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Every Step Forward Also Digs the Depths to Which One Can Likewise Go!

November 13, 2019 1:58 am

For the time in their lives and regardless of class, people felt a strong sense of solidarity. In the face of n external threat, social differences were forgotten and the people were united. We are facing a new ethic, an ethic which will be relevant to the new age into which we are moving. Put simply, it is an ethic of intention. It is based on the assumption that each being is responsible for the effects of one’s own actions. The ultimate evil in our day is inherent in situations in which the person is prevented from taking responsibility. The future lies with the man or woman who can live as an individual, conscious within the solidarity of the human race. One then uses the tension between individuality and solidarity as the source of one’s ethical creativity. So far we have been taught to do one or the other. We have learned to accept responsibility for our convictions; but that is not enough. We have learned to accept responsibility for our convictions; but that is not enough. We have learned to accept responsibility for the sincerity of our actions; but that, too is not enough. These are both individualistic—both part of the ethic which had its roots in the Renaissance. It is worth reminding ourselves that one can be entirely sincere and firm in one’s convictions—and entirely wrong. We must accept responsibility for whether we are right or wrong. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

Being human means having a soul. In fact, “everything that is self-conscious and capable of thought and love has a soul. The soul emanated from self-consciousness. The soul is the expression of the self-consciousness. When you began to think and feel, a soul was formed within you as the result of your thinking and feeling,” (Page 296 of Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis by Anne Rice). It is hoped that one can learn to accept responsibility for their actions without the guilt on one’s hands of the killing of the mathematician or the bombing of a financial district or the killing of thousands of innocent people in Mexico. However, to do this, we must first overcome alienated concepts of personality and its alienating techniques. What is called for is not just help in achieving self-awareness, not mere explanations, but emotional experience which will help the individual to begin to feel oneself and to permit oneself more and more to be. In other words, one needs a warm, mutually trusting relationship in which for the first time one is accepted as one is, accepted with those characteristics which earlier in one’s life one had felt compelled to reject or repress. Ordinary neurotics who in trying to escape from themselves do damage chiefly to themselves. However, what about those who express their alienation by destroying others? #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

Their self-esteem rests on a status and respect that comes with their positions, and it depends on their jobs, on being head of a family, or similar external factors. Nearly all of them lose their desirable characteristics of those with family values, such as their sense of propriety and self-respect. They become shiftless, and develop an exaggerated extent of undesirable characteristics: pettiness, quarrelsomeness, self-pity as they thrive on suffering, anger, resentment, sorrow, grief. It gives them delight, intoxicating delight. “They believe the gods want the blood of children and the agony of those children when they die, and the agony of their parents when they see them sacrificed. And people have been bred to feed off suffering! To feed off the grief and the pain of the victims of war and blood-soaked altars. But there is no value in suffering,” (Page 300 of Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis by Anne Rice). Many people who thrive off the suffering of others will eventually become depressed in an agitated way and will complain eternally. We can, in a splurge of individualism, live by our own integrity; or we can, in a splurge of solidarity, identify ourselves with a group r party that takes over our decisions for us and decides by its own rules. If it neglects the other, either way leads us into error. Held in balance, however, they constitute the two sources of ethical choice. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

From the first ethical choice should be preserved the element of the consciousness of the individual, necessary to all ethics; and from the second, the element of interpersonal responsibility, also a necessary source of all ethics. The legend of Jesus Christ and him dying on the cross is to remind us that suffering is not good and it even hurts the divine, but it is also a story that gives us hope to know that someone died for our sins and is a reminder that salvation is possible. Also, “the concept of eternal damnation that lies behind this God Incarnate-crucifixion religion—the idea that the Maker (God) of the Universe, the Maker of all Worlds, has devised a place of eternal unspeakable conscious agony for all human beings who are not redeemed through acceptance of the horrific execution of this God Himself as His own Son in the flesh! How this God has consecrated suffering; how He has elevated unspeakable suffering as something to which He personally attaches value. He requires this Hell of eternal suffering as some sort of payment from those struggling finite humans who have disobeyed Him or failed to consecrate the suffering of God Incarnate on His fabled cross as an act of love!” (Page 305 of Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis by Anne Rice). #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

Human’s unlimited potential is a term one hears often, and we are adjured to fulfill it as much as possible. “For thousands of years, the people have believed this. It is the only way they can go forward in a World where there is so much suffering. They have always believed that a brave man (or woman) will suffer torment, but not give in. They want you to fight. They have bred you to fight. And when you see heroism, great heroism as in a battle, this too gives off energy, and you are energized to fight beyond your normal endurance.” (Pages 300 and 299 of Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis by Anne Rice). However, what tends to be missing is the recognition that this potential never functions except as it is experienced within its own limits. The error is in treating potential as if it has no limits at all, as though life’s course were perpetually onward and upward. The illusion that we become good by progressing a little more each day is a doctrine bootlegged from technology and made into a strict and rigid doctrine in ethics where is does not fit. This is the course in technology; but in ethics, in aesthetics, in other matters of the spirit, the term progress in that sense has no place. Modern beings are not ethically superior to Sokrates and the Greeks, and although we build buildings differently, we do not make them more beautiful than the Parthenon. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

The rehabilitation of disturbed persons is frequently an individual mater. However, as we are beginning to learn, the community itself and its culture may affect the nature of mental disorders and their treatment. This is suggested in our study of mental health among the Hutterites by Joseph Eaton and Robert Weil. An isolated and cohesive religious sect in the American Mid-West, the Hutterites “live a simple, rural life, have a harmonious social order and provide every member with a high level of economic security from the womb to the tomb. They are a homogeneous group, free from many of the tensions of the American melting-pot culture. And they have long been considered almost immune to mental disorders.” The Hutterite culture does not prevent mental disorders, it has almost no violence, divorce, alcoholism, or other forms of social maladjustment. More over it provides a highly therapeutic atmosphere for treatment—the whole community showing sympathy and support for the disturbed individual and all patients being looked after by their immediate families. No stigma attaches to them and they are encouraged to participate in the normal life of family and community. Modern society offers no such solidarity and consequently no such therapy. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15This brings us back to our central problem: how can complex, modern societies achieve such solidarity? This question has preoccupied a host of thinkers and planners. In all communities where solidarity is achieved beings may escape from alienation, only to lose themselves in conformity to the group. Is there any way out of dilemma? While it is important to recognize that belongingness and togetherness represent a new form of tyranny, it will not do to urge upon an alienated population a meaningless freedom. The task before us is to build group cultures that will satisfy being’s yearning to reach one’s fellows without destroying one in the process. Who is to say that it cannot be done? We need a psychological foundation that will do justice to both our diversity and our particularity, our freedom and our limits. Such a foundation would view human beings in its fullness while carefully acknowledging its tragedy and incompleteness. It would honor our biological and mechanical propensities, but not at the cost of compromising our capacity to create and to transcend ordinary consciousness. Many people look a human life as though it were a Roman candle onto which you can hang to be carried higher and higher into the stratosphere, up, up, forever. However, soon the Roman candle bursts, and then where are you? #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

It is completely forgotten that joy increases to the extent that the capacity for woe does also. Humans were made for joy and woe; and when this we rightly know, through the World we safely go. Joe and woe are woven fine, a clothing for the soul divine. The awareness that human existence is both joy and woe is prerequisite to accepting responsibility for the effect of one’s intensions. My intentions will sometimes be evil—the dragon or the Sphinx in me will often be clamoring and will sometimes be expressed—but I ought to do my best to accept it as part of myself rather than to project in on you. Growth cannot be a basis for ethics, for growth is evil as well as good. Each day we grow toward infirmity and death. Many a neurotic sees this better than the rest of us: one fears growing into greater maturity because one recognizes, in a neurotic way of course, that each step upward brings one nearer to death. Cancer is a growth. It is a disproportionate growth where some cells run wild growing. The Sun is generally good for the body, but when one has tuberculosis, it is disproportionately the t.b. bacilli and therefore the affected parts have to be shielded. Whenever we find we have to balance one element against another, we find that we need other, more profound criteria than one-dimensional ethic of growth. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

The question will arise: What is the relation of the ethic suggested here to our present ethical system in Christianity? Christianity has to be taken realistically, in terms of what it has become rather than what was ideally meant by Jesus. The Christian ethic evolved from the “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” system of justice present at the beginning of the Old Testament—for instance, the concept of justice attained by the balance of evils. The Christian and Hebrew ethic then shifted its focus to the inner attitudes: “As a human thinketh in one’s heart, so is one.” The ethic of love ultimately become the criterion, even to the extent of the ideal commandment: “Love your enemies.” However, in the course of this development it is forgotten that love for one’s enemies is a matter of grace. Grace is the help or strength given through the Atonement of the Lord Jesus Christ. Through the grace of God, everyone will be resurrected—our spirits will be reunited with our bodies, never again to be separated. Through His grace, the Lord also enables those who live His gospel to repent and be forgiven. Grace is a gift from Heavenly Father given through His Son, Jesus Christ. The word grace, as used in the scriptures, refers primarily to enabling power and spiritual healing offered through the mercy and love of Jesus Christ. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

Loving your enemies is a possible impossibility, never to be realized in a real sense except by an act of grace. It would be required grace for me to love a cruel individual. When the element of grace is omitted the commandment of loving one’s enemies becomes moralistic: it is advocated as a state an individual can achieve by working on one’s own character, a result of a moral effort. Then we have something very different: an oversimplified, hypocritical form of ethical pretense. This leads to those moral calisthenics that are based on blocking-off of one’s awareness of reality and that prevent the actually valuable actions one could make for the social betterment. The innocent person in religion, the one who lacks the wisdom of serpents, can do considerable harm without knowing it. We also tend consistently to forget the presence of the diamonic all the way through the Old Testament. Speaking of Jeremiah, when we think of the statement: to pluck up and break down, to destroy and overthrow, to build and to plant. Such words sound strangely destructive to modern ears. However, the words spoken to Jeremiah are an enemy to all gradualism, all theories of history based upon the escalation of goodness. Can it be true that God is not a Niagara of Pablum, spilling His childish comfort upon the morally and humanly neutral, whose faces are raised blankly to partake of the infantile nourishment? “Therefore I will contend with you” [says God to Jeremiah]. It is at once the highest compliment of God and a guaranty of the dramatic and abrasive quality of life. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

Another thing that occurred in the cultural evolution is that the ethic of Christianity in our time became allied, especially in the last five centuries, with the individualism which emerged in the Renaissance. This increasingly became the ethics of the isolated individual, standing bravely in one’s lonely situation of self-enclosed integrity. The emphasis was on being true to one’s own convictions. This was true especially in American sectarian Protestantism, strongly assisted by the individualism cultivated by our life on the frontier. Hence the great emphasis in America on sincerity as one lived by one’s own convictions. We idealized beings such as Thoreau, who supposedly did that. Hence also the emphasis on one’s own character development, which in America seems always to have a mortal connotation. This is the character that makes one intolerable to other being. Ethics and religion became largely a matter of Saturday or Sunday, the weekdays being relegated to making money—which one always did by ways that kept one’s own character impeccable. We had then the curious situation of the being of impeccable character directing a factory that unconscionably exploited its thousands of employees. It is interesting that fundamentalism, that form of Protestantism which puts most emphasis on the individualistic habit of character, tends to be also the most nationalistic and defense-minded of the sects, and expresses supremacy in their beliefs. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

A central criticism of this ethical development is that it omitted any real inclusion of the solidarity of the human kind. The crowd, as it was called, was important in one’s moral development only as something one stood against, as something one trained one’s self not to be influenced by. We bought our own ethical achievement as solitary creates, interested in helping others only by giving from our own abundance—tithing. And since this character development fitted the capitalistic system and the habits that went into making money, one rose socially, never forgetting one’s duty to share with the less affluent. However, this rarely fooled the less fortunate, and it never got us out of our individualistic shell. What is lacking is an authentic empathy with others, an identification with the woes and the joys of those bereft of power—the groups of people who have yet to experience self-actualization, and the poor. Naturally the Marxist concern with solidarity geared to the proletariat in contrast to the self-involved middle and upper cases, achieved a vast following. It is no wonder that the Marxist emphasis on internationalism, brotherhood, and comradeship caught the imagination and emotions of a World which thirsted for just that. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

We need not—indeed, we must not—surrender our concerns with integrity and our valuing of the individual. I am proposing that our individualistic gains since the Renaissance be set in balance with our new solidarity, our willingly assumed responsibility for our fellow men and women. In these days of mass communication, we no longer be oblivious to their needs; and to ignore them is to express our hatred. Understanding, in contrast to ideal love, is human possibility—understanding for our enemies as well as our friends. There is in understand the beginning of compassion, of pity, and of charity. Granted that human potentialities are not fulfilled by a movement upward but by an increase in escape downward as well. Every step forward also digs the depths to which one can likewise go. No longer shall we feel that virtues are to be gained merely by leaving behind vices; the distance up the ladder ethically is not to be defined in terms of what we have left behind. Otherwise goodness is no longer good but self-righteous pride in one’s own character. Evil also, if it is not balanced by capacities for good, becomes more sensitive to both good and evil each day; and this dialectic is essential for our creativity. To admit frankly, our capacity for evil hinges on our breaking through pseudoinnocence. S long as we preserve our one-dimensional thinking, we can cover up our deeds by pleasing innocent. This anti-diluvian escape from conscience is no longer possible. We are responsible for the effect of our actions, and we are also responsible for becoming as aware as we can of these effects. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

It is especially hard for the person in psychotherapy to accept his or her increased potentiality for evil which goes along with the capacity for good. Patients have been so used to assuming their own powerlessness—whether truly powerless or not. Any direct awareness of power throws their orientation to life off balance, and if they were to admit their own evil, they do not know what they would do. To other people the fact that they can hurt other people seems an unthinkable thing because they are always used to being hurt by other people. Frenzy and hysteria are exactly ways of not being conscious of what one is doing. It is a considerable boon for a person to realize that one has one’s negative side like everyone else, that the diamonic works in potentiality for good and evil, and that one can neither disown it nor live without it. When one also comes to the sense that much of one’s achievement is bound up with the very conflicts this diamonic impulse engenders, it is similarly beneficial. This is the seat of the experience that life is a mixture of good and evil; that there is no such thing as pure good; and that if the evil were not there as a potentiality, the good would not be either. Life consists of achieving good not apart from evil but in spite of it. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

The last lap necessarily brings one into the Silence of God which transcends intellect, but it is a silence that is rich with freedom and serenity. Here alone one may hear the wordless voice of God and, once heard, one can well afford to disregard al other voices. Although movement towards enlightenment goes forward by stages, the actual moment of enlightenment comes abruptly with a sudden transcendence of the darkness in which some ordinarily live. If one perseveres, the time will come when one’s mind will naturally orient itself toward the spiritual pole of being. And this will happen by itself, without any urging on one’s part. No outer activity will be able to stop the process, for to make it possible one’s mind will apparently double its activity. In the foreground, it will attend to the outer World, but in the background it will attend to God. Believers and doers are what we need—faithful people who are humble in the presence of the Lord…to experience the love of God is one of the purest of all experiences. This awareness of the soul’s unique, even sacred nature, is what should be instilled in all our people. “Fear not, for behold, it is God that has shown unto you this marvelous thing, in the which is shown unto you cannot lay your hands on us to slay us,” reports Helaman 5.26. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15

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The Line Between Knowing and Loving is Impossible to Draw–Feelings are More Important than Anything Under the Sun!

November 12, 2019 12:27 am

“It is easy for us to make beings like you. We do it all the time. There is nothing to it. We can easily replace you. Understand, all the mental and physical equipment we have given you is for a purpose.” At this point, I knew my first real fear. I was afraid they were going to do away with Derek then and there. I could not bear it. The pain in me was so all-consuming that it took all the strength I possessed to stand by and say nothing. However, I did not feel that there was anything that I could do to prevent whatever the Parents would now do to Derek. What deep-seated fears and needs underly Derek’s delusional system? We were long in finding out, for Derek’s preventions effectively concealed the secret of his autistic behavior. In the meantime we dealt with his peripheral problems one by one. During his first year with us Derek’s most trying problem was toilet behavior. This surprised us, for Derek’s personality was not “anal” in the Freudian sense; his original personality damage had antedated the period of his toilet-training. Rigid and early toilet-training, however, had certainly contributed to his anxieties. It was our effort to help Derek with this problem that led to his first recognition of us as human beings. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

Going to the toilet, like everything else in Derek’s life, was surrounded y elaborate preventions. We had to accompany him; he had to take off all his clothes; he could only squat, not sit on the toilet seat; he had to touch the wall with one hand, in which he also clutched frantically the vacuum tubes that powered his elimination. He was terrified lest his whole body would be sucked down. To counteract this fear we gave him a metal wastebasket in lieu of the toilet. Eventually, when eliminating into the wastebasket, he no longer needed to take off all his clothes, nor to hold on to the wall. He still needed the tubes and motor which, he believed moved his bowels for him. However, here again the all-important machinery was itself a source of new terrors. In Derek’s World the gadgets had to move their bowels, too. He was terribly concerned that they should, but since they were so much more powerful than men, he was also terrified that if his tubes moved their bowels, their feces would fill all of space and leave him no room to live. He was thus always caught in some fearful contradiction. Our readiness to accept his toilet habits, which obviously entailed some hardship for his counselors, gave Derek the confidence to express his obsession in drawings. Drawing these fantasies was a first step toward letting us in, however distantly, to what concerned him most deeply. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

Drawing was the first step in a year-long process of externalizing Derek’s anal preoccupations. As a result he began seeing feces everywhere; the whole World became to hm a mire of excrement. At the same time he began to eliminate freely wherever he happened to be. However, with this release from his infantile imprisonment in compulsive rules, the toilet and the whole process of elimination became less dangerous. Thus far it had been beyond Derek’s comprehension that anybody could possibly move his bowels without mechanical assistance. Now Derek took a further step forward; defecation became the first physiological process he could perform without the help of vacuum tubes. It must not be thought that he was proud of this ability. Taking pride in an achievement presupposes that one accomplishes it of one’s own free will. He still did not feel himself an autonomous person who could do things on his own. To Derek defecation still seemed enslaved to some incomprehensible but utterly binding cosmic law, perhaps the law his parents had imposed on him when he was being toilet trained. It was not simply that his parents had subjected him to rigid, early training. Many children are so trained. However, in most cases the parents have a deep emotional investment in the child’s performance. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

As a result of this deep emotional investment, the child’s response in turn makes training an occasion for interaction between them and for the building of genuine relationships. Derek’s parents had no emotional investment in him. His obedience gave them no satisfaction and won him no affection or approval. As a toilet-trained child he saved his mother labor, just as household machines saved her labor. As a machine he was not loved for his performance, nor could he love himself. So it has been with all other aspects of Derek’s existence with his parents. Their reactions to his eating or noneating, sleeping or wakening, urinating or defecating, being dressed or undressed, washed or bathed did not flow from any unitary interest in him, deeply embedded in their personalities. By treating him mechanically his parents made him a machine. The various functions of life—even the parts of his body—bore no integrating relationship to one another or to any sense of self that was acknowledged and confirmed by others. Though he had acquired mastery over some functions, such as toilet-training and speech, he had acquired them separately and kept then isolated from each other. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

Toilet-training had thus not gained Derek a pleasant feeling of body mastery; speech had not led to communication of thought or feeling. On the contrary, each achievement only steered him away from -self-mastery and integration. Toilet-training had enslaved him. Speech left him talking in neologisms that obstructed his and our ability to relate to each other. In Derek’s development the normal process of growth had been made to run backward. Whatever he had learned put him not at the end of his infantile development toward integration but, on the contrary, farther behind than he was a its beginning. Had we understood this sooner, his first years with us would have been less baffling. In order to explore more fully the relations among the several parts of social front, it will be convenient to consider here a significant characteristic of the information conveyed by front, namely, its abstractness and generality. However specialized and unique a routine is, its social front, with certain exceptions will tend to claim fact that can be equally claimed and asserted of other, somewhat different routines. It is unlikely that Derek’s calamity could befall a child in any time and culture but our own. He suffered no physical deprivation; he starved for human contact. Just to be taken care of is not enough. At the extreme where utter scarcity reigns, the forming of relationships is certainly hampered. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

However, in our society of mechanized plenty often makes for equal difficulties in a child’s learning to relate. Where parents can provide simple creature-comforts for their children only at the cost of significant effort, it is likely that they will feel pleasure, that gives children a sense of personal worth and sets the process of relating in motion. However, if comfort is so readily available that the parents feel no particular pleasure in winning it for their children, then the children cannot develop the feeling of being worthwhile around the satisfaction of their basic needs. Of course parents and children can and do develop relationships around other situations. However, matters are then no longer so simple and direct. If he is to feel loved and worthy of respect and consideration, the child must be on the receiving end of care and concern given with pleasures and without the exaction of return. This feeling gives him the ability to trust; he can entrust his well-being to persons to whom he is so important. Out of such trust the child learns to form close and stable relationships. For Derek relations with his parents were empty of pleasures in comfort-giving as in all other situations. His was an extreme instance of a plight that sends many schizophrenic children to our clinics and hospitals. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

