Randolph Harris II International Institute

He had lost his hold of the magnetic chain of humanity. He was no longer a brother-man, opening the chambers of the dungeons of our common nature by the key of holy sympathy, which gave him a right to share in all its secrets; he was now a cold observer, looking on humankind as the subject of his experiment, and, at length, converting man and woman to be his puppets, and pulling the wires that moved them to such degrees of crimes as were demanded for his study. Aggression emerges on the spectrum at that point where overt conflict also emerges. Although conflict may be faintly detected in self-affirmation and may be even slightly more noticeable in self-assertion, on those levels it is typically directed inward. There is a conflict within me, for example, when I get m nerve up to assert myself before a large audience to ask a question of the speaker; the conflict may then be invisible to the outside World. However, in aggression there is no question about the overt conflict. There occurs a pitting of interest against interest, and the aggressive act is an endeavor to come to some resolution in this conflict. A Pandora’s box of moral maladies is opened if, following the habit in America, we condemn aggression as evil as soon as it shows its head. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14

To that kind of thinking, the power of the status quo is automatically beneficent and God-given, whether it be the state troopers going in to slaughter at Garlic Festival or the police quelling a Sacramento riot; just as automatically the rebel is seen as evil. Thus we have the tendency to label one act as aggressive and, therefore, to be condemned when performed by those out of power, and to label the exact same act as good when performed by those in power (or vice versa). The reason aggression terrifies people so much is that it involves the potentiality of force. The force in aggression can take away our lives in the physical, intellectual, or spiritual sense. Physical force is understood well enough. Intellectual aggression may have the same compelling quality, as in abrasive argument—especially argumentum ad hominem. Or the coercion may be spiritual, as in the threat of ostracism or excommunication. That is last can be a great threat is shown by the phenomenon known as “voodoo death.” A condemned person who is “cut dead” in primitive society, as a punishment, say, for breaking one of the taboos, falls to the ground; one’s pulse becomes thready; one pants and breathes hard; and in a few hours one dies. Even in advanced societies “cutting one dead” is an aggressive act that is both psychological and spiritual and produces potent results. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14

The Janus-faced nature of aggression can be seen in that word’s Latin root aggredi, which means “to go forward, to approach.” Primarily, this means to “approach someone for counsel or advice.” Second, it means “to move against” or “to move with intent to hurt.” In other words, aggression in origin is pure conjecture, a reaching out, a making contact either for friendly affirmation of yourself and another or for hostile purposes the way a bear hug is part f a puglist’s technique. The opposite of aggression is not loving peace or consideration or friendship, but isolation, the state of no contact at all. This is actually the state of the person—the understanding of whom may be obtained by looking within one’s self and not necessarily observing in a mental hospital—who can brook no rebuke of what one does or thinks; soon one can accept no correction; and, finally, no comment at all. One becomes totally isolated from other persons. As so often happens in psychotherapy, when the patient expresses some negation—“I feel you are attacking me. I cannot stand that…”—or when the therapist says: “What you are saying makes me angry; let us see why,” both together can explore what sensitive spot was hit. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14

When these aspects of aggression are worked though, there is not only a clearing of the air but both arrive at a new and deeper understanding of the other and, generally—since we love people for their faults as well as their virtues—a greater affection for the other too. The constructive forms of aggression include cutting through barriers to initiate a relationship; confronting another without intent to hurt but wit the intent to penetrate into one’s consciousness; waring off powers that threaten one’s integrity; actualizing one’s own self and one’s own ideas in hostile environments; overcoming the barriers to healing. Love-making and fighting are very similar neurophysiologically in human beings. Lovers’ quarrels often end up in pleasures of the flesh. There is a strange relationship between the fighter and the lover: the knight rescuing the maiden from the dragon and enjoying pleasures of the flesh with are part of the same fable. In fighting there is a vivid intimacy, a closeness that partakes of both hate and love, an intimacy held off by hatred but an intimacy nevertheless, and it can blossom into affection or love. An example of this is seen in Armand the Vampire by Anne Rice when Armand has a one night encounter of the pleasures of the flesh with Lord Harlech. Lord Harlech tries to kill him, but Armand escapes. Only for Lord Harlech to track him down, break into his house, and kill two of the boys. Armand is so upset that he refuses to hide and goes after Lord Harlech to take his life. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14

