And something else happened, a rather small thing, yet it seemed a good omen. Many of us do not even allow ourselves to imagine what it would be like to feel free in our daily lives and in our interaction with other people. We are so accustomed to believing that there are certain things we just have to do to survive and get along reasonably well with people that we have only the vaguest notion of what it would mean to live a self-chosen or spontaneous life. We tend to make a way of life out of feeling trapped. Perhaps we need first of all, then, to take a good look at ourselves and discover that we are kidding ourselves about not being free. We are trapped. We almost invariably have alternative courses of action, much as we may try to persuade ourselves otherwise. We do things that we do because we choose to do them. And if we fee trapped, it is because we have chosen to feel that way for our own inner reasons. Perhaps the awareness that we have much more freedom than we choose to think we have is too frightening for us to face. If we could grasp, not only intellectually, but emotionally, the fact or our freedom, a considerable change might occur in our attitudes and feelings. Then we would recognize that we are making choices constantly as to what we do each moment even though we often do not allow ourselves to be aware of those decisions. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
Claudia Amadeo, housewife and mother of three young children, after three rainy days of having the children in the house and underfoot continuously thinks to herself, “If I have to stay cooped up with these kids one more hour, I think I will go out of my mind!” However, she probably looks out the window, sees it is still raining, and concludes that she is trapped and can do noting other than stay right there and try to keep from going out of her mind. Nonetheless, is she really without alternatives? Not at all. She could, of course, abandon the children. She could simply take off and leave the children to whatever fate would dictate. And the objection is raised, “But she would never do that!” No, she probably would not. Yet, it is an alternative, and at a particularly exasperating moment it may enter her mind. Chances are, however, that she does not allow herself to see it as a live option. Perhaps she does not trust herself enough to allow herself to say and accept it as a possibility that she could just up and walk out. So she chooses not to recognize she has chosen not to leave. This brings us to one of the gross abuses of freedom in our day: change for its own sake, or change as a flight from reality. This abuse of freedom is most egregious in what are called growth centers. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
Let me hasten to say that impetus for the growth-center movement and the work of many individual centers I believe to be sound and admirable. This impetus is the courage to confront one’s own self and one’s problems in human relationships; it is the belief that one can take oneself in hand and establish some autonomy in one’s life. However, anyone who is paying attention can readily see the preponderance of optimistic thinking and self-delusion in its most blatant forms. We always hear motivation speakers talking about tapping your true potential and creativity, finding more and more joy, a perfect living guru is a must on the path Godward, and so on. Nowhere do we hear words dealing with common experiences of anyone living in our day—namely, anxiety, tragedy, grief, feeling trapped, or death. All is drowned out by endless joy and the fearless promises of triumph and transcendence, a mass movement toward egocentric pace, self-enclosed love, with its somnolescent denial of the realities of human life, the use of change for escapist purposes if there was one. And what a misunderstanding of the ancient religions of the East that in their name salvation is promised over the weekend! #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
The problem in these growth centers is the complete absence of any sense of destiny. They seem to believe that all of destiny is controlled by themselves. The individuals will totally determine their fate. The leaders seem not to be aware that what they are espousing is not freedom at all, but sentimentality, a condition in which the feeling alone is sought rather than reality. Such considerations as these lend urgency to our purpose to rediscover the meaning of personal freedom. The burgeoning of the growth-center movement does testify to the widespread hunger among modern people from some guidance so that life will not have passed them by. The mere existence of these centers—which could not survive were they not patronized—demonstrate that hordes of people feel there is something missing in their lives, some failure to find what they are seeking or perhaps even to know what they are seeking. Claudia was well acquainted with the situation and said, “I cannot remember what a spontaneous feeling really is.” There are many alternatives beside leaving her family that Claudia could examine and implement. Perhaps she could hire a baby-sitter and get away for a couple of hours, even if financial skimping were necessary in another area. Possibly a relative could come in for a while, or maybe she could combine children with a neighbor so they could give each other some escape. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
Perhaps Claudia could bundle up all of her children and herself and find a change of pace walking in the Sunshine. We often avoid seeing the alternative and then bemoan our helplessness and lack of choice. We are not trapped. Even the feeling of being trapped is a chosen feeling. Supposed we do allow ourselves to recognize we have more freedom than we thought. How will we use that freedom? The most satisfying answer to this appears to be that our freedom is best used when we choose to live more spontaneously. This idea has been variously described. Some have called it the inner-directed life in contrast to the outer directed life. Others speak of self-actualizing. Perhaps it can be described by saying that as we move in the direction of living spontaneously we will become more aware of and more responsive to our inner impulses, feelings, needs, and self-chosen values. While we will be even more realistically aware of those around us, our responses will not be dictated by the desires or demands of others. We will respond in the way in which we choose. One mark of the spontaneous life is that it is lived in the present time, not the past of the future. Psychotherapy in all its branches is a response to the loss on a vast scale of people’s inner mooring posts. It is symptomatic of the breakdown of freedom in our culture, the bankruptcy of our culturally inherited ways of dealing with our freedom and destiny. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
It is not an accident that Dr. Freud’s psychotherapy came at a time when personal inner freedom was becoming all but lost in the maelstrom of modernity. Confusion about human destiny and confusion about personal freedom go together, and they will be resolved, so far as resolution is possible, together. Psychoanalysis—and any good therapy—is a method of increasing one’s awareness of destiny in order to increase one’s experience of freedom. In contrast to his technical determinism, Dr. Freud struck a significant blow on a deeper level of freedom. He set out to free people from the psychological entanglements they, like Claudia, was embroiled in because of their failure to confront their own destinies. What is most remarkable about Dr. Freud is his continuous wrestling with destiny. By showing the impossibility of shortcuts and the superficial by-passes to freedom, which break down at every turn, Dr. Freud required us to search for freedom on a deeper level. If freedom is to be achieved it will not be achieved overnight. In his theory of reaction formation, for example, he pointed out that altruism is the result of repressed stinginess (which surely a great deal of it is), and that religious beliefs are an opiate and a way for people to avoid facing death (which many of them are), and that the belief in God is an expression of yearning for the all-powerful father who will take care of us (which for multitudes of people it manifestly is). #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
If we are to achieve freedom, we must do so with a daring and a profundity that refuse to flinch at engaging our destiny. Many people live largely in the past. This often takes the form of remorse, regret, or bitterness. Some who have been exposed to punitive forms of religion may become stuck at the level of feeling perpetually guilty about things that have occurred in the past. They never feel they have been forgiven, because they cannot forgive themselves. It is too good to be true to believe that others or even God could forgive them. With these unresolved, pervasive feelings of guilt he individual keeps oneself unfree to experience and enjoy the freedom to live now. All I do to my disciples is to free them from their own bondage, by any means their case may need. Whether you are bound by a gold chain or an iron one, you are in captivity. Your virtuous activities are the gold chain, your evil ones the iron. One who shakes off both the chains of good and evil that imprison one, one has attained the Supreme Truth. Another variation of living in the past is that of feeling so inexorably in the grips of past events that one is unable to be a freely choosing person in the present. Of course there is some truth in this, which makes it possible to kid ourselves in this way. We unquestionably have some limitations that come to us from the past. We have been born with varying degrees of intellectual, physical, and emotional capabilities. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
Life’s experiences up to this moment have affected us in ways. Some of our capabilities may have been dulled. However, with the possible exception of those who have been so badly damaged by hereditary or environmental factors that they can hardly be described as human, we have so much more capability in intellectual, physical, and emotional spheres than we ever choose to use that we cannot be described as trapped. In other words, despite whatever limitations to our free will we may have from a philosophical point of view, we are all surrounded by a vast territory in which we are free to move, the limits of which we never begin to explore. Psychological insights about the development of human personality provide many people with another popular way of living in the past. For example, there will surely be some people who will become bogged down in these essays in the passages that describe childhood rejection and the problems that result. They will say, “Yes, that is me. That describes what happened to me.” However, instead of following up on this potentially freeing glimpse into their lives by asking themselves “How is this affecting me right now, and what can I do about it?” they will tend to go no further than to feel bitterness toward their parents, who led them to feel rejected, and helplessness about doing anything about themselves now. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
The woman in Simon’s house comes to Jesus because she was forgiven. We do not know exactly what drove her to Jesus. And if we knew, we should certainly find that it was a mixture of motives—spiritual desire as well as natural attraction, the power of the prophet as well as the impression of the human personality. Our story does not psychoanalyze the woman, but neither does it deny human motives which could be psychoanalyzed. Human motives are always ambiguities, but it does not demand that they become unambiguous before forgiveness can be given. If this were demanded, then forgiveness would never occur. The description of the woman’s behavior shows clearly the ambiguities of her motives (reason why). Nevertheless, she is accepted. There is no condition for forgiveness. However, if we were not asking for it and receiving it, forgiveness could not come. Forgiveness is an answer, the divine answer, to the question implied in our existence. An answer only for one who has asked, who is aware of the question. This awareness cannot be fabricated. It may be in a hidden place in our souls, covered by many strata of righteousness. It may reach our consciousness in certain moments. Or, day by day, it may fill our conscious life as well as its unconscious depths and drive us to the question to which forgiveness is the answer. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
It is well to recognize that psychotherapists have sometimes unwittingly contributed to the problem of living in the past by focusing too much on ancient experiences in one’s personal life, and World history. One of the legitimate criticisms of classical psychoanalysis, for example, is that it encourages the individual in analysis to dredge up every possible childhood memory and whenever feasible to see a causal relationship between those experiences and the individual’s problems. While many people have undoubtedly been helped in analysis, this method of therapy is not only unnecessarily time-consuming, but it encourages the individual to focus on the past rather than on the present. Some clients of this and similar approaches to therapy have unquestionably capitalized on this opportunity to make a way of life out of constantly analyzing their past. Thus they manage to avoid dealing fully with their awareness of themselves and those around them in the present moment of their existence. A more useful approach to therapy appears to be one in which the therapist, by means of one’s alertness to what is going on each moment within oneself, confronts one’s clients with these awarenesses and thereby enables them to become more self-aware. When memories of significant past experience or past feelings intrude into this process of becoming self-aware, then these feelings can be taken as indications of unfinished business and can be dealt with as part of the current experience. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
When Aaron Lightner, for example, in one session expressed some anger toward his therapist for seeming to be indifferent toward him, almost immediately Aaron expressed the feeling that the therapist was condemning him for getting angry, “just as my father would have.” The therapist knew that he felt neither indifferent nor condemning, so he encouraged Aaron to talk to his father as though he were present in the room. In the “conversation” that followed, in which Aaron alternately took the role of himself and his father, some of his still present feelings of anger and frustration—unfinished business of the past—were experiences and expressed. Out of many such moments in therapy Aaron was able to gradually deal more directly and realistically in the present moment with his encounters with others (including the therapist), having less need to distort the present reality to make it conform with unresolved experiences from the past. A discussion of living in the past cannot be concluded without mentioning the tendency of some to avoid the present by looking back to some glorious moment or period of the past. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
The middle-aged former high school or college football star may still be cutting off tackle for long gainers in his fantasy. The maturing beauty queen may be trying to dress twenty-two rather than experiencing her potential beauty and more mature fashions in the present moment. The evangelist may constantly relive and retell the experience of that moment when he was saved from a life of sin twenty years ago. The Vietnam war veteran may dwell on the danger, excitement, and adventure he experienced in some far-off place and completely dull himself to the potential adventure available now. In the minds of many people the word forgiveness has connotations which completely contradict the way people think Jesus deals with people. Many of us think of solemn acts of pardon, of release from punishment, in other words, of another act of righteousness by the righteous ones. However, genuine forgiveness is participation, reunion overcoming the powers of estrangement. And only because this is so, does forgiveness make love possible. We cannot love unless we have accepted forgiveness, and the deeper our experience of forgiveness is, the greater is our love. We cannot love where we feel rejected, even if the rejection is done in righteousness. We are hostile towards that to which we belong and by which we feel judged, even if the judgment is not expressed in words. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
As long as we feel rejected by God, we cannot love God. As we make God appear to us as an oppressive power, as the Lord who gives laws according to his pleasure, who judges according to his commandments, who condemns according to his wrath. However, if we have received and accepted the message that God is reconciled, everything changes. Like a fiery stream God’s healing power enters into us; we can affirm him and with him our own being and the others from who we were estranged, and life as a whole. Then we realize that God’s love is the law of our own being, and that is the law of reuniting love. And we understand that what we have experienced as oppression and judgment and wrath is in reality the working of love, which tries to destroy within us everything which is against love. To love this is to love God. Theologians have questioned whether mortals are able to have love towards God; they have placed love by obedience. However, they are refuted by our story. They teach a theology for the righteous one but not a theology for sinners. One who is forgiven knows what it means to love God. And one who loves God is also able to accept life and to love it. This is not the same as to love God. For many pious people in all generations the love of God is the other side of the hatred for life. And there is much hostility towards life in all of us, even in those who have completely surrendered to life. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
Our hostility towards life is manifested in cynicism and disgust, in bitterness and continuous accusations against life. We feel rejected by life, not so much because of its objective darkness and threats and horrors, but because of our estrangement from its power and meaning. One who is reunited with God, the creative Ground of life, the power of life in everything that lives, is reunited with life. One feels accepted by it and one can love it. One understands that the greater love is, the greater the estrangement which is conquered by it. In metaphorical language I should like to say to those who feel deeply their hostility towards life: Life accepts you; life loves you as a separated part of itself; life wants to reunite you with itself, even when it seems to destroy you. There is a section of life which is nearer to us than any other and often the most estranged from us: other human beings. We all know about the regions of the human soul which things look quite different from the way they look on its benevolent surface. In these regions we can find hidden hostilities against those with whom we are in love. We can find envy and torturing doubt about whether we are really accepted by them. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
And this hostility and anxiety about being rejected by those who are nearest to us can hide itself under the various forms of love: friendship, sensual love, conjugal love and family love. However, if we have experiences ultimate acceptance this anxiety is conquered, though not removed. We can love without being sure of the answering love of the other one. For we know that one is longing for our acceptance as we are longing for theirs, and that in the light of ultimate acceptance we are united. Being forgiven and being able to accept oneself are one and the same thing. No one can accept oneself who does not feel that one is accepted by the power of acceptance which is greater than one, greater than one’s friends and counselors and psychological helpers. They may point to the power of acceptance, and it is the function of the minister to do so. However, one and the others also need the power of acceptance which is greater than they. One can never overcome one’s disgust at one’s own being without finding this power working through Jesus, who tells people with authority, “You are forgiven.” Thus, one experienced, at least in one ecstatic moment of one’s life, the power which reunited one with oneself and gave one the possibility of loving even one’s own destiny. This happened to one in one great moment. And in this one is no exception. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
Decisive spiritual experiences have the character of a break-through. In the midst of our futile attempts to make ourselves worthy, in our despair about the inescapable failure of these attempts, we are suddenly grasped by the certainty that we are forgiven, and the fire of love begins to burn. That is the greatest experience anyone can have. It may not happen often, but when it does happen, it decides and transforms everything. Thus the conventional character of the divine presence is evident. Christ can be present in such an object only be convention. For this very reason one can be perfectly present in it. God can only be present in secret here below. One’s presence in the Eucharist is truly secret since no part of our thought can reach the secret. Thus it is total. No one dreams of being surprised that reasoning worked out from nonexistent perfect lines and perfect circles should be effectively applied to engineering. Yet that is incomprehensible. The reality of the divine presence in the Eucharist is more marvelous but not more incomprehensible. One might in a sense say by analogy that Christ is present in the consecrated host by hypothesis, in the same way that a geometrician says by hypothesis that there are two equal angles in a certain triangle. It is because it has to do with a convention that only the form of these consecration matters, not the spiritual state of one who consecrates. Deep lasting happiness comes by intentionally and carefully living the gospel of Jesus Christ. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
It is no longer good for you to be around us. I fear we have all become too enamored of you and would sweep you off your feet and take you away from these things which you have set out to do. You will forgive us for leaving so suddenly. I am confident that this is best for you. I have arranged for the car to take you to the airport. Be assured I love you more than words can say. In all departments of life, love is not real unless it is directed toward a particular object; it becomes universal without ceasing to be real only as a result of analogy and transference. It might be said in passing that the knowledge of what analogy and transference are, a knowledge for which mathematics, the various branches of science, and philosophy are a preparation, also has a direct relationship to love. Many people find their way into some form of psychotherapy or counseling as a way of interrupting the rejection cycle. They seek professional help for all kinds of reasons, of course. Some are aware, at least vaguely, of their lack of self-acceptance and how it interferes with their relationship with other people and are not content to live out their lives on that level. More often individual find their way into psychotherapy because of some symptom of their self-hate and its corollary fear of love. They may be having marital problems of issues dealing with pleasures of the flesh, anxiety attacks, vocational problems, physical illness caused by emotional factors, or any numerous symptoms. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