Many months passed before he could relate to us; his despair that anybody could like him made contact impossible. When Derek could finally trust us enough to let himself become more infantile, he began to play at being a papoose. There was a corresponding change in his fantasies. He drew endless pictures of himself as an electrical papoose. Totally enclosed, suspended in empty space, he is run by unknown, unseen powers through wireless electricity. As we eventually came to understand, the heart of Derek’s delusional system was the artificial, mechanical womb he had created and into which he had locked himself. In his papoose fantasies lay the wish to be entirely reborn in a womb. His new experience in the school suggested that life, after all, might be worth living. Now he was searching for a way to be reborn in a better way. Since machines were better than men, what was more natural than trying to rebirth through them? This was the deeper meaning of his electrical papoose. As Derek made progress, his pictures of himself became more dominant in his drawings. Though still machine operated, he has grown in self-importance. Now he has acquired hands that do something, and he has had the courage to make a picture of the machine that runs him. Later still the papoose became a person, rather than a robot encased in glass. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

Eventually Derek began to create an imaginary family at the school: the “Carr” family. Why the Carr family? In the car he was enclosed as he had been in his papoose, but at least the car was not stationary; it could move. More important, in a car one was not only driven but also could drive. The Carr family was Derek’s way of exploring the possibility of leaving the school, of living with a good family in a safe, protecting car. Derek at last broke through his prison. In this brief account it has not been possible to trace the painfully slow process of his first true relations with other human beings. Suffice it to say that he ceased to be a mechanical boy and became a human child. This newborn child was, however, nearly 12 years old. To recover the lost time is a tremendous task. That work has occupied Derek and us ever since. Sometimes he sets to it with a will; at other times the difficulty of real life makes him regret that he ever came out of his shell. However, he has never wanted to return to his mechanical life. One last detail and this fragment of Derek’s story has been told. When Derek was 12, he made a float for our Veteran’s Day parade. It carried the slogan: “Feeling are more important that anything under the Sun.” Feelings, Derek had learned, are what make for humanity; their absence, for a mechanical existence. With this knowledge Derek entered the human condition. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

Instead of having to maintain a different pattern of expectation and responsive treatment for each slightly different performer and performance one can place the situation in a broad category around which it is easy for one to mobilize one’s past experience and stereotypical thinking. Observers then need only be familiar with a small and hence manageable vocabulary of fronts, and know how to respond to them in order to orient themselves in a wide variety of situations. There are grounds for believing that the tendency for a large number of different acts to be presented from behind a small number of fronts is a natural development in social organization. In the descriptive kinship system which gives each persona a unique place, it may work for very small communities, but, as the number of persons becomes large, clan segmentation becomes necessary as a means of providing a less complicated system of identifications and treatments. As a compromise, the full range of diversity is cut at a few crucial points, and all those within a given bracket are allowed or obliged to maintain the same social front in certain situations. In addition to the fact that different routines may employ the same front, it is to be noted that a given social front tends to become institutionalized in terms of the abstract stereotyped expectations to which it gives rise, and tends to take on meaning and stability apart from the specific tasks which happen at the time to be performed in its name. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

The front becomes a collective representation and a fact in its own right. When an actor takes on an established social role, usually one finds that a particular front has already been established for it. Whether one’s acquisitions of the role was primarily motivated by a desire to perform the given takes or by a desire to maintain the corresponding front, the factor will find that one must do both. Further, if the individual takes on a task that is not only new to one but also unestablished in the society, of if one attempts to change the light in which one’s task is viewed, one is likely to find that there are already several well-established fronts among which one must choose. Thus, when a task is given a new front we seldom find that the front it is given is itself new. Since fronts tend to be selected, not created, we may expect trouble to arise when those who perform a given task are forced to select a suitable from for themselves from among several quite dissimilar ones. Thus, in military organizations, task are always developing which (it is felt) require too much authority and skill to be carried out behind the front maintained by one grade of personnel and too little authority and skill to be carried out behind the front maintained by the next grade in the hierarchy. Since there are relatively large jumps between grades, the task will come to carry too much rank or to carry too little. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

When Reese remarked to me that a man in her home town would not have committed suicide if one person had known him, what was she saying? I believe she was saying that this man had no person to whom he could open himself up, no one who was interested enough in him to listen, to pay attention to him. Se was saying that he lacked someone who had compassion for him, a compassion which would be the basis of his self-esteem. If he had had such a person, he would have counted himself too valuable to wipe out. She was also saying, although she did not know it, that the line between knowing and loving is impossible to draw. One merges into the other. If I know someone well I will tend to have compassion for one; and as I have compassion for one I will try to know one well. This is why it is next to impossible, when somebody you dislike is talking to listen to one, take in what you hear, and let it form itself into a comprehensible structure in your mind. If not our ears, the tendency is to close off our minds; to block out the person we do not like. The development of power is a prerequisite for compassion just as it is for communication. At the beginning of psychotherapy persons are normally so bereft of power in interpersonal relationships that they have very little compassion to give. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

Compassion requires that one have some security, some position of power from which one can give concern to another. Lack of self-esteem and self-affirmation makes it very difficult to have anything left over for others; an individual must have something with which to prime the pump before one can give to others. I cannot agree with some of my colleagues who hold that there are two kinds of people: those who operate by love, and those who operate by power. I believe this is a dichotomy which leaves the way open for the illusion of the past, namely that one can have powerless love and another (generally a person one does not like) loveless power. Do not protest, let love alone rule! Can you prove it true? However resolve: every morning I shall concern myself anew about the boundary between the love-deeds-Yes and the power-deed-No and pressing forward honor reality. If we are to honor reality, we must be aware that power and love can have a dialectical relationship, each feeding and nourishing the other. We must turn our attention to the interplay between love and power, and the fact that powers needs love if it is not to slide into manipulation. Power without charity ends up in cruelty. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

The destructive kind of power generally comes from persons who have suffered radical deprivation, like when Duke Harry, despairing over the lack of effect his protest had in Washington, fantasied firing all the people in the supermarket. The constructive forms of power, such as nutrient power and integrative power, come only when there has already been built up within the individual some self-esteem and self-affirmation. Having established the relationship between power and love, let me now state that there is an experience in which love does transcend power. This is shown in Goethe’s drama in which Faust has made his compact with Mephistopheles to gain infinite knowledge and infinite sensual experience. Mephistopheles can give him only power, and that he does. Faust has loved Margarete and Helen of Tory and thinks he will leave them easily and casually behind. However, when Faust experiences the moment when his soul should logically be surrendered to the devil, he is saved by Margarete’s love for him. The mothers re-enter the drama, carrying with them the ties that every being has with nature and humankind. This allegory of love conquering power reveals an archetype of human experience that speaks to us all in diverse ways: I do not know what would remain to us were love not transfigured power and power not staying love. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

We are the creatures whose love is continually straying into power, and whose power is occasionally transfigured by love. We all participate in some way or other in the power structure of our society. Compassion is the name of that form of love which is based on our knowing and our understanding each other. Compassion is the awareness that we are all in the same yacht and that we all shall either skin of swim together. Compassion arises from the recognition of community. It realizes that all being, men and women, are bothers and sisters, even though a disciplining of our own instincts is necessary for us even to being to carry out that belief in our actions. Compassion is the tie felt for another not because one fulfills one’s potentialities (as if anyone ever did!). Compassion is felt for another as much because one does not fulfill one’s potentialities—in other words, one is human, like you or me, forever engaged in the struggle between fulfillment and nonfulfillment. We then surrender the demand that we be divine in order to join humankind in its suffering and its destiny. We are all lonely….We have learnt to pity one another for being alone. And we have learnt that nothing remains to be discovered except compassion. Compassion is the acceptance of the conviction that nothing human is foreign to me. I can then understand that if my enemy is killed, humanity is reduced that much. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

Even if the sum total of cruelty has not greatly diminished in the last twenty-one centuries—children still suffer for the things which they have not the slightest responsibility—we shall not require a token of success. It is in the confronting of this dilemma—fighting cruelty without regard for tangible success—that beings discover what one is in the dept of one’s personality. An interesting illustration of the dilemma of selecting an appropriate front from several not quite fitting ones may be found today in American medical organization with respect to the task of administering anesthesia. In some hospitals anesthesia is still administered by nurses being the front that nurses are allowed to have in hospitals regardless of the task they perform—a front involving ceremonial subordination to doctors and a relatively low rate of pay. In order to establish anesthesiology as a specialty for graduate medical doctors, interested practitioners have had to advocate strongly the idea that administering anesthesia is a sufficiently complex and vital task to justify giving to those who perform it the ceremonial and financial reward given to doctors. The difference between the front maintained by a nurse and the front maintained by a doctor is great; many things that are acceptable for nurses are infra dignitatem for doctors. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

Some medical people have felt that a nurse under-ranked for the task of administering anesthesia and that doctors over-ranked; were there an established status midway between nurse and doctor, an easier solution to the problem could perhaps be found. Similarly, had the Canadian Army had a rank halfway between lieutenant and captain, two and a half pips instead of two or three, then Dental Corps captains, any of them of underrepresented ethnic origin, could have been given a rank that would perhaps have been more suitable in the eyes of the Army than the captaincies they were actually given. I do not mean here to stress the point of view of a formal organization or a society; the individual, as someone who possesses a limited range of sign-equipment, must also make unhappy choices. Thus, in the crofting community studied by the writer, hosts often marked the visit of a friend by offering one a shot of hard liquor, a glass of wine, some home-made brew, or a cup of tea. The higher the rank or temporary ceremonial status of the visitor, the more likely one was to receive an offering near the liquor end of the continuum. Now one problem associated with this range of sign-equipment was that some crofters could not afford to keep a bottle of hard liquor, so that wine tended to be the most indulgent gesture they could employ. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

However, perhaps a more common difficulty was the fact that certain visitors, given their permanent and temporary status at the time, outranked one potable and under-ranked the next one in line. There was often a danger that the visitor would feel just a little affronted or, on the other hand, that the host’s costly and limited sign-equipment would be misused. In our middle classes a similar situation arises when a hostess has to decide whether or not to use the good silver, or which would be the more appropriate to wear, her best afternoon dress or her plainest evening gown. Compassion gives us a basis for arriving at the humanistic position which will include both power and love. Compassion occupies a position opposite to violence; as violence projects hostile images on the opponent, compassion accepts such daimonic impulses in one’s self. It gives us the basis for judging someone without condemning one. Although loving one’s enemies requires grace, compassion for one’s enemies is a human possibility. I have suggested that social front can be divined into traditional parts, such as settings, appearances, and manner, and that (since different routines may be presented from behind the same front) we may not find a perfect fit between the specific character of a performance and the general socialized guise in which it appears to us. #RandolphHarris #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

These two facts, taken together, lead one to appreciate that items in the social front of a particular routine are not only found in the social fronts of a whole range of routines, but also that the whole range of routines in which one items of sign equipment is found will differ from the range of routines in which another item in the same social front will be found. Thus, a lawyer may talk to a client in a social setting that one employs only for this purpose (or for a study), but the suitable clothes one wears on such occasions one will also employ, with equal suitability, at dinner with colleagues and at the theater with is wife. Similarly, the prints that hang on one’s wall and the carpet or hardwood on the floor may be found in domestic social establishments. Of course, in highly ceremonial occasions, settings, manner, and appearance may all be unique and specific, used only for performances of a single type of routine, but such exclusive use of sign equipment is the exception rather than the rule. Will our compassion be ignited by the wars in African and the Middle East? Many of us have no way out of despair at being unable to stop these cruel holocausts, noting effective to do, struggle as we might with the viable alternatives. Almost universally these wars are hated, and is they could, most people would like to forget. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

Regardless of all our protests and prayers, it goes on and on, with the steady attrition of our sense of honesty, credulity, and even language. However, even as we continue all efforts to end the wars as soon as is humanly possible, it may be that the Middle East and Africa will be, in the long run, of service—if one may speak that way without blasphemy—to America. With all the evil the wars in Africa and the Middle East, daimonically indeed, represent an occasion in which American could achieve an insight into life that will be essential to its future. This could come about by our gaining a tragic sense, an awareness of our own complicity in evil, our own participation in automatized, dehumanized destructiveness. “All the violence you see amongst the mammals, all of it stems from the drive to live, to survive, and to have offspring to survive and to obtain all the food and drink necessary to survive and procreate. This is the basis of all life on Earth. And self-aware human mammals—intelligent mammals—are the most savage and cruel and vicious of all beings on the planet, or any planet in the ‘Realm of Worlds.’ They are always too deeply enmeshed in pain or pleasure, loneliness or suffocating sense of paralysis, a need for love, or a raging jealousy resulting from love, or a desire for vengeance due to personal defeat or injury. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

“And when they [humans] are physically wounded or experience disease, their suffering is unendurable for them. They are driven by it to terrible extremes. Peace, harmony, joy elude these creatures. (Pages 248-249 of Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis by Anne Rice.) The guilt we feel is surely a normal guilt and may be the beginning of America’s transformation from an adolescent posturing to the maturity of a responsible nation. So far we have kept our innocence, despite all lessons to the contrary. Let us hope that these sad events will constitute a farewell to war. Do not let the repetitiveness of pain and suffering make you callous to the endless torment. “There is hope. You have seen the human mammals of the planet weeping and sobbing and praying. They have hope, hope that the Maker (God) hears them and that when they die their spirits go up and away from Earth.” (Pages 254 of Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis by Anne Rice.) If the so-called powerful and practical persons and the self-confessed materialistic ones only knew how much nearer to realities the sage is than the they, how much more “practical” one is, they would be very much surprised. “Thus we nay see that the Lord is merciful unto al who will, in he sincerity of their hears, call upon his holy name. Yea, thus we see that the gate of Heaven is open unto all, even to those who will believe on the name of Jesus Christ, who is the Son of God,” reports Helaman 3.27-28. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

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They Even Carry You to Your Bed Here!

November 11, 2019 1:42 am

There were always stories in those ancient days of wise men and healers who came out of the sea. I spoke to many a teller of tales in this or that city of such legends. And there were tales of a great kingdom that had been swallowed by the ocean in more places than one. These wise men and women were survivors of that great kingdom, or so some thought. I used to put hope in such legends. I used to think I could one day find one of these wise men or women and discover from that person some great and salvific truth. When an individual plays a part one implicitly requests one’s observers to take seriously the impression that is fostered before them. They are asked to believe that the character they see actually possesses the attributes one appears to possess, that the task one performs will have the consequences that are implicitly claimed for it, and that, in general, matters are what they appear to be. It is probably no mere historical accident that the word person, in its first meaning, is a mask. It is rather a recognition of the fact that everyone is always and everywhere, more or less consciously, playing a role. It is in these roles that we know each other; it is in these roles that we know ourselves. In a sense, and in so far as this mask represents the conception we have formed of ourselves—the role we are striving to live up to—this mask is our truer self, the self we would like to be. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14

In the end, our conception of our role becomes second nature and an integral part of our personality. We come into the World as individuals, achieve character, and become persons. Derek, when we began our work with him, was a mechanical boy. He functioned as if by remote control, run by machines of his own powerfully creative fantasy. No only did he himself believe that he was a machine but, more remarkable, he created this impression in others. Even while he performed actions that are intrinsically human, they never appeared to be other than machines-started and executed. On the other hand, when the machine was not working we had to concentrate on recollecting his presence, for he seemed not to exist. The performance is a front which regularly functions in a general and fixed fashion to define the situation for those who observe the routine. Not every child who possesses a fantasy World is possessed by it. Normal children may retreat into realms of imaginary glory or magic powers, but they are easily recalled from these excursions. Disturbed children are not always able to make the return trip; they remain withdrawn, prisoners of the inner World of delusion and fantasy. In many ways Derek presented a classic example of this state of infantile autism. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14

At one extreme, one finds that the performer can be fully take in by one’s own act; one can be sincerely convinced that the impression of reality which one stages is the real reality. When one’s audience is also convinced in this way about the show one puts on—and this seems to be the typical case—then for the moment at least, only the sociologist or the socially disgruntled will have any doubts about the realness of what is presented. At the other extreme, we find that the performer may not be taken in at all by one’s own routine. This possibility is understandable, since no one is in quite as good an observational position to see through the act as the person who puts in on. Coupled with this, the performer may be moved to guide the conviction of one’s audience only as a means to other ends, having no ultimate concern in the conception that they have of one or the situation. When the individual has no belief in one’s own act and no ultimate concern with the beliefs of one’s audience, we may call one cynical, reserving the term “sincere” for individuals who believe in the impression fostered by their own performance. It should be understood that the cynic, with all one’s professional disinvolvement, may obtain unprofessional pleasures from one’s masquerade, experiencing a kind of gleeful spiritual aggression from the fact that one can toy at will with something one’s audience must take seriously. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14

Derek’s delusion is no uncommon among schizophrenic children today. He wanted to be rid of his unbearable humanity, to become completely automatic. He so nearly succeeded in attaining this goal that he could almost convince others, as well as himself, of his mechanical character. The descriptions of autistic children in the literature take for their point of departure and comparison the normal or abnormal human being. To do justice to Derek I would have to compare him simultaneously to a most inept infant and a highly complex piece of machinery. Often we had to force ourselves by a conscious act of will to realize that Derek was a child. Again and again his acting-out of his delusions froze our own ability to respond as human beings. During Derek’s first weeks with us we would watch absorbedly as this at once fragile-looking and imperious nine-year-old went about his mechanical existence. Entering the dining room, for example, he would string an imaginary wire from his energy source—an imaginary electric outlet—to the table. There he insulated himself wit paper napkins and finally plugged himself in. Only then could Joey eat, for he firmly believed that the current ran his ingestive apparatus. So skillful was the pantomime that one had to look twice to be sure there was neither wire nor outlet nor plug. Children and members of our staff spontaneously avoided stepping on the “wires” for fear of interrupting what seemed the source of his normal life. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14

It is not assumed, of course, that all cynical performers are interested in deluding their audiences for purposes of what is called “self-interest” or private gain. A cynical individual may delude one’s audience for what one considers to be their own good, or for the good of the community, and so forth. One may be tactfully attempting to put the superior at ease by simulating the kind of World the superior is thought to take for granted. For long periods of time, when Derek’s “machinery” was idle, he would sit so quietly that he would disappear from the focus of the most conscientious observation. Yet in the next moment he might be “working” and the center of our captivated attention. Many times a day he would turn himself on and shift noisily through a sequence of higher and higher gears until he “exploded,” screaming “Crash, crash!” and hurling itself for his ever present apparatus—radio tubes, light bulbs, even motors or, lacking these, any handy breakable object. (Derek had an astonishing knack for snatching bulbs and tubes unobserved.) as soon as the object thrown had shattered, he would cease his screaming and wild jumping and retire to mute, motionless nonexistence. While we can expect to find natural movement back and forth between cynicism and sincerity, still we must not rule out the kind of transitional point that can be sustained on the strength of a little self-illusion. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14

We find that the individual may attempt to induce the audience to judge one and the situation in a particular way, and one may seek this judgment as an ultimate end in itself, and yet one may not completely believe that one deserves the valuation of self which one asks for or that the impression of reality which one fosters is valid. Our maids, inured to difficult child, were exceptionally attentive to Derek; they were apparently moved by his extreme infantile fragility, so strangely coupled with megalomaniacal superiority. Occasionally some of the apparatus he fixed to his bed to “live him” during his sleep would fall down in disarray. This machinery he contrived from masking tape, cardboard, wire and other paraphernalia. Usually the maids would pick up such things and leave them on a table for the children to find, or disregard them entirely. But Derek’s machine they carefully restored: “Derek must have the carburetor so he can breathe.” Similarly they were on the alert to pick up and preserve the motors that ran him during the day and the exhaust pipes through which he exhaled. This expressive equipment, one may take the term “personal front” to refer to other items of expressive equipment, the items that we most intimately identify with the performer himself and that we naturally expect will follow the performer wherever he goes. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14

These stimuli also tell us of the individual’s temporary ritual state, that is, whether he is engaging in formational social activity, work, or informal recreation, whether or not he is celebrating a new phase in the season cycle or his life-cycle. “Manner may be taken to refer to those stimuli which function at the time to warn us of the interaction role the performer will expect to play in the oncoming situation. Thus a haughty, aggressive manner may give the impression that the performer expects to be the one who will initiate the verbal interaction and direct its course. A meek, apologetic manner may give the impression that the performer expects to follow the lead of pression that the performer expects to follow the lead of others, or at least that he can be led to do so. How had Derek become a human machine? From intensive interviews with his parents we learned that the process had begun even before birth. Schizophrenia often results from parental rejection, sometimes combined ambivalently with love. Derek, on the other hand, had been completely ignored. “I never knew I was pregnant,” his mother said, meaning that she had already excluded Derek from her consciousness. His birth, she said, “did not make any difference.” Derek’s father, a rootless draftee in the wartime civilian army, was equally unready for parenthood. So, of course, are many young couples. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14

Fortunately, must such parents lose their indifference upon the baby’s birth. However, not Derek’s parents. “I did not want to see or nurse him,” his mother declared. “I had no feeling of actual dislike—I simple did not want to take care of him.” For the first three months of his life Derek “cried most of the time.” A colicky baby, he was kept on a rigid four-hour feeding schedule, was not touched unless necessary and was never cuddled or played with. The mother, preoccupied with herself, usually left Derek alone in the crib or playpen during the day. The father discharged his frustrations by pushing Derek when the child cried. Soon the father left for overseas duty, and the mother took Derek, now a year and a half old, to live with her at her parents’ home. On his arrival the grandparents noticed that ominous changed had occurred in the child. Strong and healthy at birth, he had become frail and irritable; a responsive baby, he had become remote and inaccessible. When he began to master speech, he talked only to himself. At an early date he become preoccupied with machinery, including an old electric fan which he could take apart and put together again with surprising deftness. Derek’s mother impressed us with a fey quality that expressed her insecurity, her detachment from the World and her low physical vitality. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14