The two of them get into a fight and Lord Harlech cuts Armand, then Armand slashes his throat, but he did not die. As the battle continues, Lord Harlech expresses his feelings. “You horrid damnable little devil,” he said. “You made me adore you so you could draw and quarter me at your pleasure. You promised me you would come back!” The Armand says that, Lord Harlech “kept up this sort of verbal barrage the entire time we fought. He seemed to need it, rather like a goading battle drum and fife.” “Come on, you despicable little Angel, I will tear your wings off!” Lord Harlech said. This battle proves that there is a strange relationship between fighting and love. Because Lord Harlech could not get the love he wanted and had an obsession, he fighting Armand was the only way he could get close to him, but it blossom into affection, as Armand and Riccardo ended Lord Harlech’s life, and Lord Harlech poisoned Armand. So I guess it pays to be careful who you fight with. The negative side of aggression is what is normally referred to in our society and thus does not require much definition here. It consists essentially of contact with another with intent to injure or give pain, taking power from the other for one’s self-protection or simply to increase one’s own power. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14

Why has the beneficial side of aggression been so consistently repressed and the negative side so emphasized? One obvious reason is that we have been terrified of aggression, and we assume—delusion though it is—that we can better control it if we center all our attention on its destructive aspects as though that is all there is. This identification of a word with only its negative meanings (such as expletives and devil) is one of the oldest misuses of the diamonic. In so doing we proscribe the whole area by labeling it off limits, so that anyone who talks about the devil is already under his power. Another reason we tend to emphasize only the negative side of aggression is that it carries with it anxiety and guilt. We think we can better avoid that anxiety and guilt if we call Prometheus a fanciful legend and posit ourselves as saved from anxiety and guilt by the second Adam, Christ. When this is done through rigid and strict doctrines, as it is by many fundamentalists, it does give the individual a certain amount of control. However, the system of control is shaky at best. Its value is grossly outweighed by the harm it does in truncating consciousness and blocking off sensitivity and understanding of others. The truth is that practically everything we do is a mixture of positive and negative forms of aggression. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14

Before I give a lecture, I find myself getting in the mod of “If anyone foes to sleep, my voice and ideas will be so importunate that I will wake him up” (which is positive aggression). Sometimes I defiantly feel: “If anyone tries to interrupt me by heckling, I will shut one up by making one look silly” (which is negative aggression). There is a hypothesis that people have a predisposition toward anxiety to the degree which they had been rejected by their mothers. However, it is only true 50 percent of the time because people who are forced out of their houses by their mothers, many of them simply make their friends among other youngsters on the street. Hence, there was not the predisposition to anxiety we would have expected according to what we know in psychology. How could this be? Had the rejected young women who had not experienced anxiety become hardened, apathetic, so that they did not feel rejection? The answer to that seemed clearly no. Were they psychopathic or sociopathic types, who also do not experience anxiety? Again, no. I felt myself caught by an insoluble problem. Late one day, putting aside my books and papers in the little office I used in that shelter house, I walked down the street toward the subway. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14