When it is effective in helping a person achieve a more satisfying life, what takes place in psychotherapy? This is a profoundly significant question to which many answers have been given, each involving differing theories of the human personality and its development. Although there is room for disagreement about many details of the process, one change that appears to occur in successful psychotherapy is that the person has a growing sense of one’s own worth as a person. And it seems likely that one of the best ways to describe the process behind this growing sense of one’s value is to see it as a cycle of acceptance. The therapist working with Jesse in his own unique way somehow coveys to her his feelings that she is a person of worth with intensely green eyes and the thick curly red hair pouring down over her shoulders. Jesse then gradually comes to feel that she is basically accepted and respected as an individual. She begins to understand that the therapist sees through whatever annoying traits she has and the things she does that tend to destroy herself and others. She grasps that he recognizes that all of these things are symptoms of her self-hate and have nothing to do with her basic worth. She begins to sense that he cares for her. This does not mean that the therapist remains benignly acquiescent to every reaction of the client. He may become annoyed and express his annoyance; he may feel hurt or angered by something the client says or does and express his feelings. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
However, the very fact that the therapist is willing to enter into the relationship this honestly and intensely, revealing his own humanness, will be an expression of trust in the client’s basic ability to handle the situation. And through it all he somehow conveys the feeling, perhaps not expressed directly, that he values the client for the individual one is because everyone is unique. In such a relationship the client is gradually freed to be aware of more and more of one’s feelings that one has not allowed oneself to fully experience. One becomes more free to reveal facets of one’s personality to this accepting human being that one has hitherto revealed to no one for fear of experiencing further rejection. Gradually, with the assistance of the therapist’s teachings, and encouraged by the feeling of acceptance, the client discovers oneself being more honest and open as an individual and with the therapist. As one discovers that nothing destroys the therapist’s basic attitude toward one, one begins to allow oneself to have glimmerings of one’s own value as a person. This is often a discouraging process. The fear of emotional intimacy is ever-present and there will be frequent setbacks as the clients begins to reveal oneself, becomes frightened, and withdraws into the shell of one’s defenses against closeness. Later, as one gives up one defense against intimacy one is likely to adopt another in its place, with little or nor awareness of what one is doing. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
The client is almost certain to have doubts about the genuineness of the therapist’s acceptance. If these doubts remain unexpressed, they constitute a serious block to the therapeutic process. When they are expressed openly they can often be dealt with effectively. They take many forms. One person may say, “It is your job to accept me when no one else would possibly do so.” Another may say, “I cannot help feeling that sooner or later you will find out something about me that will cause you to have nothing more to do with me.” Such ideas are very persistent because our feelings of self-hate are so persistent. One woman had been in therapy for many months and had made many gains in growing self-acceptance, which were reflected in much more satisfying relationships with people. Even so, on one occasion just before a session with her therapist, when she was feeling particularly low, she rose from her chair, from which she had been talking with a group of friends, and blurted out, “I am going to the one person in the World who accepts me, and I pay him to!” However, as the client’s confidence in the therapeutic relationships grows, one can begin to deal directly with one’s self-hate and its sources. In one therapy session, a young woman, Maharet, was making remarks that indicted she was feeling critical of herself. In order to help her experience her emotions more intensely, the therapist asked her to imagine that the self she was criticizing was sitting in the chair opposite her and to talk directly to the self. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
Maharet paused for a few moments, and then said, “The first thing that comes to my mind is that I want to gradually think about what I want to say and let it dawn on my how I feel about myself.” She then said with deep feeling, “I guess I really want to tell you I love you, but it seems somehow selfish.” As she finished, she was crying as the relief of knowing that she could care for herself flooded over her. At the same time tears rolled won the therapist’s cheeks, for he knew the same feeling from his own experience. For many moments, thereafter, Maharet and the therapist sat in silence, enjoying their sense of closeness to each other and to themselves. As the individual in therapy gradually develops this sense of self-acceptance, one will have less need to escape into the various defenses one has used in the past. One will gain ability to be more open and self-revealing to the therapist as another human being who consistently care for one regardless of whatever emotional interchanges they may experience together. Sometimes one will become very frightened, but gradually the awareness of the satisfactions of being one’s self will be so rewarding and so productive of growing feelings of self-worth that former patterns of living will seem too unrewarding to continue. No attempt is being added here to explain every movement in the direction of emotional health that can occur in psychotherapy. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
It is being suggested that perhaps the most important thing that can happen is that they cycle of rejection in the client’s life is broken and a cycle of acceptance is begun. This process is as follows: Feelings of rejection lead to feelings of worthlessness, self-hate, then escape into defenses against intimacy, and further feelings of rejection as others react to our defenses. However, with therapy, there is an interruption of cycle through psychotherapy, followed by feelings of unconditional acceptance by therapist who sees through client’s defenses against intimacy, growing feelings of self-worth, growing love of self, an increasing openness and genuineness and less need for escape hatches, and further feelings of acceptance as others react favorably to our openness. Not every therapist, of course, is equal in the ability to be authentic and genuinely accepting in relationship with clients. Therapists are human, too, an inevitably have experienced some degree of rejection and self-hate. Most of them have at one time been in therapy themselves in order to become more effective persons and more capable of direct and open relationships. However, in common with all of humanity, therapists remain somewhat afraid of love and only relatively able to be genuine. Perhaps it is likely to be a sign of the effective therapist that one can afford to experience one’s own humanness and limitations, freely admitting that one’s adventure with each client is one in which one, too, hopes to grow as a person. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
This discovery may take time. There may be emotions that take more effort to cope with. However, gradually awareness comes that the more depth of emotion they reveal to each other, the more similarity of feeling they find among themselves, and the more emotionally intimate they come to feel. The mutual acceptance and enjoyment they find in each other gradually translates itself into increased feelings of self-worth and growing courage to be one’s self with group members and with people in general in spite of the fears that still exist. Humans demean themselves by not caring for the dignity of their status the ideals they ought to honour. Our daily lives become mechanical, obedient to the World’s demands, and our daily activities a constantly turning treadmill; but this only happens if there are no spiritual aims, spiritual aspirations, and spiritual practices to provide a resistance to this course. In Europe today, and perhaps even the whole World, the knowledge of comparative religion amounts to just about nothing. People have not even a notion of the possibility of such a knowledge. Even without the prejudices which get in our way, it is already very difficult for us even to form an idea of it. Among the different forms of religion there are, as it were, partial compensations for the visible differences, certain hidden equivalents which can only be caught sight of by the most penetrating discernment. Each religion in original combination of explicit and implicit truths; what is explicit in one is implicit in another. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
The implicit adherence to a truth can in some cases be worth as much as the explicit adherence, sometimes even a great deal more. One who knows the secrets of all hearts alone knows the secret of the different forms of faith. One has never revealed this secret, whatever anyone may say. Because we trouble our heads with search for intangible reality, we are regarded as odd people. However, it never occurs to our critics that it is much more odd that they should go on living without pausing to inquire if there by any purpose in life at all. When one knows that one must put aside the trivialities of life and come to terms with the demands made upon one by one’s higher nature, a time comes in the intellectual growth of a mortal. To put one’s own purpose in harmony with the Universe’s purpose is the most sensible thing one can do. Therefore there is nothing unpractical, irrational, or eccentric in the Quest. Only the unthinking crowd, who suffer blindly and drift tragically, may believe so. No one who has felt the inner peace, received the deep wisdom, and touched the rocklike strength which mark the more advanced stages, could ever believe so. The virtue of religious practices is due to contact with what is perfectly pure, resulting in the destruction of evil. Nothing here below is perfectly pure except the total beauty of the Universe, and that we are unable to feel directly until we are very far advanced in the way of perfection. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
Moreover, this total beauty cannot be contained in anything tangible, though it is itself tangible in a certain sense. Religious things are pure by right, theoretically, hypothetically, by convention. That is why it is perfect. If they are not connected with motives that impel people to observe them, human conventions are useless. In themselves they are simple abstractions; they are unreal and have no effect. However, the convention by which religious things are pure is ratified by God himself. Thus it is an effective convention, a convention containing virtue and operating of itself. This purity is unconditioned and perfect, and at the same time real. There we have a truth that is a fact and in consequence cannot be demonstrated by argument. It can only be verified experimentally. It is a fact that the purity of religious things is almost everywhere to be seen in the form of beauty, when faith and love do not fail. Thus the words of the liturgy are marvelously beautiful; the words of the prayer issued for us from the very lips of Christ are perfect above all, In the same way Romanesque architecture and Gregorian plain chant are marvelously beautiful. Some people like to believe that the architecture, singing, language, and even the words are chosen by Christ himself. The moment we become convinced that universal life has a higher purpose than the mere reproduction of the species, that moment our own individual life takes on a higher meaning, a glorious significance. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
It is this that gives our less affluent personal lives their meaning and rescues them from their foamlike character. Here is a concept on which the mind can linger, braces by its reminder of our human possibilities. Those who move through life hopeless and dreamless, who see none of its beauty and hear none of its music, who have lost most of its battles and won none of its prizes, these can console themselves only by adopting a new set of values or by applying one if they merely theorized before. If they do this, the end can be a new beginning. The discovery that there are higher concepts of human existence, that these have a validity not less than the meaner ones which are all that so many people know, may prove a turning point at any age. For the young it gives some guidance, for the mature it offers some hope. So short a time, so small a gain, so high a quest. For what is best, serves better in the end. The importance of this work is ignored by most people and unknown to many people. They believe it to be the preoccupation of time-wasting dreamers or ill-adjusted neurotics. If they do not treat it with such indifference they treat it either with open abuse or with contemptuous indulgence. However, if they could understand that it penetrates to the foundations of human living and affects the settlement of human problems, they might be less arrogant in their attitudes towards it. It is not less important to the individual than to society at all times but immeasurably more so in those grave, critical times. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
It may be asked of what social use are those who make this quest their primary occupation, and therefore make their Worldly occupation and way of life conform to it? First of all, they embody, and therefore carry on and keep alive, the very idea of the quest. Secondly, their very presence, by telepathic and auric existence, does touch the inner beings of those who come into contact with them and does leaven the mental atmosphere of those who do not—however minute the effect on any particular day. Thirdly, although each has to live and express the quest in the way referable to one’s temperament and circumstances, one does offer a model—in general terms—for others to see, an example from which to draw stimulation. In choosing this path, the aspirant has taken the first step toward a Divine Power whose possession, or rather whose possession of one, will ultimately, enable one to become a real healer of suffering humankind. Jesus declares that we are forgiven. Our state of mind, our ecstasy of love, show that something has happened to us. And nothing greater can happen to a human being than that one is forgiven. Forgiveness means reconciliation in spite of estrangement; it means reunion in spite of hostility; it means acceptance of those who are unacceptable, and it means reception of those who are rejected. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
Forgiveness is unconditional or it is not forgiveness at all. Forgivenness has the character of in spite of, but the righteous ones give it the character of because. The sinners, however, cannot do this. They cannot transform the divine in spire of into a human because. They cannot show facts, because of which they must be forgiven. God’s forgiveness is unconditional. There is no condition whatsoever in mortals which would make one worthy of forgiveness. If forgiveness were conditional, conditional by mortals, no one could be accepted and no one could accept one’s self. We know that this is our situation, but we loathe to face it. It is too great as a gift and too humiliating as a judgment. We want to contribute something, and if we have learned that we cannot contribute anything beneficial, then we try at least to contribute something negative: the pain of self-accusation and self-rejection. And then we read our story and the parable of the Prodigal Son as if they said: These sinners were forgiven because they humiliated themselves and confessed that they were unacceptable; because they suffered about their sinful predicament they were made worthy of forgiveness. However, this reading of the story is a misreading and a dangerous one. If that were the way to our reconciliation with God, we should have to produce within ourselves the feeling of unworthiness, the pain of self-rejection, the anxiety and despair of guilt. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
There are many Christians who try this in order to show God and themselves that they deserve acceptance. They perform an emotional work of self-punishment after they have realized that their other good works do not help them. However, emotional works do not help either. God’s forgiveness is independent of anything we do, even of self-accusation and self-humiliation. If this were not so, how could we every be certain that our self-rejection is serious enough to deserve forgiveness? Forgiveness creates repentance—this is declared in our story and this is the experience of those who have been forgiven. The view that such an existence is selfish and unproductive, is a shallow one. It takes no account of the value of higher forces. For whoever, by this quest and practice, realizes the divine presence, does so not only for oneself but for all others in that little part of the World confided to one’s care. Who are the most important human beings in the World? Those who try to bring sanity to an insane World or those who try to perpetuate its condition? Our artist can find new sources of inspiration in it. Our dying religious hopes can receive an influx of unexpected new life from it. If we turn our faces to that direction where the Sun rises in red dawn, the phoenix of Divine Truth can rise again out of the ashes of materialism strewn around us. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
Yet since the spiritual is the deepest part of our nature, the process of our absorption of spiritual truths is a slow and not obvious one. Another perennial attitude is summed up in the words Us-Them Here the World is divided in two: the children of light and the children of darkness, the sheep and the goats, the elect and the damned. Every social problem can be analyzed without much study: all one has to look for are the sheep and goats. There is room for anger and contempt and boundless hope; for the sheep are bound to triumph. Should a goat have the presumption to address a sheep, the sheep often do not hear it, and they never hear it as another I. For the goat is one of Them, not one of Us. Righteousness, intelligence, integrity, humanity, and victory are prerogatives of Us, while wickedness, stupidity, hypocrisy, brutality, and ultimate defeat belong to Them. Those who have managed to cut through the terrible complexities of life and offer such a scheme as this have been hailed as prophets in all ages. In these five attitudes there is no You: I-I, I-It, It-It, We-We, and Us-Them. There are many ways of living in a World without You. There are also many World with the two poles I-You. I-You sounds unfamiliar. What we are accustomed to is I-Thou. However, mortal’s attitudes are not manifold, and Thou and You are not the same. Nor is Thou very similar to the German Du. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
German lovers say Du to one another, and so do friends. Du is spontaneous and unpretentious, remote from formality, pomp, and dignity. What lovers or friends say Thou to one another? Thou is scarcely ever said spontaneously. Thou immediately brings to mind God; Du does not. And the God of whom it makes us think is not the God to whom one might cry out in gratitude, despair, or agony, not the God to whom one complains or prays spontaneously; it is the God of the pulpits, the God of the holy tone. When mortals pray spontaneously or speak directly to God, without any mediator, without any intervention of formulas, when they speak as their heart tells them to speak instead of repeating what is printed, do they say Thou? How many know the verb forms Thou commands? The World of Thou has many mansions. Thou is a preachers’ word but also a dear to anticlerical romantic poets. Thou is found in Shakespeare and at home in the English Bible, although recent versiouns of the Scriptures have tended to dispense with it. Thou can mean many things, but it has no place whatever in the language of direct, nonliterary, spontaneous human relationships. If one could liberate I-Thou from affectation, the price for that would still involve reducing it to a mere formula to jargon. However, supposed a mortal wrote a book about direct relationships and tried to get away from the formulas of theologians and philosophers: a theologian would translate it and turn Ich und Du into I and Thou. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
One may be told contemptuously that that kind of truth and reality have no practical value for us living in the World as it is, active in the World and dealing with the facts as they are, not getting lost in dreams. That in several ways this is not so can be demonstrated without too much difficulty. However, let it be said that such a supreme knowledge or experience may possibly serve higher purposes which our small minds cannot yet glimpse. All that really matters is how one lives one’s life. However, relative-plane activities do not constitute all there is to living. Consciousness rises from the plane behind the mind, and this region, like the outer World, needs to be explored with competent guides—its possibilities and benefits fully revealed by each individual one thou. Living will begin to achieve its own purpose when one’s outer life becomes motivated, guided, and balanced by the fruits of one’s inner findings. When you show u and censure the oddities and charlatanries, you do not demolish the cause for mystics, the unreasons and fanaticisms of a few mystical cults. As the influences of the World increasingly embrace the evil, we must strive with all diligence to stay firmly on the path that leads us safely to our Savior. We do not lower our standards to fit in or to make someone else feel comfortable. #Randolpharris 16 of 16
Your faith touches me as always, but do not be my acolyte just now. They were already legends—filled with love for all they saw around them, beings who understood the word joy. How can we learn to love ourselves? Perhaps we can start by admitting that it is impossible! It is not possible in the same sense that we will never become completely self-accepting (not in this life anyway!). Like others values worth wanting, loving one’s self is an ideal never fully realized. However, moving in that direction is a fascinating and worthwhile, lifelong adventure. If we can become more self-aware, it will help us to become more loving toward ourselves. It is not possible to love someone profoundly whom one does not know, and many of us are virtually strangers to ourselves, so deadened have we become to any awareness of our deeper feelings. And since we have spent many years cutting ourselves off from awareness of hated parts of ourselves, the recovery of awareness is usually not easily accomplished. We are frightened of what we may find and resist awareness in multitudes of ways. Frequently, the help of a professional therapist is needed to help us overcomes these resistances. Often in the early stages of recovering self-awareness it will seem as though we are learning to hate ourselves, not love ourselves. This happens because one of the first things we become aware of is our hidden self-hate, which has been building up over the years and of which we have likely had only vague intimations, and feelings that have been too unacceptable for us to allow ourselves to experience some to the surface. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14
We may begin to feel more hate then we thought it was possible for us to feel. Self-loathing, deeply experienced hurt, disgust about pleasures of the flesh, and other frightening feelings may burst into awareness. This is a crisis in personal growth, but it is often a necessary crisis. Advocates of self-actuating thinking approach mental health frequently do a disservice at this point. Too often they short-circuit this process by encouraging individuals to think optimistically about themselves without taking into account their need to first experience their self-hatred. Under the influence of this advice individuals are likely to cover up something bad about apparent self-acceptance and self-affirmation over the tomb of their inner deadness to themselves and their self-hate. In this way they may talk themselves into being more successful insurance salesmen or less disagreeable husbands, while they have only cut themselves off even farther from contact with themselves and the ultimate possibility of genuine self-acceptance and self-affirmation. Gradually, when we allow ourselves to experience self-hate, this crisis will pass. We discover that it is not so bad after all to have very human feelings. A young woman who has been shocked and scandalized by accounts of promiscuity feels profound disgust as she becomes aware that she, too, has desires for pleasures of the flesh that are not limited to one man. However, she begins to enjoy and cherish her feelings for pleasures of the flesh. As is usually the case, he disgust masked an unaccepted appetite. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14