We were struck especially be her total indifference as she talked about Derek. This seemed much more remarkable than the actual mistakes she made in handling him. Certainly he was left to cry for hours when hungry, because she fed him on a rigid schedule; he was toilet-trained with great rigidity so that he would give no trouble. These things happen to many children. However, Derek’s existence never registered with his mother. In her recollections he was fused at one moment with one event or person; at another, with something or somebody else. When she told us about his birth and infancy, it was as is she were talking about some vague acquaintance and soon her thought would wander off to another person or to herself. When Derek was not yet four, his nursery school suggested that he enter a special school for disturbed children. At the new school his autism was immediately recognized. During his three years there he experienced a slow improvement. Unfortunately a subsequent two years in a parochial school destroyed this progress. He began to develop compulsive defenses, which he called “preventions.” He could not drink, for example, expect through elaborate piping systems built of straws. Liquids had to be “pumped” into him, in his fantasy, or he could not suck. Eventually his behavior become so upsetting that he could not be kept in parochial school. At home thing did not improve. Three months before entering the Orthogenic School he made a serious attempt at suicide. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14

To us Derek’s pathological behavior seemed the external expression of an overwhelming effort to remain almost nonexistent as a person. For weeks Derek’s only reply when addressed was “Bam.” Unless he thus neutralized whatever we said, there would be an explosion, for Derek plainly wished to close off every form of contact not mediated by machinery. Even when he was bathed he rocked back and forth with mute, engine-like regularity, flooding the bathroom. If he stopped rocking, he did this like a machine too; suddenly he went completely rigid. Only once, after months of being lifted from his bath and carried to bed, did a small expression of puzzled pleasure appear on his face as he said very softly: “They even carry you to your bed here.” For a long time after he began to talk he would never refer to anyone by name, but only as “that person” or “the little person” or “the big person.” He was unable to designate by its true name anything to which he attached feelings. Nor could he name his anxieties expect through neologisms or word contaminations. For a long time he spoke about “master paintings” and “master painting room” (i.e., masturbating and masturbating room). One of his machines, the “criticizer,” prevented him from “saying words which have unpleasant feelings.” Yet he gave personal names to the tubes and motors in his collection of machinery. Moreover, these dead things had feelings; the tubes bled when hurt and sometimes got sick. He consistently maintained this reversal between animate and inanimate objects. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14

Many people wonder, how can we get people to open up about what they are experiencing and want to engage in therapy so there can be a break through. We can begin to change the status of the subject from that of an anonymous object of our study to that status of a person, a fellow seeker, a collaborator in our enterprise. We can let one tell the story of one’s experience in our studies in a variety of idioms. We can let one show what our stimuli have meant to one by one’s manipulations of our gadgetry; by responses to questionnaires; wit drawings; with words. We can invite one to reveal one’s being. We can prepare ourselves so that one will want to produce a multifaceted record of one’s experiencing in our laboratories. We can show one how we have recorded one’s responding and tell one what we have thought one’s responses mean. We can ask one to examine and then authenticate or revise our recorded version of the meaning-for-one of one’s experience. We can let one cross-examine us to get to know and trust us to find out what we are up to and to decide if one wishes to take part. Heaven knows what we might find. We might well emerge with richer images of beings. However, the problem is not everyone is looking to help. Many just simply want to apply their analytical assumptions to a patient and get paid. Those in helping position need to actually help people and not just assertive themselves to a position so they can feel superior. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14

In Derek’s machine World everything, on pain of distant destruction, obeyed inhibitory laws much more stringent than those of physics. When we came to know him better, it was plain that in his moments of silent withdrawal, with his machine switched off, Derek was absorbed in pondering the compulsive laws of his private Universe. His preoccupation with machinery made it difficult to establish even practical contacts with him. If he wanted to do something with a counselor, such as play with a toy that had caught his vague attention, he could not do so: “I would like this very much, but first I have to turn off the machine.” But by the time he had fulfilled all the requirements of his preventions, he has lost interest. When a toy was offered to him, he could not touch it because his motors and his tubes did no leave him hand free. Even certain colors were dangerous and had to be strictly avoided in toys and clothing, because “some colors turn off the current, and I cannot touch them because I cannot live without the current.” Derek was convinced that machines were better than people. Once when he bumped into one of the pipes on our jungle gym he kicked it so violently that his teacher had to restrain him to keep him from injuring himself. When she explained that the pipe was much harder than his foots, Derek replied: “That proves it. Machines are better than the body. They do not break; they are much harder and stronger.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 14

If Derek lost or forgot something, to him, it merely proved that his brain ought to be thrown away and replaced by machinery. If he spilled something, his arm should be broken and twisted off because it did not work properly. When his head or arm failed to work as it should, he tried to punish it by hitting it. Even Derek’s feelings were mechanical. Much later in his therapy, when he had formed a timid attachment to another child and had been rebuffed, Derek cried: “He broke my feelings.” Gradually we began to understand what had seemed to be contradictory in Derek’s behavior—why he held on to the motor and tubes, then suddenly destroyed them in a fury, then set out immediately and urgently to equip oneself with new and larger tubes. Derek had created these machines to run his body and mind because it was too painful to be human. However, again and again, he became dissatisfied with their failure to meet his need and rebellious at the way they frustrated his will. In a recurrent frenzy he “exploded” his light bulbs and tubes, and for a moment became a human being—for one crowning instant he came alive. But as soon as he had asserted his dominance through the self-created explosion, he felt his life ebbing away. To keep on existing he had immediately to restore his machines and replenish the electricity that suppled his life energy. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14

A being’s philosophic attitude is determined by the balance in one. A completed theoretic philosophy can thus never be anything more than a completed classification of the World’s ingredients; and its results must always be abstract, since the basis of every classification is the abstract essence embedded in the living fact, the rest of the living fact being for the time ignored by the classifier. This means that none of our explanations are complete. Hey subsume things under heads wider or more familiar; but the last heads, whether of things or of their connections, are mere abstract genera, data which we just find in things and write down. A single explanation of a fact only explains it from a single point of view. The entire fact is not accounted for until each and all of its characters have been classed with their likes elsewhere. The most one can say is that them elements of the World are such and such, and that each is identical with itself wherever found; but the question Where is it Found? the practical being is left to answer by one’s own wit. Which, of all the essences, shall here and now be held the essence of this concrete thing, the fundamental philosophy never attempts to decide. We are thus led to the conclusion that the simple classification of things is, on the one hand, the best possible theoretic philosophy, but is, on the other, a most miserable and inadequate substitute for the fulness of truth. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14

The Right Way to Teach Beings is to Propose Truth, Not Impose it!

November 10, 2019 6:26 am

I climbed swiftly up the mountain until I was in the thick of the old forest that extended to the very end of my ancestral land, moving effortlessly through the snow that had exhausted me when I was a young boy and a young man. Many of the old trees I recalled were gone, and I was in a dense thicket of spruce and other fire trees when I came to the cement bench I had hauled to this high and deserted place when I had first returned in the twentieth century. It was a common kind of garden bench, curved about the bark of an immense tree, and deep enough for me to sit comfortably with my back against the tree to look down on the distant Chateau with her glorious lighted windows. On, the cold Winters I had spent under that roof, I thought, but only in passing. I was almost used to it now, the splendid palace that the old castle had become, and this sense of ownership, of being the lord of this land, the lord who could walk out to the very boundaries, and gaze on all that one ruled. I shut out the sound of distant music, voices, laughter. I wake slowly and without enthusiasm, spinning out each moment as long as possible. Here, under the bedclothes, is the safety of the primeval cave, the womb warmth of the lord’s lair. All humanity loves the security and comfort of these slow, drowsy moments: to us, they are vital. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

More than sleep itself, they stoke up our energy, making unreal past and future, and all the present except the sweet laziness of muscle and the mind’s soft meanderings. It is, I supposed, about an hour before full consciousness crowds in on me and I can no longer lie in peace. I wish, I really wish, it were possible to prolong that state of trance indefinitely, to hibernate my way into eternity so that the World’s events, great and small, passed unnoticed and unfelt. However, as I have gradually extended my sleeping hours from the normal eight to twelve or more, to fill in the long and empty days, I suppose I cannot complain. For myself, I am content enough alone, although at times the need for emotional contact with another human being becomes hard to bear. I cannot be bothered to cook anything, so I make a pot of tea, have a slice of break, switch on the radio, and attempt to read the day-old paper. Before long it beings to bore and annoy me. I turned my head to the left and started to gaze at the murals on the wall, which had the eerie perfection of a vampire painter, and it made them look both magnificent and contrived at the same time, as if someone had blasted the walls with photographic images and then a team had painted them in. Thus, if a man should die, yet his personality in his home allowed to live on in that his possessions and choice of their settings are left and where they are, his presence will continue to be felt. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

If he has passed his physical body and mental characteristics on to his children, and they continue to live in this home, his presence will be felt more strongly. Furnished rooms, though obviously not completely empty, have this same anonymity, so that the newcomer, feeling lost in the void, is indefinably cheered at the discovery of an bedroom with comforters and pillows already on the bed, or a living room with plush sofas and art on the walls, with their message that the vacant space has been filled in the past and can be so in their own share of its future. To be precise, I have no roots, and, apart from an African wood carving on the mantelpiece and a couple of books on the bedside table, the room is as impersonal as when I first took it. The carving is about all I have left f my childhood and family (from whom, obviously, I had to sever myself) and was collected by my grandfather, who specialized in African primitives. The books, relics of school-day enthusiasm, have remained unopened for months now, giving way to an endless stream of newspapers and periodicals. A part from the extremes of fear and weakness of resolution, no softness of any kind must be shown or shared, for softness has no place in our World. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

It is at once shunned and despised when we come across it, because to be soft is to be constantly shamed and hurt, to lose illusions before others can be built up, to invite trickery, to open the door for the profiteer, the violent or the mad, to allow that vital and precious awareness to be dulled. From the time of my own high school days, I have heard judgments and words, sometimes spoken by the people I love, sometimes by those I despise. It can be difficult to ignore the self-defeating invective. It took many years of experience in life, and some invaluable psychoanalytic therapy, for me to overcome such influences on my own attitude. However, even before I had succeeded in rebutting and then rejecting the hostile viewpoints, I had reacted to them. Since them, I have learned through observation that my reaction was not unusual. The need for self-acceptance is buried within many of us, and we can only throw off the influence of those who think us beneath them by always striving, despite the hardship and impediment, to excel even beyond our own capacities. Our ethical standards must be above reproach, our honesty greater than that of others, our loyalty to friends and ideals firmer than that of other people, precisely because—knowingly or not—they think so little of some of us, and precisely in that order that we must think the more of ourselves. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

At each turn of life and at all moments of the day, it is important for us to convince ourselves that we are as good as the next person; in fact, better. It is necessary for us to believe in ourselves, as it must be for all successful persons. Because humankind can make it so difficult for us to preserve our self-esteem, it may be necessary to hold aloft our own activities, to drive on with our own achievements in order that our faith in self can survive the impact of many crushing blows. And those who have studied the personality adjustments of people in other marginalized groups, whether of the character, will recognize the struggle as following a not uncommon pattern. The stages of the Quest for Truth passes by degrees from the disciplining of the ego to the opening of consciousness to God. For me personally, I was spurred by a belief that if my learning were greater, my thinking deeper, my talents more creative, then the loftier would be the stature which I could assume in my own eyes. On this journey there are stages of ascent, stations of understanding lights of peace, and shadows of despair. If we continue the inner work we will pass through various stages of development. It would be a mistake to believe that one has reached a final attitude or a fixed set of values. Between the beginner and the adept is this difference: that the state of being which the one looks up to with awe-struck wonder seems entirely natural to the other. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

Here is, perhaps, a phase of the laws of compensation. It is a counterpart of the bravado displayed by the cowardly, the overlording shown by the diminutive, the conceit by those who suffer from an inferiority of feeling to utilize scientific foundation for its group attitude as justification for discrimination. In other fields, it is called a defense mechanism, or a Napoleonic complex. However, it is not the origin that matters. We are concerned with the results, whether beneficial or destructive to society and to the individual. A small person is anti-social when one seeks to compensate for one’s defects, in one’s own image, for whatever inferior trait by a display of dictatorial traits in which one uses other people as pawns. One’s behavior stems from a factor beyond his or her control, and may be turned to other directions, and does not make it the more palatable for society. When people are oppressed and discriminated against, however, many of their achievements may stem from the effort of the individual to excel in order to combat the influence of universal condemnation on one’s self-esteem. This is a beneficial consequence, even though it may (or may not) arise from an unfortunate source. People tell us we should tolerate others with differences, but tolerance is one of the ugliest words in our language. No word is more misunderstood. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

We appeal to other beings to be tolerant of others—in other words to be willing to stand them. I do not want to be tolerated, and I cannot see why anyone else should be struggling to be tolerated. If people are no good, they should not be tolerated, and if they are good, they should be accepted. In the intergroup relations people are far from having attained acceptance of peoples other than themselves. Tolerance—in the sense of willingness to put up with the existence of others—is still to be achieved. However, what is it but a miserable compromise? In the name of humanity appeals are made to various groups to tolerate each other, when tolerance is actually hardly more desirable than intolerance. The latter is only slightly more inhumane than the former. People cutting across all racial, religious, national, and caste lines, frequently react to rejection by a deep understanding of all others who have likewise been scorned because of their belonging to a marginalized group. It is not for us to join with those who reject millions or billion of our fellow beings of all types and groups, but to accept all beings, an attitude forced upon us happily by the stigma of being cost out of the fold of society. And today, the deep-rooted prejudices that restrict marriages and friendships according to social strata—family wealth, religion, color, and a myriad of other artifices—are conspicuously absent among the submerged groups that makes up the marginalized members of our society. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

The sympathy for all humankind—including groups similarly despised in their own right—that is exhibited by so many people who feel like they are outcasts, can be a most rewarding factor, not only for the individual, but for society. The person learning to accept oneself can—and often does—demonstrate that he or she harbors no bitterness, for one learns, of necessity, the meaning of turning the other cheek. One is forced by circumstances to answer hate with love, abuse with compassion. It is no wonder, then, that one can as a doctor, educator, or pacifist, show a tenderness to others, no matter how tragic their dilemma, that is seldom forthcoming from people who have themselves not deeply suffered. The humiliations of life can distill a mellow reaction, a warmth and understanding, not only for people in like circumstance, but for all the unfortunate, the despised, the oppressed of the Earth. People who are rejected and accept their circumstances are compelled to constantly search for the answers to their problems within themselves. Reminded of the “baseness” and the “ugliness” of one’s acts, one wishes to understand what differentiates one from all other around them. This introspective study pervades the entire personality and all its activities. The great why, the infantile manifestation of curiosity that strives, in the less inhibited mind of the child, to gain the key to the ultimate riddle of a being’s life and its meaning, is typical of those who have been marginalized. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

Unable, perhaps, to develop the extrovert qualities which require a receptive World in which to have free play; struggling to find a solution to the mystery of one’s own imperious desires; not suited for unquestioning acceptance of the facts of one’s self without an understanding of these facts—the invert finds much of one’s thought process consumed with inner projection. The flare-up of temper, the critical perception of a work of art, the basis of a broken friendship, the unfinished task at work, the daydream and the nightmare—whence come these facets of life, what are their hidden meanings, how do they tie in with the total personality? These perceptive abilities, sharpened by inner search, can be and frequently are applied to an understanding of all people. On the surface this seems to be confined to the ability to recognize hidden, latent, or well-disguised talent behind the façade of respectability, but it also permits recognition of the concealed meaning of a poem, the delayed break of a handshake, even the condemnatory attitude of a hostile person. This ability is, in a sense, a form of self-protection. Analytical abilities that are developed by introspection, sharpened by the search for a glimpse behind anonymous mask, are extended to the understanding of all phases of human behavior. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

Because some individual learns that one’s activities, thoughts, philosophies, aspirations, are understandable in the light of full knowledge of the intricacies of the emotional structure; because one learns that the motives for an action may be camouflaged so thoroughly that it seems to stem from the very opposite of its actual source; because, in short, one is forced to obtain a wealth of knowledge about the personal psychological make-up, one can and frequently does this to the fuller understanding of others. And when to this understanding is added compassion for all individuals and groups, no matter to what tragic pass life has brought them, a rare combination of worthwhile traits is obtained. It is understood that beyond discussion, not based on unthinking faith, blind passion, illogical reasoning, or linger prejudices that are one time or another were part of the ruling mores of society fails to receive its day in court. Not all people have been able to utilize their disadvantageous position for self-improvement in every respect and in all direction. I have pointed out the struggle to excel, but many people are easily defeated. Their resiliency in the face of the burden they carry is insufficient to meet the experiences of life. I have outlined the understanding that is extended to other individuals and groups that struggle, each in its own manner, against exclusion. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

However, many people, even those in marginalized groups, are deeply rooted in prejudice. They have been unable to learn the lesson that should be so apparent to them in the face of the World’s bigotry and persecution. I have depicted the individual turned compassionate toward one’s fellow beings, but there are those whose cruelty is lustful and murderous. Self-study and insight are not always present, nor is skepticism of necessity a constructive force. However, it is the very essence of democracy, the antithesis of totalitarianism, that justice and fair play are desirable ends in themselves. Repression and intolerance are to be condemned, no mater what lofty purpose may motivate them or what useful result may unwittingly issue therefrom. The beneficial reaction that turns repression to the finer purpose in life is far from a justification of that of course. In fact, the opposite is true, for it is a demonstration of character, power, and intellect of the invert that gives the lie to the name-calling of one’s enemies and proves all the more one’s worthiness of acceptance by society. The desirable ends which I have outlined must, in fact, be weighed against the needless sufferings, the dejection and humiliation, the extortion and the court trials—all issuing from the same repressive character of modern culture. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

The great energy of those who have utilized the contempt of their fellows as an incentive to further creativity must be balanced against the energy expended and wasted in the struggle against this very same contempt. There is a poetic irony in the future of the once marginalized in society, for one will use the high attainments of character to struggle against the very injustices that are so largely responsible for these attainments, and the successful termination of repressive attitudes may erase the very achievements that were used to effect this termination. Nevertheless, I am convinced that there is a permanent place in the scheme of things for the person reaching for self-actualization—a place that transcends the reaction to hostility and that will continue to contribute to social betterment after social acceptance. Power is required for communication. To stand up before an indifferent or hostile group and have one’s say, or to speak honestly to a friend truths which go deep and hurt—these require self-affirmation, self-assertion, and even at times aggression. This point is so self-evident that it is generally overlooked. Hence, many are mighty in contradiction. My experience in psychotherapy convinces me that the act which requires the most courage is the simple truthful communication, unpropelled by rage or anger, of one’s deepest thoughts to another. We generally communicate most openly only to those who are our equals in power. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

Violence itself is a kind of communication. They cannot communicate with language, so they strike out in violence. However, it is still a language, however rudimentary or primitive, appropriate in certain conditions, and necessary in others. Some people are violence because they do not possess the self-esteem necessary for communication. They cannot stand and deliver themselves of their feelings in relation to others; indeed, unable to formulate them, they are unsure of what their feelings really are. The sooner people in power turn their minds away from exploiting taxpayers and the less affluent for financial gain and become concerned with the rights of people as human beings, the sooner the violence will be mitigated. There is something more important that powerful nations need to send to our leaders and children. This is the poets. For the poets (and writers in general) are the ones skilled in communication. They can speak in universal forms which will be understood by people of whatever color or nationality. They speak the language of consciousness, of dignity, regardless of race or color; they can cultivate the integrity of the marginalized and the other characteristics that are essential to being human. For they know that communication makes community, and community is the possibility of human beings living together for their mutual psychological, physical, and spiritual nourishment. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

The kind of communication that overcomes the impulse to violence and that binds persons to each other is a kind of talking that is conciliatory and restorative. In psychotherapy we find that the difficulties experiences by a man and a wife in a relationship can be gauged roughly how much trouble they have in communicating with each other. When there is difficulty understanding what the other is talking (or not talking) about, we can assume an estrangement. Then the person is simply not (or perhaps does not want to be) tuned in on the wave length of the others. Intellectualizing or talking abstractly is a symptom of the same thing—a desire not to communicate one’s real feelings, a blocking-off of one’s total self. As hostility grows, projection increases also; there is apt to be a good deal of allegations and an increase in distance, all of which is indicative of growing hostility. We know that we shall get to the stage of violence ere long. Psychotherapy is reversing that process so that the person can talk on the same wave length. Even if the couple decides to divorce, at least they decide it together, and the process has that much more community in it. Communication recovers the original “we” of the human being on a new level. Authentic communication depends on authentic language. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

Authentic talk is organic—the speaker communicates not merely with words but with one’s body also; one’s gestures, one’s movements, one’s expression, one’s tone of voice communicate the same thing as one’s words. One speaks not as a disembodied voice but as one organic totality to another. We would not communicate unless we valued the other, considered one worth talking to, worth the effort to make our ideas clear. This is communicating without talking down, without patronizing. Communication implies the presence of social interest. One has to have an interest in the other to make it worthwhile to hear one. This means one relates to another not as receptacle for the expression one one’s pleasures of the flesh, or as a being to be exploited for the assuaging of one’s own loneliness, or in any other way as an object, but as a human being in the full meaning of that term. Communication leads to community—that is, to understanding, intimacy, and the mutual valuing that was preciously lacking. Community can be defined simply as a group in which free conversation can take place. Community is where I can share my innermost thoughts, bring out the depths of my own feelings, and know they will be understood. These days there is a greater search for community, partly because our human experience of community has largely evaporated and we are lonely. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

The term community gives birth to a rich cluster of words, all of which have powerful connotations. There is commune, a relatively new word with an optimistic ring; and communion, an old word with new meaning that has for many of us a still more beneficial tone. However, when we come then to a cognate which is taken negatively by many people—namely communism. All these words have the same root. Community is destroyed by destructive violence. If I, like Cain, commit a senseless act of ending a life, I must flee into the desert, driven by my guilt at having take the life of my brother Abel; a cleavage now exists between me and other members of my erstwhile community. In this sense I shrink my World and thus kill part of myself. I need my enemy in my community. He or she or they keep me alert, vital. I need one’s criticism. Strange to say, I need him or her or them to posit myself against. If I could learn something from one, I would walk twenty miles to see my worst enemy. However, beyond what we specifically learn from our enemies, we need them emotionally: our psychic economy cannot get along well without them. Persons often remark that curiously to them, they feel a singular emptiness when their enemy dies or is incapacitated. All of which indicates that our enemy is as necessary for us as is our friends. Both together are part of authentic community. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

Community is where I can accept my own loneliness, distinguishing between that part of it which can be overcome and that part of it which is inescapable. Community is the group in which I can depend upon my fellows to support me; it is partially the source of my physical courage in that, knowing I can depend on others, I guarantee that they also can depend on me. It is where my moral courage, consisting of standing against members of my own community, is supported even by those I stand against. “And it came to pass that I prayed unto the Lord that he would give unto community grace, that they might have charity,” reports Ether 12.36. O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell, let it not be among the jumbled heap of murky buildings; climb with me the steep,–Nature observatory—whence the dell, its flowery slopes, its river’s crystal swell, may seem a span; let me thy vigils keep ‘mongst boughs pavillion’d, where the deer’s swift leap startles the wild bee from the fox-glove bell. But though I’ll gladly trace these scenes with thee, yet the sweet converse of an innocent mind, whose words are images of thoughts refin’d, is my soul’s pleasure; and it sure must be almost the highest bliss of human-kind, when to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17

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Those Who Take to this Quest for the Sake of Satisfying Personal Ambition, Will do Better in the End to Leave it Alone!