I was tired. I tried to put the whole troublesome business out of my mind. About fifty feet away from the entrance to the Brighton Station, it suddenly struck me out of the blue, as the not-unfitting expression goes, that those young women who did not fit my hypothesis were all from the proletarian class. And as quickly as that idea struck me, other ideas poured out. I think I had not taken another step on the sidewalk when a whole new hypothesis broke loose in my mind. I realized my entire theory would have to be changed. I saw at that instant that it is not rejection by the mother that is the original trauma which is the source of anxiety; it is rather rejection that is lied about. The proletarian mothers rejected their children, but they never made any bones about it. The children knew they were rejected; they went out on the streets and found other companions. There was never any subterfuge about their situation. They knew their World—bad or good—and they could orient themselves to it. However, the middle-class young women were always lied to in their families. They were rejected by mothers who pretended they loved them. This was really the source of their anxiety, not the sheer rejection. I saw, in that instantaneous way that characterizes insights from these deeper sources, that anxiety comes from not being able to know the World you are in, not being able to orient yourself in your own existence. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14

I was convinced there, on the street—and later thought and experienced only convinced me the more—that this is a better, ore accurate, and more elegant theory, than my first. The helplessness of a child is often considered merely as a biological fact. Though the child is for long years factually dependent on its environment for the fulfillment of its needs—having less physical strength and less experience than the grown-ups—there is nevertheless too much emphasis on the biological aspects of the question. After the first two or three years of life there is a decided change from the prevailingly biological dependence to a kind of dependence that includes mental, intellectual and spiritual life of the child. This continues until the child matures into early adulthood and is able to take life into its own hands. There are great individual differences, though, in the degree to which children remined dependent on their parents. It all depends on what the parents try to achieve in the education of their offspring: whether the tendency is to make a child strong, courageous, independent, capable of dealing with all sorts of situations, or whether the main tendency is to shelter the child, to make it obedient, to keep it ignorant of life as it is, or in short to infantilize it up to twenty years of age or longer. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14

In children growing up under adverse conditions helplessness is usually artificially reinforced by intimidation, by babying or by bringing and keeping the child in a stage of emotional dependence. The more helpless a child is made the less will it dare t feel or show opposition, and the longer will such opposition be delayed. In this situation the underlying feeling—or what we may call the motto—is I have to repress my hostility because I need you. Fear may be aroused directly by threats, prohibitions and punishments, and by outbreaks of temper or violent scenes witnessed by a child; it may be aroused also by indirect intimidation, such as impressing this child with the great dangers of life—germs, street cares, strangers, uneducated children, climbing trees. The more apprehensive a child is made the less will it dare to show or even to feel hostility. Here the motto is: I have to repress my hostility because I am afraid of you. Love may be another reason for repressing hostility. When genuine affection is absent there is often a great verbal emphasis on how much the parents love the child and how they would sacrifice for one up to the last drop of their blood. A child, particularly if otherwise intimidated, may cling to this substitute for love and fear to be rebellious lest it lose the reward for being docile. In such situations the motto is: I have to repress hostility for fear of losing love. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14

Thus far we have discussed situations in which a child represses his hostility against the parents because he is afraid that any expression of it would spoil his relations to the parents. He is motivated by plain fear that these powerful giants would desert him, withdraw their reassuring benevolence or turn against him. In addition, in our culture a child is usually made to feel guilty for any feelings or expressions of hostility or opposition; that is, he is made to feel unworthy or contemptible in his own eyes if he breaks the rules set up by them. These two reasons for feelings of guilt are closely interrelated. The more a child is made to feel guilty about trespassing on forbidden territory the less will be dare to feel spiteful or accusatory toward the parents. In our culture the sphere of pleasures of the flesh is the one in which guilt feelings are most frequently stimulated. Whether prohibitions are expressed by audible silence or by open threats and punishment, a child frequently comes to feel not only that pleasures of the flesh and curiosity about pleasures of the flesh are activities that are forbidden and they feel they are dirty and despicable if they indulge in them. If there are any fantasies and wishes concerning pleasures of the flesh, they are to remain unexpressed as a result of the forbidding attitude toward sexuality in general, and of course it makes a youth feel guilty. In this situation the motto is: I have to repress hostility because I would be a bad child if I felt hostile. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14

