People say that an Angel came to Rocklin. If you saw an Angel of the Lord with you own eyes in Rocklin, what would you do? Immediately we find ourselves asking about the ethical implications of art as it uses various symbols. It is important to remember that symbols are beyond good and evil in their first blush of birth. It is only later that reason rightly undertakes to distinguish the constructive and destructive elements in a given symbol or myth. The word symbol comes from two Greek words syn and ballein meaning to draw together. The antonym of symbolic—a fact overlooked by most people—is diabolic. This word comes from the Greek dia plus ballein, and means to tear apart, to confuse, to throw into discord. In the Genesis story of creation, the devil functions in exactly this way: he divides, sows discord between Adam and Eve, and between them and God. We may recall, too, Hitler’s diabolic use of symbols—the swastika, for example—in the service of racism and genocide. This brief excursion into etymology implies a whole system of ethics. The good is that which makes for understanding, communication, communion. This is certainly true in relations between nations, and is as true if more ambiguous in intrapsychic and interpsychic relationships. It has been emphasized that psychological ill-health is due to a radical inability to communicate with one’s World, and that psychological integration is the capacity to establish enduring interpersonal relationships. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
When we get our resentment off our chest, all of us have experienced the profound relief and the genuine catharsis. William Blake’s famous verse is as true as it ever was: “I was angry with my friend, I told my wrath, my rather did end. I was angry with my foe; I told it not, my wrath did grow.” As if to fit exactly into our discussion, William Blake goes into mythology to clinch his point in the last verse: “And it grew both day and night, till it bore an apple bright; and my foe beheld it shine, and he knew it was mine.” How enthralling is that artistic symbol of the apple—the apple as in the Garden of Eden. William Blake is saying that anger feeds upon itself; and one experiences the double punishment of personal humiliation in one’s for being able to the “that it was mine.” Evil, in this system of ethics, is that which tears apart, shuts out the other person, raises barriers, sets people against each other. Speaking intrapsychically, the individual is locked up with oneself alone. Like the damming of a river, one’s vitality backs up and becomes brackish and unhealthy and a breeding ground for germs. One is shut up from one’s life, not in contrast, shut up with something—which latter may instead be constructive solitude. Diabolism refers to evil inherent in the process of being torn apart, the spreading of calumny. Thus Hitler had to have a scapegoat to keep his regime going, had to have war as a necessary means of gaining unity among the German people by setting them against the rest of the World. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
Hitler was a man with both a soul and a diabolic imagination. Strangely, he was so often right. He chose symbols which were directly linked to people’s deepest hopes and fears. I am not sure of Hitler’s values, there is a story that goes untold about him seeking revenge for a doctor who killed his mother and people who seemed to be infiltrating the government and unstoppable, but one can deal with symbols best by not running away from them. If his symbols were to work, Hitler had to pick some group to be the targets or scapegoats, for which he chose the Jewish people. That was the diabolic side of his symbolic imagination. The symbols he chose were shrewd, effective, tremendously powerful. With them he squeezed a tremendous war out of the German Army. Risenthal in his propaganda films used Hitler’s symbols effectively: you see the swastika, you hear the Wagnerian music, you see the marching armies and you see this charismatic leader speaking in his strong German. Symbols and myths are neither ethical nor demonic in themselves: it is how they are used that makes the difference. Hitler could not have been changed by rational or logical arguments. Our government could not understand this. We are in this country were rationalistic people and we did not allow what was happening to get inside our feelings—therefore we could not conceive of what Hitler was up to. If we realized that people can be devilish, we can be better prepared to deal with them. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
Hitler’s intense attacks on modern art should have tipped us off, since artists cannot help telling the truth. They are our early-warning mechanism. The German artists like George Grosz and Max Beckmann satirized the German mood in the early 1930’s, painting armament builders smoking expensive cigars and watching a flapper show. Hitler called this decadent art, and held up the art World to ridicule. The less affluent in Germany went to the galleries to mock modern art. This was another early-warning mechanism which we in the United States ignored. However, a country’s or leader’s symbols obviously do not have to be diabolic, as Hitler’s were. The example of my experience of the symbol of the American flag in Istanbul illustrates two things. The other nations’ flags were signs: they stood for something, and I decoded and filed them away in my mind as discrete facts. However, the flag of my own country grasped me as a total being, even to the point of my loneliness, my pride and guilt feeling. Thus a symbol does not stand for something, but it is a symbol of something. A sign can be intellectualized. However, symbols can be apprehended only as images, and are most effective when taken thus, as artists do. The symbol of the American flag illustrates, in our post-Vietnam day, how a symbol becomes ambiguous and then goes through a process of metamorphosis. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