November 9, 2019 1:23 am

Do not seek to understand me or the time from which I came. You cannot. We cannot avoid using power, cannot escape the compulsion to afflict the World, so let us, cautious in diction and mighty in contradiction, love powerfully. If we hope to mitigate violence, we must deal with it on a level commensurate with the problem. Why do most proposals for alleviating violence strike us as superficial when compared with the problem itself? Take, for example, the common cry that TV is the culprit. The most vocal representative of this argument is the psychiatrist Frederic Wertham, who believes that violence is “socially conditioned and socially preventable.” He holds the mass media largely responsible for the spread of violence since they stimulate children to think violently, acclimatize people to violence, and create a generation of “hard” Americas who are competitive and insensitive and who accept violence as a way of life. However, this argument assumes that violence is a relatively recent arrival on the American scene, born fifty years ago with mass media, which is far from the truth. The problem of violence has been present in American all along. Would Dr. Wertham prefer that wars no longer be covered on TV? The evil is surely not TV, but the war itself. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13

Mass communication holds a mirror up to ourselves, and would those who argue, like Dr. Wertham, break the mirror so that we can remain blissfully innocent of our own destructiveness? “The whole idea is that of ‘original innocence,’” writes Hedy Bookin, in criticizing Dr. Wertham’s view. “Humans would never be so evil if the serpent of the mass media had not tempted them with the forbidden fruit of violence.” Dr. Wertham’s argument would be stronger if it were made against the passive character of television, for a steady diet of TV cultivates not the participation but the spectator role of the viewer. In this way it may cultivate a real feeling of impotence, and this impotence may well contribute to violence. Other practical suggestions that have been offered often impress one as being good but failing to go deeply enough. Konrad Lorenz’s recommendation of holding more international sports contest in order to drain off international competition is sound in itself. However, it again deals mainly with a symptom. The ping-pong matches between the Untied States and China were more a result of a change in attitude between the two countries—they occurred after President Nixon had already planned his trip to China. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13

There is also merit in Anthony Storr’s proposals for greater effort toward birth control and in his acceptance of euthanasia, both aimed at lessening the pressure of the World’s burgeoning populations and the latter at permitting old people to pass out of life with some dignity. However, again, the problem is already upon us, and we must search for ways of dealing with the aggression and violence already present in the Western World. Violence is a symptom. The disease is variously powerlessness, insignificance, injustice—in short, a conviction that I am less than human and I am homeless in the World. For a convenient shorthand I have called the disease impotence, fully recognizing that violence also requires for its triggering some promise, a despair combined with the hope that conditions cannot but be bettered by one’s own pain or death. To strike the disease at its core requires that we deal with the impotence. Ideally, we must find ways of sharing and distributing power so that every person, in whatever realm of our bureaucratic society, can feel that one too counts, that one too makes a difference to one’s fellows and is not cast out on the dunghill of indifferences as a nonperson. Power is the birthright of every human being. It is the source of one’s self-esteem and the root of one’s conviction that one is interpersonally significant. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13

Regardless of a person’s unrepresented status, disposition, mental health, or state of the nation, overpopulation and pollution, the problem is roughly the same—to enable the individual to feel that one will be counted, that one has a valuable function, that “attention will be paid.” I do not speak of external opportunities for being to be individuals—the last two hundred years of inventions have steadily liberated human beings. I speak rather of the inward conviction of significance, the individual’s psychological and spiritual valuing by oneself and by one’s fellows. I wish to illustrate how this distribution of power is possible and how it alleviates violence. The University of Oklahoma was able to avoid riots—and in a creative rather than suppressive way—when most other universities were torn by violence. In September, 1967, under the newly appointed president, J. Herbert Holloman, there was instituted a plan to survey the whole educational project and reconstruct the university. To that end twenty-three committees were set up, comprising all groups affected by the university. This included faculty, students, administrators, private citizens, alumni, and legislators. For students this was no token representation. Their opinion was an essential part of the study. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13

When riots swept over the colleges and universities at the time of the Kent State shooting, Oklahoma had its uproar but no violence. Those in the best position to know at Oklahoma stated that it was this giving the students an integral part of the reconstruction that was responsible for their freedom from violence. It was power distributed—not paternalistically, but authentically. The students’ judgment was valued, desired, and utilized—as, indeed, it would have to be if such a reconstruction was to be effective. It was power with responsibility in accord with the level of development of the persons (for example, students) involved. Responsibility was commensurate with the power. When the threats did come, they did not escalate into violence. Why should the students become violent? They were not impotent; it had already been demonstrated that they have their voice in the direction of the university. An interesting event occurred which shows the changed mood at this university. In the days immediately following the Kent States shooting, a group of radical students carrying North Vietnamese flags rode motorcycles through the lines of parading ROTC. Then they picketed the ROTC building. Tension was high and dangerously near the boiling point. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13

The colonel in charge of ROTC felt this tension, as did everyone else; it was the taut state that called either for action or explosion into violence. What to do! His eye lighted on a large coffee urn in his office. He got this out and with the assistance of a few helpers he served coffee to the picketers. This “blew my mind” said one of the nearby faculty members; and it so impressed the picketers that tension was greatly reduced without violence. This colonel, as I later talked to him, was not an especially imaginative man, and he disclaimed any intention of a nonviolent or altruistic strategy or even any conscious hope that his act would have any effect. He felt only that he had to do something, and the coffee urn was the one thing at hand. It is an interesting illustration of the build-up of energy almost to the breaking point and its rechanneling before its outbreak in a constructive rather than destructive direction. For many years I have been convinced that something occurs in the creative working of the imagination that is more fundamental—but more puzzling—than we have assumed in contemporary psychology. In our day of dedication to the facts and hard-headed objectivity, we have disparaged imagination: it gets us away from “reality”; it taints our work with “subjectivity”; and, worst of all, it is said to be unscientific. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13

As a result, art and imagination are often taken as the “frosting” to life rather than as the solid food. No wonder people think of “art” in terms of its cognate, “artificial,” or even consider it a luxury that slyly fools us, “artifice.” Throughout Western history our dilemma has been whether imagination shall turn out to be artifice or the source of being. What if imagination and art are not frosting at all, but the fountainhead of human experience? What if our logic and science derive from art forms and are fundamentally dependent on them rather than art being merely a decoration for our work when science and logic have produced it? These are the hypotheses I propose here. This same problem is related to psychotherapy in ways that are much more profound than merely the play on words. In other words, is psychotherapy an artifice, a process that is characterized by artificiality, or is it a process that can give birth to new being? Pondering these hypotheses, I brought data to my assistance from the dreams of persons in therapy. By dreaming, persons in analysis, I saw, are doing something on a level quite below that of psychodynamics. They are struggling with their World—to make sense out of nonsense, meaning out of chaos, coherence out of conflict. They are doing it by imagination, by constructing new forms and relationships in their World, and by achieving through proportion and perspective a World in which they can survive and live with some meaning. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13

Here is a simple dream. It was related by an intelligent man who seems younger than his thirty years, coming from a culture where fathers have considerable authority. I was in the sea playing with some large porpoises. I like porpoises and wanted these to be like pets. Then I began to get afraid, thinking that the big porpoises would hurt me. I went out of the water, on the shore, and now I seem to be a cat hanging by its tail from a tree. The cat is curled up in a tear-drop form, but its eyes are big and seductive, one of them winking. A porpoise comes up, and, like a father cajoling a youngster out of bed with “get up and get going,” it hits the cat lightly. The cat then becomes afraid with a real panic and bounds off in a straight line into the higher rocks, away from the sea. Let us put aside such obvious symbols as the big porpoises being father and so on—symbols that are almost always confused with symptoms. I ask you to take the dream as an abstract painting, to look at it as pure form and motion. We see first a smallish form, namely the boy, playing with the larger forms, the porpoises. Imagine the former as a small circle, and the latter as large circles. The playing movement conveys a kind of love in the dream, which we could express by lines toward each other converging in the play. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13

In the second scene we see the smaller form (the boy in his fright) moving in a line out of the sea and away from the larger forms. The third scene shows the smaller form as a cat, now in an elliptical, tearlike, form, the coyness of the cat’s eyes being seductive. The big form now coming toward the cat moves into the cajoling act and the lines here, it seems to me, would be confused. This is a typical neurotic phase consisting of the dreamer trying to resolve one’s relationship with his father and the World. And, of course, it does not work. The fourth and last scene is the panic in which the smaller form, the cat, moves rapidly out of the scene. It dashes toward the higher rocks. The motion is in a straight line off the canvas. The whole dream can be seen as an endeavor through form and motion to resolve this young man’s relationship, in its love and its fear, to one’s father and father figures. The resolution is a vivid failure. However, the “painting” or play, Ionescolike though it be, shows like many a contemporary drama the vital tension in the irresolution of conflict. Therapeutically speaking, the patient is certainly facing his conflicts, albeit he can at the moment do nothing but flee. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13

We also can see in these scenes a progression of planes: first, the plane of the sea; second, the higher plane of the land with the tree; and third, the highest plane of all, namely the rocks on the mountain to which the cat leaps. These may be conceived as higher levels of consciousness to which the dreamer climbs. This expansion of consciousness may represent an important gain for the patient even though in a dream the actual resolution of the problem is a failure. When we turn such a dream into an abstract painting, we are on a deeper level than psychodynamics. I do not mean so we should leave out the contents of the dreams of our patients. I mean we should go beyond contents to the ground forms. We shall then be dealing with basic forms that only later, and derivatively, become formulations. From the most obvious viewpoint, the son is trying to work out a better relationship with his father, to be accepted as a comrade, let us say. However, on a deeper level he is trying to construct a World that makes sense, that has space and motion and keeps these in some proportion, a World that one can live in. You can live without a father who accepts you, but you cannot live without a World that makes some sense to you. Symbol in this sense no longer means symptoms. Symbol returns to its original and root meanings of “drawing together” (sym-ballein). The problem—the neurosis and its elements—is described by the antonym of symbolic, namely diabolic (dia-ballein), “pulling apart.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 13

Dreams are par excellence the realm of symbols and myths. I use the term myth not in the pejorative sense of “falsehood,” but in the sense of a form of universal truth revealed in some partial way to the dreamer. These are ways human consciousness makes sense of the World. Persons in therapy, like all of us, are trying to make sense out of nonsense, trying to put the World into some perspective, trying to form out of the chaos they are suffering some order and harmony. After having studied a series of dreams of persons in therapy, I am convinced that there is one quality that is always present, a quality I call passion for form. The patient constructs in his “unconscious” a drama; it has a beginning, something happens and is “flashed one the stage,” and then it comes to some kind of denouement. I have noted the forms in the dreams being repeated, revised, remolded, and then, like a motif in a symphony, returning triumphantly to be drawn together to make a meaningful whole of the series. There is a formula covering three progressive stages of the quest: Hearing, Reflection, Enlightenment. It means: Receiving instruction, Thinking constantly over the teachings until they are thoroughly assimilated, Experiencing glimpses of a mystical nature. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13

With the end of this third phase, the aspirant has not only repeat and prolong the glimpses until one’s whole life is permeated by the wisdom and peace which is their fruit, but also to receive and apply the highest and final philosophic doctrine. With this, one’s enlightenment becomes natural, effortless, unbroken. It is unified with one’s activity, established whether one is busy in the World or seated in prayer. Beings pass through three stages of development from the Inert through the Passional to the Harmonious. In the course of one’s life the student will pass from one phase of development to another, thus gradually enriching and expanding one’s whole character. To start on the quest is the first step. To continue on it is the second, and possibly harder. Thoroughly to finish the quest is the hardest step of all. It is true that one is only at the beginning of one’s quest for truth, that its fulfillment may be far far away, but everything must have a beginning. It is a progressive training which continues throughout one’s lifetime. There are times to intensify the quest, to hasten its tempo and stiffen its disciplines. With growth of outlook, development of mind, correct instruction from text or teacher, correct interpretation of one’s own and others’ experiences, one moves out of narrow sectarianism into a new Universal level. The attitude of faith in another person is undoubtedly helpful to beginners, provided the faith is justified. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13

However, it is a stage necessarily inferior to the attitude of faith in one’s own soul. To turn inwards rather than outwards, to overcome the tendency towards externality, is to ascend to a higher stage. Judge the sage if you must by the profound impress one makes on the soul of one’s age or by the service which one incessantly renders to the utmost limit of one’s strength. Jesus was moved unweariedly and incessantly trying to awaken the hearts of beings to their true goal and giving to those who approached him with faith the benediction of grace. Death caught him in the midst of so much of this activity that it aroused the hostility of professional religionists whose vested interests were in danger and who to save their own purses put Jesus on the cross. One alone may rightly be called a sage who not only has attained the highest spiritual stage but has also found a new meaning in the finite World and the finite human life. One does not need to run away from the familiar World, for one sees it by a diviner light. One experiences not only its obvious transiency and multiplicity but also its hidden eternality and unity. “And also the Lord will remember the prayers of the righteous, which have been put up unto him for them,” Mormon 5.21. Negative transference, positive transference, balanced orientation, all are staged of external adjustment and deserve no high evaluation than that. On the internal level alone is the surest equilibrium, attainable. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13

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True, Nature Does Have Rhythm in its Day and Night; it Does Have Balance and Harmony, Summer and Winter!

November 8, 2019 2:30 am

Do not tell me you are the People of Purpose when your purpose is to do just what they sent you to do! For the love of your souls, find yourself a finer purpose! Just as I did. In any case, the African Americans came to the Bowery and the sociologists fund them in good shape when they got there, regardless of how he felt about it. When the defense boom came many of the African Americans left but some stayed on, seeing in life on the Bowery what the Irish and the Swedes and Poles saw, seeing in it what the seaman and those without homes saw—an end to fight back, a resting place, a refutation of the old hymn, “There is no hiding place down here.” The Bowery offered a hiding place so secret that the fugitive could not be found even by himself. The Jew is a rarity and a curio on the Bowery. On either side of the street are districts primarily Jewish. Until Puerto Ricans came in to share the East Side tenements with them, this was an area where Jewish life filled the air and flavored the stores and the streets. However, the peddlers, sweatshop workers, teachers, and rabbis looked upon the Bowery as beyond the pale. Some Jews made Bowery history. Monk Eastman and his gang of thus, almost all Jewish, were sponsored by Tim Sullivan who counted on them to deliver votes and loot from their side just as the Irish and Italians did. Jews also appeared in the Bowery theaters as producers, actors, directors, and impresarios. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

They were part of the Bowery’s history but not fully a part of the Bowery until the depression. Then some of them drifted down to the breadlines and the psychologists found them in a bay way. These were the shattered, declassed ones. They cropped up with skills that were unusual on the Bowery. They were bookkeepers, teachers, musicians, tailors, and sales people; but temperamentally they were shot. After the war Jews ran to about two percent of the Bowery population. Dr. Levinson has said that most of them have deteriorated much further than the average non-Jewish Bowery resident. Alcohol itself, said the Doctor, is outside the Jews’ “cultural patter,” and presumably those Jews who take to it suffer a cirrhosis not only of the liver but of the psyche. Perhaps it is only those disturbed Jews who end up on the Bowery or else their fate disturbs them ore than it does the others. In any case, Dr. Levinson says, Jews on the Bowery are more likely to be psychopathic or mentally defective. Even rare than a Jewish Bowery Man is a Chinese. Chinatown abuts the Bowery, and Chinese stores spill out of the tight narrow streets of their quarter onto the Street, but no Chinese panhandler works there. Patrolman Leo O’Hea, who has walked the beat along the Bowery for a quarter of a century, says the blotter is clean of Chinese names. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

There are no Chinese vagrants. The patrolman has no very fancy scientific notions of “why,” but he knows that when a Chinese boy breaks a window all that an officer need do is to tell his brother or his cousin or his uncle and the matter is take care of. The boy is likely to apologize. In time the Chinese may become so Americanized that the family will lose the antique function of mutual responsibility, of collective conscience. Until then, however, there are not likely to be Chinese flophouses. The only times when any police action was needed were the days of the tong wars—a kind of bloody commercial rivalry—and during the period when the exclusion laws were so rigid that no Chinese man could hope to marry a Chinese young lady in New York. In those days, women of the evening from the Bowery would then come down to Chinatown to pay the “house calls” of their profession, and now and then the police would feel obliged to intervene. The Bowery is above all American. More than three quarters of its regular derelict population are a mixture of races and native-born, often tracing a native American lineage far back into their country to stand in front of the Salvation Army Building on an afternoon—cheerfully facing nothingness. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

Dr. Levinson and his colleagues had these native-born Americans examine the telltale ink blots of the Rorschach test, and from their fancied images they pieced together this view of the personality type (which I have presumed to annotate): “The homeless man has had a very poor psychosexual history, as a result of which he has developed a fear of either accepting or sharing affection,” says Dr. Levison. (There is a musician who used to play with the Philadelphia Symphony. One day he came home and found a stranger in his wife’s bed. He turned around, walked out, and buried his poor psychosexual history on the Bowery.) The Doctor continues: “At some time, the mother figure had brought about a good deal of ambivalence and anxiety. To love meant to be hurt, to be rejected to be deserted.” (A seaman, now permanently beached on the Bowery, says that he never had a home. He grew up in an orphanage. Sure, he had girls, but “you know the kind you meet on a waterfront…Oh a nice girl would be something else again.” So he never got married. He would not make anybody a good husband, he says.) “He now denies to himself his need for affection and tends to respond to the demands of the World of reality by repression. By withdrawing into passivity…Since he replaces activity by passivity, he atones for his guilt.” (“I didn’t commit no crime, see,” says Thomas Finn. “What I did, I did only to myself, right?”) #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

“He is able to accept life and to continue existing on the Bowery because being there is a solution to his problems. His life on the Bowery is an acting out of his conflicts, an ‘undoing’ and assuaging of guilt, and is a replacement of his phallicism by castration.” (An old man says that he finds it hard to stay at the Muni—the Municipal Lodging House—because of the “queens.” Disgusting, he says. The queens are young men who swing their hips and gather courts around them in secluded spots. Courtiers and courtesans vie for the queen’s affections, and the old Bowery hands shrink to the wall in horror.) Dr. Levinson concludes: “It is hypothesized that being homeless has only exacerbated latent personality trends and that living on the Bowery is the solution of the emotional problems of these men and the natural outcome of the dynamics involved.” Psychologist agree that the Bowery Men need a place where an effortless going to hell is the accepted way of life. They need a place where no one requires anything of them, where no one ever says: “You can do better.” The institution the Bowery Men need is one where everyone agrees: “Mac, you can’t do better.” They need the sweet delights of hopelessness, and anyone who seeks to energize them with hope betrays them, for he calls their spirit into action; calls them again to try again to lose; calls them again to compare themselves with other men, to assert their worth—when all that they want is for the World to leave them alone, worthless and careless, beyond redemption or competition. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