Khayman was a young man addicted to working long and hard hours and he was considerably bugged by his father’s lack of ambition. He could not understand how his father could go off for a day of fishing when he was having business difficulties and financial pressures. When the young man examined his feelings more closely, it became evident that he did not allow himself to experience his own desire to take off and get away from it all occasionally. He was afraid he would like it too much and become a drifter. So he drove himself constantly, no allowing himself the pleasure of relaxation. And it is not surprising that once Khayman was able to experience this desire to loaf within himself, he not only moved in the direction of greater self-acceptance but was able to experience more love for his father. If we can keep our goals realistic, it will also help us in our efforts to learn to love ourselves. Many of us make severe demands on ourselves. We think we ought to be perfect, and we think we ought to achieve that perfection immediately. When we fail to do so, as we certainly must, we are burdened with unproductive feelings of guilt and worthlessness. With this kind of perfectionist cycle operating we might easily make even the search for self-acceptance a new vehicle for feelings of worthlessness! #RandolphHarris 3 of 14
Perhaps the secret is possessed in learning to relax and enjoy what we are right now—every feeling, every urge, every idiosyncrasy that is a part of us. Then if we really want to be what we have always told ourselves we ought to be, we may be freer to move in that direction. In other words, we dare not wait until we are perfect to start loving ourselves. We would wait forever. Let us learn to love ourselves in our imperfections. This attitude toward ourselves might be compared to the attitude of a warmly affectionate father toward his son. When the boy makes mistakes, he does not stop loving his son. He recognizes that failures and probably will express his concerns and perhaps may even become angry. However, somehow, there is communication from father to son of steadfast love and encouragement that is no destroyed or even threatened by these occasional crises. A similar attitude toward ourselves is very desirable. There will, of course, be times when we feel we have goofed. We may be angry and say to ourselves, “Oh, you meathead, you have done it again.” However, if there is a basic underlying sense of personal worth that is not shaken by the recognition that we have made a mistake, we can be much more effective about doing what we want to do in the future; for we will not be wasting the days of our lives in self-recrimination. Often this self-accepting attitude involves a sense of humor in which we can laugh at ourselves in our errors, give ourselves a good kick in the britches, and move on to the next moment of living. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14
Ideally, religious faiths might play an important part in helping their believers to learn to love themselves. Perhaps they do, but frequently they tend to create self-hate. Often religion says, “You are unworthy and condemnable in God’s sight. However, if you confess your unworthiness, God is willing to forgive you. You will then be a new creature, and God will give you strength to feel and act in more acceptable ways.” It cannot be denied that individuals who accept such a belief in God often experience a profound relief as they feel released from the burden of self-hate. And often they live greatly changed lives. However, the question remains whether the basic problem of self-hate has been adequately dealt with or whether a veneer of self-acceptance has simply been laid over the self-condemnation. It would appear that a new and better repressive technique is often acquired whereby the individual can somewhat better avoid dealing with the desires and feelings that are still felt to be so condemnable in God’s eyes. On the other hand, religion sometimes says, “God knows how often you get into messes you regret. He also knows how ugly and brutal you can sometimes seem. However, he also knows how frightened you are and understands why you do the things you do. He loves and accepts you as you are. Because God loves you, he really wants you to enjoy life and the experience of love to the fullest. He enjoys being a partner in your quest.” It seems likely that faith in this kind of God would add to the experience of love for one’s self. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14
Millions of humans come into the World and after a relatively short existence disappear. No of us are an exception, our turn to vanish will also come. Thought, confronted with this fact, must either despair, take refuge in the hopes of religion, or resolve to find out the truth behind the tremendous cosmic drama. It is better to accept the loneliness of the quester than the complacency of the Worldling who lives without any understanding of life’s inner purpose. Men and women try various ways to overcome their innate loneliness and with various results in the end. So long as the expedient used is something or someone outside themselves, their victories turn out to be illusions. There is no final way other than the Way which everyone has had to tread at last who ever succeeded in this objective, and which leads inwards to the Overself. In their search for satisfaction outside of and apart from the Overself, men and women are really fugitives from it. The response provoked in you by the entry of these ideas will determine your future. We suffering from stagnation and imagine that existence in the intellect and body is enough; it is not. The primary emphasis must be laid on the living principle of our being, the central self which creates both body and intellect. Here it is, the human creature put upon this round planet and left to make nothing from life, merely survive, or to make something out of it, and hold the great vision of the World-Idea, in company with the gods. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14
The making of money, the earning of a livelihood, and the attainment of professional or business success have their proper place in life and should be accorded it but—in comparison with the fulfilment of spiritual aspiration—out to be regarded as having quite a secondary place. Some people throw their clothes away after they wear them, they rent million-dollar apartments and forget where they are. No scientific technological advance, buy sports and luxury cars and cannot remember where they parked them. These individuals have an endless parade of sports coats, pants, robes, silk foulards. mink-lined raincoats, and dinner jackets for Monte Carlo, and jeweled cuff links. When they awake, their clothes are already laid out for them. Heaven help them if they were to change a single time, from the linen handkerchief to the black silk socks. Breakfast awaits them in the immense kitchen with its beautiful windows. The Greeks as always were a splendid people, gentle and trusting though they were darker of hair and skin now on account of their Turkish blood. The power to communicate varies. To listen to the thoughts of others is often to be heard oneself. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14
They are sane, but they are so busy, and have so much money, and travel so much that it is like finding a tree in the forest without a map of which one you are looking for. Gold watch on his wrist, one of those high-tech numbers he so adored. Think of that thing flashing its digits inside his office. No scientific technological advance, no political gain, no economic improvement will ever be enough in and of itself to provide a proper goal for human endeavour. It is easy to forget this in certain favourable periods, and if we do we come close to disaster in the end. We use every possible moment to cultivate the uncertain fields of commerce or to grow the perishing flowers of pleasure, but we are unable to spare one moment to cultivate the certain fields of the spirit within ourselves or to grow the enduring asphodels of divine devotion. The goals of progress are but imagined ones. There is only one goal which is undeniably real, completely certain, and authentically true—and that is an unchanging one, an eternal one. Yet it is also the one that has escaped humankind! #RandolphHarris 8 of 14
Our self-hate is developed primarily from experiences of feelings of rejection by others. Learning to love ourselves also involves relationships with people. We need the experience of emotional intimacy with others so that we can learn that we can be accepted as we are and thus can grow in self-acceptance. A very real predicament faces us at this point. We are desperately afraid of intimacy because we assume that deep involvement with another person will lead only to further rejection and hurt, and further confirmation of our feelings of worthlessness and unlovableness. Yet the experience of intimacy is almost a prerequisite for moving in the direction of the greater self-acceptance that would free us to enter into intimate relationships. The only solution to this dilemma seems to be to move gradually into increasing intimacy in spite of our fear. We will probably act somewhat like a wild deer leading to trust a would-be human friend. Because of our fear, our seeking of intimacy will undoubtedly proceed slowly and cautiously and our forward progress will include many frightened strategic withdrawals. However, if we can overcome our fear sufficiently to begin to talk about our inner feelings with another human being we will begin to learn that we are not unique. And out of the mutual acceptance will begin to assert itself. When we feel hurt, angered, misunderstood, and above all else, frightened, of course such a relationship will have its difficult moments, both for ourselves, and the other person. This will happen because we are both so frightened of self-disclosure that we constantly seek to avoid it. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14
If we can persist in spite of our fears, the rewards in satisfaction and growing self-acceptance will be great. If we are sufficiently motivated toward changing ourselves, if we have not been so emotionally damaged that we cannot make a start, the suggestions described above for breaking through the cycle of rejection and our self-hatred and learning to love ourselves will probably be helpful. Here in this country, mortals are more eager to better their manufactures than themselves. They will accept their own imperfections quite smugly and contentedly, but the imperfections of their automobiles—never! Yet, if they do not even know why they are standing upon it at all what is the use of their running from point to point on this Earth? Mortals as scientists have put under observation countless objects on Earth, in sea and sky. They have thoroughly examined them. However, mortal as mortal has put oneself under a shallower observation. One has limited one’s scrutiny first to the body, second to what thinking can find. Yet a deeper level exists, where a deeper hidden self can be found. One will discover that it is not enough to regard as good only that which is favourable to one’s physical life. One must complete the definition and sometimes even contradict it by adding that which is favourable to one’s spiritual life. There is nothing more important in life than the Quest, and the time will come when the student discovers that there is nothing more enjoyable as well. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14
This is inevitable in a Quest whose essential nature is one of infinite harmony and unbroken peace. No Worldly object, person, or pleasure can ever bestow the satisfaction experienced in uniting with the Overself. It is not the primal needs and their gratification but the realization of our divine possibilities which is the hidden justification of our presence in this World. The ceaseless longing for person happiness which exists in every human being is a right one, but is generally mistake in the direction along which satisfaction is sought. For all outward objects and beings can yield only a transient and imperfect delight that can never be equivalent to the uninterrupted happiness of life in the Overself. An existence which has no higher aims than purely physical ones, no nobler activities than merely personal ones, no inner references to a spiritual purpose, has to depend only on its own small resources. It has failed to benefit by its connection with the power behind the Universe. That the truth of life must be deeper than what we see and hear and touch, is suspected by intuitive persons, believed or felt by pious persons, and directly known by wise persons. What the surface story tells us is not the whole of it, they say. The love of institutional religion, although the name of God necessarily comes into it, is not in itself an explicit, but an implicit love of God, for it does not involve direct, immediate contact with him. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14
When they are pure, God is present in religious practices, just as he is present in our neighbor and in the beauty of the World; in the same way and not any more. The form that the love of religion takes in the soul differs a great deal according to the circumstances of our lives. Some circumstances prevent the very birth of this love; others kill it before it has been able to grow very strong. In affliction some mortals, in spite of themselves, develop a hatred and contempt for religion because the cruelty, pride, or corruption of certain of its ministers have made them suffer. There are others who have been reared from their earliest youth in surrounding impregnated with a spirit of this sort. If they are sufficiently strong and pure, we must conclude that in such cases, by God’s mercy, the love of our neighbor and the love of the beauty of the World will be enough to raise the soul to any height. The love of institutional religion normally has as its object the prevailing religion of the country or circle in which a mortal is brought up. As a result of an inborn habit, everyone thinks first of that each time one thinks of a religious service. The whole virtue of religious practices can be conceived of from the Christian tradition concerning the recitation of the name of the Lord. Our goal is to raise ourselves in a land of purity, and the Bible reminds of that the Lord really has the power of transforming the soul. Religion is supposed to truly be nothing else but this promise of God. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14
Every religious practice, every rite, all liturgy is a form of the recitation of the name of the Lord and in principle should have a real virtue, the virtue of saving whoever devotes oneself to performing it with desire. All religions pronounce the name of God in their particular language. As a rule it is better for a mortal to name God in one’s native language rather than one that is foreign to the culture. When it has to make the slight effort of seeking for the words in a foreign language, even when this language is well known, except in special cases, the soul is not able to abandon itself utterly. A writer whose native language is poor, difficult to manipulate, and not widely known throughout the World is very strongly tempted to adopt another. There are a few like Joseph Conrad who have done so with startling success. However, they are very rare. Except in special cases such a change does harm, both thought and style suffer, the writer is always ill at ease in the adopted language and cannot rise above mediocrity. A change of religion is for the soul like a change of language for a writer. All religion, it is true, are not equally suitable for the recitation of the name of the Lord. Some, without any doubt, are very imperfect mediums. However, religion is known only from inside. Catholics say this of Catholicism, but it is true of all religions. Religion is a form of nourishment. It is difficult to appreciate the flavor and food value of something one has never eaten. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14
The comparison of religions is only possible, in some measures, through the miraculous virtue of sympathy. If at the same time as we observe them from outside, we can know mortals to a certain extent, as we manage by sympathy to transport our own soul into theirs for a time. In the same way the study of different religions does not lead to a real knowledge of them unless we transport ourselves for a time by faith to the very center of whichever one we are studying. Here, moreover, this word faith is used in its strongest sense. This scarcely ever happens, for some have no faith, and the others have faith exclusively in one religion and only bestow upon the others the sort of attention we give to strangely shaped shells. There are others again who think they are capable of impartiality because they have only a vague religiosity which they can turn indifferently in any direction, all our faith, all our love to a particular religion in order to think of any other religion with the high degree of attention, faith, and love that is proper to it. In the same way, only those who are capable of friendship can take a real heartfelt interest in the fate of an utter stranger. If we do not love our fellow travelers on this mortal journey, we cannot truly love God. We are all spirit children of our Heavenly Father and, as such, are brothers and sisters. As we keep this truth in mind, loving all of God’s children will become easier. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14
I went into the bedroom, latched the door tight, surveyed the inviting bed, dove into it and pulled the covers up over my head. No more! Down pillows, yes, Oblivion, will you please get with it! Self-hate also gets in the way of successful relationships because we do not trust ourselves to be genuine. We develop some variety of phoniness because we assume people will not like us as we really are, since we ourselves do not. Every one of us probably has one or more acquaintances who are patently phony and are rather extreme examples of this tendency. It may, for example, be a woman who grew up in less affluent surroundings than those which she now lives. She is insecure in the next experience and, whether she allows herself to be aware of it or not, feels her current social set could not accept her if she were natural, so she puts on airs and acts in ways that she feels are the way a person in her setting should act; but the performance does not come off well since it is obviously false. While most of us are not as obviously phony as such a woman, we all have some of the tendency. One way it may express itself is in an effort to be kind or helpful when we do not really feel kindly toward a person. This is a made-to-order pitfall for those who have been raised in religious families where strong emphasis has been placed on the individual’s obligation to be helpful and loving. #RandolphHarris 1 of 11
In Christian homes children become familiar with such passages as: Love is patient and kind…it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. (I Corinthians 13.3-7.) These are beautiful words from a beautiful chapter. And when we are filled with feelings of warmth and love, they describe well some of the experiences that occur. When we are so full of feelings of caring that we could scarcely do otherwise then be loving, they are the genuine overflow toward another. Often we turn it around. We say to ourselves,” Kindness is a sign of love, so I should be kind, therefore I will be kind.” So we try to be kind to those for whom we may feel considerable unexpressed irritation or resentment. We remain emotionally distant because our kindness is phony. Our resentment is almost sure to seep through in indirect expressions, as when, for example, we seem condescending and patronizing in our kindness. Or perhaps we should be patient with our children, and so we act that way when we feel more like screaming at them. They sense our anger and yet have no way of coping with it directly since it remains unexpressed. And a wall of falseness stands between us because we have not trusted ourselves to be genuine. #RandolphHarris 2 of 11
The self-hate that makes us afraid to be ourselves gets us into very difficult binds in our relations with others because we tend to assume that we can gain affection only through acceptable performances, since we feel no one could possibly love us just because who we are. Destiny grew up in a home where great emphasis was placed on performance. Generally, she was made to feel that anything she did in the home as a child was inadequate and that she was rather worthless. The resulting feelings of self-hate made marriage a difficult experience for her. It was inevitable that she would assume that her husband, Marius, could not possibly love her for herself, so she constantly assumed that she would have to perform well or he would abandon her. Yet she seethed with anger, because he did not love her (so she self) without regard to her performance. The way in which Destiny kept the house became one of the focal points of this predicament. She has some tendency to let it become quite cluttered. Whenever this happened Marius became angry. He said that since there were no children and since she was not working the least she could do was to keep a reasonably picked up house. And since he himself was frightened and full of doubts about his own lovableness, he felt—and expressed the feeling—that when she failed to keep the house uncluttered she care nothing at all for him. #RandolphHarris 3 of 11
Marius’s reaction added fuel to the fire as far as the dilemma that Destiny felt. Anything that she did at that point was certain to be unsatisfying to her. If, in response to his anger, she busied herself and cleaned the place up, he praised her, and yet this only increased her anger, because she would say to herself, “Only when I perform well for him, he expresses affection.” I am not free to do as I please because he will leave me if I want him to stay with me.” If, on the other hand, she rebelled, as she often did, against the feeling of having to please him and let the house become more and more cluttered, Marius became more frustrated and angry, and she would use this to confirm her feelings of self-hate, for she could say, “You see, it is true. You only love me when I do exactly what you want me to do.” Perhaps the most damaging result of Destiny’s preoccupation with this bind was that she became virtually emotionally paralyzed. She became unable to know what she wanted, so concerned was she with what he wanted. She could not really tell whether it was more satisfying to herself to live in a clutter or an uncluttered house. Everything she did tended to be a reaction to Marius, rather than the act of a person doing what she wanted to do. Even the suggestion by Marius that they hire somebody to some in regularly and clean up was very frightening, for she told herself, “When someone is coming in and cleaning up, he will no longer need me. Then he will get rid of me!” #RandolphHarris 4 of 11