In various combinations any of the factors mentioned may bring a child to repress one’s hostility and eventually produce anxiety. However, does every infantile anxiety necessarily lead ultimately to a neurosis? Our knowledge is not advanced enough to answer this question adequately. My belief is that infantile anxiety is a necessary factor but not a sufficient causes for the development of a neurosis. It seems that favorable circumstances, such as an early change of surroundings or counteracting influences of any sort, may forestall a definite neurotic development. If, however, as frequently happens, living conditions are not of a kind to diminish the anxiety, then not only may this anxiety persist, but—as we shall see later—it is bound gradually to increase and to set in motion all the processes which constitute a neurosis. Among the factors that may influence the further development of infantile anxiety there is one that I want to consider especially. It makes a great difference whether the reaction of hostility and anxiety is restricted to the surroundings which forced the child into it, or whether it develops into an attitude of hostility and anxiety toward people in general. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14

If a child is fortunate enough to have, for example, a loving grandmother, an understanding teacher, some good friends, one’s experience with them may prevent one from expecting nothing but bad from everybody. However, the more difficult are one’s experiences in the family, the more will a child be inclined to develop not only a reaction of hatred toward the parents and other children but a distrustful or spiteful attitude toward everyone. The more a child is isolated and deterred from making other experiences of one’s own, the more such a development will be fostered. And finally, the more a child covers up one’s grudge against one’s own family, as for instance by conforming with one’s parents’ attitudes, the more one projects one’s anxiety to the outside World and thus becomes convinced that the World in general is dangerous and frightening. The general anxiety concerning the World may also develop or increase gradually. A child who has grown up in this kind of atmosphere described will not dare in one’s own contacts with others to be as enterprising or pugnacious as they. One will have lost the blissful certainty of being wanted and will take even a harmless teasing as a cruel rejection. One will be wounded and hurt more easily than others and will be less capable of defending oneself. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14

The condition that is fostered or brought about by the factors I have mentioned, or by similar factors, is an insidiously increasing, all-pervading feeling of being lonely and helpless in a hostile World. The acute individual reactions to individual provocations crystallize into a character attitude. This attitude as such does not constitute a neurosis but it is the nutritive soil out of which a definite neurosis may develop at any time. Because of the fundamental role this attitude plays in neuroses I have given it a special designation: the basic anxiety; it is inseparably interwoven with a basic hostility. The answer to those who defend group work by quoting Jesus’ single statement, “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I, in the midst of them,” is that it contradicts his repeated statement, “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you,” and is more likely to be interpolated than authentic. Within the exclusivity of a sect one’s power to think forcefully, creatively, and originally is lost. One is forced into a narrow area, deprived of the stimulating results of World-search. There is neither the wish nor the will to step outside the imposed borders of one’s own sect and measure other ideas, test other ideals, and benefit by other insights. There is a pathetic acceptance of mental captivity. No organized church likes individual revelations to supplant its own authority. One may work toward enlightenment and inner freedom, to the aspiration which draws one most. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14

August 17, 2019 11:36 pm

Oh, how innocent he sounded, how it came from his heart, ancient and childlike, a heart so preternaturally strong that it has taken hundreds of years to render it safe to beat in the company of mortal hearts. Cities are, first of all, seats of the highest economic division of labor. They produce thereby such extreme phenomena as Paris the remunerative occupation of the quatorzieme. They are person who identify themselves by signs on their residences and who are ready at the dinner hour in correct attire, so that they can be quickly called upon if a dinner party should consist of thirteen persons. In the measure of its expansion, the city offers more and more the decisive conditions of the division of labor. It offers a circle which through its size can absorb a highly diverse variety of services. At the same time, the concentration of individuals and their struggles for customers compel the individual to specialize in a function from which one cannot be readily displaced by another. It is decisive that city life has transformed the struggle with nature for livelihood into an inter-human struggle for gain, which here is not granted by nature but by other beings. For specialization does not flow only from the competition for gain but also from the underlying fact that the seller must always seek to call forth new and differentiated needs of the lured customer. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