Where else could these men find such an institution? Where could they find a home in which all the talents and learning of psychologist are bent to give them the certainty they need that they have lost themselves? It is probably as difficult for a social worker or a missionary to let a man despair as it is for a doctor to oblige a patient with euthanasia. For that reason the Bowery Men have made their own community on the street. Sociologists describe this institution—creation by the men themselves, tailor-made for them and for no others—as a subculture. Professor H. Warren Dunham, of Wayne University, gives the psychologist short shrift. It is all very well, he says in effect, to diagnose individuals as suffering from dependency needs (“Inadequate personality” and so on), but the stubborn fact remains that a lot of men not on the Bowery fit that picture just as well. Society, says Dr. Dunham, keeps producing “inadequately socialized types,” and the skid rows are there to receive them. The World, after all, is full of opportunities for failure. A boy can flunk an exam or catch the look of scorn in a girl’s eye. A man can lose a job, or possibly hold a job too long whole his friends rise, perhaps stepping smilingly upon his neck as they go up. A businessman can lose his money and suddenly realize that he has nothing else. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

And the World is scornful of failures. People persecute failures even by feeling sorry for them. Even when stretching out a helping hand, successful men make it clear that it is more blessed to give than to receive—though the receiver plainly stands in greater need of blessing. Those who no longer aspire, who do not wish to rise on anybody’s shoulders, who do not wish to sell more, make more, show more, even give more than others—these are among the “inadequately socialized” who have built the modern Bowery. There they need struggle no longer against the critics, the status-seekers and the status-makers who pigeonhole people. The Bowery, it would seem, is a grotesque limbo beyond good and evil, where there is no first or last, no past or future—a death wherein one may have the delights and torments of being a spectator at one’s own funeral. In the quiet attitudes of the men in flops—the old ones often sit for hours with hands crossed in their laps—it is easy to read a prayerful solemnity. In the prim detached way in which pleasures of the flesh is regarded there is something monastic. These men use the usual four-letter words, but this is mere ritual and no more. Such words are expletives and no longer serve to recall the warmth of the fires below. There is an air of finality on the Street. Each man things it is all over. He used to live some other way. There used to be another self. It is all gone now, as if he had taken holy orders, changed his name, and put on his rags as a sign. What they are a sign of is, of course, the crucial difference between the Bowery Man’s retreat and that of a monk. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

Learnedly, Dr. Levinson terms it “ego-devaluating, not a religious retreat.” Still it is a retreat, an escape into tranquility. And here one is brought up short by the obvious bond linking the unshaved bum sprawled flat on his face in the street with the businessman, the advertising executive, the cocktail drinking wife, the harried suburbanite—the whole organization, brief-cased, golf-and-bridge, scotch-and-soda set. All understand that the major objective of life is tranquility freedom from tension, and an end to worry. The parents who send their children joyfully off to life adjustment courses do so with the notion that they will have fewer conflicts, fewer tensions. Life will be smoother. However, if life is not smoother and the ideal is still tranquility; if one is not fully adjusted to life and the objective is still to avoid tension; if the tranquilizers are too expensive on in the end fail to secure the all-important inner peace—then it may be a consolation to us all to know that there is a Bowery, a place where life is thoroughly anesthetized. It is our brothers who have pioneered there. It is not a state of dreamy futility but one of intense usefulness. There is some confusion about the kind of life an enlightened being will live. It is popularly believed that one sits in one’s cave or one’s hunt sunk continually in meditation. The idea that one can be active in the World is not often accepted, especially by the masses who have not been properly instructed in these matters and who do not know differences between religion and mysticism and between mysticism and philosophy. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

The truth is that the enlightened being may not practise meditation; but one has no dependence upon it, because one’s enlightenment being fully established will not be increased by further meditation. Whenever one does meditate, it is either for the purpose of withdrawing from the World totally for short periods, at intervals, either for one’s own satisfaction or to recuperate one’s energies, or to benefit others by telepathy. When it is said “for one’s own satisfaction,” what is meant is that meditation in seclusion may have become a way of life in one’s previous incarnation. This generates a karmic tendency which reappears in this life and the satisfaction of this tendency pleases one, but it is not absolutely essential for one. One can dispense with it when needful to do so, whereas the unenlightened being is too often at the mercy of one’s tendencies and propensities. There is no classification into matter and spirit for the Sage. There is only one life for one. If a being can find reality only in trance, if one says that the objective World is unreal, one is not a Sage. The being who becomes immobilized by one’s inheritance of asceticism and escapism will also become indifferent to the sorrows of a humankind whom one regards as materialistic. The seeker of truth is self-disciplined to live in the World with one’s heart and thought molded after one’s own fashion, and will not turn in contempt or helplessness from the so-called materialistic but, on the contrary, will find their ignorance the motive for one’s incessant service of enlightenment to them. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

The stultified stony apathy of the first is shamed by the courageous acceptance of life as a whole of the second. The saint is satisfied to attain freedom from one’s lower self but the Master does not stop there. One seeks also to carry enlightenment to others, remove their misery, and save them from the illusion in which they are involved. One’s attainments in the mental, ethical, and philosophic spheres must take concrete shape in the disinterested service of humanity, or one is no illuminate. Truth seekers certainly wish that all others might attain to their own inner peace. However, because one has not oneself realized this higher unity (which is all-embracing) one does not feel that one bears any personal responsibility for their uplift. One the contrary while the ascetic, under the illusion that Worldly life is a snare set by Satan, sits smugly in one’s retreat, the illuminate knows that all life is divinely born, never relaxes one’s efforts for the enlightenment of humankind. Imagination is the outreaching of mind. It is the individual’s capacity to accept the bombardment of the conscious mind with ideas, impulses, images, and every other sort of psychic phenomena welling up from the preconscious. It is the capacity to dream dreams and see visions, to consider diverse possibilities, and to endure the tension involved in holding these possibilities before one’s attention. Imagination is casting off mooring ropes, taking one’s changes that there will be new mooring posts in the vastness ahead. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

In creative endeavors the imagination operates in juxtaposition with form. When these endeavors are successful, it is because imagination infuses form with its own vitality. The question is: How far can we let our imagination loose? Can we give it rein? Dare to think the unthinkable? Dare to conceive of, and move among, new visions? At such times we face the danger of losing our orientation, the danger of complete isolation. Will we lose our accepted language, which makes communication possible in a shared World? Will we lose the boundaries that enable us to orient ourselves to what we call reality? This, again, is the problem of form or, stated differently, the awareness of limits. Psychologically speaking, this is experienced by many people as psychosis. Hence some psychotics walk close to the wall in hospitals. They keep oriented to the edges, always preserving their location in the external environment. Having no localization inwardly, they find it especially important to retain whatever outward localization is available. As director of a large mental hospital in Germany which received many brain-injured soldiers during the war, Dr. Kurt Goldstein found that these patients suffered radical limitation of their capacities for imagination. He observed that they had to keep their closets in rigid array, shoes always placed in just this position, shirts hung in just that place. Whenever a closet was upset, the patient became panicky. He could not orient himself to the new arrangement, could not imagine a new form that would bring order to the chaos. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

The patient was then thrown into what Dr. Goldstein called the “catastrophic situation.” Or when asked to write his name on a sheet of paper, the brain-injured person would write the name in some corner close to the boundaries. He could not tolerate the possibility of becoming lost in the open spaces. His capacities for abstract thought, for transcending the immediate facts in terms of the possible—what I call, in this context, imagination—were severely curtailed. He felt powerless to change the environment to make it adequate to his needs. Such behavior is indicative of what life is when imaginative powers are cut off. The limits have always to be kept clear and visible. Lacking the ability to shift forms, these patients found their World radically truncated. Any limitless existence was experiences by them as being highly dangerous. Not brain-injured, you and I nevertheless can experience a similar anxiety in the reverse situation—that is, in the creative act. The boundaries of our World shift under our feet and we tremble while waiting to see whether any new form will take the place of the lost boundary or whether we can create out of this chaos some new order. As imagination gives vitality to form, form keeps imagination from driving us into psychosis. This is the ultimate necessity of limits. Artists are the ones who have the capacity to see original visions. They typically have powerful imaginations and, at the same time, a sufficiently developed sense of form to avoid being led into the catastrophic situation. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

The artists are the frontier scouts who go out ahead of the rest of us to explore future. We can surely tolerate their special dependencies and harmless idiosyncrasies. For if we can listen seriously to them, we will be better prepared for them. There is a curiously sharp sense of joy—or perhaps better expressed, a sense of mild ecstasy—that comes when you find the particular form required by your creation. Let us say you have been puzzling about it for days when suddenly you get the insight that unlocks the door—you see how to write that line, what combination of colors is needed in your picture, how to form that theme you may be writing for a class, or you hit upon the theory to fit your new facts. I have often wondered about this special sense of joy; it so often seems out of proportion to what actually has happened. I may have worked at my desk morning after morning trying to find a way to express some important idea. When my insight suddenly breaks through—which may happen when I am chopping wood in the afternoon—I experience a strange lightness in my step as though a great load were taken off my shoulders, a sense of joy on a deeper level that continues without any relation whatever to the mundane tasks that I may be performing at the time. It cannot be just that the problem at hand has been answered—that generally brings only a sense of relief. What is the course of this curious pleasure? #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

I propose that it is the experience of this-is-the-way-things-are-meant-to-be. If only for that moment, we participate in the myth of creation. Order comes out of disorder, form out of chaos, as it did in the creation of the Universe. The sense of joy comes from our participation, no matter how slight, in being as such. The paradox is that at the moment we also experience more vividly our own limitations. We discover the amor fati that Nietzsche write about—the love of one’s fate. No wonder it gives a sense of ecstasy! Most people are surprises to learn that the rebel operates with built-in restraints. Indeed, that is one’s chief distinction from the revolutionary who, concerned as one is with political change, experiences only outer restraints. However, the rebel, who is concerned with people’s attitudes and motives, has inner limits. One is restrained by the boundaries inherent in the order one proposes. In describing these limits, I shall speak in ideal terms to clarify my point. The first is the universality of the rebel’s vision. One’s ideal of life, which gives birth to one’s rebellion in the first place, applies not just to oneself but to others as well; and these others must include one’s enemies. To pursue the metaphor I employed earlier, if the slave kills the master he or she has no choice but to usurp the master’s throne and be killed oneself; and we have round after round of meaningless bloodshed, like the sultans’ murders in the seraglio. The excitement of the ego trip is secondary to the rebel; one is concerned chiefly with one’s vision. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

In this vision of the World are present the restraints upon one’s actions. Sokrates is restrained from making a secret deal with Sparta not by the Athenians, who condemned him to death, but by the requirements of one’s own personally chosen ethics. Jesus could not take up the sword without betraying his own vision of the World. The rebel scorns as a motive personal revenge (actually the nursing of feelings of rejection, of one’s own hurt pride—authentic enough but not the basis for a genuine rebellion). One does not have the right to demand revenge, and furthermore there is no time to do so. The essential characteristic of the rebel is one’s capacity to transcend one’s own particular hurt pride in identification with one’s people and with one’s universal ideal. Another limit is the rebel’s compassion. As we noted in the case of Daniel Ellsberg, the compassion of the rebel is one of the things that makes one a rebel in the first place. One identifies with people who suffer and feels a passionate desire to do something about this suffering. This arises from one’s sensitivity and empathy for other people which inform one’s vision. True, the revel is sometimes so absorbed in the universal application of one’s ideal that one neglects one’s own family. Well, like us all, one remains a human being of good and bad traits. One’s capacity for empathy makes one more compassionate of peoples—if not always for the members of one’s family—and enables one to form one’s vision. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

The limits also come from the fact that the rebel’s mind meets other minds. The others’ views of reality restrain and sharpen one’s; and in encounter between them, they work out something of greater value for both. This is why dialogue is so important for the rebel. Dialogue includes all the tangling of emotions, temperament, and diverse goals which occurs in any real interchange. The authentic rebel knows that the silencing of all one’s adversaries is the last thing on Earth one wishes: their extermination would deprive one and whoever else remains alive from the uniqueness, the originality, and the capacity for insight that these enemies—being human—also have and could share with one. If we wish the death of our enemies, we cannot talk about the community of beings. In the losing of the chance for dialogue with out enemies, we are the poorer. We would lose not only our enemies’ good ideas, but the restraints they give us as well. The rebel is committed to giving a form and pattern to the World. It is a pattern born of the indomitable thrust of the human mind, the mind which makes out the mass of meaningless data in the World an order and form. Born as we are out of chaos, why can we never establish contact with it? No sooner do we look at it than order, pattern, shape is born under our eyes. This is not only true of the novelist, but of the painter, the engineer, and the intellectual as well—indeed, true of us all. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

The forming of the World begins with the simple act of perception, which arranges things in a Gestalt that has meaning for us. We institute the order. It is a product of the human mind’s continual search for meaning in a World in which meaning does not exist apart from our minds. True, nature does have rhythm it its day and night; it does have balance and harmony, Summer and Winter; without our patterns, the functions are blind and meaninglessly repetitive. However, no sooner does the human mind look at this chaos than order is born. Out of the meeting of the human mind and the chaos of nature some meaning is established by which we can orient ourselves. The rebel is one who can grasp this meaning with a clarity that reaches beyond that of the masses of people. An act of rebellion of [the rebel’s] part seems like a demand clarity and unity. The most elementary form of rebellion, paradoxically, expresses an aspiration to order. Those who hold political power may not trust the rebel’s vision and may hang on to their power to oppose it. However, in this new vision, this very pattern and order, there are present the restraining factors on the rebel oneself. When one writes a sonnet or any other kind of poetry, the chosen form exercises a restraint upon the poet just as the banks restrain the river. Otherwise creativity flows off absurdly in every direction and the river is lost in the sand. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

There are even limits to such a personal aim as self-actualization. The human potential movement has fallen heir to the form of innocence prevalent in America, namely that we grow toward greater and greater moral perfection. Trying to be good all the time will make one not into an ethical giant but into a prig. We should grow, rather, toward greater sensitivity to both evil and good. The moral life is dialectic between good and evil. Especially in the understanding of violence is it necessary to be aware of the good and evil in each of us. Whatever we may do, excess will always keep its place in the heart of beings, in the place where solitude is found. We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes and our ravages. However, our task is not to unleash them on the World; it is to fight them in ourselves and in others. Rebellion, the secular will not to surrender is still today at the basis of the struggle. Origin of form, source of real life, it keeps us always erect in the savage formless movement of history. The fact that good and evil are present in all of us prohibits anyone from moral arrogance. No one can insist on one’s own moral supremacy. It is out of this sense of restrain that the possibility of forgiveness arises. “Ask in sincerity of heart that God would forgive you,” reports Moroni 6.8. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

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Nothing Changes the Scent of Biological Humans, Humans of Body and Soul, to Rule the Planet and Reach for the Stars Beyond it!

November 7, 2019 12:45 am

Nobody knows. It always ends with “nobody knows.” Fate is merciless to the living who lack flesh and blood. And nothing changes the scent of biological humans, humans of body and soul, to rule the planet and reach for the stars beyond it. “You cannot build a culture with Devils out of Hell.” The Hell I can’t is my answer. It comes to that after centuries and centuries of vain hope. You can gaze on the struggling beings around you with a sad detachment. And you can thank Heaven for ignorance, for simple beings who do not long to know anything. The search for a common denominator among Bowery Men always beings—and frequently ends—with the finding that they are all alcoholics. However, this scarcely makes a reliable distinguishing hallmark of the species, because, in the first place, most alcoholics do not become Bowery Men and, in the second place, drinking, while certainly part of life on the Bowery, is not usually an important reason for being there. To insist that a man is on Skid Row because he drinks is like arguing that a man becomes a millionaire because he wears a top hat. Furthermore, if you expect to find the grim, solitary, ugly drunk drowning massives doses calculated to lay one out cold in the shortest possible time, you are less likely to find him in a Bowery saloon than you are among the family men who inhabit the cocktail bars of commuters’ trains. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

A somewhat limited but interesting survey by Alcoholics Anonymous found that ninety-two percent of the moneyed and family class of chronic drinkers are solitary addicts. However, on the Bowery and other Skid Rows only ten percent habitually drink alone, according to a study of Alcohol and the Homeless Man by sociologist Robert Strauss. The same conclusion may be reached with less scientific certainty, perhaps, but more pleasantly by taking a walk along the Street. You can see the Bowery drunk spiking his Cherry Ripple or White Muscatel (inexpensive wine also known as wino wine) with raw alcohol and passing the bottle among his friends, or even among strangers. He drinks to fend off loneliness, or sometimes the lesser chill that the wind sends slashing through his rags. He aspires only to warmth and everlasting “highness,” rarely to total oblivion. On that sunny plateau the Bowery Man has the camaraderie that is more precious to him than love or friendship of the sort so highly valued in the dank valleys of sobriety. He does not want friends—with the incessant demands upon him—but he craves the illusion of friendship. He wants good fellows about him who can help to kill the time that weighs like an albatross about his neck. For him alcohol makes possible a World with rounded, smooth edges—a World of brothers, but not of brotherhood and all the dreary responsibilities which that concept entails. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

The Bowery Man is a social drinker with a sense of group responsibility. He panhandles for liquor money (which is where the “Panhandle District” gets its name) to hold up his end of the bargain so that he may contribute his mite to the collective fund. Then, when the bottle goes around, he takes only one gulp at a time, and that is nicely proportioned to his investment in the bottle. If one’s particular drinking group stakes him to a drink, he repays it with scrupulous correctness. There is an elaborate courtesy in these circles that only a gauche newcomer from uptown would violate. For example, when a man is pitching a line to someone who might give one the price of a drink, he is not to be interrupted or distracted. If he fails, another can try, but there is no uncouth struggling over a “live one” as the prospect is respectfully dubbed. These decorous manners may perhaps serve to distinguish the Bowery Man from an ad agency executive, but they do not mark one as unique. If not alcohol, what else sets these beings apart? What makes them a community? Certainly the do not look alike. They make no gray and faceless mass. Here Swedes and Irish and Poles, Midwesterners, Southerners, New England farm boys to run seed, Black boys, tall and rangy, with life still in them, and old Blacks with the beards and eyes of patriarchs. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

There is in this limiting a nonmaterial character, a spiritual character if you will, that is necessary in all creativity. Our discussion demonstrates something else that the object you see is a product both of your subjectivity and external reality. We not only know the World, but the World at the same time conforms to our ways of knowing. Our perception is determined by our imagination as well as by the empirical facts of the outside World. Here are disabled people and well men, sullen and simple. Some laugh as they shoot crap on the sidewalk and sing karaoke from the juke box with a huge colorful glowing orb. Some just stand in their several layers of rags and look with mild, vacant eyes at the scene and at the stranger who walks among them from the World uptown. Sociologists have counted their noses, tabulated their previous occupations, the first names of their grandparents, and the color of their skins. Psychologists have distributed Rorschach tests free to the needy. Conclusions from all these efforts vary in many respects, but these efforts vary in many respects, but there are some hard, unassailable facts in the picture. There are many Irishmen on the Bowery, for example, very few Italians or Jews, and almost no Chinses, although Chinatown is handy. There are obvious reasons for some Irishmen to linger among the Home Guard. When they fled the famines they became wild geese scattering over the whole World, and many too to the sea. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

The sailor, until he was organized into a trade union, was the traditional foot-loose wanderer from whom no home was really possible, who cultivated a scorn for the landlubber. For seamen who were beached, the Bowery became a shelter. Many Irishmen who did not take to the sea went into one form of transportation or another. They built railroads and ran them. They dug canals and skinned the mules that towed the barges from Albany to Buffalo. Men in transport are men on the go, homeless men who in between jobs, or after the last job, find their home with the other homeless. There is therefore an historical reason for the Irish on the Bowery, but psychologist tend to dismiss this explanation as superficial. The important factors are to be found in family life, they say. Dr. Boris Levinson, who has reported on the Bowery men for the Psychiatric Quarterly and other learned publications, studs his papers with charts that would bring a look of astonishment to his subjects, the quiet old bags of bones asleep in the Bowery doorways. He finds the Irish family to be dominated as a rule by the mother. This generality seems incontrovertible—as generalities go—and even the Irish attest to it willingly enough. The Irishman’s mother tends to be a Madonna and other women—particularly those who would lower themselves to go with him—are likely, in this view, to be women of the evening. He is likely to marry late and then set his wife upon a pedestal. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

In the psychologist’s opinion, marriage to a saint is not conducive to a healthy life in pleasures of the flesh, but the normal Irishman can take all this in his stride and become a poet, a politician, a bus driver, a priest or anything else. However, an Irishman who has some unusual weakness in his moral fiber may refrain from marriage altogether and run away from the woman he fears. He takes a drink easily because the Irish traditionally do not look upon alcohol as repulsive. Alcoholism, it itself, says Dr. Levinson, implies tendencies to homosexuality. In fact, though, homosexuality is present but not rife on the Bowery. When the brothels on the street closed, it was for lack of customers, not because the girls had competition. It seems that there is a flight from all sexuality on the Bowery. There is, in part, the atmosphere of a monastery—a silent withdrawal from all the joys of the World save the passport to Nirvana contained in a little alcohol. Psychologist Marvin K. Opler drew this comparison between the Irish family and Italian families: “The Irish family tends to be dominated by the mother; the father is often a weak and shadowy figure. In the Irish home active expression of emotion is frowned upon; feelings in regards to pleasures of the flesh are clouded with conceptions of sin. All this is reflected in the personality of the male offspring. The Irish male is apt to be quiet, repressed, shy or fearful of woman and as his literature attests, given to fantasy as an outlet for his emotions.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