Destiny never learned to love herself, and so it was difficult for her to believe that Marius could be staying with her because he loved her and wanted her for reasons other than efficiency. If we hope to grow in emotional maturity and in the capacity to experience and express love, one must believe self-hate continually gets in the way of the experience of love, and it becomes evident that learning to love ourselves is a crucial and necessary experience. Since we will be more able and willing to disclose ourselves, a solid, deep rooted sense of one’s worth as a person is the foundation, we can become independent individuals, who know ourselves and thus have a self for others to discover and love. And out of this foundation of self-acceptance comes the capacity to accept others as they are, for we will find nothing in them that we have not found and accepted in one form or another in ourselves. Beauty is the form which reaches most deeply into the human heart and mind. It is the language which translates all the moods of humanity into feelings and insights and sensual experiences that we can understand. In beauty there are no foreigners: the deeper we penetrate into the human soul, be it of ourselves or our neighbors, the more we find ourselves at one with people of all nations, even those people behind iron curtains. It is by beauty that we feel the pulse of all humankind. #RandolphHarris 5 of 11
The love of the beauty of the World, while it is universal, involves, as a love secondary and subordinate to itself, the love of all the truly precious things that bad fortune can destroy. The truly precious things are those forming ladders reaching toward the beauty of the World, opening onto it. One who has gone farther, to the very beauty of the World itself, does not love them any less but much more deeply than before. Numbered among them are the pure and authentic achievements of art and science. In a much more general way they include everything that envelops human life with poetry through the various social strata. Every human being has at one’s roots here below a certain terrestrial poetry, a reflection of the Heavenly glory, the link, of which one is more or less vaguely conscious, with one’s universal country. Affliction is the tearing up of these roots. Human cities in particular, each one more or less according to its degree of perfection, surround the life of their inhabitants with poetry. They are images and reflections of the city of the World. Actually, the more they have the form of a nation, the more they claim to be countries themselves, the more distorted and soiled they are as images. However, to destroy cities, either materially or morally, or to exclude human beings from a city, thrusting them down to the state of social outcasts, this is to sever every bond of poetry and love between human beings and the Universe. It is to plunge them forcibly into the horror of ugliness. There can scarcely be a greater crime. We all have a share by our complicity in an almost innumerable quantity of such crimes. If only we could understand it, it should wring tears of blood from us. #RandolphHarris 6 of 11
This requires freedom, you say? Yes, freedom of the body within limits, but limits which free the mind. However, you may argue, “We have learned in our day to enslave the mind—what do you say to that?” The tyranny over the mind we need to fight, but let us make sure what kind of bondage we are fighting, and for what kind of freedom. It is not the freedom to become a millionaire, or the freedom to convince us through clever advertising to buy the million and one things we do not need, nor the things that are deleterious to us. In principle it is the freedom to be, not just to possess. Freedom is indeed an integral part of this beauty, but let it be a genuine freedom, a freedom to think and to feel, a freedom to speak and to contemplate, a freedom to appreciate and to create, a freedom to experience beauty. Let us return to the major problem of beauty versus power in our World. For the first time in all human history persons like you and me have been able literally to see the planet concentrated in exploration. Some people spend the entire night flying through the air. Flying to Boston, then Washington, then to Chicago, then back to New York City, is not unusual. Technological inventions obsess so many, one after the others. People use telephones to call long distance all over the planet, speaking with for hours with mortals in Australia or India and the internet to contact people Worlds away or order medication and shoes. #RandolphHarris 7 of 11
Television catches people up utterly, so that the house is full of blaring speakers and flickering screens. Anything with blue skies enthralls some. Many must watch the news programs, prime time series, documentaries, and every film, regardless of merit, ever taped. Many people have seen images of the planet supposedly photographed as a totality. The astronauts, and we through identifying with them and seeing the picture emblazoned in newspapers throughout the World, have been able to gaze at the World as a whirling planet in which all nations now are a part. This photograph is a symbol for a new relationship between nations. We saw the great wall of China, the Indian ocean the Russian steppes, the north and south Americas, the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and unfortunately we all got to watch Our Lady of Paris, also known as Norte-Dame Cathedral, which is 856 years old burn to the ground. Indeed, in the photograph we were what we in our stubbornness have been trying to escape in reality: all citizens of the same World. In this photograph the Chinese wall shuts our nothing, the perpetual squabbles of the nations turn out to be absurd, the revolvers held at the heads of Russian and the United States are transcended by the spinning planet in its orbit. #RandolphHarris 8 of 11
The whole Earth turns slowly before our eyes. I do not mean to belittle our national problems at all: I mean only to present a new symbol of the Word which for the first time requires us to see that all countries are citizens of the planet. As we are all awaiting the Royal baby, most of us realize we are grasped in this photograph of World culture by how colorful is this new Earth, new in the sense that it was our first view of the whole Earth. The whirling ball is shimmering gold on the side of the Sun, dazzling and resplendent, shading into a brilliant ultramarine. The shadow then merges into inky darkness and on into the pure black of the vast empty corridors that separate us from the solar systems of light far beyond. On and on the blackness stretches to the distant stars. The photograph was a symbol which can lead us to a radical change in our way of seeing and experiencing the World. The picture reached deeply into my own soul; the nations, usually so noisy, now seemed silent and serene. It showed the nations at last formed into a peaceful co-existence, charmed by the vast spaces of the Universe. Can anyone of us let this picture penetrate into our minds and souls without realizing that we live in a new World, a planet now of a beauty we had not suspected before? #RandolphHarris 9 of 11
It is not surprising that on Christmas Eve, in the flight of Apollo 8, Captain Frank Borman and his crew of two astronauts read for all the World to hear the story of creation in the book of Genesis. “The Earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep….And God said, ‘Let there be light.’ And God saw that the light was good.” This word “form” from the King James translation has the same meaning as I have used it in describing the form in the work of artists. The ground forms Joseph Binder used to emphasize are now wedded to space-forms; we reach not just into our own foundations as Binder taught us, but also into infinity. One of the astronauts, Russell Schweickart, told me that he carried with him into the stratosphere a number of quotations from different authors, T.S. Eliot, Archibald MacLeish, among them, which he thought might express his experience. One that especially grasped his personal feelings while in orbit was a short poem by Robert Nathan: “So beauty passes ever out of reach, save to the heart where happiness is home; there beauty walks, wherever it may be, and paints the Sunset on a quiet sea.” However we may conceive of the intimations of infinity with which our human minds are endowed, the metaphor of God the Artist is most expressive for many people. That is the concept of the painter of the Sunset on the quiet sea in Robert Nathan’s poem, and includes the forms of the Earth as well as of infinity. #RandolphHarris 10 of 11
Form is the essence of all things on Heaven and Earth, as I have tried to show in many different ways. Its dwelling is the light of setting Suns, and the round ocean and the living air. A presence that disturbs us with the joy of elevated thoughts. When I asked Russell Schweickart which of his fellow astronauts had uttered the phrase quoted by the newspapers with the photograph of the Sun-emblazoned Earth, he replied that everyone of them had felt the same thing when they looked out from their spaceship at the whirling Earth. It came our in words that one of them suddenly exclaimed, “God, it is beautiful.” So long as a mortal is a stranger to one’s own divine soul, so long has one not even begun to live. All that one does is to exist. In this matter most mortals deceive themselves. For they take comfort in the thought that this attitude of indifference, being a common one, must also be a true one. They feel that they cannot go far wrong is they think and behave as so many other mortals think and behave. Such ideas are the grossest self-deceptions. When the hour of calamity comes, they find out how empty this comfort, how isolated they really are in their spiritual helplessness. #RandolphHarris 11 of 11
Know thy self and you will win a hundred battles. The major difficulty of our effort to live selfless lives is that we become more or less successful at it! As we try to lease those around us, we become more and more fuzzy as individuals. Chameleonlike, we seem to become like those in whose presence we are at the moment. This is a basic problem of those whose lives are centered in giving of themselves. If this is their primary motive in life, they soon have very little self to give. The theologian Paul Tillich once declared, “It is time to end the bad theological usage of jumping with moral indignation on every word in which the syllable ‘self’ appears.” Love of one’s self is not antagonistic to having satisfying relationships. On the contrary, we are free to love others only as we become free to love ourselves. From the standpoint of the emotional factors involved in interpersonal relationships it would be legitimate to rephrase Jesus’ statement, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” to read, “You cannot love your neighbor until you love yourself.” For hate of one’s self constantly interferes with the whole gamut of our relationships from casual acquaintances to those with whom we desire to be intimate. #RandolphHarris 1 of 12
For one thing, when we are intolerant of ourselves, we tend to be intolerant of others. An often it is the same trait with which we have difficulty within ourselves that we cannot tolerate others. Jealousy often involves this kind of reaction. One man, Martin, had a brief encounter with another woman near the end of his second year of marriage. He and the other woman engaged in pleasures of the flesh on only one very unsatisfying occasion. He felt very guilty about this experience. During the succeeding years of his marriage Martin was ridden with fear that he might repeat the experience. Whenever he became aware of feelings of wanting to have pleasures of the flesh with another woman other than his wife, Pandora, who was a vivacious, sometimes almost flirtatious, woman. He could not tolerate in her what he found intolerable in himself; and he built a virtual prison for her, and incidentally for himself as well. He became very upset when Pandora showed any warmth or interest in their male friends and alienated a number of other couples with whom they began to associate. He became very suspicious of her, frequently checking up on her activities. He insisted that she spend every moment possible with him. For Pandora, that trapped feeling in marriage was no figure of speech as long as she was willing to tolerate the unreasonable demand brought on by his own self-hate and self-mistrust. #RandolphHarris 2 of 12
Another way that self-hate interferes with our enjoyment of our associations with others is that it frequently leads to our being overly sensitive and too easily hurt. When we are self-condemning we tend to read condemnation into other people’s words and actions. We may become so touchy that the simplest comments by others seem to have sinister condemning undertones. On the way home from a party, a wife may say in passing, “Gee, the Buber’s have a beautiful home.” And the husband may feel she is condemning him for not being man enough to have sufficient earnings to own such a home. Or he may say, Chelsea Buber sure looked great tonight, did she not?” And her reply, “Yeah, great!” may be loaded with sarcasm because she feels he is really saying, “You look pretty unattractive and sloppy compared to that Chelsea Buber!” This touchiness also often causes us to generalize another’s critical remark in a very limited area and make it into a wholesale condemnation of ourselves. Many a wife has reacted this way to a comment from her husband at the dinner table, such as, “This coq au vin tastes a little flat. I wish you had put more red Burgundy and garlic in it.” Wife at this point may burst into tears, jump up from the table, and shout, “Nothing I do it ever good enough for you. You really have me, right?!” Assuming the husband does not constantly criticize her, it can safely be said that she has read a great deal of self-condemnation into his remark. #RandolphHarris 3 of 12
The human creature is the most fortunate of all living creatures, because one alone has the potential capacity and opportunity to become spiritually aware. Every life in the fleshly body represents and opportunity to obtain spiritual realization because mortals can only discover one’s divinity to the fullest whilst in the waking state. The refusal to reach up towards the higher truth and power leaves problems basically unsolved and questions really unanswered, for the cosmic urge within must assert and reassert itself. When a mortal comes to his or her real senses, one will recognize that one has only one problem: “How can I come into awareness of, and oneness with, my true being?” For it is to lead one to this final question that other questions and problems have staged the road of one’s whole life. This answered, the way to answer all the other ones which beset one, be they physical or financial, intellectual or familiar, will open up. Hence Jesus’ statements: “Seek ye first the kingdom of Heaven and all these things shall be added unto you,” and “To one that hath [enlightenment] shall be given [what one personally needs].” Because we have lost our way, these truths are once again as fresh and significant and important as if they had never been known to humanity. Beauty will save the World. What does this mean? For a long time I thought it merely a phrase. Was such a thing possible? When in our bloodthirsty history did beauty ever save anyone from anything? Ennobled, elevated, yes: but whom has it saved? #RandolphHarris 4 of 12
Nothing else seems able to save us. For no one would be foolish enough to think that the present policies of the two super-nations will do any more than produce a stand-off, each with a revolver as the other’s head. We build more nuclear warheads and the Russians do the same, they even have spy planes looking at military bases in California, and we invent more means of destruction and they do the same, each go around only repeating the stand-off on a more dangerous scale. Will we still be at the mercy of chance: an accidental release of some missile, or an extremist group setting off an atom bomb in New York, and the holocaust will be upon us? Power, not beauty, seems to govern nations. What the World can no longer endure in the nuclear age is its separation into many different nations, each with its own power needs; and the fact that the United States seems to be the most powerful is due largely to the fact that destiny gave us a particularly lush portion of this globe. However, or powerful position should not numb our realization that we will not be in this position forever. As Athens, at the height of its power and its great, unrivaled culture, as when Aeschylus and Sophocles were still alive, when Pericles was its leader, when Phidias had just finished the Parthenon, when Plato was young and Socrates gathered around him this unequaled group of young philosophers eternalized in Plato’s Dialogues—at its time of glory and power, Athens committed suicide by fighting the Peloponnesian War. #RandolphHarris 5 of 12
Sparta and the other city-states joined in this useless and wanton suicide. They were all so exhausted by the year 400 B.C. that the days of the city-state were numbered. We in our twenty-first century World face almost exactly the same challenge. Can we transcend that nation-state? Can we extend our love for country to other countries and the World? Destiny clearly cries out with the challenge to us to extend our imaginations, our economy and our way of thinking, to relate us to the whole planet rather than our own one piece of it. So long as we view our freedom as dependent upon our remaining the most powerful and richest nation on Earth, we shall have placed ourselves again under the sword of Damocles. We shall not be freed from this threat until we confirm a freedom for humanity. Power brings with it responsibility. Our power in America has brought more responsibility in the remarks that we are the special children of God, we carry his banners, God blesses America, he has a destiny for us different from that for other nations. God we thank thee the we are not as other people. Beauty and power. Were there every two such strange antagonists They have almost always been set in opposition to each other, such as Beauty and the Beast. How can we change this? #RandolphHarris 6 of 12
In mythology Beauty is pictured as the radiant but weak maiden, requiring the knight to rescue her from the dark and unattractive Power, often pictured as a dragon. How can we be saved by beauty—this gentle but timeless quality, this eternal but ephemeral experience? I recall as a young boy when at the Villa Floridiana Porza, Ticino, 6948 Switzerland in Winter a snowflake lighted on my black mitten, and just as I was overwhelmed with winder at its marvelously intricate design, it melted away and left only a wet spot as a token that it was there an instant ago. How can we talk of such a gentle quality saving the World? Art and the beauty as expressed, are on a different level from the mundane characteristics of our World. There is, however, something special in the essence of beauty, a special quality in art: the conviction carried by a genuine work of art is absolute and subdues even a resistant heart. A work of art contains its verification in itself. Works which draw on truth and present it to us in live and concentrated form grip us, compellingly involve us, and no one ever, not even ages hence, will come forth to refute them. Perhaps then the old trinity of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty is not simply the dressed-up, worn-out formula we thought it in our presumptuous, materialistic youth? #RandolphHarris 7 of 12
If the crowns of these three trees meet, as scholars have asserted, and if the too obvious, too straight sprouts of Truth and Goodness have been knocked down, cut off, not let grow, perhaps the whimsical, unpredictable, unexpected branches of Beauty will work their way through, rise up to that very place, and this complete the work of all three? Beauty will save the World—is not a slip of the tongue but a prophecy. One thing is certain: a World that does not have a concern for beauty will not be worth saving. Not life is to be valued, but the good life. The noble life is first of all the beautiful life. This is the fundamental importance of beauty and of the art that springs from the love of beauty. The humanities, such as art and music and poetry, exist for one purpose alone: to enhance the quality of human existence. There are riches that are posses at hand in any library, waiting to make life fuller, to make us more vital, to disclose to us the presence of joys in life which have been there all the time but we were blind to them. There is no library worth the name which does not have the mental inspiration to take us, like Columbus, to new Worlds. In poetry, in art, in literature, in music, there is not only the power to tame the savage breast, but to give us the sense of joy and serenity we sorely need. There is music that brings us this with no need for economic riches. #RandolphHarris 8 of 12
If our lives our boring, do we need to be awakened to adventure and the sense of passion? Homer brings us this, as does the poetry in many songs of Aaliyah Haughton and the Beatles. Taste is a particular approach, but it still can have its value; there is no need to insist that every person experience one’s soul enlivened by the same things. The earlier the age at which a person begins these studies and practices the better for one. To be born into a family where they already prevail, is to have an exceedingly good destiny. But however late in life anyone comes to them, it is never too late. One will have to content with set ways and fixed habits that will need changing, it is true. The mature and the elderly should take to spiritual studies as a duty. They have come to a period of life when they can evaluate its experiences better than the youthful. It is not too late at any period of life, even in one’s golden years, to obtain a firm footing upon the spiritual path and gain its satisfying rewards. In the end we all must turn to the inner Source of all our best human sources, to the Guru of all gurus, to the Overself. Then why not now? Now is the right moment to practice philosophy, to crush the ego, and to think optimistically. The quest, with its ideas and goals, is essential to the awakened mortal. One could not live without it without feeling half-dead, empty and futile. #RandolphHarris 9 of 12
Let us have done with the fake serenity that comes from the avoidance of tragedy. We do not need to cite the grandeur of classics like Hamlet, but the tragedies which are set in squalor, like O’Neill’s The Ice Man Cometh, also show us the nobility of the human being. We need not insist that every garden be as beautiful as the Keukenhof, Lisse, Netherlands with its 32 hectares and 7 million flowering plants; a meadow of weeds can also be beautiful. There is death as there is life, and let us open ourselves to both. We are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve; we have an internal, and then our place knows us no more. We affirm life as we affirm death; the two always go together, just as we listen to the discords which play their crucial part in Beethoven’s symphonies. We never have denied that darkness goes with light, or that pain goes with pleasure, and if the truth were known, makes possible the pleasures. We have never denied the ugliness that makes beauty possible and necessary, for it is in juxtaposition with ugliness that we are able to recognize beauty. We can note with pleasure that museums and galleries are becoming increasingly attended these day, and particularly that young people attend more and more exhibitions of art. More people go to galleries than attend football games; and such statistics, absurd on one level, on another tell us that the acquaintanceship with art seems at least to be growing. #RandolphHarris 10 of 12
The galleries and museums give us the presence of adventure and solace, which we, citizens of a technological age, sorely need. Or we can carry with us in memory one picture to give us cheer and purpose, says Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. Here the faces of Venus and the cherubic spirits of springtime seem woven together by the gossamer breeze, and we are carried away to an Olympus where the gods are not mocked but for once are humble and recognize one of their own. We are made in the very image of God. It is by virtue of something in us which attaches to the fact of being a person but which is not the fact itself. It is the power of renouncing our own personality. It is obedience. Every time that a mortal rises to a degree of excellence, which by participation makes one a divine being, we are aware of something impersonal and anonymous about one. One’s voice is enveloped in silence. This is evident in all great works of art or thoughts, in the great deeds of saints and in their words. It is then in a sense that we must conceive of God as impersonal, in the sense that one is the divine model of a person who passes beyond the self by renunciation.Lord. Lord, whoever I am, whatever I am, whatever I am meant to be, I am part of this, this World, that is all of a flowing wonder–like this music. And you are with us. You are here. You have pitched your tent here, among us. This music is your song. This is your house. #RandolphHarris 11 of 12