In order to find a source of income which is not yet exhausted, and to find a function which cannot readily be displaced, it is necessary to specialize in one’s services. This process promotes differentiation, refinement, and the enrichment of the public’s needs, which obviously must lead to growing personal differences within this public. All this forms the transition to the individualization of mental and psychic traits which the city occasions in proportion to its size. There is a whole series of obvious causes underlying this process. First, one must meet the difficulty of asserting one’s own personality within the dimensions of metropolitan life. Where the quantitative increase in importance and the expense of energy reach their limits, one seizes upon qualitative differentiation in order somehow to attract the attention of the social circle by playing upon its sensitivity for differences. Finally, beings are tempted to adopt the most tendentious peculiarities, that is, the specifically metropolitan extravagances of mannerism, caprice, and preciousness. Now, the meaning of these extravagances is not at all possessed in the contents of such behavior, but rather in its form of being different, of standing out in a striking manner and thereby attracting attention. For many character types, ultimately the only means of saving for themselves some modicum of self-esteem and the sense of filling a position is indirect, through the awareness of others. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

In the same sense a seemingly insignificant factor is operating, the cumulative effects which are, however, still noticeable. I refer to the brevity and scarcity of the interhuman contacts granted to the metropolitan being, as compared with social intercourse in the small town. The temptations to appear to the point, to appear concentrated and strikingly characteristic, is possessed much closer to the individual in brief metropolitan contact than in an atmosphere in which frequent and prolonged association assures the personality of an unambiguous image of one’s self in the eyes of the other. The most profound reason, however, why the metropolis conduces to the urge for the most individual personal existence—no matter whether justified and successful—appears to me to be the following: the development of modern culture is characterized by the preponderance of what one may call the objective spirit over the subjective spirit. This is to say, in language as well as in law, in the technique of production as well as in art, in science as well as in the objects of the domestic environment, there is embodied a sum of spirit. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

The individual in one’s intellectual development follows the growth of this spirit very imperfectly and at an ever-increasing distance. If, for instance, we view the immense culture which for the last hundred and fifty years has been embodied in things and in knowledge, in institutions and in comforts, and if we compare all this with the cultural progress of the individual during the same period—at least in high status groups—a frightful disproportion in growth between the two becomes evident. Indeed, at some points we notice a retrogression in the culture of the individual with reference to spirituality, delicacy, and idealism. This discrepancy results essentially from the growing division of labor. For the division of labor demands from the individual an ever more one-sided accomplishment, and the greatest advance in a one-sided pursuit only too frequently means dearth to the personality of the individual. In any case, one can cope less and less with the overgrowth of objective culture. The individual is reduced to a negligible quantity, perhaps less in one’s consciousness than in one’s practice and in the totality of one’s obscure emotional states that are derived from this practice. The individual has become a mere cog in an enormous organization of things and powers which tear from one’s hands all progress, spirituality, and value in order to transform them from their subjective form into the form of a purely objective life. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

In needs merely to be pointed out that the metropolis is the genuine arena of this culture which outgrows all personal life. Here in buildings and educational institutions, in the wonders and comforts of space-conquering technology, in the formations of community life, and in the visible institutions, in the wonders and comforts of space-conquering technology, in the formations of community life, and in the visible institutions of the state, is offered such an overwhelming fullness of crystalized and impersonalized spirit that the personality, so to speak, cannot maintain itself under its impact. On the one hand, life is made infinitely easy for the personality in that stimulations, interests, uses of time and consciousness are offered to it from all sides. They carry the person as if in a stream, and one needs hardly to swim for oneself. On the other hand, however, life is composed more and more of these impersonal contents and offerings which tend to displace the genuine personal colorations and incomparabilities. This results in the individual’s summoning the utmost in uniqueness and particularization, in order to preserve one’s most personal core. One has to exaggerate this personal element in order to remain audible even to oneself. The atrophy of individual culture through the hypertrophy of objective culture is one reason for the butter hatred which the preachers of the most extreme individualism harbor against the metropolis. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