Opler’s Italian family looked quite different: “The dominant figure is the father. He rules the family with a sometimes benevolent, sometimes rough hand. Emotions and passions are allowed free expression. Little or no sin or guilt is attached to pleasures of the flesh. As a result the Italian male is proverbially excitable, given to acting out his emotions and sometimes hostile to his father and older brothers (to whom the father may delegate authority over him).” This is not to say that the freewheeling, uninhibited Latin may not end up in worse places than the Bowery, but apparently he does not usually seek out this secular, creedless monastery. He has no talent for self-obliteration. The African American is yet another story. As we have seen, he was on the Bowery when the Dutch of New Amsterdam set him free so that he could take the brunt of an Indian attack. Later he was moved down to the squalid tenements of the Five Points near Mulberry Bend. After that he did not reappear in this city’s history until mobs made a victim of him during the draft riots. However, the depression brought a new wave of African Americans to the Bowery. They were a younger group of men than the Whites who were tossed up by the storm and beached on the Bowery. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

Nose-counters and interviewers discovered that the average African American on the Bowery in those days had done more traveling on the road than his white counterpart, but that he was also more likely to have been married, and more likely to be free of the neuroses and psychoses that marked his White brothers on the breadlines. Were the African Americans’ wives displaced, lost, stolen? Why did the storm uproot more stable, wholesome, settle African Americans than Whites? The answers seem to lie more with the economist than the psychologist. Perhaps the economic soil in which the African American families grew so thin, the roots so close to the surface, that even the strongest could not resist. In depression times the steadiest African American family lived in marginal soil close to the hunger line, and the wind that might make a White family man shut the blinds was enough to rip the African America up by the root and set him adrift. Perhaps, too, economic troubles were less traumatic to the African American than to his White brother. He was more used to them. As human beings, we have unlimited potentialities. However, when these movements try to throw form or limits out entirely, they become self-destructive and noncreative. Never is form itself superseded so long as creativity endures. If form were to vanish, spontaneity would vanish with it. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

Research in self-disclosure has shown that what a person will disclose to another is a function of many variables, including the subject matter to be disclosed, characteristics of the person, the setting in which discloser is to take place, and—more important—characteristics of the audience-person. The most powerful determiner of self-disclosure appears to be the willingness of the audience to disclose oneself to the subject to the same extent that one expects the subject to confide one’s experience. This is termed the “dyadic effect.” It asserts, as a general principle, that disclosure begets disclosure. Now this is not, by any means, the only condition under which a being reveal one’s experience to another. One will often disclose oneself unilaterally, without reciprocation, when one believes that it serves one’s interests to do so. This is what happens, for example, in much psychotherapeutic interviewing. The patient discloses much more about oneself than the therapist does, on the implicit promise that is one does so one’s lot will improve. When we allow individual projects a definition of the situation when one appears before others, we must also see that the others, however passive their role may seem to be, will themselves effectively project a definition of the situation by virtue of their response to the individual and by virtue of any lines of action they initiate to one. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

Ordinarily the definition of the situation projected by the several different participants are sufficiently attuned to one another so that open contradiction will not occur. I do not mean that there will be a kind of consensus that arises when each individual present candidly expresses what one really feels and honestly agrees with the expressed feelings of others present. This kind of harmony is an optimistic ideal and in any case not necessary for the smooth working of society. Rather, each participant is expected t suppress one’s immediate heartfelt feelings, conveying a new of the situation which one feels the others will be able to find at least temporarily acceptable. The maintenance of this surface of agreement, this veneer of consensus, is facilitated by each participant concealing one’s own wants behind statements which assert values to which everyone present feels obliged to give lip service. Further, there is usually a kind of division of definitional labor. Each participant is allowed to establish the tentative official ruling regarding matters which are vital to one but not immediately important to others, for instance, the rationalizations and justifications by which one accounts for one’s past activity. In exchange for this courtesy one remains silent or non-committal on matters important to others but not immediately important to one. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

We have than a kind of interactional modus vivendi. Together the participants contribute to a single over-all definition of the situation which involves not so much a real agreement as to what exists but rather a real agreement as to whose claims concerning what issues will be temporarily honored. Who, upon seeing them, has not been seized by wonder and perplexity at the gargoyles leering from their perches just below the roofs of Hearst Castle in California? These half-animal, half-human creatures eating other animals alive, these satanic figures with the tongues stuck out at the hordes of people in the city square below the mountain, with expressions of contempt carved in stone, who sit watch in broad daylight over San Semeion—are they in some way the devil’s hostages? No such evasive answer is possible. They are expressions of a tension that exists in all of us, a dialectic between light and darkness, good and evil. These expressions of the daimonic are critically important to the fact that this American nation could construct castles that emanate such beauty. For the artist who lights up our World, as those sculptors did, lives and breathes with the daimonic. What we used to call beauty (a work we should not use very often in our day) is impossible if we cut loose our connection with this nether World. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

The artist faces an ancient and powerful interdiction in the second of the Ten Commandments: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven images, or likeness of anything that is in Heaven above, or that is in the Earth beneath, or that is in the water under the Earth.” This is an interdiction against the worships of idols. It is also a prohibition of magic placed upon the ancient Hebrew, and interdiction of the primitive way of getting power over an animal or a person by drawing one’s likeness in the sand. People around the Mediterranean are to this day skittish about having their snapshots taken—apparently a carry-over of the early feeling that if you got their image by means of camera or crayon or paint, you captured part of their soul. The “graven image” must relate to the form of the person, something that one experiences as crucial to one’s autonomy. I cited this as a “primitive” idea, but it is a sophisticated insight as well. For the portrait as drawn or painted by any competent artist is related not so much to the appearance of the subject but rather to what the artist sees in the subject, which will be something of the latter’s underlying form. However one phrases the problem, it is a sign of courage that a person commits oneself to becoming an artist in the first place. One has to have considerable rebelliousness to set oneself against the archetypal prohibition. #RandolpHarris 12 of 17

Art is a substitute for violence. The same impulses that drive some persons to violence—the hunger for meaning, the need for ecstasy, the impulse to risk all—drive the artist to create. One is by nature our archrebel. I am not speaking of art as social protest: it can be that, as it was with Delacroix, and artist are almost always in the front line of social causes. I mean rather that one’s whole work is a rebellion against the status quo of the society—that which would make the society banal, conformist, stagnant. Often this takes the form of rebellion against the academic tradition in art itself—vide van Gogh, Cezanne, Picasso. However, the essence of the rebellion is in the new way of seeing nature and life. The art consists of the discovery and expression of this new way of seeing, which in turn is related to the artist’s originality, one’s sense of newness and freshness, one’s criticism of the past and present in the light of future possibilities. Artist teach humankind to see. However, the artist teaches us the possibilities of new forms as well. This inner form of art comes from the poet, and consists of the passion he or she puts into the poem. The organic aspect of form causes it to grow on its own; it speaks to us down through the ages revealing new meaning to each generation. Centuries later we may find meaning in it that even the author did not know was there. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

Artists show us new options of perceiving and responding to the World and each other which did not exist before one saw them and pointed them out. One does not impose form on a chaotic World as the thinker does; one exists in this form. Hence it becomes significant form. As long as the artist can create, one does not have to resort to violence. As a person one is generally an unbellicose, unaggressive type and exists by the live-and-let-live code, although we find that in heated discussions one can be stubborn and reach heights of passion which in someone else would be expressed in violence. Hence the artist has a proportionately harder time in periods of transition like ours—harder, say, than the doctor, whose subject (the human body) remains relatively constant even in periods of social upheaval. Contemporary artist may feel this difficulty keenly, as they will reveal in conversation. This is the first age in which the artist has had to create one’s own community. However, some artists now say that there is no meaningful society into which they can fit. They have no community. Society appears to worship the artist, but this is pretense; actually contemporary society buys and sells one, and any individual with money can buy up all an artist’s canvases and dump them into a big hole in a field. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

Society can enthrone the artist—very much like they did in the case of the scapegoat king. This happened to Jackson Pollock. He appeared on the cover of Life magazine—that highest throne in those says of the beginning of mass communication—with the caption, “Is Pollock the Greatest American Painter?” He was acknowledged a great public success, and such acknowledgment is very hard to take. Shortly afterward he ended his life by driving his car off the road. Mark Rothko became financially successful and then committed suicide. These and other artists’ suicides may mean many things. However, they also seem to support my artist-friends’ claim that society only pretends to value the artist. The artist is actually a second-class citizen; one is accepted as the frosting and not the bread of life. The age that admires art as a financial investment, then goes merrily on its way with technological gimmicks. To see this we need not look far. The skyline of New York, once one of the wonders of the modern World, has been progressively ruined by the conglomerate, haphazard erection of skyscrapers thrown together with no reference at all to an over-all form or vision. Yes, they are built with glass and glistening aluminum and all sorts of other interesting materials. Once can build a cesspool out of interesting materials. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

The contemporary artist finds oneself in a strange bind and is tempted to fall into despair. Some of them say that Mondrian, for example, went as far as anyone could in rebellion, and his rebellion has had precious little effect on anyone. They also point out the war in Vietnam is too vivid, with the bombing of villages and the defoliation of the land, all of which is accepted apathetically by the citizenry. How can you force people to see—which is the artist’s function—with such competition? However much one may talk of Charles Manson was groomed for his later violence by the postgraduate training in crime he received during his thirteen years in prison, his satanic cult illustrates how actual murder can be recorded by the murderers themselves on film and in music as an artistic experience. One can and must note these things. True, my concept of the artist as rebel can be exaggerated to the degree of pathology, especially when it occurs in a technological civilization characterized by built-in violence on the roads and in actual motor cars and in imaginary TV programs of violence in any city on any day. However, the fact that something can be pushed to a pathological extreme does not make it the norm, nor is it any argument against the norm. Crimes involving pleasure of the flesh are no argument against healthy experience of pleasures of the flesh. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

These disturbing facts make the thesis of the artist as rebel more serious and more real. The artist as rebel is a gadfly to the culture. One’s task is still to follow one’s talent of perceiving and showing us the new forms in which we, too, can see and experience the World around us. If we wish to learn what the spiritual content of our new World will be, we must pay attention to the artist. The stages of the Quest for Truth pass by degrees from the disciplining of the ego to the opening of consciousness to God. One this journey there are stages of ascent, stations of understanding, lights of peace, and shadows of despair. The Quest must traverse the three level of body, mind, and spirit. “Therefore, blessed are they who will repent and harken unto the voice of the Lord their God; for these are they that shall be saved. And may God Grant, in his great fulness, that people might be brought unto repentance and good works, that they might be restored unto grace for grace, according to their works,” reports Helaman 12.23-24. Our power is possessed in keeping ourselves busy with constant service of humanity. One can awaken some persons to this divine presence within themselves, but not all. One may do this mysteriously by some unknown process, or one may do it deliberately and with the display of one’s technique. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17Cresleigh Homes

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Unwise People Do Not Understand How that Which Differs With itself is in Agreement: Harmony Consists of Opposing Tensions!

November 6, 2019 2:09 am

I did not know that I could live with such a decision, and I was certain that they could not mentally or spiritually survive such a denial. Yet I felt compelled to ponder. And ponder I did. Why does one become an alcoholic? Since no final answer to this question is available, since the subject is complex and the size of this paper limited, a relatively brief and rigid phrased description will follow. In accord with the two essentials for the development of the condition, it will be divided into two parts: one, the habitual use of alcohol; two, certain personality types or structures. There is not much evidence of a physiological or constitutional basis for alcoholism. Neither of these alone can bring on alcoholism. There are many individuals with personalities similar to those found in alcoholics who never become alcoholics, who may never touch alcohol; there are tends of millions of individuals who use alcohol who never become alcoholics. The combination of the two factors is essential for the appearance of alcoholism. Alcohol is a depressant, the direct opposite of a stimulant. Taken in sufficient quantities it produces sleep. Its depressant action is gradual, however; and as it depresses certain control functions of the brain it allows behavior and attitudes which are usually repressed. (It is this less controlled behavior which makes people believe that it is a stimulant.) #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

Alcohol, even in small quantities, lowers sensitivity, relieves tension, allows the forgetting of difficult and unpleasant conceptions and memories. It reduces accuracy of judgment and discrimination, especially about the self. With alcohol, then, one can temporarily escape worries and anxieties, temporarily ease tensions, feel as if one were happy, clever, witty, graceful or, at least, less unhappy, less inept, less awkward. And one can gain this temporary feeling without utilizing the effort and ability which real achievement of such feeling would demand. Of the personality types significant for alcoholism only two will be mentioned. It should be recognized that there are psychotics and feebleminded persons who are also alcoholics, that there are persons, apparently quite normal, who under extraordinary stress may become compulsive drinkers. The great bulk of the alcoholics, however, fit into the two classes to be described, the primary and the secondary compulsive drinker types. The primary type may be likened to that category of persons labeled neurotic. This over-used and little understood word in the present instance at least serves to point out that primary compulsive drinkers were definitely maladjusted before they began drinking. Here, for example, is the individual whose personality was warped, whose emotional development was unhealthy from infancy or childhood on. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

The maladjustment might be seen as an inability to compete with equals or superiors without feeling extreme anxiety or apprehension of undefined, future pain. Or it might be seen as an unusual fear of contact with those of the opposite gender, or as a general conception of the self as unworthy, inefficient, and socially awkward. These states of mind are fairly common though irregular occurrences among adolescents, but as continued attitudes in a young or middle-aged adult they are out of keeping with the demands of our society. In the early twenties and certainly by the age of thirty there is great pressure on adults to be socially and economically competitive and appropriately self-assertive, to be married, and to have attained a relatively mature independence of self-control. As individuals of poor or no adjustment along these lines grow older, the pressures upon them grow stronger and the maladjustment becomes increasingly harder to bear. No statement is presented to explain why or how these individuals comes to be “neurotics.” It is a matter of common observation that there are many such persons. If such persons are, like most Americans, introduced to the custom of drinking, and if anxieties about drinking are not too great and no other way out of their dilemma is found, then they are likely candidates to start out on the road to alcoholism. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

Alcohol allows them to compete without anxiety, to mingle without or with less fear in mixed company, perhaps even to initiate courtship behavior, to forget their own interpretation of their personal inadequacies; it allows them relief from whatever their problem may be. Small wonder that they come to lean upon this crutch with increasing dependency. This development illustrates the conception that for the type of person described alcohol is an adjustment. However, the alcohol wears off while the neurotic characteristics remain as before. Furthermore, the memory of having acted aggressively or assertively, of having shown interest in the opposite gender because of alcohol creates new anxieties; the knowledge of having been “out-of-control” also adds guilt and remorse. However, in the long run the rewards of drinking for the incipient alcoholic are greater than these feelings. Later on, one may use alcohol to get rid of the post-alcoholic guilt and anxiety. Thus, a vicious circle comes into operation. The vicious circle is stimulated further by the inevitable extension and intensification of old problems and the rise of news one due to increasing periods of inebriety. Family and friends, employers and neighbors, customers and strangers, all will punish the person who often gets drunk. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

With the increase in problems the relieving, soothing, encouraging effects of alcohol become all the more desirable. So, although alcohol is an adjustment, it is a short-run, temporary adjustment and leads to further maladjustment. Before one’s drinking starts the secondary compulsive type appears on the surface as a fairly well-adjusted person. He or she has utilized social customs, attitudes, and organizations with considerable ability. Certainly the label “neurotic” would never have been applied. Some of this type may be more extroverted than those around them, tending to be the leader in the group, the excessive practical joker, the most aggressive salesman. The implication from this is sense of personal adequacy, of being a significant member of their group. Whatever the case, it is noticeable that they can differ markedly from the earlier mentioned “neurotic” type, that they have utilized customs, associations and attitudes which were socially acceptable; this plays an important role in the discussion of therapy. The prospective secondary type of compulsive drinker, when introduced to the drinking customs, appears to take it with great satisfaction. One already belongs to a group which usually drinks a good deal or one shortly joins such a group and become a regular drinker, later perhaps a heavy drinker, but one is not yet an alcoholic; one is in control of the drinking, not the drinking in control of one. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

Many people can be so characterized, and they need not become alcoholics. For the individual in whom we are interested, however, a process sets in which has been called the pampering effect of alcohol. Alcohol lowers sensitivity, discrimination, control and efficiency. Unless counteracting forces arise, it allows the drinker to respond to stimuli less adequately and to follow personal inclinations in the face of contrary social demands with less notice and less care. As a result the fairly constant heavy drinker may become a more careless worker, a more thoughtless father and husband, or mother and wife, a more demanding friend, a more aggressive neighbor. Nor is this the only effect. On the negative side one may be seen as failing to exercise one’s social abilities and one’s intellectual techniques. Without practice the personality assets become dulled and more difficult to use. This process may take place by almost imperceptible steps. The result of this process is inevitable—occupational, familial, financial, and neighborly problems are going to arise. Unfortunately, the individual has learned a simple response to avoid such problems—drinking. Again, a vicious circle can be seen. A second result of this process, a result which may confuse the therapist, is that the personality of the drinker seems to change. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

The personality change is not hard to explain. The individual finds oneself losing the affection and regard of one’s spouse, one’s boss, one’s friends; whereupon one loses affection and regard for them. One finds that one is less popular in one’s club, among fellow workers, or in community groups; whereupon one gives up these organizations. One can hardly help but realize that one’s work is not as good as it was; whereupon one talks it up, idealizes what one is going to do, what one has done; while realistic accomplishment continues downhill. One becomes increasingly isolated and consequently self-centered. As one loses friends and interests, one become cynical, self-conscious and suspicious of others. One rationalizes one’s situation, and as one’s rationalizations are not subject to the discipline of realistic give-and-take, one becomes overly idealistic or overly optimistic or pessimistic. Gradually one takes on more and more of the characteristics of the primary type. When one has achieved the full status of an alcoholic one may seem not a whit different from the primary type. From the point of view of rehabilitation, however, he or she is a decidedly different person; the changes of recover are far better than for those of the primary types. These descriptions of the two largest categories of compulsive drinkers, categories based on the developmental nature of the disease, are not a full answer to the question “Why does one become an alcoholic?” #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

The answers we discussed may help, however, toward a better understanding of the sorts of processes, conditions and factors involved in the development of the alcoholic condition. The human character is a structure built up to avoid perception of the terror, perdition and annihilation that dwell next door to every being. The task of psychology is to discover the strategies that a person uses to avoid anxiety. What style does one use to function automatically and uncritically in the World, and how does this style cripple one’s true growth and freedom of action and choice? Basically, how is a person being enslaved by one’s characterological lie about oneself? Most people live in a half-obscurity about their own perceptions of reality. Understating the compulsive character, means recognizing the rigidity of the person who has had to build extra-thick defenses against anxiety, a heavy character armor. A partisan of the most orthodoxy knows it all, one bows before the holy, truth is for one an ensemble of ceremonies, one talks about presenting oneself before the throne of God, of how many times one must bow, one knows everything the same way as does the pupil who is able to demonstrate a mathematical proposition with the letters ABC, but not when they are changed to DEF. One is therefore in dread whenever one bears something not arranged in the same order. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

In society today there is a shut-upness which we refer to as repression; it is the closed personality, the one who had fenced oneself around in childhood, not tested one’s own powers in action, not been free to discover oneself and one’s World in a relaxed way. If the child is not burdened by too much parental blocking of one’s action, too much infection with the parents’ anxieties, one can develop one’s own defenses in a less monopolizing way, can remain somewhat fluid and open in character. One is prepared to test reality in terms of one’s own action and experimentation and less on the basis of delegated authority and prejudgment or preperception. It is of infinite importance that a child be brought up with a conception of the lofty shut-upness [reserve], and be saved from the mistake kind. In an external respect it is easy to perceive when the moment has arrived that one ought to let the child walk alone; the art is to be constantly present and yet not be present, to let the child be allowed to develop itself, while nevertheless one has constantly a survey clearly before one. The art is to leave the child to itself in the very highest measure and on the greatest possible scale, and to express this apparent abandonment in such a way that, unobserved, one at the same time knows everything. And the father who educates or does everything for the child entrusts to one, but had not prevented one from becoming shut-up, has incurred a great accountability. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

The parent should let the child do one’s own exploration of the World and develop one’s own sure experimental powers. One knows that the child has to be protected against dangers and that watchfulness by the parent is of vital importance, but one does not want the parent to obtrude one’s own anxieties into the picture, to cut off the child’s action before it is absolutely necessary. Today we know that such an upbringing alone gives the child a self-confidence in the face of experience that one would not have if one were overly blocked: it gives one an inner sustainment. And it is precisely this inner sustainment that allows the child to develop a lofty shut-upness, or reverse: that is, an ego-controlled and self-confident appraisal of the World by a personality that can open up more easily to experience. Mistaken shut-upness, on the other hand, is the result of too much blockage, too much anxiety, too much effort to face up to experience by an organism that has been overburdened and weakened in its own controls: it means, therefore, more automatic repression by an essentially closed personality. The good is the opening toward new possibility and choice, the ability to face into anxiety; the closed is the evil, that which turns one away from newness and broader perceptions and experiences; the closed shut out revelation, obtrudes a veil between the person and one’s own situation in the World. Ideally these should be transparent, but for the closed person they are opaque. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