To conceive of him as an all-powerful person, or under the name of Christ as a human person, is to exclude oneself from the true love of God. That is why we have to adore the perfection of the Heavenly Father in his even diffusion of the light of the Sun. The divine and absolute model of that renunciation which is obedience in us—such is the creative and ruling principle of the Universe—such is the fulness of being. It is because the renunciation of the personality makes mortals a reflection of God that it is so frightful to reduce mortals to the condition of inert matter by plunging them into affliction. When the quality of human personality is taken from them, the possibility of renouncing it is also taken away, except in the case of those who are sufficiently prepared. As God has crated our independence so that we should have the possibility of renouncing it out of love, we should for the same reason wish to preserve the independence of our fellows. One who is perfectly obedient sets an infinite price upon the faculty of free choice in all mortals. In the same way there is no contradiction between the love of the beauty of the World and compassion. Such love does not prevent us from suffering on our own account when we are in affliction. Neither does it prevent us from suffering because other are afflicted. It is on another plane from suffering. #RandolphHarris 12 of 12
Never. I will never envy you. Envy is a terrible thing, a terrible sin. I will love you. As I looked at the stars, and tried to see the hosts singing in the Heavens, I prayed for the Angels to come to me as they would to anyone on the Earth. A great sweetness came over me, a quiet in my heart. I thought to myself, all this World is the Temple of the Lord. All the Creation is his Temple. I was all right. It was early morning. The stars were still there. One of the most insulting things a person can say about another in our culture without using profanity is “Man, that guy really loves himself!” It is interesting that so many of us from very different kinds of background and having various levels of sophistication consider love of the self to be a condemnable quality. In Christian circles, for example, much is said or written about the corrupted and sinful nature of mortals showing forth in one’s acts of self-love. So strong has this tendency been within the Christian church that if an individual church member were asked what the most basic or central problem of humankind is, one’s answer would likely include some form of the phrase love of self. Loving one’s self has not only become a sin, but the sin! This view of love of self would appear to have developed in spite of the teaching of Jesus, for when he said, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” (Mark 12.31) he appears to have recognized a legitimate place in life for loving ourselves in addition to loving God and others. #RandolphHarris 1 of 9
At this point some might state, “Well, what difference does it make if we use the term self-love instead of selfishness or self-centeredness? We know what we mean by it.” However, more in involved than a mere loose use of words. For we are constantly exposed throughout our lives to this idea that it is wrong to love ourselves. Children are told by parents that they ought to act primarily in terms of other people’s interest and not consider their own desires and their own feelings. The child finds one’s self unable to do this and feel guilty. One may also feel quite confused when one looks about one and sees people, including one’s parents, appearing to act most of the time in terms of their own self-interest. It is important to challenge the idea that loving ourselves is wrong, because this concept is damaging to the human personality. For one thing, it leads to the glorification of self-hate. Many who were reared in the Christian Faith were exposed as children to a gospel song, the words of which are sometimes changed in more recent various. However, formerly it went like this: “Alas did my Savior bleed? And did my sovereign die? Would he devote that sacred head for such a worm as I?” To have people sing about themselves as worms would certain appear to be an encouragement to them to hate themselves. Yet it would hardly seem to be an accurate description of the religion of Jesus, who was accused (and correctly!) of being a friend of the greatly despised tax collectors and sinners.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 9
We have already examined the damage that self-hate does to the human personality and the deteriorating effect that it has on our relationships with each other. The implication that we ought not to love ourselves but ought rather to hate ourselves does us the disservice tending to perpetuate self-hate, our most basic neurosis. One of the problems arising from the glorification of self-hate is that it often leads to morbid and unproductive feelings of guilt. Particularly in religious settings this often become so pervasive a feeling that an individual will describe one as feeling guilty about everything one does. Such nonspecific feeling of guilt would appear to serve no other purpose than to rob the individual of the freedom to enjoy life. We already have seen that symptoms of personality disturbances such as bragging and bullying are not evidence that the person thinks too highly of one, but rather that one hates one’s self. The same is true of the person who has qualities that cause us to describe one as selfish or self-centered. Selfishness does not result from love of self; it is self-hate masquerading at self-love, for the selfish person is very insecure on the deeper levels of one’s personality. One is not in love with one’s self. One has never experienced one’s worth; because of one’s insecurity one must center all one’s life and interest about one. One must be selfish. Everything must turn to one’s own advantage to protect one’s self from the nagging haunting suspicion that one is worthless. #RandolphHarris 3 of 9
The individual is like the miser who clings to every cent, not because one gets a healthy satisfaction from one’s skill in earning one’s living, but because one has an overwhelming distrust of the future and of one’s ability to provide. And just as the miser cannot enjoy one’s money and the thing it could provide, the selfish person cannot fully enjoy human relationships because of one’s lack of trust in one’s self. Another damaging aspect of self-hate is that it often prevents us from realistic appraisals of ourselves that could lead to growth and maturity. When we hate ourselves, we become reluctant to look closely at ourselves because we cannot tolerate what we see. So instead we tend to build false images of ourselves, often based on some pseudoconfidence. As we develop these shaky images of ourselves, built on the flimsiest of foundations, we have to build strong defenses against seeing how empty and meaningless they really are. We bitterly resent and reject any criticism or apparent criticism that appears to threaten our house of cards. If we saw them clearly, we do not allow ourselves to see things about ourselves that we might want to change, things that may be painfully apparent to others. Our attitude toward our images might be compared to the child’s feeling about a blanket that has become important to one’s feeling of security. One drags it around with one wherever one goes. It becomes dirty and tattered and an embarrassment to one’s parents, but for one these deficiencies simply do not exist. #RandolphHarris 4 of 9
We are often in a similar, but less humorous, predicament with our self-images. We are so certain at the deeper level of our personalities that our real selves are unlovable that we show the World spurious selves to which we cling desperately lest they be tampered with and our fragile security lost. We do everything possible to conceal our self-hate from ourselves. In this way we prevent ourselves from heathy appraisal of our abilities and liabilities, which might lead to personality growth. We become our own worst enemies. And often it might be said of us, as one novelist described a character, “He was not so much a human being as a civil war.” It is this war within ourselves brought on by self-hate that keeps us from realizing our potentials more fully. In certain circles one hears much praise of selflessness as a human motive. It is said that the ultimate in goodness is to have no concerns for one’s own welfare and to be concerned only for the welfare of others. It is unlikely that such indifference to the self can exist. And it is likely that the ideal exists, because we have tended to think that self-interest and the interest of others are mutually exclusive. We have been taught to say to ourselves, “If I am concerned with following my own feelings and satisfying my own desires, I will be destructive to those around me. Therefore, if I am to love another person I must suppress my own interests and be as they want me to be.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 9
If we could see that even this effort to subjugate ourselves to others is a striving to enhance ourselves and gain a feeling of self-worth, we would become more realistic about the all-important role of self-interest in our lives. Dante’s Divine Comedy, for example, begins with these two verses: “Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray from the straight road and woke to find myself alone in a dark wood. How shall I say what wood that was! I never saw so drear, so rank, so arduous a wilderness!” Thus begins what is certainly one of the most human, richest and beautiful classic that we humans are heir to, no matter what our language. In exile from Florence for political reasons, Dante found his personal hardship turned into a great gift to humanity. He wrote this epic not only in poetry but in what would seem to be the most arduous kind of poetry. Each of the three parts, the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, consist of thirty-three Cantos, each one of which is made up of forty or fifty three-line verses. Each of the Cantos ends in the word “Star”: “And we walked out once more beneath the Stars” ends the first book, “perfectly pure, and ready for the Stars” the second, and the third, “by the love that moves the Sun and the other Stars.” It would seem that such architectonics would make the Comedy rigid and hard to read. However, it does just the opposite. #RandolphHarris 6 of 9
The piercing of human experience so deeply that it can be expressed only in poetry means pushing one’s thoughts to a deeper form. A tension is required to write such poetry, and this tension in turn requires the poet to express one’s thoughts on a deeper level of art. I have said earlier that art is arriving at form in human life. The fact that the poet, in this case Dante, confronts the cadence, the sense of proportion, the form of poetry, requires Dante’s feeling for the depths of the human soul. Poetry comes out of one’s most profound sense of being alive. The self-perception, the depth of intuition, the capacity to experience suffering and joy so deeply—for all these reasons poetry speaks out of levels which yield us new truth every time we read it. “Deep calleth unto the deep” describes the experience of being a poet and the reading of poetry. In the expression of beauty through literature, we also find a basis for reconciliation among nations. In this country we, indeed, hate the very idea of a police state, as Russian was cruelly called the evil empire by President Reagan. However, let us not forget that the great contribution of Russia to the World is its surge in the arts in the second half of the nineteenth century. This produced Tolstoy’s War and Peace, often called the greatest novel ever written and the source of enchantment for millions, plus the amazingly penetrating psychological novels of Dostoyevsky such as The Brothers Karamazov, plus the important dramas of Chekhov, which has made such a contribution to the stage. #RandolphHarris 7 of 9
Russia’s many other works of literature are paralleled by their musical creativity, which includes Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Shostakovich and host of others. There is surely good reason for the fact that many cultural authorities speak of Russia in the second half of the nineteenth century as the Second Renaissance, next in importance only to the Italian Renaissance which launched the modern age. We may well, when we are thinking of beauty which transcends all politics and nations, bravely speak of the great arts as the basis for the reconciliation of the warring factions of humankind. In art and poetry and literature there is, to paraphrase St. Paul with a slightly different meaning, “neither male nor female, neither slave nor free, neither Russian nor American.” It is significant that art is the only human institution which is never destructive. Religions turn into wars, as in the Crusades and the endless holy wars which continue even in our own day. Economic systems set country against country, as is happening now all over the modern World. However, art—not its economic status or prestige status, but art itself—is always a win-win situation, the one human institution which never turns person against persons. #RandolphHarris 8 of 9
It is because absence of any finality or intention is the essence of the beauty of the World that Christ told us to behold the rain and the light of the Sun, as they fall without discrimination upon the just and the unjust. This recalls the supreme cry of Prometheus: “The Heavens, where the common orb of day revolves for all.” Christ commands us to imitate this beauty. Plato also in the Timaeus counsels us through contemplation to make ourselves like to the beauty of the World, like to the harmony of the circular movements that cause day and night, months, seasons, and years to succeed each other and return. In these revolutions also, and in their combination, the absence of intention and finality is manifest; pure beauty shines forth. It is because it can be loved by us, it is because it is beautiful, that the Universe is a country. It is our only country here below. This thought is the essence of wisdom of the Stoics. We have a Heavenly country, but in a sense it is too difficult to love, because we do not know it; above all, in a sense, it is too easy to love, because we can imagine it as we please. We run the risk of loving a fiction under this name. If the love of the fiction is strong enough it makes all virtue easy, but at the same time of little value. Let us love the country of here below. It is real; it offers resistance to love. It is this country that God has given us to love. He has willed that is should be difficult yet possible to love it. #RandolphHarris 9 of 9
I was coming to understand something of the greatest importance: all stories were part of one great story, the story of who we are. I had not seen it so clearly before, but now it was so clear that it thrilled me. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul, and with all your strength. And teach your children diligently, and talk with them when you sit in your houses. Because another great principle of family life is that it is desirable for disciplinary measure to be reserved for things that have been done and not be used for things that have been said. Many parents express a concern about respect at this point, saying, “If we let our children say anything they please to us, they will not have any respect of us.” However, when this thought is examined, the idea of forcing our children to be dishonest with us by disciplinary means seems a rather strange way to help our children consider us worthy of high regard. There are too many instances of quiet, studious, industrious, and respectful young men or women who have spent many years bottling up anger and other feelings and who at a crisis point in their lives take up a harsh attitude and alienate those around them or act out and start bullying to place a very high value on respect won this way. Fortunate indeed is the child who has learned through experience that one can tell one’s parents how one really feels without living in fear of retribution. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
Because in each of us, what we much realize, is the full story of who we are. Therefore, one is fortunate, too, if one has learned that one can trust one’s parents to be as honest with one. Out of this kind of relationship will grow the genuine mutual respect and love that can last a lifetime. A quality of relaxed good humor seems to accompany the disciplinary efforts of many successful parents. “Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee,” reports Exodus 20.12. For such parents the children’s infractions of the rules and the punishment meted out does not become the deadly serious business that it does in many households. It is likely that the quality in the parents that makes this attitude possible is their own self-acceptance. When the child goes against the rules, they do not feel that their worth as persons or as parent is threatened, so they do something that will help the child remember in the future. The commandment to honor our parents has strands that run through the entire fabric of the gospel. It is inherent in our relationship to God our Father. It embraces the divine destiny of the children of God. This commandment relates to the government of the family, which is patterned after the government of Heaven. The commandment to honor our parents echoes the sacred spirit of family relationships in which—at their best—we have sublime expressions of Heavenly love and care for one another. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
When we realize that our greatest expressions of joy or pain in mortality come from the members of our families, we sense the importance of these relationships. In this day, failing to honor our parents is not a capital crime in any country of which I am aware. However, the divine direction to honor our father and our mothers has never been revoked. It is important that parents to not feel like bad parents, and so they do not give the child the feeling that he or she is a bad seed. Imagine, for example, if he had been relaxed about it, how Leo Pete’s father could have laughed, even with a five-year-old, when he found him urinating against the church. And still he could have gotten the message across that it would be wise to be more discreet in the selection of a site for the sake of the shockable ladies who might be watching. The relaxed good humor being described does not, of course, include hostile ridicule and sarcasm, which are very destructive to children. There would be little humor and nothing salutary, for example, in the comment of a father who would say to his son in from of the boy’s friends, “If you were more intelligent, you would have remembered to take the rubbish out this morning.” To young people, honoring parents is appropriately understood to focus on obedience, respect, and emulation of righteous parents. “Children, obey your parents in all things [I believe he meant all righteous things]: for this is well pleasing to our Lord,” reports Colossians 3.20. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
One factor that seems to underlie a great many problems in families is the tendency of parents to underrate children’s abilities in the area of relationships. Perhaps we use the idea that they could not possibly understand as another device to maintain some emotional distance between ourselves and them because of our fear of love and its risks. In any case, our children are more perceptive than we think they are. When we attempt to conceal emotions from them, we fool our children much less than we think we do. When we resent them, for example, and try to hide our resentment from them, we show it in some more subtle way and they get the message. And the subtlety makes it much more difficult for them to handle than our anger. Our children are also much tougher than we think they are, and they can handle our negative feelings better than we think they can. Children do not need to be handled with kid gloves. Particularly, if we do not have to pretend that we are perfect, we can make a lot of mistake in our dealings with our children and they can survive quite well. If we can have a genuine relationship with them in which we are not too frightened to express our love, our anger, and our others feelings, and if we can admit it when we make mistake, our children will understand, accept, and feel secure because it will have the ring of reality; because they will know that they, too, have the same feelings. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
If one truly honors one’s parents, one will seek to emulate their best characteristics and to fulfill their highest aspirations for us. No gift purchased from a store can begin to match in value to parents some simple, sincere words of appreciation. Nothing we could give them would be more prized than righteous living for each youngster. Our children can also understand our feelings better than we think they can. When we are discouraged or upset about something, we often assume that our children could not understand. And we may feel that we want to protect the from some of the problems and worries that beset us. If they knew what was going on and why they tension exists within the family, since they sense that something is wrong, more often than not even our younger children would understand and would feel much better. If, for example, a family is in financial difficulties, there is likely to be a charged atmosphere throughout the hoe no matter how hard the parents try to conceal the fact from the children. If the children are not told what is going on, they can only guess about the cause of the tension. Their guesses will most likely be that something is wrong between family members. They may feel that the parents do not love each other any more and are going to get a divorce, as some of the others parents on the block have done. Or they may even imagine that they have dome something to create all the tension that nobody wants to talk about. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
If we will simply give them facts and feelings with which to work, our children will understand much better than we think they can. It may even be a relief to them to discover that parents are human, too, and also have their worries and problems! Everything that has been said here about family life points to the importance of the maturity of parents. If parents are able to be emotionally honest and direct with their children, if they can express their love in deeply satisfying ways, despite the risks of being hurt that such love always involves, families will tend to be more healthy. However, parents, too, have been reared in families. And, they, like everyone else, have been hurt in the past and have in varying degrees been emotionally crippled in the ability to accept themselves and in their freedom to express love, so the tendency exists for parents to react to their children in ways that perpetuate the fear of love from one generation to the next. Is there an any escape from this social inheritance? Fortunately, it is possible for individuals, whether they are parents or not, who long for more satisfying experiences of love to gain more self-acceptance and self-awareness. It is a matter of learning to value ourselves. The Lord of All Creation has restored us. It must have been for our good that we have known such bitterness…we who live thank you, as we do now, the father will tell the children of your faithfulness. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