However, it is, indeed, also a reason why these preachers are so passionately loved in the metropolis and why they appear to the metropolitan being as the prophets and saviors of one’s most unsatisfied yearnings. If one asks for the historical position of these two forms of individualism which are nourished by the quantitative relation of the metropolis, namely, individual independence and the elaboration of individuality itself, then the metropolis assumes an entirely new rank order in the World history of the spirit. The eighteenth century found the individual in oppressive bonds which had become meaningless—bonds of a political, agrarian, guild, and religious character. They were restraints which, so to speak, forced upon beings an unnatural form and outmoded, unjust inequalities. In this situation the cry for liberty and equality arose, the belief in the individual’s full freedom of movement in all social and intellectual relationships. Freedom would at one permit the noble substance common to all to come to the fore, a substance which nature had deposited in every being and which society and history had only deformed. Besides this eighteenth-century ideal of liberalism, in the nineteenth century, through Goethe and Romanticism, on the one hand, and through the economic division of labor, on the one hand, another ideal arose: individuals liberated from historical bonds now wished to distinguish themselves from one another. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

The carrier of being’s values is no longer the general human being in every individual, but rather being’s qualitative uniqueness and irreplaceability. The external and internal history of our time takes its course within the struggle and in the changing entanglements of these two ways of defining the individual’s role in the whole of society. It is the function of the metropolis to provide the arena for this struggle and its reconciliation. For the metropolis presents the peculiar conditions which are revealed to us as the opportunities and the stimuli for the development of both these ways of allocating roles to beings. Therewith these conditions gain a unique place, pregnant with inestimable meanings for the development of psychic existence. The metropolis reveals itself as one of those great historical formations in which the opposing streams which enclose life unfold, as well as join one another with equal right. However, in this process the currents of life, whether their individual phenomena touch us sympathetically or antipathetically, entirely transcend the sphere for which the judge’s attitude is appropriate. Since such forces of life have grown into the roots and into the crown of the whole of this historical life in which we, in our fleeting existence, as a cell, belong only as a part, it is not our task either to accuse or to pardon, but only to understand. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

Our present times call the firsthand information, experience, and individual proof of the Truth, which the Quest alone offers. Institutions and organizations, on the other hand, offer nothing, demand much, and actually impede progress. There are a very few redeeming exceptions which justify their existence, but there are not generally known. The assertion that spiritual chaos and anarchy are the alternatives to spiritual institutionalism and organization is absurd, for the contradictory claims and teachings of the various institutions themselves lead to a chaotic situation. Only the uninformed can be deceived by the outside appearance of unity in these organized groups. The struggles and conflicts and factions which really exist inside them are a better indication of their moral grade than their tall talk in print or lecture. Those who are distrustful of organization for religious purposes find good reasons in history for their attitude. The records betray its inner failure, how it really substitutes one kind of Worldliness for another, how it merely offers ambition a different stage to play on, or how it replaces personal self-seeking by the corporate kind. Why should many who are unable as individuals to life themselves in prayer, devotion, or actions be able to do so as a group? It is illogical to believe that they can, auto-suggestive to believe that they do. The way of group organization is only a poor substitute for the way of individual inspiration. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

I am quite chary of organization, because I have seen too much in the New World and the Old World of the evils which it quickly breeds, as I am quite unimpressed by centralization because I have seen how hard it is to eradicate the illusions to which it leads. Instead of organization, it is better to encourage individual effort; and instead of centralization, it is wiser to encourage individual deepening. The goal is to move toward a continuous unbroken realization that it is quite unnecessary to stay in monasteries. Only your mind…function in freedom….let it abide nowhere, but be free from attachment to all outside objects. To pray faithfully means to realize that tranquility of essence of the mind is possible. Thorough understanding of the truth about reality and a penetration into and through delusions, to one’s essence of mind, seeks to eliminate the personal feelings usually attached to identification. It is a union of reason and intuition. It is an awakening once and for all. It is not something, a state alternative gained and lost on numerous occasions, but gradually expanded as it is clung to. It is a single awakening that enlightens the being so that one never returns to ignorance again. One has awakened to one’s divine essence, one’s source in mind, as an all day and every day self-identification. It has come by itself, effortlessly. This is as high as human consciousness can possibly go while yet encased in the flesh. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