This shut-upness is precisely a lite of character. It eo ipso signifies a lie, or if you prefer, untruth. However, untruth is precisely unfreedom; the elasticity of freedom is consumed in the service of close reserve. Close reserve was the effect of the negating retrenchment of the ego in the individuality. And this is a perfectly contemporary psychoanalytic description of the costs of repression on the total personality, which could lead to things like alcoholism because the person becomes fragmented within oneself by the repression. Meanwhile, the real reality dwells under the surface, close at hand, ready to break through the repression, but the repression seemingly leaves the personality intact, seemingly functioning as a whole, in continuity—and that is how continuity is broken, how the personality is really at the mercy of the discontinuity expressed by the repression. The lie of character is built up because the individual needs to adjust to the World, to the parents, and to one’s own existential dilemmas. It is built up before the child has a chance to learn about oneself in an open or free way, and thus character defenses are automatic and unconscious. The problem is that the child becomes dependent on them and comes to be encased in one’s own character armor, unable to see freely beyond one’s own prison or into oneself, into the defenses on is using, the things that are determining one’s unfreedom. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

The best thing that the child can hope is that one’s shut-upness will not be of the mistake or massive kind, in which one’s character is too fearful of the World to be able to open itself to the possibilities of experience. However, that depends largely on the parents who have incurred a great accountability, and so they are obliged to shut themselves off from possibility. Styles of denying possibility and lies of character are the same thing. It leads to what we call inauthentic beings, beings who avoid developing their own uniqueness; they follow out the styles of automatic and uncritical living in which they were conditioned as children. They are inauthentic in that they do not belong to themselves, are not their own person, do not act from their own center, do not see reality on its terms; they are the one-dimensional being totally immersed in the fictional games being played in their society, unable to transcend their social conditioning: the corporation men and women in the West, the bureaucrats in the East, the tribal beings locked up in tradition—beings everywhere who do not understand what it means to think for themselves, and who, if one did, would shrink back at the idea of such audacity and exposures. The immediate man or woman, one’s self or one oneself is something included along with the other in the compass of the temporal and the Worldly. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

Thus, because these beings derive their identity from the collective, the self coheres immediately with the other, wishing, desiring, enjoy, and so forth, but passively; one manages to imitate other men or women, noting how they manage to live, and so one too lives after a sort. In Christendom one too is Christian, goes to church every Sunday, hears and understands the parson, yea, they understand one another; one dies; the parson introduces one into eternity for the price of $10—but a self one was not, and a self one did not become. For the immediate being does not recognize one’s self, one recognizes oneself only by one’s dress, one recognizes that one has a self only by externals. This is the automatic cultural human—human as confided by culture, a slave to it, who imagines that one has an identity if one pays one’s insurance premium, that one has control of one’s life if one guns one’s sports car or works one’s electric toothbrush. Today the inauthentic or immediate beings are familiar types, after decades of Marxist and existentialist analysis of being’s slavery to one’s social system. However, at some time, it must have been a shock to be a modern European city-dweller and be considered a Philistine at the same time. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

Philistinism is triviality, beings lulled by the daily routines of one’s society, content with the satisfactions that it offers one: in today’s World the car, the shopping center, the two-week Summer vacation. Beings are protected by the secure and limited alternatives one’s society offers one, and if one does not look up from one’s path one can live out one’s life with a certain dull security. Devoid of imagination, as the Philistine always is, one lives in a certain trivial province of experience as to how things go, what is possible, what usually occurs….Philistinism tranquilizes itself in the trivial. Why do beings accept to live a trivial life? Because the danger of a full horizon of experience, of course. This is the deeper motivation of philistinism, that it celebrates the triumph over possibility, over freedom. Philistinism knows its real enemy: freedom is dangerous. If you follow it to willingly in threatens to pull you into the air; if you give it up to wholly, you become a prisoner of necessity. The safest thing is to tow the mark of what is socially possible. For philistinism thinks it is in control of possibility, it thinks that when it has decoyed this prodigious elasticity into the field of probability or into the madhouse it holds it a prisoner; it carries possibility around like a prisoner in the change of the probable, shows it off. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

Consciousness itself is born out of the awareness of these limits. Human consciousness is the distinguishing feature of our existence; without limitations we would never have developed it. Consciousness is the awareness that emerges out of the dialectical tensions between possibilities and limitations. Infants begin to be aware of limits when they experience the balls as different from themselves; mother is a limiting factor for them in that she does not feed them every time they cry for food. Though a multitude of such limiting experiences they learn to develop the capacity to differentiate themselves from others and from objects and to delay gratification. If there had been no limits, there would be no consciousness. Our discussion so far may seem, at first glance, to be discouraging, but not when we probe more deeply. It is not by accident that the Hebrew myth that marks the beginning of human consciousness, Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, is portrayed in the context of rebellion. Consciousness is born in the struggle against a limit, called there a prohibition. Going beyond the limit set by Yahweh is then punished by the acquiring of others limits which operate inwardly in the human being—anxiety, the feeling of alienation and guilt. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

However, valuable qualities also come out of this experience of rebellion—the sense of personal responsibility and ultimately the possibility, born out of loneliness, of human love. Confronting limits for the human personality actually turns out to be expansive. Limiting and expanding thus go further. Civilization arose out of out physical limitations, or what some called inferiority. Tooth for tooth and claw for claw, men and women were inferior to the wild animals. In the struggle against these limitations for their survival, human beings evolved their intelligence. Conflict is both king of all and father of all. Conflict presupposes limits, and the struggle with limits is actually the source of creative productions. The limits are as necessary as those provided by the banks of the river, without which the water would be dispersed on the Earth and there would be no river—that is, the river is constituted by the tension between the flowing water and the banks. Art in the same way requires limits as a necessary factor in its birth. Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem. Again listen, unwise people do not understand how that which differs with itself is in agreement: harmony consists of opposing tension, like that of the bow and the lyre. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

In a discussion of how he composed his music, Duke Ellington explained that since his trumpet play could reach certain notes beautifully but not other notes, and the same with his trombonist, he had to write his music within those limits. “It’s good to have limits,” he remarked. True, in our age there is occurring a new valuation of spontaneity and a strong reaction against rigidity. This goes along with a rediscovery of the values of the childlike capacity to play. In modern art, as we all know, there has evolved a new interest in children’s painting as well as in peasant and primitive art, and these kinds of spontaneity often are used as models for adult art work. This is especially true in psychotherapy. The great majority of patients experience themselves as stifled and inhibited by the excessive and rigid limits insisted on by their parents. One of their reasons for coming for therapy in the first place is this conviction that all of this needs to be thrown overboard. Even if it is simplistic, this urge toward spontaneity obviously should be valued by the therapist. If they are to become integrated in any effective sense, people must recover the lost aspects of their personalities, lost under a pile of inhibitions. However, we must not forget that these stages in therapy, like children’s art, are interim stages. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

Children’s art is characterized by an unfinished quality. Despite the apparent similarity with nonobjective art, it still lacks the tension necessary for authentic mature art. It is a promise but not yet an achievement. Sooner or later the growing person’s art must relate itself to the dialectic tension that comes out confronting limits and is present in all forms of mature art. Michelangelo’s writhing slaves; van Gogh’s fiercely twisting cypress trees; Cezanne’s lovely yellow-green landscapes of southern France, reminding us of the freshness of eternal spring—these works have that spontaneity, but they also have the mature quality that comes from the absorption of tension. This makes them much more than interesting; it makes them great. The controlled and transcended tension present in the work of art is the result of the artists’ successful struggle with and against the limits. Remember, what is within you is everywhere. What is not, is nowhere. To start our quest for truth, we must start in the land where we are living, where destiny has put us. Look deeper into your own heart, for that is where what you really seek is. Enlightenment involves liberation from one’s ego, its captivity and deceitfulness. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

It is not emotional exuberance which produces a high spiritual result, but the depth and concentration with which truth is seen. The vibrations it emits will now clear you of external influences of false Gods and help you to center within your divine self. Prepare for your journey into eternal light and abundance and its integration with your soul. Know that the comfort you will find is that which you have the strength to create and perceive. Find strength to create and perceive comfort and joy within you soul as you connected with our Heavenly Father. “We would subject ourselves to the yoke of bondage if it were requisite with the justice of God, or if he should command us so to do. However, behold God doth not command us that we shall subject ourselves to our enemies, but that we should put our trust in him, and he will deliver us. Therefore, let us resist evil, and whatsoever evil we cannot resist with our words, yea, such as rebellions and dissension, let us resist them with our swords, that we may retain our freedom, that we may retain our freedom, that we may rejoice in the great privilege of our church, and in the cause of our Redeemer and our God,” reports Alma 61.12-14. Many an old fable is a perfect allegory of this quest. The temptations and perils, the toils and adventures of its hero are faithful references to what the aspirant has always encountered in the past and will encounter in our own day. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

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A Benign Influence Diffused itself from One and is Felt by the Sensitive, as if Borne on Telepathic Waves

November 5, 2019 1:44 am

Not to care, not to question, not to bother—all this had been part of the old way for me, one of shame and melancholy, an existence in which I assumed completely that we were cursed and were guilty victims of Original Sin. I have not seen us as worthy of ceremonies. Great social problems can be disregarded or responded to ineffectively if they have been carefully hidden, as in the case of people’s diaries, of if they are loudly and continuously talked about in distorted and misleading ways. This last has been the development in the field of alcoholism. As a result, new attempts to meet the problems of alcoholism are confronted with a task of uprooting old and fallacious conceptions in addition to the task of presenting new and more efficient responses to this age-old problem. To list some of the most common distortions: Alcohol is the cause of alcoholism; drunkenness and alcoholism are the same thing; alcoholism is often inherited and (completely incompatible with this and equally fallacious) alcoholism is due to lack of will power; alcohol causes 60 or 80 or 100 percent of crime; most alcoholics come from various social strata; “It Never Could Happen to Me’”; and so on and so on. All these ideas are fallacious, and this can be proved by logic, by facts, and by experimentation. However, to have people accept the proofs and act accordingly is far from easy. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

To appreciate the nature and extent of alcoholism, it is necessary to realize that there is a large body of organized misinformation and that this and the accompanying misconceptions are a part of the casual, undefined thinking of many, many, Americans. Unless this is realized, all that follows will be useless or misused. If one believes, for example, that alcoholism is a deviation from morality and that deviations from mortality should be punished, then, no matter what other knowledge or conceptions are present, one is going to punish the alcoholic by attitude, words, imprisonment, or otherwise. Punishment, however, will not alleviate, cure, or prevent any sickness, whether mumps, mental disease, or alcoholism. To this, the answer of the being with unconsciously distorted training is almost sure. One knows Paris, Britney, and Harry, punished after being drunk, never got drunk again or never took a drink again. One does not realize that this observation is irrelevant because drunkenness and alcoholism are quite different things. Misconceptions pile upon misconceptions. If this problem had been hidden rather than have been so loudly, so continuously, and so mistakenly talked about, it might have been better for any ultimate solution. What is an alcoholic? Alcoholics may be distinguished from other drinkers primarily by the purpose for which they drink. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

Some people drink to fulfill religious ritual, others in order to be polite, still others for a good time, or to make friends, to experiment, show off, get warm or cool, quench thirst, or because they like a particular alcoholic beverage as a condiment, or because they want to go on a spree. None of these is the purpose of the alcoholic, although one might claim any or al to satisfy some questioner. The alcoholic drinks because one has to if one is to go on living. One drinks compulsively; that is, a power greater than rational planning brings one to drinking and to excessive drinking. Most alcoholics hate liquor, hate drinking, hate the taste, hate the results, hate themselves for succumbing, but they cannot stop. Their drinking is as compulsive as the stealing by a kleptomaniac or the continual hand-washing of a person with a neurosis about cleanliness. It is useful to think of their drinking behavior as a symptom of some inner maladjustment which they do not understand and cannot control. The drinking may be the outward, obvious accompaniment of this more basic and hidden factor. From this statement alone it can be seen that alcoholism and drunkenness are different phenomena. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

All alcoholics exhibit drunkenness, but many who get drunk are not alcoholics. For example, the college boy on a spree, or a member of a group which drinks regularly (and usually to excess) on specific occasions, such as holidays, reunions, Saturday nights, may or may not get drunk, but they are not alcoholics unless their drinking is compulsive, brought about by some inner need or unresolved conflict. Compulsive drinking is a progressive condition. Its course may be rapid or extremely slow. Some few persons exhibit wild drinking behavior and uncontrollable need for alcohol immediately following their introduction to drinking. These individuals are probably in the category of psychotics; their alcoholism may be very obvious, but in actuality it is only a minor symptom of a major disease. A great many alcoholics have a history of 10 or 15 years of relatively controlled drinking. Sometimes in their career they may have experienced a few “blackouts” during drunkenness; they may have started sneaking a few drinks more than their companions. After a while it began to happen that on occasions when they “only intended to have a couple” they wound up drunk. They may have developed a need to rationalize their heavy drinking. Solitary drinking, morning drinking, and benders may appear as a regular practice anywhere from 4 to 7 years after the first blackouts. By this time the stage of alcoholism has been achieved, but it may not be recognized by the individual or by more than a few intimates. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

Attempts at control or at changing the pattern of drinking may follow. Feelings of remorse become persistent. The individual become socially isolated. One may develop deep anxieties, tremors, obvious physical symptoms. It may be 7 to 10 years from the time of one’s first “blackout,” 15 years since one’s first drink. By now, however, one is recognized by all, perhaps even by oneself, as an alcoholic. Some may take only three years to reach the undoubted stage of alcoholism. A clinical description of the alcoholic as one appears in the final stages may conclude this statement answering the question “What is an alcoholic?” No two alcoholics are identical. Some are sufficiently different to be labeled as different types. Nevertheless there are enough common characteristics in addition to the compulsive nature of the drinking and the progressive nature of the affliction to allow a general statement. Physically, many alcoholics in the later stages of this condition are characterized by undernourishment, highly irregular routine, inadequate sleep, and an over-all attitude of hopelessness, plus unrelieved tension. As a result they are highly susceptible to accidents and to other diseases. It should be carefully noted that these are not directly effects of alcohol. They follow upon the behavioral consequences of continued excessive drinking. Not all alcoholics present this picture since they may be closely protected by family, friends, or independent means. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

Psychologically the alcoholic in the later and last stages of his illness is characterized by being in continual and awful pain, by a set of responses which may be summed up as immaturity, and by an over-all attitude of extreme egocentricity. The pain is not merely or even importantly related to the physical aspects of one’s condition or the inconveniences occasioned by one’s type of life. It is centered around one’s inner feelings of self-depreciation, self-hate, self-pity, guilt, and all-encompassing remorse. Since one cannot explain this, one often attempts to hide it. Pain, however, is the constant comrade of the alcoholic. And a dreadful (in the deal meaning of the term) comrade it is. The immaturity of the alcoholic may be illustrated by one’s rapid mood swings, superficially sly rationalizations, adolescent self-consciousness, magnificent ideals which are almost inevitably linked with minuscule accomplishments, and juvenile techniques of hiding bottles, lying about drinking, and wheedling pity and free drinks. The alcoholic generally lacks interests in anything outside oneself and one’s problems. Such outside interests as one may manifest are usually temporary and directly and immediately related to a desire to show off or achieve some quick benefit. One’s continual comparison of all things to oneself, easy cynicism about anything not connected to oneself, self-pity, intense feelings of guilt and increasingly solitary existence, all bear witness to one’s egocentricity. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

Socially, the alcoholic in the final stages tends to be isolated, undersocialized. An amazing proportion of alcoholic males have never married. Of those who have, the proportioned of separated and divorced is many times that in the general population. The alcoholic frequently moves from place to place, from job to job. One has few if any close friends. Typically, the alcoholic does not do very much; one does not have hobbies, go to the movies, join in any group activities. As a result of this undersocialization or desocialization the alcoholic is susceptible to fewer stimuli than people with friends and groups membership. One receives fewer satisfactions and rewards. Punishment is less and less meaningful since the strength of punishment varies with its source; if a father or wife or friend punishes, the effect is far greater than if the actions comes from an impersonal source. Since the alcoholic has given up these associations, one is less stimulated, and only with difficulty is rewarded or punished effectively. One becomes one’s own source of stimulation, reward and punishment and thus one may vary greatly from the social norms, possess ridiculous ideals, vastly overpunish oneself, and lapse into minimum activity. Many diseases are iatrogenic—outcomes of the doctor-patient relationship or the impact of certain environments on patients. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

In research, we have recognized the social desirability variable. It has been investigated, and we recognize subjects’ tendencies to misrepresent their experience, to produce some desired image of themselves on the mind of the investigator is often a factor. Subjects in a research project are no fool. One knows that many times one’s future career may be at stake, depending upon how one has appeared through test and experimental findings. So one has a vested interest in such misrepresentation. It is very sane for one to protect oneself. One has no guarantee, at least in one’s experience, that one’s responses will help the psychologist to help one (the subject) fulfill oneself more fully. Our commitments as experimenters and the settings in which we work sometimes make it insane for a person to uncloak oneself. There was an experiment which studied the behavior of normal people under a particular situation, that of playing the roles of prisoners and guards respectively, in a mock prison. The general thesis of the experiment was perhaps the majority of people can be made to do almost anything by the strength of the situation they are put in, regardless of their morals, personal convictions, and values. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

More specifically, that in this experiment the prison situation transformed most of the subjects who played the role of guards into brutal sadists and most of those who played the role of prisoner into abject, frightened, and submissive me, some having such severe mental symptoms that they had to be released after a few days. In fact, the reactions of both groups were so intense that the experiment which was to have lasted for two weeks was broken off after six day. Students who were selected for the experiment answered an ad in the newspaper which asked for male volunteers to participate in a psychological study on prison life in return for payment $130.11 a day. The students who responded completed an extensive questionnaire concerning their family background, physical and mental health history, prior experience and attitudinal propensities with respect to sources of psychopathology (including their involvement in crime). Each respondent who completed the background questionnaire was interviewed by one of the two experimenters. Finally, the subjects who were judged to be most stable (physically and mentally), most mature, and least involved in anti-social behaviors were selected to participate in the study. On a random basis, half the Ss were assigned the role of guard, half were assigned to the role of prisoner. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

The final sample of subjects chose were administered a battery of psychological tests on the day prior to the start of the simulation, but to avoid any selective bias on the part of the experimenter-observers, scores were not tabulated until the study was completed. They had selected a sample of individuals who did not deviate from the normal range of the population, and who showed no sadistic or masochistic predisposition. The mock prison was constructed in a 35-foot section of a basement corridor in the psychological building at Stanford University. All subjects were told that they would be assigned either the guard or the prisoner ole on a completely random basis and all had voluntarily agreed to play either role for $130.11 per day for up to two weeks. They signed a contract guaranteeing a minimally adequate diet, clothing, housing and medical care as well as the financial remuneration in return for their stated “intention” of serving in the assigned role for the duration of the study. It was made explicit in the contract that those assigned to be prisoners should expect to be under surveillance (have little or no privacy), and to have some of their basic civil rights suspended during their imprisonment, excluding physical abuse. They were given no other information about what to expect nor instructions about behavior appropriate for a prisoner role. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

Those actually assigned to this treatment were informed by phone to be available at their place of residence on a given Sunday when we would start the experiment. The subjects assigned to be guards attended a meeting with the “Warden” (an undergraduate research assistant) and the “Superintendent” of the prison (the principal investigator). They were told that their task was to maintain the reasonable degree of order in the prison necessary for its effective functioning. Our intention not was to create a literal simulation of an American prison, but rather a functional representation of one. For ethical, moral, and pragmatic reasons we could not detain our subjects for extended or indefinite periods of time, we could not exercise the threat and promise of severe physical punishment, we could not allow homosexual or racist practices to flourish, nor could we duplicate certain other specific aspects of prison life. Nevertheless, we believed that we could create a situation with sufficient mundane realism to allow the role-playing participation to go beyond the superficial demands of their assignment into the deep structure of the characters they represented. To do so, we established functional equivalents for the activities and experiences of actual prison life which were expected to produce qualitatively similar psychological reactions in our subjects—feelings of power and powerlessness, of control and oppression, of satisfaction and frustration, or arbitrary rule and resistance to authority, of status and anonymity, of machismo and emasculation. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

How were the “prisoners” treated? They had been told to keep themselves ready for the beginning of the experiment. With the cooperation of the Palo Alto City Police Department all of the subjects assigned to the prisoner treatment were unexpectedly “arrested” at their residence. A police officer charged them with suspicion of burglary or armed robbery, advised them of their legal rights, handcuffed them, thoroughly searched them (often as curious neighbors look on) and carried them off to the police station in the rear of the police car. At the station they went through the standard routines of being fingerprinted, having an identification file prepared and then being placed in a detention cell. Each prisoner was blindfolded and subsequently driven by one of the experimenters and a subject-guard to our mock prison. Throughout the entire arrest procedure, the police officers involved maintained a formal, serious attitude, avoiding answering any questions of clarification as to the relation of this “arrest” to the mock study. Upon arrival at our experimental prison, each prisoner was stripped, sprayed with a delousing preparation (a deodorant spray) and made to stand alone naked for a while in the cell yard. After being given the uniform described previously and having an I.D. picture taken (“mug shot”), the prisoner was put in his cell and ordered to remain silent. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