Jesus and the New Testament writers are aware of the psychological and sociological factors which determine human existence. They are keenly aware of the universal and inescapable dominion of sin over this World, of the demonic splits in the souls of people, which produce insanity and bodily destruction; of the economic and spiritual misery of the masses. However, there awareness of these factors, which have become so decisive for our description of mortal’s predicament, does not prevent them from calling the sinners sinners. Understanding does not replace judging. We understand more and better than many generations before us. However, our immensely increased insight into the condition of human existence should not undercut our courage to call wrong wrong. Sinners are seriously called sinners in the same way the righteous one are seriously called righteous. If we tried to show that righteous one’s are not truly righteous, we would be missing something in our spirit. When our children do what they are supposed to do, they have no reason to feel that they have done anything wrong, and nor does their father or mother tell the so because good behavior is encouraged. The child’s righteousness is not questioned. Such righteousness is not easy to attain. Much self-control, hard discipline, and continuous self-observation is needed. Therefore, we should not despise righteous ones. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
Human attitudes are manifold. Some mortals take a keen interest in certain objects and in other mortals and actually think more about them than they think of themselves. They do not so much say I or think I as they do I. They take an interest, they do not give of themselves. They may manipulate or merely study, and unlike mortals of the I-I type they may be good scholars; but they lack devotion. This I-It tendency is so familiar that little need be said about it, except that it is a tendency that rarely consumes a mortal’s whole life. Those who see a large part of humanity—their enemies, of course—as mortals of this type, have succumbed to demonology. This is merely one of the varieties of mortal’s experience and much more widespread in all ages as a tendency and much rarer as a pure type in our own time than the Manichaeans fancy. There are mortals who hardly have an I at all. Nor are all of them of one kind. Some inhabit Worlds in which objects loom large. They are not merely interested in some thing or subject, but the object of their interest dominates their lives. They are apt to be great scholars of extraordinary erudition, with no time for themselves, with no time to have a self. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
They study without experiencing: they have no time for experience, which would smack of subjectivity if not frivolity. They are objective and immensely serious. They have no time for humor. They study without any thought of use. What they study is an end in itself for them. They are devoted to their subject, and the notion of using it is a blasphemy and sacrilege that is not likely to occur to them. For all that, their subject is no subject in its own right, like a person. It has no subjectivity. It does not speak to them. It is a subject one has chosen to study—one of them subjects that one may legitimately choose, and there may be others working on the same subject, possibly on a slightly different aspect of it, and one respects them insofar as they, too, have no selves and are objective. Here we have a community of solid scholars—so solid that there is no room at the center for any core. Theirs is the World of It-It. There are other ways of having no I. There are mortals who never speak a sentence of which I is Lord, but nobody could call them objective. At the center of their World is We. The contents of this We can vary greatly. However, this is an orientation in which I does not exist, and You and It and He and She are only shadows. One type of this sort could be called We-We. Theirs is a sheltered, childish World in which no individuality has yet emerged. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
In pursuing this integral quest, one has the satisfaction of knowing that they are pursuing the only quest which can bring them to a truth which is all-embracing and all-explaining. The fact that so few have ventured on this quest offers no indication of what will happen in the future. If humankind could take any other way to its own self-fulfillment, this situation might remain. However, there is no other way. For one there must exist something more than merely being a member of the herd; there must be a higher direction leading to truth to satisfy the mind, to a nobler character to satisfy the conscience, to refined beautiful and gentler moods inspired by the arts, music, literature, and reverence. What we see and think is only an awareness gleaned by the shallower part of oneself. There is one’s deeper being—indeed, the term “part” is quite inapplicable here—one’s real essence, the greater Consciousness from which thoughts and emotion emerge for their limited lives. To find and know this is a duty to which one must one day come. The search for truth becomes, for such a person, neither a spare-time hobby nor an intellectual curiosity, but a driving moral compulsion. The more deeply we understand the nature of mortals, the more reliably shall we understand the duty of mortals. The risk of entering such a spiritual adventure may be quite formidable, but the risks of not entering it are unquestionably frightful. For the probabilities of wrong action and mistaken choice will still remain, with the painful karmic aftermath. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
The mortal who fails to touch the Overself’s beauty in this life and under this pressure can hardly be blameworthy, but the mortal who fails to try to touch it, is blameworthy. Nobody really knows how to live correctly unless one knows the higher laws governing life itself. Whether on college campus or life’s school, the higher laws have to be learnt at some time, in some birth—whether by instruction when young or by experience when older. The fact of their existence may be disregarded at our own peril. Mortals can come into the personal knowledge that there is this unseen power out of which the whole Universe is being derived, including oneself. However, neither the animal nor the plant can come into this knowledge. Here we see what evolution means and why it is necessary. We find a similar truth in the great literature of the World. Whether one’s native speech is French or Urdu or Mandarin Chinese or any other, the literature of the World—of only in translation—is open to us all. We never think of avoiding reading Goethe because he is German, or that Shakespeare is confined to Britain, or that the Koans are the property only of the Japanese. The more deeply authors penetrate into the depths of human experience the more they speak the language of all humanity. They then give solace and enhancement to us all. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
This is another definition of a classic: a writing that interprets our own deepest symbols and myths. Hence a classic passes on from ancient Homer, say, to all of us no matter how many centuries later we may live and no matter what nationality we may be. The drama, Peer Gynt, for example, is entirely about the questions, “What is my Self?,” surely the deepest puzzle of human beings in whatever country. When Ibsen wrote the drama he thought his play would not be understood outside Scandinavia. However, to his surprise he found that Peer was understood wherever human beings were conscious of themselves, wherever human beings asked, “Where is myself?”; and hence Peer was claimed everywhere as a national prototype. Even in Japan it was stated that Peer Gynt is typically Japanese. George Bernard Shaw wrote that “The universality of Ibsen (and his grip upon humanity) makes his plays come home to all nations, and Peer Gynt is as good a Frenchman as a Norwegian.” There is on my desk a copy of the book of poems by the contemporary Russian poet, Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Opening the book at random I found these lines, “The visions of malapaga those of Peer Gynt, seem, all of them, now to apply to me.” The reason Peer Gynt is a character for all nations is that the myth and the drama reflect on a profound level the problems, the loves, the yearnings, the sorrows, the ultimate discoveries of one human being who stands for all human beings. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
After reading it, we arise from our chairs feeling deeply understood; our loneliness is assuaged and our hearts feel at home again. Such a classic gives us a sense of joy and serenity—which after all is our definition of beauty. Poetry is a particular form of art which gives us another aspect of beauty in our common human language. If we ask why such and such a word in a poem is in such and such a place and if there is an answer, either the poem is not of the highest order or else the reader has understood nothing of it. If one can rightly say that the word is where it is in order to express a particular idea, or for the sake of a grammatical connection, or for the sake of the rhyme or alliteration, or to complete the line, or to give a certain color, or even for a combination of several reasons of this kind, there has been true inspiration. In the case of a really beautiful poem the only answer is that the word is there because it is suitable that is should be. The proof of this suitability is that it is there and that the poem is beautiful. The poem is beautiful, that is to say the reader does not wish it other than it is. It is in this way that art imitates the beauty of the World. This suitability of things, beings, and events consists only in this, that they exist and that we should not wish that they did not exist or that they had been different. Such a wish would be an impiety toward our universal country, a lack of the love of the Stoics. We are so constituted that this love is in fact possible; and it is this possibility of which the name is the beauty of the World. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
One may ask one’s self, “Why is it that so many of the great classics in human history are in poetry?” Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Lucretius’s The Nature of Things, Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, Vergil’s Aeneid, Shakespeare’s dramas, Goethe’s Faust are all in poetry. One might think the prose would be more flexible, and therefore enable the writer to range more widely than in poetry. However no: depth rather than flexibility is what these authors seek, and poetry requires a deeper level of communication. “Why these things rather than others?” never has any answer, because the World is devoid of finality. The absence of finality is the reign of necessity. Things have causes and not ends. Those who think to discern special designs of Providence are like professors who give themselves up to what they call the explanation of the text, at the expense of a beautiful poem. In art, the equivalent of this reign of necessity is the resistance of matter and arbitrary rules. Rhyme imposes upon the poet a direction in one’s choice of words which is absolutely unrelated to the sequence of ideas. Its function is poetry is perhaps analogous to that of affliction in our lives. Affliction forces us to feel with all our souls the absence of finality. When we earnestly, heartily, firmly, and sincerely seek to learn the gospel of Jesus Christ and teach it to one another, these teachings may transform our hearts. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
My mind goes back to those two Summers is 2005 and 2006 when, as the International School of Art, we traveled, painting and drawing as we went, through Europe. The bright colors now come back to me: the brilliant red and magenta of each nationality, the blue and yellow of designs, different as they were from each other but in another sense all similar. In Hungary, the dark red skirts which spun outward as the dancers swung around in their delightful whirls, each woman and man adored with black aprons embroidered with flowers in yellow and blue. Then in Czechoslovakia, the colors were lighter in pink and brilliant green, vests laced up the front, all embroidered through many Winters of whiling away the daylight and snow-bound hours crocheting. The Polish mountaineers showed the same fondness for bright colors and home-spun harmony, seemingly copied from the flowers every family had planted in their thatch-roofed house with its stork nests on its chimney. Everywhere the flowers were of similar varieties—sunflowers, lilies, hollyhocks, and many kinds I did not know. Everywhere the designs betokened a bond between the less affluent, no matter what flag the Treaty of Versailles had placed them under. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14
What does it mean that these less affluent people used symbolic forms, cones, circles in their designs as they sewed costumes for a marriage ceremony or when they painted flowers on the walls of their huts? It should come as no surprise that the basis of our culture is reflected in its art, even in the most fundamental of art’s formal elements—line. The young painters of Cezanne see nature in cones, rectangles, squares, circles, and likes which are the forms that make up abstract art. Depending on how these forms are employed, they can seem extremely intellectual and rational or highly express and emotional. These people, knowing nothing of Cezanne, had for untold centuries seen nature in these same abstract forms, as though they were inwardly commanded to interpret their view of nature in precisely Cezanne’s ways. When I looked at the designs on vases and drinking cups in Hungary or Poland, I recalled the friezes on the vases of ancient Greece which are the treasure of almost every museum in our civilized World. What does it mean that everywhere we find human being seeking art in the same kind of designs and forms, from the Navajo Indians of North America to the natives of Africa to ancient Greece to the less affluent of Europe? What is this thirst, the yearning in all peoples which cannot be denied to make something which gives them delight? #RandolphHarris 2 of 14
Is the art made to satisfy some unknown inner urge or to express objectively the way each person sees that World at its best? Or simply to brighten whatever corner he or she has and to make it livable? These people could not understand the language of their counterparts of other countries, but they could understand completely the language of designs on the vases which pleased their eyes everytime they used them. What does it mean that each of these nationalities of people develop its dance, unique but similar, to express their exhilaration and their hope for some happiness? Some of these similarities may be the cultural influence from one country to another, but the fundamental need of human beings to ornament their vases and their tools is surely not. From the flowers of Chis on their light green vases to the cherry blossoms on Japanese parchment to the designs on holy manuscripts in Tibet to the veils in India to the rugs in the near east woven to the songs of the leader, to the designs of the Navajo rings in the New World—everywhere we find human beings making ornaments on their clothes and armor and on everything that is meaningful to them. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14
The ancient Greeks could not use a vase for oil or wine without painting in black on the terra-cotta red of the vase the stories of Sirens chasing some youth or chariot races with lovely horses or the stories of the gods in Homer, all intricate and fascinating that it gives a person hours of delight tracing these tales in the Metropolitan Museum or in London or the Louvre or anywhere these vases are gathered. Even the death-dealing swords and other armaments show the owners’ love of design. The shields, the spears to protect one’s self and to terminate one’s opponents, are covered with designs which tell the ancient Homeric tales over and over again. And in the majority of cases this beauty has nothing in the World to do with function or utility. Indeed, an unadorned sword or spear would pierce the heart of the enemy more easily. The ancient Persian saying seems to be true for all of us, “If I have one penny, with half of it I buy some bread, and with the other half I buy a violet.” Perhaps even more puzzling is the fact that the primitive art—which our less affluent in central Europe and their ceremonies richly demonstrated—has such a pronounced influence on contemporary artists in New York City and London and Paris. Primitive art, the carved wood and painted totems from Africa to Alaska, from China to Australia, from New York to India, is the language a multitude of modern artists speak. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14
It seems that whenever art in our capital cities becomes dried up, exhausted in principle, reduced to copying previous matters, the artists are driven back to find again the primitive sources of beauty, to drink again the inspiration from the original forms of circle and cube and language which Gauguin and Van Gogh and their colleagues found. They find again what friends in the art World call honest forms; they drink again and deeply of the Pierian Springs. We realize now that our common human language is not Esperanto or computers or something having to do wit vocal cords and speech. It is, rather, our sense of proportion, our balance, harmony and other aspects of simple and fundamental form. Our universal language, in other words, is beauty. Beneath our loquacious chatter, there is a silent language of our whole being which years for art and the beauty form which art comes. For we find ourselves an integral part of this Universe is our breathing, our heart beat, our amazing balance in such a minor thing as taking one step on the path: the Earth comes up to meet us, and infinitesimally small distances, and our foot goes out to meet the Earth. From this fantastic balance of the human organism comes the art of walking and ultimately to making such forms as the ballet dancers which Degas shows us in his rich paintings. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14
Two things incline the heart to wonder, the starry sky above and the moral law within, and I wish to add a third. That is the amazing sense of balance that enables us to walk and run and to dance in the ways the peasants and other humans celebrate and express their ecstasy in all parts of the World. Art is the instrument by which beauty is actualized. Art is the eternal endeavor to realize beauty. Sometimes it is successful, sometimes a failure; but the poignancy of beauty will never let us go. As I write I fantasize that God had added an eleventh commandment, which Moses kept secret because he thought it would conflict with the second commandment which prohibited graven images since the Hebrews were living among idolatrous tribes. This shalt make thyself and thy World beautiful, for this is why I sent my gardeners, Adam and Eve, to cultivate the flowers in Eden. And this is why I have made the twilights and the springtime so radiant with splendor. An I fantasize that this is why Joan of Arc cried out from the stake when she was being burnt, “How long! O Lord, how long will it take for thy people to come see thy presence in this beautiful Earth?” #RandolphHarris 6 of 14
That which really is, as opposed to that which appears to be, behind all the countless objects of this varied Universe, is one alone, beginningless, endless, the source of all, the parent of the “I” -consciousness. This truth provides the final hope for mortals. Somewhere along one’s way one will discover it, act upon it, and be redeemed. This will be one’s last conversion, one’s final salvation, one best quest. Then only will the horrors one has contributed to the race’s history begin to fade out. All else is utopian chimera based upon wishful thoughts and fanciful imaginations. When mortals acquire proper values, whether by reflecting over their experience or by listening to their prophets, they will recognize this truth—that noting really matters except the search for the Overself. If this calls for the giving up of Earthly obstacles, then they are worth giving up for it. When one has become ripened by experience and reflection, one will accept this truth with the spontaneity of a biological reaction. If some are to be aroused to its importance they must first be given something of its meaning. Having a human body one must think with one’s heart on life’s end. This enterprise of the quest is the most serious in which a mortal can engage. We must treat it as such. However, let this not cause anyone to lose the sense of humour. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14
In pursuing this integral quest, they have the satisfaction of knowing that they are pursuing the only quest which can bring them to a truth which is all-embracing and all-explaining. The fact that so few have ventured on this quest offers no indication of what will happen in the future. If humankind could take any other way to its own self-fulfillment, this situation might remain. However, there is no other way. For one there must exist something more than merely being a member of the herd; there must be a higher direction leading to truth to satisfy the mind, to a nobler character to satisfy the conscience, to refined beautiful and gentler moods inspired by the arts, music, literature, and reverence. For one, there must be a Quest. This is the only way whereby mortals can impregnably demonstrate to oneself the illustrious dignity of one’s true being. This is the only way one can obtain the power of living in and by oneself, that is, of living the only real freedom possible on this Earth. If the consciousness is to be enlarged, if the mind’s dark places are to be lit up, if a blessed inspiration of living, work, or virtue is to be discovered, then this self-quest must be started. The Ideal in these critical days no longer a mere wish: it has become the necessary. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14
It is not enough to know with the intellect that God is everywhere and everywhen. It is also necessary to establish a practical working connection with God, if we are to obtain the actual benefit of this knowledge. Moreover this, and this alone, will give absolute assurance. One needs to recover one’s conscious relationship to the Overself: the subconscious one is never lost. The vision of the World and the understanding of life which one receives from the lips of books of others will never be so true nor so real as that which one makes one’s own. If one hears a thousand lectures or reads a thousand books but hath not found this Overself, what shall it profit a mortal? The student must advance to the next step and seek to realize within one’s own experience that which is portrayed to one by one’s intellect. And that is possible only by one’s entry upon the Quest. With ever day that passes, a mortal makes one’s silent declaration of faith in the way one spends it. It is a poor declaration that modern mortals makes when one brushes aside all through or prayer and meditation as something one has no time for. To become so lost in this World of appearances, as so many have become lost, is to shut the door on the World of reality. This is why the lost art of contemplation is a necessity and must be regained if we are to open that door and let truth in. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14
In general all the tastes of mortals from the guiltiest to the most innocent, from the most usual to the most peculiar, are related to a combination of circumstances or to a set of people or surroundings which they imagine can give them access to the beauty of the World. The advantage of this of that group of circumstances is due to temperament, to the memories of a past life, to causes which are usually impossible to recognize. There is only one case, which moreover is frequent, when the attraction of the pleasure of the senses is not possessed in the contact it offers with beauty; it is when, on the contrary, it provides an escape from it. The soul seeks nothing so much as contact with the beauty of the World, or at a still higher level, with God; but at the same time it flies from it. When the soul files from anything it is always trying to get away, ether from the horror of ugliness, or contact with what is truly pure. This is because all mediocrity flies from the light; and in all souls, except those which are near perfection, there is a great part which is mediocre. This part is seized with panic every time that a little pure beauty or pure goodness appears; it hides behind the flesh, it uses it as a veil. As a bellicose nation really need to cover its aggression with some pretext or other of it is to succeed in its enterprises, the quality of the pretext being actually quite indifferent, so the mediocre part of the soul needs a slight pretext for flying from the light. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14