This high of human consciousness is as present to one as one’s clothes, yet it exists through a sixth sense. One lives simultaneously aware of both Worlds of being. And one knows which is the eternal one. When this spiritual state is established in a being, when it stays with one for the remainder of one’s years, one is truly blessed. This state is paradoxical for the very name is really wrong, since it implies something that can be different later or was different earlier, something that is in time. However, what is being here described is not of that kind. Time flows out from it, there is no change yet to come that will better it or bring it any gain. It still is what it always was. Why, then, is the word “state” used at all? Partly, of course, through the poverty of human language in describing what is trans-human and partly because there is a state but it is in us, the change which brings us into being in our minds. Angels do feel dread, this is the very thing that causes Satan to rebel against God and he is very seductive in his truths, but cannot be trusted. It is said that music sooths the savage breast for this is the set of human emotions and the encasement of feelings. Sense humans can be in dread, and the greater the dread, the greater the being. This, however, is not affirmed in the sense in which beings commonly understand dread. Only in this sense can we interpret the passage where is said of Christ that he was in dread [angetes] even unto death, and place also where he says to Judas, “What thou doest, do quickly.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

Not even the terrible word upon which even Luther dreaded to preach, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”—not even in this expresses suffering so strongly. For this word indicates a situation in which Christ actually is: the former sayings indicate a relation to a situation which is not yet actual. Dread is the possibility of freedom. Only this dread is by the assistance of faith absolutely educative, laying care is it does all finite aims and discovering all their deceptions. And no Grand Inquisitor has in readiness such terrible tortures as has dread, and no spy knows how to attack more artfully the being one suspects, choosing the instant when one is weakest, nor knows how to lay traps where one will be caught and ensnared, as dread knows ow, and no sharp-witted judge knows how to interrogate, to examine the accused, as dread does, which never lets one escape, neither by diversion nor by noise, neither at work nor at play, neither by day nor by night. However, let us also consider those among us who are surrounded by friends and neighbors, by co-workers and country people, who live in family groups and enjoy the communion of the genders—everything that others do not have. And let us ask—are they without the pain of loneliness? Is their aloneness covered up by the crowd in which they move? #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

If we can number ourselves among these people, we might answer the question as follows: When I was surrounded by people, but suddenly realized my ultimate isolation, I never felt so lonely as in that particular hour. I became silent and retired from the group in order to be alone with my loneliness. I wanted my external predicament to match my internal one. Let us not minimize such an experience by asserting that some people are simply not strong enough to obtain a significant place in the group, and that their withdrawal is nothing but an expression of weakness, that may call for counseling or psychiatric help. However, I speak now of the strong ones, who have achieved their place in the crowd, and who nevertheless experience the terror of ultimate loneliness. They are aware, in a sudden break through the World around them, of being’s real predicament. Let us also not minimize this experience by pointing out the fact that some people feel misunderstood despite their urgent desire to make themselves understandable, and therefore feel lonely in the crowd. No one can deny that there are such people, and further, that they even demonstrate a certain truth—for who is really understood, even by one’ self? The mystery of a person cannot be encompassed by a neat description of one’s character. Those, however, who always feel misunderstood confuse the mystery of each personality with imaginary treasures which they themselves believe they possess and which demand recognition from others. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

