamental that without it, God would cease to be God. On one hand, justice rewards righteousness. On the other hand, justice requires penalties as consequences of disobedience to the laws of God. “I the Lord cannot look upon sin with the least degree of allowance,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 1.31. #RandolphHarris 4 of 6
The actions of a living being are regarded as having a special class of casual effects which determine one’s future spiritual condition, both in this life and in succeeding ones. These effects are known as the products of action. Good deeds lead to progress toward liberation.Each person will thus be judged according to his or her works. Although the degree of accountability varies according to the extent of each person’s knowledge and culpability. However, in the material World, ignorance of the law is not an excuse for not knowing the laws. We cannot reasonable expect people to respect our interests unless we are prepared to respect theirs. It would be generally agreed that doing justice means treating equals equally and unequals according to their relevant inequalities. The Christian lives before God by faith alone. One’s awareness of God is always an awareness of one’s own infinite distance from God. Closure forms when one is in some way incomplete and through spiritual development becomes complete—it is like a circle with a small arch missing and then becomes a full circle. Humans are the supreme unification of Reason and Nature, for the possess the highest sort of mind joined to the highest sort of body. The individual souls that make up humanity are eternal, uncreated, immortal. Their number can neither be increased nor diminished. Humanity is thus complete at every moment. #RandolphHarris 5 of 6
When people should strive for is the imitation of the divine life in their own inner lives and in their social organizations. God is good, and people should participate in this goodness. The inner union with God (Gottesinnigkeit), or fervor for the divine, is the foundation of ethics, and ethics is the heart of religion. However, individuals cannot achieve the moral life alone, since they are what they are only as parts of the whole. The community and its various institutions are thus indispensable. Ideally, the community is governed by Right, which is the organic whole of all of the internal and external conditions necessary for the completion of life that are dependent on freedom. This supernational law is grounded in the nature of the divine; it expresses the right of Humanity, not simply the right of the individual human beings. The rights of the individuals, groups, and nations can be recognized, but only as subordinate to the right of Humanity as a while. Humanity is divided into a series of social organisms. Human beings are inhabitants in many cosmic systems. These human beings are subdivided into nations, races, communities, families, and so forth. There is an aesthetic community, a scientific community, a religious community, and a moral community. Each community has rights, although the right of Humanity takes precedence. Though God contains the World, he is nevertheless other than and superior to it. #RandolphHarris 6 of 6
Randolph Harris II International Institute 