The attraction of pleasure and the fear of pain supply this pretext. There again it is the absolute that dominates the soul, but as an object of repulsion and no longer as an attraction. Very often also in the search for carnal pleasure the two movements are combined; the movement of running toward pure beauty and the movement of flying far from it are indistinguishably tangled. However it may be, in every kind of human occupation there is always some regard for the beauty of the World seen in more or less distorted or soiled images. As a consequence there is not any department of human life which is purely natural. The supernatural is secretly present throughout. Under a thousand different forms, grace and mortal sin are everywhere. Between God and these incomplete, unconscious, often criminal searchings for beauty, the only link is the beauty of the World. Christianity will not be incarnated so long as there is not joined to it the Stoic’s idea of filial piety for the city of the World, for the country of here below which is the Universe. When, as the result of some misapprehension, very difficult to understand today, Christianity cut itself off from Stoicism, it condemned itself to an abstract and separate existence. Even the very the highest achievements of the search for beauty, in art or science for instance, are not truly beautiful. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14
The only true beauty, the only beauty that is the real presence of God, is the beauty of the Universe. Nothing less than the Universe is beautiful. In our mortal lives, we must have respect for all humans, and realize that parents are people, too! One of the problems inherent in talking about the importance of acceptance in family relationships is that parents are likely to demand of themselves that they be accepting 100 percent of the time, whether they feel like it or not, and that they are likely to define acceptance as meaning that the parents should never become angry, never be stern, never express a contrary opinion, and in general should become a nonentity in relation with one’s children. When this happens, the parent has become a second-class citizen in the home, one who encourages one’s children in the free expression of feeling but denies oneself the same right, for the fact is that we do not always feel accepting of our children. Sometimes the little darlings seem more like monsters. For parents to try to appear accepting wen they feel angry is to be phony and in reality to be unaccepting, for it betrays a lack of trust in the child to deal with us as we really are. It is quite possible for us to be very open with our children about our opinions and our feelings without demanding that they agree with us and without attempting to control their behavior. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14
One mother became very concerned about the clothes her daughter was wearing to high school. To her mind the girl was coming up with goofy combinations. In discussing the matter with a friend, she said, “Those getups she wears really bug me, but I do not say anything about them because I think it is important for her to be able to make her own decisions about these things. I know if I had to dressed like that when I was in high school, my mother would have said, ‘Get those clothes off and put these items from Draper James on right away!’ And I just do not feel like I want to boss my daughter around that way, but the clothes are so beautiful.” Apparently it had never occurred to her that she could express her feelings and opinion about her daughter’s clothing without robbing the girl of her right to make her own decisions, so she was adopting an attitude of studied indifference that might have given the girl the false impression that her mother had no interest or concern about her appearance. It is far better to be sufficiently self-accepting of our feelings as parents to be genuine with our children that it is to work at being accepting at the cost of suppressing our feelings. If we do not deal with it directly, our anger, hurt, or fear will be expressed indirectly in some way. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14
What comes with years and which is ascribed to mature people is the wisdom of practical living. This is merely information, knowledge from experience in practical affairs; it is not the wisdom which comes from the deeper being, the deeper self. That will arise only when one looks for it, aspires to it. The profound meaning of life is not put before our eyes. We have to search for it with much patience and perseverance. We must put a spiritual purpose in our lives and families. The first duty of mortals, which takes precedence over all other duties, is to become conscious of one’s Overself. This is the highest duty and every other duty must bow before it. When, and if, the two collide, even domestic happiness must not stand in the way of spiritual salvation. The training which makes this possible may be largely unpracticable in one’s particular circumstances but it is never entirely so. The difficulty of performing this duty is not enough excuse to relive one of it. The Universe is beautiful as a beautiful work of art would be if there could be one that deserved this name. Thus it contains nothing constituting an end or a good in itself. It has in it no finality beyond universal beauty itself. The essential truth to be know concerning this Universe is that it is absolutely devoid of finality. Nothing in the way of finality can be ascribed to it except through a lie or mistake. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14
I dreamed while I was still awake. It was the most pleasant dream I have ever had. I knew I was in Heaven. I knew I was safe. Out of this awareness of value as a person, the child develops feelings of self-acceptance, just as feelings of self-hate tend to grow out of feelings of worthlessness. As a matter of fact, the terms “love of one’s self” is entirely appropriate in describing these attitudes of self-acceptance, if we can strip away all the unfortunate connotations that have been mistakenly associated with the idea of “self-love.” One of the effects of the child’s feeling of worth and the resulting self-acceptance is that one will not have the need to deny feelings within oneself. There will be a tendency to have an operational feeling, which, if it could be put into words, might go something like this: “Since I am a person of worth, I am not suddenly ‘bad’ or ‘dirty’ if I become aware of feelings of anger or sexual feelings. They are part of me too.” When the child does not expend one’s emotional resources attempting to suppress and repress unacceptable feelings, then one is freed to discover ways to use and enjoy one’s emotional responses to people. Thus a child can learn that one can express one’s anger when others try to take advantage of one and that one does not have to let people walk over one. One can also learn that it is ultimately destructive to oneself if in one’s anger one becomes destructive toward others or their property. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
Again, it is well to remind ourselves that we are speaking in relative terms. Everyone experiences some feelings of rejection, and thus some feeling of self-hate. However, the person who is fortunate enough to have had parent who were largely accepting in their attitudes is likely to become relatively self-accepting. And this person will have relatively little need to escape from feelings of self-hate. One will not, for example, have to be falsely confident about oneself. One will be able to be realistic about one’s self, accepting the fact that one is not, and need not be, perfect, so one will not have to be constantly on the defensive. Such a child will tend to be open and genuine in one’s relationships with other people. Because of this openness one will generally meet with favorable responses from others and since one has been relatively emotionally honest, one will not be likely to mistrust these favorable reactions because one will not feel that one has seduced other into liking one. These generally favorable responses the child experiences begin with the family and spread out in ever-widening circles as one encounters more and more people in one’s adventuring into the World. And each such favorable response reinforces one’s feelings of worth and self-acceptance. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
This a cycle occurs. Feelings of acceptance by parents, feelings of worth as a person, self-acceptance (Love of one’s self), little need to escape (Ability to be genuine and open with people), further feelings of acceptance (A generally favorable response from others), and more feelings of one’s worth as a person. It is inevitable, of course, that the growing child will not always receive accepting responses as one makes one’s creative thrusts into the World around one. One will encounter people who are incapable of accepting others. One will probably, for example, have at least one emotionally unhealthy teacher during one’s early school years. One will meet people who will criticize him, some who will treat one unjustly, some who will bull one. However, when one encounters these inevitable sporadic rebuffs and hurts one will have sufficient self-acceptance and confidence that one’s general sense of well-being as a person will not be shattered. And one will be more able than a less self-accepting child to deal realistically with situations that arise. If, for example, a teacher criticizes one’s work, one will be less apt to take it as a complete damning of oneself as a person. And since one does not have to see oneself as perfect, one can afford to listen to the teacher’s comments and profit from them if they seem valid or ignore them if they seem unimportant or incorrect. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
If they should occur, even the sever traumas that we would hope our children might be spared will be far less damaging. Suppose, for example, that a seven-year old child is accosted by an adult man who escapes unnoticed by any third party, the child will probably be able to understand when it is explained to one that the man who accosted one has problems that caused one to approach one as he did. So the experience will probably not cause the individual to have any permanent reaction against mortals in general. One has too good a foundation of acceptance of one’s self and one’s feelings. It is worth noticing that the cycle of acceptance is also the process, described earlier, by which a child moves from dependency toward increasing independence, which in turn makes deeply meaningful relationships more possible. One aspect of this is particularly relevant here. As the child becomes more and more self-accepting as a result of one’s experiences of feeling accepted, one becomes less and less dependent on the responses of others as a measure of one’s self-worth. One becomes increasingly able to stand on one’s own feet, think one’s own thoughts, and act in self-affirming ways without the likelihood that disapproval or discouragement will shatter one’s feeling of self-worth. While the effort is being made to avoid the hazards of outlining techniques of child-rearing, it may nevertheless be helpful to attempt to state some general principles about family life that are corollary to the cycle of acceptance. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
The love of power amounts to a desire to establish order among the mortals and things around oneself, either on a large or small scale, and this desire for order is the result of a sense of beauty. In this case, as in the case of luxury, the question is one of forcing a certain circle into a pattern suggestive of universal beauty; this circle is limited, but the hope of increasing it indefinitely may often be present. This unsatisfied appetite, the desire to keep on increasing, is due precisely to a desire for contact with universal beauty, even though the circle we are organizing is not the Universe. It is not the Universe and it hides it. Our immediate Universe is likely the scenery in a theater. Art is an attempt to transport into a limited quantity of matter, modeled by mortals, an image of the infinite beauty of the entire Universe. If the attempt succeeds, this portion of matter should not hide the Universe, but on the contrary it should reveal its reality to all around. Works of art that are neither pure and true reflections of the beauty of the World nor openings onto this beauty are not strictly speaking beautiful; their authors may be very talented but they lack real genius. That is true of a great many works of art which are among the most celebrated and the most highly praised. Every true artist has had real, direct, and immediate contact with the beauty of the World, contact this is of the nature of a sacrament.#RandolphHarris 5 of 13
God has inspired every first-rate work of art, though its subject may be utterly and entirely secular; he has not inspired any of the others. Indeed the luster of beauty that distinguishes some of those others may quite well be a diabolical luster. Science has as its object the study and the theoretical reconstruction of the order of the World—the order of the World in relation to the mental, psychic, and bodily structure of mortals. Contrary to the naïve illusions of certain scholars, neither the use of telescopes and microscopes, nor the employment of most unusual algebraical formulae, nor even a contempt for the principle of noncontradiction will allow it to get beyond the limits of this structure. Moreover it is not desirable that is should. The object of science is the presence of Wisdom in the Universe, Wisdom of which we are the brothers, the presence of Christ, expressed through matter which constitutes the World. We reconstruct for ourselves the order of the World in an image, starting from limited, countable, and strictly defined data. We work out a system for ourselves, establishing connections and conceiving of relationships between terms that are abstract and for that reason possible for us to deal with. This in an image, an image of which the very existence hangs upon an act of our attention, we can contemplate the necessity which is the substance of the Universe but which, as such, only manifests itself to us by the blows it deals. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
We cannot contemplate without a certain love. The contemplation if this image of the order of the World constitutes a certain contact with the beauty of the World. The beauty of the World is the order of the World that is loved. Physical work is a specific contact with the beauty of the World, and can even be, in its best moments, a contact so full that no equivalent can be found elsewhere. The artist, the scholar, the philosopher, the contemplative should really admire the World and pierce through the film of unreality that veils it and makes of it, for nearly all mortals at nearly every moment of their lives, a dream or stage set. They ought to do this but more often than not they cannot manage it. One who is aching in every limb, worn out by the effort of a day of work, that is to say a day when one has been subject to matter, bears the reality of the Universe in one’s flesh like a thorn. The difficulty for one is to look and to love. If one succeeds, one loves the Real. That is the immense privilege God has reserved for his less affluent. However, they scarcely ever know it. No one tells them. Excessive fatigue, harassing money worries, and the lack of true culture prevent them from noticing it. A slight change in these conditions would be enough to open the door to a treasure. It is heart-rending to see how easy it would be in many cases for mortals to procure a treasure for their fellows and how they allow centuries to pass without taking the trouble to do so. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
At the time when there was a people’s civilization, of which we are today collecting the crumbs as museum pieces under the name of folklore, the people doubtless had access to the treasure. Mythology too, which is very closely related to folklore, testifies to it, if we can decipher the poetry it contains. Carnal love in all its forms, from the highest, that is to say true marriage or platonic love, down to the worst, down to debauchery, has the beauty of the World as an object. The love we feel for the splendor of the Heavens, the plains, the sea, and the mountains, for the silence of nature which is borne in upon us by thousands of tiny sounds, for the breath of the winds or the warmth of the Sun, this love of which every human beings has at least an inkling, is an incomplete, painful love, because it is felt for things incapable of responding, that is to say for matter. Mortals want to turn this same love toward a being who is like themselves and capable of answering to their love, of saying yes, of surrendering. When the feeling for beauty happens to be associated with the sight of some human being, the transference of love is makes possible, at any rate in an illusory manner. However, it is all the beauty of the World, it is universal beauty, for which we yearn. This kind of transference is what all love literature expresses, from the most ancient and well-worn metaphors and comparisons to the subtle analyses of Proust. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
The longing to love the beauty of the World in a human being is essentially the longing for the Incarnation. It is mistaken if it thinks it is anything else. The Incarnation alone can satisfy it. It is therefore wrong to reproach the mystics, as has been done sometimes, because they use love’s language. It is theirs by right. Others only borrow it. If carnal love on all levels goes more or less directly toward beauty—and the exceptions are perhaps only apparent—it is because beauty in a human being enables the imagination to see in one something like an equivalent of the order of the World. That is why sins in this realm are serious. They constitute an offense against God from the very fact that the soul is unconsciously engaged in searching for God. Moreover they all come back to one thing and that is the more or less complete determination to dispense with consent. To be completely determined to dispense with consent. To be completely determined to dispense with it is perhaps the most frightful of all crimes. What can be more horrible than not to respect the consent of a being in whom one is seeking, though unconsciously, for an equivalent of God? It is still a crime, though a less serious one, to be content with consent issuing from a low or superficial region of the soul. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
Whether there is physical union or not, the exchange of love is unlawful if, on both sides, the consent does not come from that central point in the soul where the yes can be nothing less than eternal. The obligation of marriage which is so often regarded as a simple social convention today, is implanted in the nature of human thought through the affinity between carnal love and beauty. Everything that is related to beauty should be unaffected by the passage of time. Beauty is eternity here below. It is not surprising that in temptation mortals so often have the feeling of something absolute, which infinitely surpasses them, which they cannot resist. The absolute, which infinitely surpasses them, which they cannot resist. The absolute is indeed there. However, we are mistaken when we think that is dwells in pleasure. The mistake is the effect of this imaginary transference which is the principal mechanism of human thought. Job speaks of a person who is enslaved who in death will cease to hear the voice of one’s master and who thinks that this voice harms one. It is but too true. The voice does one only too much harm. Yet one is mistaken. The voice is not harmful in itself. If one were not a slave it would not hurt one at all. However, because one is slave, the pain and the brutality of the blows of the whip enter one’s soul by the sense of hearing, at the same time as the voice, and penetrate to its very depths. There is no barrier by which one can protect oneself. Affliction has forged this link. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
In the same way the mortal who thinks one is in the power of pleasure is really in the power of the absolute which he has transferred to it. This absolute is to pleasure what blows of the whip are to the master’s voice; but the association is not the result of affliction here; it is the result of an original crime, the crime of idolatry. Saint Paul has emphasized the kinship between vice and idolatry. One who has located the absolute outside pleasure possess the perfection of temperance. The different kinds of vice, the use of drugs, in the literal or metaphorical sense of the word, all such things constitute the search for a state where the beauty of the World will be tangible. The mistake lies precisely in the search for a special state. False mysticism is another form of the error. If the error is thrust deeply enough into the soul, mortals cannot but succumb to it. A woman of twenty-two came to me so that I could refer her to a therapist. Her problem was that she could never fight the right job. Se was intelligent and open, a person who, one would think, would be a success in the business World. She had had a good job as an executive secretary with interesting people in an organization she liked and believed in, and she did the work well. However, for some reason she could not understand, she hated this job, and her hatred took a great toll in nervous anguish. She quit the job, enrolled in a college, but was bored with studying and dropped out. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
It turned out that her father was a successful executive, and at home he had been exceedingly authoritarian, blustering about the house and debating with her mother about news and politics. The bind in which the would-be patient is caught and which radically curtails her freedom is that her father was the only image of strength she had, and in spite of her strong dislike for him, she also identified with him. The dilemma, then, is that she identifies with the person she feels she strongly dislikes, and how could she then escape hating her executive job? However, no other job would be interesting to her either, in as much as she identifies success, achievement, strength, and zest in life with her father. The upshot was that her freedom to do anything at all was blocked. When a person loses one’s freedom, there develops in one an apathy, as in the people enslaved in the United States, or neurosis or psychosis as in twenty first-century people. Thus, their effectiveness in relating to their fellow mortals and also to their own natures is proportionally reduced. We can define neurosis and psychosis as lack of communicativeness, shut-up-ness, inability to participate in the feelings and thoughts of others or to share oneself with others. Thus, blind to one’s own destiny, the person’s freedom is also truncated. These states of psychological disturbance demonstrate by their very existence the essential quality of freedom for the human being—if you take it away, you get radical disintegration on the part of the victim. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