When such recognition is not forthcoming, they feel lonely and withdraw. They also need help. However, again, there are those whose real treasures are great enough to find expression, to be understood and received, and yet who have this terrifying experience of ultimate loneliness. In such moments they break through the surface of their average life into the depth of being’s predicament. Many feel lonely because, in spite of their effort to love and be loved, their love is rejected. This loneliness is often self-centered. These people may be claiming as a right what can only come to them as a gift. They withdraw into a self-chosen loneliness, taking revenge through bitterness and hostility towards those they feel have rejected them, actually enjoying the pain of their loneliness in our time. They above all need help, for the easily become the prey of a demonic force that secludes them completely within themselves. They are not sure that God loves them and feel that he is angry with them. These beings feel the agony of separation from God! Their souls cannot ascend to Heaven! They cannot feel communion with God in their flesh. And as they sit up and lift their arms, these individuals realize they are trying to connect with God with their whole being, and cannot do it, and then the sadness comes over them, so great, so lonely, and so totally that they can only bow their heads. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

However, there is also the genuine experience of rejected love. No special claim is made, but hope yearns toward another, and is disappointed. A community of love comes to an end or fails to exist at all. Such loneliness cuts our ties with the World. We are indeed ultimately alone, and not even love from other directions or the power of our own love can lift this burden from us. One who can endure the loneliness of disappointed love without bitterness experiences the depth of the being’s predicament radically and creatively. There are, finally, two forms of loneliness that cannot be covered or escaped: the loneliness of guilt and the loneliness of death. Nobody can remove from us what we have committed against our true being. We feel both our hidden guilt and our open guilt as ours, and ours alone. We cannot really make anybody else responsible for what we have done. We cannot run away from our guilt, and we cannot honestly cover it up. We are alone with it. And it is a loneliness that permeates all other forms of loneliness, transforming them into experiences of judgment. Then, there is that ultimate loneliness of having to die. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

In the anticipation of our death we remain alone. No communication with others can remove it, as no other’s presence in the actual hour of our dying can conceal the fact that it is our death, and our death alone. In the hour of death we are cut off from the whole Universe and everything in it. We are deprived of all the things and beings that made us forget our being alone. Who can endure this loneliness? An anxiety may be fully accounted for by the actual conflict situation. If, however, we find an anxiety-creating situation in a character neurosis we always have to reckon wit previously existing anxieties in order to explain why in that particular instance hostility arouses and was repressed. We shall find then that this previous anxiety was in turn the result of a pre-existing hostility, and so on. In order to understand how the whole development started we have to track back to childhood. In examining the childhood histories of great numbers of neurotic persons I have found that the common denominator in all of them is an environment showing the following characteristics in various combinations. The basic evil is invariably a lack of genuine warmth and affection. A child can stand a great deal of what is often regarded as traumatic—such as a sudden weaning, occasional beating, bonding experience—as long as inwardly one feels wanted and loved. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

Needless to say, a child feels keenly whether love is genuine, and cannot be fooled by any faked demonstrations. The main reason why a child does not receive enough warmth and affection is possessed in the parent’s incapacity to give it on account of their own neuroses. More frequently than not, in my experience, the essential lack of warmth is camouflaged, and the patents claim to have in mind the child’s best interest. Educational theories, oversolicitude or self-sacrificing attitude of an ideal mother are the basic factors contributing to an atmosphere that more than anything else lays the cornerstone for future feelings of immense insecurity. Furthermore, we find various actions or attitudes on the part of the parents which cannot but arouse hostility, such as preference for other children, unjust reproaches, unpredictable changes between overindulgence and scornful rejection, unfulfilled promises, and not least important, an attitude toward the child’s needs which goes through all gradations from temporary inconsideration to a consistent interfering with the most legitimate wishes of the child, such as disturbing friendships, ridiculing independent thinking, spoiling its interest in its own pursuits, whether artistic, athletic, or mechanical—altogether an attitude of the parents which if not in intention nevertheless in effect means breaking the child’s will. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

August 14, 2019 12:39 am