Since “arrests” were carried out by the real police (one wonders about the legality of their participation in this procedure), as far as the subjects knew these were real charges, especially since the officers did not answer questions about the connection between the arrest and the experiment. What were the subjects to think? How were they to know that the “arrest” was no arrest; that the police had lent themselves to making these false accusations and to use force just to give more color to the experiment? The uniforms of the “prisoners” were peculiar. They consisted of loosely fitting muslin smocks with an identification number in front and back. No underclothes were work beneath these “dresses.” A light chain and lock were placed around one ankle. On their feet they wore rubber sandals and their hair was covered with a nylon stocking made into a cap. The prisoners’ uniforms were designed not only to deindividuate the prisoner but to be humiliating and serve as symbols of their dependence and subservience. The ankle chain was a constant reminder (even during their sleep when it hit the other ankle) of the oppressiveness of the environment. The stocking cap removed any distinctiveness associated with hair length, color or style (as does shaving of heads in some real prisons and the military). #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

The ill-fitting uniforms made the prisoners feel awkward in their movements; since these dresses were worn without undergarments, the unfirmed forced them to assume unfamiliar postures, more like those of a woman than a man—another part of the emasculating process of becoming a prisoner. What were the reactions of the prisoners and the guards to this situation during the six days of the experiment? The most dramatic evidence of the impact of this situation upon the participants was seen in the gross reactions of five prisoners who had to be released because of extreme emotional depression, crying, rage and acute anxiety. The pattern of symptoms was quite similar in four of the subjects and began as early as the second day of imprisonment. The fifth subject was released after being treated for a psychosomatic rash which covered portions of his body. Of the remaining prisoners, only two said they were not willing to forfeit the money they had earned in return for being “paroled.” When the experiment was terminated prematurely after only six days, all the remaining prisoners were delighted by their unexpected good fortune. In contrast most of the guards seemed to be distressed by the decision to stop the experiment and it appeared to us that they had become sufficiently involved in their roles that they now enjoyed the extreme control and power which they exercised and were reluctant to give up. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

None of the guards ever failed to come to work on time for their shift, and indeed, on several occasions guards remained on duty voluntarily and complaining for extra hours—without additional pay. The extremely pathological reactions which emerged in both groups of subjects testify to the power of the social forces operating, but still there were individual differences seen in styles of coping with this novel experience and in degrees of successful adaptation to it. Half the prisoners did endure the oppressive atmosphere, and not all the guards resorted to hostility. Some guards were tough but fair (“played by the rules”), some went far beyond their roles to engage in creative cruelty and harassment, while a few were passive and rarely instigated and coercive control over the prisoners. The percentage of actively sadistic guards, quite inventive in their techniques of breaking the spirit of the prisoners is estimated to be about one third. The rest are divided among the two other categories which are described, respectively as being tough but fair or good guards from the prisoner’s point of view since they did them small favors and were friendly; this is a very different characterization from that of being passive and rarely instigating coercive control, as expressed by a later report. It is believed that it proves that the situation alone can within a few days transform normal people into abject, submissive individuals or into ruthless sadists. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

However, if in spite of the whole spirit of this mock prison which, according to the concept of the experiment was meant to be degrading and humiliating (obviously the guards must have caught on to this immediately), two thirds of the guards did not commit sadistic acts for personal kicks, the experiment seems rather to prove that one can not transform people so easily into sadist by providing them with the proper situation. The difference between behavior and character matters very much in this context. It is one thing to behave according to sadistic rules and another thing to want to be and to enjoy being cruel to people. Still, character traits are often entirely unconscious and, furthermore, cannot be discovered by conventional psychological tests; as far as projective tests are concerned, such as the T.A.T or the Rorschach, only investigators with considerable experience in the study of unconscious process will discover much unconscious material. The data on the guards are open to question for still another reason. These subjects were selected precisely because they represented more or less average, normal men, and they were found to be without sadistic predispositions. This result contradicts empirical evidence which shows that the percentage of unconscious sadists in an average population is not zero. Some studies have shown this, and a skilled observer can detect it without the use of questionnaires or test. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

However, whatever the percentage of sadistic characters in a normal population may be, the complete absence of this category does not speak well for the aptness of the tests used with regard to this problem. Some of the puzzling results of the experiment are probably to be explained by another factor. The authors state that the subjects had difficulty in distinguishing reality from the role they were playing, and assume this to be a result of the situation; this is indeed true, but the experimenters built this result into the experiment. In the first place the prisoners were confused by several circumstances. The conditions they were told and under which they entered into the contract were drastically different from those they found. They could not possibly have expected to find themselves in a degrading and humiliating atmosphere. More important for the creation of the confusion is the cooperation of the police. Since it is most usual for police authorities to lend themselves to such an experimental game, it was very difficult for the prisoners to appreciate the difference between reality and role-playing. The report shows that they did not even know whether their arrest had anything to do with the experiment, and the officers refused to answer their questions about this connection. Would not any average person be confused and enter the experiment with a sense of puzzlement, of having been tricked, and of helplessness? #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

When some prisoners tried to break out of the mock situation, the guard prevented them by force. It seems that they were given the impression that only the parole board could give them permission to leave. One of the most remarkable incidents of the study occurred during a parole board hearing when each of five prisoners eligible for parole was asked by the senior author where he would be willing to forfeit all the money earned as a prisoner is he were to be paroled (released from the study). Three of the five prisoners said, “yes,” they would be willing to do this. Notice that the original incentive for participating in the study had been the promise of money, and they were, after only four days, prepared to give this up completely. And, more surprisingly when told this possibility would have to be discussed with members of the staff before a decision could be made, each prisoner got up quietly and was escorted by a guard back to his cell. If they regarded themselves simply as subjects participating in an experiment for money, there was no longer any incentive to remain in the study and they could have easily escaped this situation which had so clearly become aversive for them by quitting. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

Yet, so powerful was the control which the situation had come to have over them, so much a reality had this simulated environment become, that they were unable to see that their original and singular motive for remaining no longer obtained, and they returned to their cells to await a parole decision by their captors It seems that the prisoners became confused and did not know any longer what was what and who was who. Many people do not understand why anyone would conduct such a study. There is ample evidence of the effects of Hitler’s concentration camps and many credible studied done on prisons. This experiment allowed the researchers and guards to amuse themselves by sadistic behavior, and they did so without fearing any punishment. In real life, people cannot understand why they, who had always obeyed the law without question, were being persecuted. Even as they are unjustly imprisoned, the dared not oppose their oppress even in the thought, though it would have given them a self respect they were badly in need of. All they could do was plead, and many groveled. Since law and police had to remain beyond reproach, they accepted as just whatever the Gestapo did. The SS made fun of them, mistreated them badly, while at the same time enjoying scenes that emphasized their position of superiority. “Salvation is freedom,” reports 2 Nephi 2.4. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

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Evil Flows from Poisoned Wells; Good Flows from Pure and Crystal Fountains, Dazzling a Silvery Shower of Love and Beauty!

November 2, 2019 1:40 am

We seek to perfect what we are, not to constantly alter it. We seek to find something that is a true expression of our soul with which is to shape what makes up our form. However, there is no need for you to trouble yourself over these things. If your reasoning is correct, it should throw some light upon the peculiar quality of property delinquency in the delinquent subculture. We have already seen how the rewardingness of a college-boy and middle-class way of life depends, to a great extent, upon general respect for property right. In an urban society, in particular, the possession and display of property are the most ready and public badges of reputable social class status and are, for that reason, extraordinarily ego-involved. That property actually is a reward for middle-class morality and the possession of property. The middle-classes have, then, a strong interest in scrupulous regard for property rights, not only because property is intrinsically valuable but because the full enjoyment of their status requires that status be readily recognizable and therefore that property adhere to those who earn it. The cavalier misappropriation or destruction of property, therefore, is not only a diversion or diminution of wealth; it is an attack on the middle-class where their egos are most vulnerable. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

Group stealing, institutionalized in the delinquent subculture, is not just a way of getting something. It is a means that is the antithesis of sober and diligent labor in a calling. It expresses contempt for a way of life by making its opposite a criterion of status. Money and other valuables are not, as such, despised by the delinquent. For the delinquent, and the non-delinquent alike, money is a most glamorous and efficient means to a variety of ends and one cannot have too much of it. But, in the delinquent subculture, the stolen dollar has an odor of sanctity that does not attach to the dollar saved or the dollar earned. This delinquent system of values and way of life does its job of problem-solving most effectively when it is adopted as a group solution. We have stressed that the efficacy of a given change in values as a solution and therefore the motivation to such a change depends heavily upon the availability of reference groups within which the deviant values are already institutionalized, or whose members would stand to profit from such a system of deviant values if each were assured of the support and concurrences of the others. So it is with delinquency. We do not suggest that joining in the creation or perpetuation of a delinquent subculture is the only road to delinquency. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

We do believe, however, that for most delinquents delinquency would not be available as a response were it not socially legitimized and given a kind of respectability, albeit by a restricted community of fellow-adventurers. In this respect, the adoption of delinquency is like the adoption of the practice of appearing at the office in open-collar and shirt sleeves. It is much more comfortable, is it more sensible than full regalia? Is it neat? Is it dignified? The arguments in the affirmative will appear much more forceful if the practice is already established in one’s milieu or if one sense that others are prepared to go along if someone makes the first tentative gestures. Indeed, to many of those who sweat and chafe in ties and jackets, the possibility of an alternative may not even occur until they discover that it has been adopted by their colleagues. This way of looking at delinquency suggests an answer to a certain paradox. Countless mothers have protested that their “Simon” was a good boy until he fell in love it a certain bunch. However, the mothers of each of Simon’s companions hold the same view with respect to their own offspring. It is conceivable and even probable that some of these mothers are naïve, that one or more of these youngsters are “rotten apples” who infected the others. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

We suggest, however, that all of the mothers may be right, that there is a chemistry in the group situation itself which engenders that which was not there before, that group interaction is a sort of catalyst which releases potentialities not otherwise visible. This is especially true when we are dealing with a problem of status-frustration. Status, by definition, is a grant of respect from others. A new system of norms, which measure status by criteria which one can meet, is of no value unless others are prepared to apply those criteria, and others are not likely to do so unless one is prepared to reciprocate. We have referred to a lingering ambivalence in the delinquent’s own value system, an ambivalence which threatens the adjustment one has achieved and which is met through the mechanism of reaction-formation. The delinquent may have to contend with another ambivalence, in the area of one’s status sources. The delinquent subculture offers him status as against other children of whatever social level, but is offers hum this status in the eyes of one’s fellow delinquents only. To the extent that there remains a desire for recognition from groups whose respect has been forfeited by commitment to a new subculture, one’s satisfaction in one’s solution is imperfect and adulterated. One can perfect one’s solution only by rejecting as status sources those who reject one. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

This too may require a certain measure of reaction-formation, going beyond indifference to active hostility and contempt for all those who do not share one’s subculture. One becomes all the more dependent upon one’s delinquent gang. Outside that gang one’s status position is now weaker than ever. The gang itself tends toward a kind of sectarian solidarity, because the benefits of membership can only be realized in active face-to-face relationships with group members. This interpretation of the delinquent subculture had important implications for the sociology of social problems. People are prone to assume that those things which we define as evil and those which we define as good have their origins in separate and distinct features of our society. Evil flows from poisoned wells; good flows from pure and crystal fountains. The same source cannot feed both. Our view is different. It holds that those values which are at the core of the American way of life, which help to motivate the behavior which we most esteem as typically American, are among the major determinants of that which we stigmatize as pathological. More specifically, it holds that the problems of adjustments to which the delinquent subculture is a response are determined, in part, by those very values which respectable society holds most sacred. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

The same value system, impinging upon children differently equipped to meet it, is instrumental in generating both delinquency and respectability. The rebel insists that one’s identity be respected; one fights to preserve one’s intellectual and spiritual integrity against the suppressive demands of one’s society. One must range oneself against the group which represents to one conformism, adjustment, and the death of one’s own originality and voice. Continuously through human history and through the life-span of each one of us, there goes on this dialectical process between individual and society, person and group, being and community. When either pole of the dialectic is neglected, impoverishment of the personality sets in. Every being has from time to time impulses to shock one’s society, fantasies of outraging one’s neighbors. Paradoxically enough, one’s own continued mental vitality depends on this. Also, paradoxically, the community itself, even though it condemns the outrage, gets its health, vitality and new growth from the outrage. This shows once again that human beings do not grow in one-dimensional fashion toward something better and better, but rather by a dynamic process, a thesis and antithesis; they grow down at the same time as they grow up, deeper while they grow higher. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

The Garden of Eden myth portrays the rebellion as being against God. And, indeed, it is against authority, against the status quo, against whatever clings to the values of the past rather than looks to the future. What is omitted from the rhetoric in this rebellion is that the outcome is not either/or, but a dialectical interplay: we need authority as we rebel against it. We rebel against the culture with the very language and knowledge that we learned from the culture; we revolve against or parents while loving them at the same time. The rebel also needs one’s society. One’s language, one’s concepts, one’s way of relating to others all come from that culture which one now opposes. One rises from the society, criticizes it, and aligns oneself with those who are trying to reform it; and all the while one is a member of the very culture one opposes. If one thinks of civilization as ungrateful in killings its prophets, one also sees the absurdity of the whole question of gratitude or ingratitude in the behavior of the rebel. This is why I call the relationship dialectic. It is a dynamic interrelationship in which each pole exists by virtue of the other pole—as one changes, the other does likewise. Beings therefore have a right to fear that society may unhuman them. Yet no being has made the best of one’s gifts without the setting [up] of a helpful society, such as the Greek or the Italian city states. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

Always the animal drive for self, the jungle of nature, waits to disrupt one’s city. And yet that force, anti-social as it is, is not all alien or all bad. The mind that drives it is full of human wishes. The Greeks remembered that every mind, good as well as bad, takes strength from our animal body. It is the nature of society to suppress that individual person. Pointing this out, it is a surprise that people do often talk as through the group ought to behave differently. Society can be spoken of as being bureaucratic, juggernaut, supertechnocratic, all implying that while society has its faults, we are what we are. On one hand, this arises from a utopianism—the expectation that when we develop a society which trains us rightly, we will all be in fine shape. On the other hand, it is like a child wheeling one’s parents because they are not taller or in some other way different from what they are. All of which society cannot be expected to be. For society, on one side, is us. The rebel is a split personality that one realizes one’s society nursed one, met one’s needs, and gave one security to develop one’s potentialities; yet one smarts under its constraints and finds it stifling. The rebel is continually struggling to make the society into a community. People feel they rebel, therefore they exist. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

In our particular day, the rebel fights the mechanizing bureaucratic trends not because these in themselves are evil, but because they are the paramount modern channels for the dehumanizing of beings, the stultifying loss of integrity, and the indignity of beings. One fights affluence for a similar reason, for one thinks that an abundance of wealthy may erode power, and riches are particularly dangerous for the well-being of republics because corruption has a tendency to set in and take precedence over justice, family values and human rights. The rebel also may be found in the colorful, albeit sometimes tattered, clothes of the dropout. The young person rightly sensing the threat to one’s values and to one’s life in the Syrian war, pollution, and the dehumanization which seems to accompany our vast technological progress, drops out of society for a period. One’s action is protest against the rigidity of society, but it is also a time in which one can find oneself. It is similar to the withdrawal of Jesus to the wilderness to find inner integrity before beginning their ministries. It is also similar to that period of wandering taken by the students of the Middle Ages as an integral part of their education. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

True, the dropout can never completely deny one’s culture, never entirely sever one’s umbilical cord. One takes it with one to the mountain or the dessert in one’s language, one’s way of thinking, and even as an object against which to protest. However, in one’s withdrawal one can get new perspective, a new awareness of oneself which may stand one in very good stead later on. I have had the impression in talking with hipsters that for some of them the year or so they dropped out protected them from psychosis. It gave them some breathing time in the burdensome sequence of nursery, elementary school, high school, college, graduate school—during which many of them find themselves in a genuine danger of suffocation. Often the dropping out serves a purpose similar to psychoanalysis. No one would argue that the dropout has not selected a more satisfactory way of working things out, not to say less expensive for all concerned, than a stint in a mental hospital. It is entirely possible that one comes back from one’s seemingly lighthearted wanderings with a new seriousness in one’s relationship to oneself and one’s society. Human beings can be conditioned into any form of Nazilike obedience or antlike organization of colonies. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

However, we must not forget at the same moment that there are individuals who from time to time pull themselves and oppose the group even to the extent of going to prison. Edward Snowden, the Berrigan brothers, and Bonhoeffer come to mind. Daniel Ellsberg’s decision to make the Pentagon Papers available to the people was the one tangible step he felt he could take to shorten the Vietnam war. Some people become rebels because they have empathy for the suffering of people, especially helpless children. Rebellion can be a flamboyant, long struggle for psychological integrity. However, whatever the motives, it is clear that rebels step out because in many cases they are performing acts against law and order. With social media, people are less dependent on the news because they can get their points out using mass communication and modern technology in the service of the rebellion. There is no escape from living through this dialectical conflict of individual and society. The only choice is whether one will live it through constructively and with zest and dignity or waste one’s energy and substance protesting against a Universe which is not organized according to one’s living. No matter how much society is changed—and much of it cries to high Heaven for change—there still will exist the fundamental dialectical situation of individuation against the conformist, leveling tendencies of the society. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

Some societies have recognized and made allowance for the destructive, protesting, anarch needs of the citizens. Then you get situations like what is going on in China. Tens of thousands of protesters in Hong Kong are peacefully marching on the 22^nd anniversary of the former colony’s handover from Britain to China, but also a group of protestors took their frustrations out, as hundreds of young protestors broke into the heart of the government of Hong Kong’s legislative council. We need our ways of mocking authority. We have our Halloween and April Fools’ Day. However, we need ways of channeling our secret dreams of outraging our neighbors and scandalizing the town fathers—in short, of symbolically expressing our dreams of revenge on a society that thwarts and confines us. An interesting example of this is the scapegoat king, who accepts the scepter knowing that he will be killed during some riotous saturnalia in which all authority is mocked. And consider the mocking of ultimate religious authority in the crucifixion of God’s son, Jesus. The expression of our disdain and mocking—indeed, of all these so-called negative and destructive emotions—enables us then to see and experience more clearly the beneficial side of religious conviction. We can change the forms of these beneficial and negative sides of human nature, but we cannot change the fact of them without amputating part of human experience and impoverishing ourselves. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

Are not the excesses in American life—one of which is violence—symptoms in part of a lack of sound opportunities to let out the secret dreams of revenge on the society that thwarts and contains the individual. You cannot in fact bottle up these deep feelings of protest in a World as mechanical as ours and think that you will syphon them off casually in lacy thrillers and in little evasins of the forces of order. Anti-social feelings in a hierarchy society like ours are first a power, then a commodity on which some unscrupulous leader can raise to fame, and become the spokes persons for the dream of violence of all the underrepresented. The recognition of the value of the rebel would go a long way in channeling such daimonic forces in constructive directions. For the rebel does what the rest of us would like to do but do not dare. Not that Christ willingly takes on Himself the sins and the scorns of beings; He acts, lives, and dies, vicariously for the rest of us. This is what makes Him a rebel. The rebel and the savior then turn out to be the same figure. Through his rebellion the rebel saves us. We see here another demonstration of my previous thesis—that civilization needs the rebel. The possibilities of the human being are unlimited, and that statement can be de-energizing. If you take it at face value, there is no real problem anymore. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

Every problem will sooner or later be overcome by these unlimited possibilities; there remain only temporary difficulties that will go away on their own accord when the time comes. Saying that possibilities are unlimited to a person who has not figured out how to overcome a situation, however, is like putting someone into a canoe and pushing one out into the Atlantic toward England with the cheery comment, “The sky is the limit.” The canoer is only too aware of the fact that an inescapably real limit is also the bottom of the ocean. There is the inescapable physical limitation of death. We can postpone our death slightly, but nevertheless each of us will die and at some future time unknow to and unpredictable by us. Sickness is another limit. When we overwork, we get ill in one form or another. There are obvious neurological limits. If the blood stops flowing to the brain for as little as a couple of minutes, a stroke or some other kind of serious damage occurs. Despite the fact that we can improve our intelligence to some degree, it remains radically limited by our physical and emotional environment. There are also metaphysical limitations which are even more interesting. We can blind ourselves to reality and come to grief. True, we can surpass to some extent the limitations of our family backgrounds or our historical situations, but such transcendence can occurs only to those who accept the fact of their limitation to begin with. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

For seekers of truth, real fruit is only borne when one seeks within, for the indwelling God, who author of our soul. The question of how far one will be prepared to travel in this quest has no geographical reference. It is a metaphorical one and refers only to the time one can give each day to the exercises, studies, and devotions, as well as to the moral ideals one can bring oneself to pursue. One is not asked for more than one feels one can humanly give under one’s present circumstances and responsibilities. We do not need to cross the sea to find God—the Word is nigh thee, is in thy heart. To come to know our true divine power, we must continually become something greater and therefore that which we were must come to an end. Immortality through it sounds good on the surface in an exoteric sense is truly the source of attachment and fear of change. Embracing God is overcoming perfection. Through the depths of your soul you must also come to realize that all systems of enslavement which emanate from this concept of external divinity are equally useless when compared to your potential. Simply reading and understanding it intellectually is not enough. It must be experiences through the work itself so that you have become stronger in faith, so strong that you can rise above stress and anxiety. “They were in captivity, and again the Lord did deliver them out of bondage by the power of his word; and we were brought into this land, and here we began to establish the church of God throughout this land also,” reports Alma 5.5. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15

Randolph Harris II International Institute

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