Neurotic symptoms, such as the psychosomatic paralysis of the leg which one of Dr. Freud’s early patients developed when she could do nothing about being in love with her sister’s husband, are ways of renouncing freedom. Symptoms are ways of shrinking the periphery of the World with which one has to deal to a size with which one can cope. These symptoms may be temporary, as when one gets a could and takes several days off from the office, thus temporarily reducing the World that one has to confront. Or the symptoms may be so deeply set in early experiences that, if unattended, they block off a great portion of the person’s possibilities throughout all the person’s life. The symptoms indicate a breakdown in the interplay of one’s freedom and one’s destiny. We do not understand the depths of our own being, the mystery in which it is grounded. I speak for humankind in general, not for those few great ones who have banished illusion and ignorance. What amid the noise of the World is the hidden purpose of life, what kind of beings are we ultimately meant to be? It is the business of great prophets to answer these questions. I spend all my time going about trying to persuade you, young and mature, to make your first and chief concern for the highest welfare of your inner selves. What grander ideal could a mortal have than to live continuously in the higher part of one’s being? #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
It was peaceful here as we went through the purification. All was beauty around me. Looking at an amazing Sunset, the sky was luminous with two long streaks of light yellow clouds, lending a radiance against which the Sun sank toward the sea. The great red-orange ball, getting larger as it neared the horizon, seemed to reach out too eagerly to make passionate contact with the houses located at Cresleigh Rocklin Trails. Just as the Sun seemed ready to dip below the horizon, it hesitated a moment and spread out its radiance as though to remind us of its mastery of our Universe. Then suddenly it was gone, leaving behind a sky and a sea painted with every kind of riotous red and lustrous yellow in every combination. Yes, it is a palace fit for an Emperor. When the Lord made the World, was it not Wisdom who said the new humanity will be universal, and it will have the artist’s attitude; that is, it will recognize that the immense value and beauty of the human being is possessed precisely in the fact that one belongs to the two kingdoms of nature and the spirit. A well-dressed man stood next to me at the rail watching the Sunset. From his tiny tailored moustache and his dark complexion I imagined that he was Turkish. He said something to me I did not understand, and we both smiled a little apologetically because I could speak no Turkish and he apparently knew no English. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
Nonetheless, we immediately recovered our dignity nodding toward the same Sunset which captivated us both, a bond between us as we watched nature’s brilliance overflow on to the profligate sea. On the other side of me stood a blondish woman, perhaps in her early twenties, with deep grey eyes and smooth features. I imagined her to be Scandinavian. However, when she also smiled at me and murmured, “Schon, schon,” I knew she was German. It was only later that I began to realize that these two persons, my companions in watching nature’s magnificence, knew that the quest was the most important adventure in the human experience. The strange thing about beauty is that it wipes away all boundaries and inspires us to realize our common humanity. Our destiny interweaves us with each other, and our arts make every war nowadays a civil war, a war against our brothers and sister and cousins no matter what nation they happen to belong to. Beauty overcomes distinctions between all people on this planet. In beauty we have a language common to all of us despite racial or cultural differences—and even despite national and historical enmities. For this very Egypt, to which I was then traveling, later shared with us in America the art objects found in King Tut’s tomb, and crowds of people stood in our twenty first century lines for hours for the privilege of seeing the statues in bronze and gold which had been buried with this king in ancient Egypt. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
The colorful Turkish and Persian rugs virtually all over the World, came from the same part of the World as the man standing beside me. And when we think of the contribution of German-speaking peoples—from Boehme to Beethoven to Goethe to Hegel, et al.—our words may not be fully understood. All these are our common heritage of beauty, and never has there been any doubt that they belong to all civilized people. No matter how archaic, the things of beauty from African to Alaska, from China to Australia, from New York to India are the language of all beings who call themselves human. One who stands on the threshold of this Pat is about to commence the last and greatest journey of all, one which one will continue until returning to the presence of God. Once begun, there is no turning back or deserting it, except temporarily. And since it is the most important and most glorious activity ever undertaken, its rewards are commensurate. One cannot stake too much on the outcome of such exalted strivings. Even all that the World can offer falls far below what the quest can offer. If outer sacrifices and inner renunciations are called for, the compensation will be more than just. In the end one gains immensely more than one loses. So, if the quest bids one to do so why not let go freely? #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
The meaning and the end of all such work is to arouse mortals to see certain truths: that the intuitive element is tremendously more important than the intellectual yet just as cultivable if pursued through meditation, that the mystical experience is the most valuable of all experience, and that the quest of the Overself is the most worthwhile endeavour open to human exertions. If there is anything worth studying by a human being, after the necessary preliminary studies of how to exist and survive in this World healthily and wisely, it is the study of mortal’s own consciousness—not a cataloguing of the numerous thoughts that play within it, but a deep investigation of its nature in itself, its own unadulterated pure self. This is the higher cause that is really worth working for, the spiritual purpose that makes life worth living. The discovery of the Overself, the surrender to it, mortals fulfills the highest purpose of one’s life on this Earth. Each mortal has only a limited fund of life-force, time, and ability. One may squander it on Worldly pleasures or spend it on Worldly ambitions. However, if without neglecting the duties of one’s particular situation, one realizes that these are changing and transient satisfactions and turns instead to the quest of the Overself, one begins to justify one’s incarnation. In our discussion up to now we have taken some long, hard looks at the negative aspects of family relationships and their effects on our children’s lives. We might almost despair of the possibility of having healthy families. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
And it is important to recognize that these emotionally damaging qualities are and always will be to some extent present in our families, for we are all caught up in the dilemma of our human imperfections. The business person who does not know that the true business for which one was put on Earth is to find the Overself, may make a fortune but will also squander away a lifetime. One’s work and mind have been left separate from one’s Overself’s when they might have been kept in satisfying harmony with them. Every mortal has another veiled identity. Until one finds out this mystical self of one’s essence, one has failed to fulfil the higher mission of one’s existence. However, the picture is not totally dismal by any means. Children do grow up in out families learning something about how to experience and express love, and the degree to which this occurs is not immutably fixed. It is possible to become more effective in our ability to love in spite of our fear and also possible to help our children become loving. The New Testament contains a profound psychological insight into the process by which children learn to love. The words are: “We love, because God first loved us,” reports I John 4.19. God is the first cause of love. If we pause to read: “We love, because we first experienced love,” the psychological impact becomes clear. And whether faith leads us to attribute the origin of love to God or not, we can agree that our experience of love comes to us through the imperfect channel of other persons. And the most significant persons for children are usually parents. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
This experience of learning to love by being loved is much more profound than simply seeing and imitating the behavior of loving persons. It has much more to do with the children’s emerging ideas and feelings about one’s self, which tend either to free one or inhibit one in one’s ability to experience and express love. In the discussion of the rejection cycle it was emphasized that all people experience feelings of rejection that lead to feelings of worthlessness and self-hate. The experience varies greatly in the degree of feelings of rejection, but it is universal. Now, as we look at the beneficial side of the picture, it can be shown that a cycle of acceptance is taking place in children’s lives during the same years the rejection cycle is establishing personality difficulty. The acceptance cycle, too, is a universal experience. Again it is a matter of degree. The acceptance cycle begins with the child’s earliest experiences of love and acceptance. This process, too, beings long before the child can form thoughts. In fact it probably begins within the first few hours of life. The sensation of touch plays a very important role. The gentle, loving, stroking touches of the mother when she is enjoying the baby are undoubtedly enjoyable to the baby. And when the infant, as it nurses from the nourishment of the mother or feeds from the bottle, is cuddled and cooed over, the physical and emotional warmth communicates itself. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
When these experiences are contrast with those that sometimes occur when the woman is very frightened of emotional closeness, it becomes very apparent that even these early experiences tend toward a sense of acceptance or rejection. Consider the effect on the child, for example, of the mother who is in strong conflict about her feminine roles, who forces herself to naturally nourish her child because she feels she should do so, although doing it makes experience unpleasant feelings because of her conflicting emotions about it. Her feelings are certain to be reflected in the way she handles the child. Or another woman may be so frightened of the emotional involvement that she cannot permit herself to satisfy her own desires to cuddle the child. So she tends to withdraw and handle the child as little as possible. Still another woman may have a great deal of psychological conflict with eliminative functions and communicate her disgust in the way she changes and cleans the baby. As the child grows older the avenues by which one senses acceptance and love (or rejection) from one’s parents become more numerous and more subtle. When parents enjoy the child, trust the child, and listen to the child, respond to the youth as a human being worthy of respect, and encourages the child to accept increasing responsibly for one’s self without pushing one, one feels acceptance. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
The sense of touch remains important. And sometimes it becomes more difficult. Some parents who found it relatively easy to enjoy expressing physical affection to their babies find themselves becoming less spontaneously affectionate to them as they grow older. The most important reason for this is probably the growing sense of vulnerability. The risk of being hurt by a baby seems rather remote, apart from the chance passing or catastrophic infirmary. However, as the child grows older and is able to express harsh feelings, we are put on notice in a multitude of ways that the age of innocence is past and that the possibility of emotional hurt is ever present. It is then that physical affection may not seem as natural. One mother, Alice reported it was difficult for her to express affection for her tends by directly hugging them. It is easy for her to smile at them and say nice words. This was probably because it was a relatively safe was of expressing affection. Because of her fears of being hurt and rejected by anyone she feels close, Alice finds this type of contact with her children more comfortable. She satisfies her need for closeness by saying, “I love you,” or “Have a great day.” And if Alice were more free to express affection directly, while it would be more helpful, the nice comments communicates some acceptance to the children and some desire to maintain their well being. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
To the degree that the child experiences the security of parents who are able to communicate their love and acceptance in a relatively open and direct manner, one is likely to react with beneficial feelings towards oneself. The emotional logic of the child must be something like this: “These people who are so significant in my life love me and consider me to be of value. Therefore I must be worthwhile.” The beauty of the World is the co-operation of divine wisdom in creation. This perfecting is the creation of beauty; God created the Universe, and his son, our first-born brother, created the beauty of its for us. The beauty of the World is Christ’s tender smile for us coming through matter. He is really present in the universal beauty. The love of this beauty proceeds from God dwelling in our souls and goes out to God present in the Universe. It also is like a sacrament. This is true only of universal beauty. With the exception of God, nothing short of the Universe as a whole can with complete accuracy be called beautiful. All that is in the Universe and is less than the Universe can be called beautiful only if we extend the word beyond its strict limits and apply it to things that share indirectly in beauty, things that are imitations of it. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
All these secondary kinds of beauty are of infinite value as openings to universal beauty. However, if we stop short at them, they are, on the contrary, veils; then they corrupt. They all have in them more or less of this temptation, but in very different degrees. There are also a number of seductive factors which have nothing whatever to do with beauty but which cause the things in which they are preset to be called beautiful through lack of discernment; for these things attract love by fraud, and all mortals, even the most ignorant, even the vilest of them, know that beauty alone has a right to our love. The most truly great know it too. No mortal is below or above beauty. The words which express beauty come to the lips as soon as they want to praise what they love. Only some are more and some less able to discern it. Beauty is the only finality here below. It is a finality which involves no objective. A beautiful thing involves no good except itself, in its totality, as it appears to us. We are drawn toward it without knowing wat to ask of it. It offers us its own existence. We do not desire anything else, we possess it, and yet we still desire something. We do not in the least know what it is. We want to get behind beauty, but it is only a surface. It is like a mirror that sends us back our own desire for goodness. It is a sphinx, and enigma, a mystery which is painfully tantalizing and titillating. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
We should like to feed upon beauty, but it is merely something to look at; it appears only from a certain distance. The great trouble in human life is that looking and eating are two different operations. Only beyond the sky, in the country inhabited by God, are they one and the same operation. When they look at a cake for a long time almost regretting that it should have to be eaten and yet are unable to help eating it, children feel this trouble already. It may be that nice, depravity, and crime are nearly always, or even perhaps always, in their essence, attempts to eat beauty, to eat what we should only look at. Eve began it. If she caused humanity to be lost by eating it, should be what is required to save it. Two winged companions, to Angels are on the branch of a tree. One eats the fruit, the other looks at it. These two Angels are the two parts of our soul. A great light will shine to the ends of the Earth, and many nations will come to you from afar, the peoples of all the Earth, to dwell near to the name of the Lord, bearing in their hands gifts for the King of Heaven. I saw the light in my mind, and I grew sleepy in a beautiful soft sleep in which I could hear the words of the prayer as I lay on my bed, with my arm under my pillow. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
No one is in Eden. There is no one there. No one is in Eden writing down the deeds of the World. However, some people say it is Enoch, but Eden is empty until the Lord should say that all the World will be Eden once again. The Lord does not break his covenants. God will come and his house will last forever. It is because beauty has no end in view that it constitutes the only finality here below. For here below there are no ends. All the things that we take for ends are means. That is an obvious truth. Money is the means of buying, power is the means of commanding. It is more or less the same for all the things that we call good. Only beauty is not the means to anything else. It alone is good in itself, but without our finding any particular good or advantage in it. It seems itself to be a promise and not a good. However, beauty only gives itself; it never gives anything else. Nevertheless, as it is the only finality, it is present in all human pursuits. Although they are all concerned with means, for everything that exists here below is only a means, beauty sheds a luster upon them which colors them with finality. Otherwise there could neither be desire, nor, in consequence, energy in the pursuit. For a miser after the style of Harpagon (a character in Moliere’s L’Avare), all the beauty of the World is enshrined in gold. And it is true that gold, as a pure and shinning substance, has something beautiful about it. The disappearance of gold from our currency seems to have made this form of avarice disappear too. Today those who heap up money without spending it are desirous of power. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
The same crisis of freedom is present in psychotherapy, this curious profession which burgeoned so fantastically in American during the past century. The crisis can best be seen when we ask: What is the purpose of therapy? To be sure, to help people. And the specific purpose differs with the particular condition with which the person is suffering. However, what is the overall purpose that underlies the development of this profession of psychological helpers? Several decades ago, the purpose of the mental-health movement was clear: mental health is living free from anxiety. However, this motto son became suspect. Living free from anxiety in a World of hydrogen bombs and nuclear radiation and food and water shortages, housing crises, lack of funding for education, and rapidly decreasing numbers of high pay jobs? Without anxiety in a World in which death may strike at any moment you cross the street? Without anxiety in a World in which two-thirds of the people are malnourished or starving? The mental health movement, in promising a freedom from anxiety that is not possible, may have had a significant role in the current belief that it is a right to feel good, thus contributing to the burgeoning consumption of alcohol and the and the almost universal prescription of the tranquilizer by physicians. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
The mental health movement has emphasized freedom from anxiety as the definition of health. However, finding that is not possible in the general run of life, people have assumed that the quickest way to achieve the freedom is through alcohol and tranquilizing drugs. Furthermore, if we did achieve freedom from all anxiety, we would find ourselves robbed of the most constructive stimulant for life and for simple survival. After many a therapeutic hour which I would call successful, the client leaves with more anxiety than one had when one came in; only now the anxiety is conscious rather than unconscious, constructive rather than destructive. The definition of mental healthy needs to be changed to living without paralyzing anxiety, but living with normal anxiety as a stimulant to a vital existence, as a source of energy, and as life enhancing. Is adjustment the purpose of therapy—that is, should therapy help people adjust to their society? Many people wonder who the psychotic is—the persons to whom the title is given or the society itself? Is the purpose of the therapist to give people relief and comfort? If so, this can also be done more efficiently and economically by drugs. Is the purpose of the therapist to help people to be happy? Happy in a World in which unemployment and inflation burgeon at the same time? #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
Such happiness can be purchased only at the price of repressing and denying too many of the facts of life, a denial that works directly against what most of us believe is the optimum state of mental health. I propose that the purpose of the psychotherapy is to set people free. Free, as far as possible, from symptoms, whether they be psychosomatic symptoms like ulcers or psychological symptoms like acute shyness. Free from compulsions, again as far as possible, to be workaholics, compulsions to repeat self-defeating habits they have learned in early childhood, or compulsions perpetually to choose partners of the opposite gender who cause continual unhappiness and continual punishment. However, most of all, I believe that the therapist’s function should be to help people become free to be aware of and to experience their possibilities. A psychological problem, I have pointed out elsewhere, is like fever; it indicates that something is wrong with the structure of the person and that struggles is going on for survival. This, in turn, is a proof to us that some other way of behaving is possible. Our old way of thinking—that problems are to be gotten rid of as soon as possible—overlooks the most important thing of all: that problems are a normal aspect of living and are basic to human creativity. This is true whether one is constructing things or reconstructing oneself. Problems are the outward signs of unused inner possibilities. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
People rightly come to the therapist because they have become inwardly enslaved and they yearn to be set free. The crucial question is: how is that freedom to be attained? Surely not by a miraculous charming away of all conflicts. The soul that is prevented by circumstances from feeling anything of the beauty of the World, even confusedly, even through what is false, is invaded to its very center by a kind of horror. If you want to know the purpose of life, read Acts 17.2: “God made man [and women] to the end that one should seek the Lord.” It comes to this: Are we to worship mortals or God? Life offers mortals a variety of meanings, but in the end one meaning comes to the top of all the others and that is the meaning which shall reveal the truth about one’s relation to God. When one sees life whole and therefore sees it right, one will understand why Jesus declared, “Seek ye first the kingdom of Heaven and all these things shall be added unto you,” and why, if one is to insist upon any single renovation in human life, it must be its own self-spiritualization. If one is to put emphasis anywhere, it must be upon the rediscovery of the divine purpose of one’s Earthly life. If mortals only knew how glorious, how rich, how satisfying this inner life really is, they would not hesitate for a moment to forsake all those things which car their way to it. “The Lord hath made bare his holy arm in the eyes of all the nations; and all the ends of the Earth shall see the salvation of God,” reports 2 Nephi 16.20. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Randolph Harris II International Institute 