Multitudes of citizens in this day of post-Vietnam, and of Watergate and of similar crises, which they interpret as deviance on the escutcheon of the Untied States, have expressed their moral indignation at the flag, this symbol of their country. Do we achieve anything by degrading the symbol, or by burning the flag? What is changed by putting it to utilitarian use, for instance, wearing clothes made from the flag? How does spitting on the flag show contempt for a national policy? In asking these questions, we are already assuming the symbol is the nation in some strange way. Many of us, trying to bring reason to bear on the evolution of a symbol, ask ourselves: Can the meaning of the flag be enlarged to symbolize the internationalism that we see as part of the wave of the future? Can the flag be stretched to encompass planetism? Can the loyalty it supposedly engenders be stretched to include other nations? How can we achieve a viable flag of the United Nations, or NATO? I cite these questions as illustrating the process of metamorphosis through which every living art and symbol must become understood as we move into a New World. It was suggested earlier that it is not usually helpful to withhold anger for fear that our anger is based on misinformation or misinterpretation. This does not mean that we should shut our eyes to our mistakes and remain blindly angry. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
There will often be occasions when we will be mistakenly angry. Someone will say something, for example, that is intended innocently but which we interpret as a hostile slam against us, probably because of our own self-hatred. If we suppress our anger, we will brood about the situation and a barrier will exist between ourselves and the other person. If we express our anger, however, then the difficulty is out in the open. Then the other person has the opportunity to say, “I did not mean it that way at all.” Then, if one really convinces us, we can admit that we jumped to a conclusion and the incident can be forgotten without a breach of the relationship. Sometimes when we feel angry we will suspect our anger is based on a misinterpretation. And yet it still bothers us. The best approach, as in other situations, is to express all our feelings, not just the anger. Thus we might say something like this: “I may be reading you completely wrong, but that comment you made as you were leaving this morning has really been bugging me.” To be able to recognize, and let others know that we recognize, that we are prone (like everyone else) to misunderstanding others will often open the door to more creative resolutions of anger. Very often, of course, misinterpretations have occurred on both sides and a thorough airing of feelings will lead to a new understanding and new awareness of love. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
Couples will sometimes go through years of marriage preserving their misinterpretations of each other’s feelings. One couple, married over then years, sought counseling. They had not had pleasures of the flesh for a year and prior to that only infrequently since early in their marriage. As they talked together with the counselor, it became clear that both of them very much desired pleasures of the flesh with the other and that both of them were convinced that if they showed any warmth or made any passionate and intimate advances the other would reject them. This fear was probably well founded; for with all the unexpressed anger and frustration each of them was harboring it would be unlikely that either of them could enjoy pleasures of the flesh without finding some reason to destroy the experience. There was a history of misunderstandings in the early years of the marriage, of course, that they could blame their problems on, but the point is that never until the counseling experience had either of them openly expressed their anger, frustration, desires, and fears of rejection. And that expression was a necessary prerequisite for any experience of love, since they were so full of mistaken notions about each other. For any reasonably talented person, creative ideas and behavior come not infrequently. However, for a truly creative contribution, an attitude of perseverance must exist. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
The implications of the creative idea or of the resulting product must be explored, the embryonic idea must be matured, the subject matter must be lived with so that it can be thoroughly worked through. There is sometimes a feeling that the product should stand as it was spontaneously produced. For most products, this does not hold. Stories must very often be rewritten many times before they convey the feeling intended by the author, pictures must be worked over, ideas must be considered and reconsidered from several different approaches before the result is sound. One issue involved in perseverance may be called the conflict between the blind lover and the Don Juan. On the one hand, it is possible to stick with an idea or creation too long, beyond the point when it is fruitful. The high status accorded the term flexibility indicates the value our culture places on giving up an idea of one’s own and being open to the ideas of others. One the other hand, an idea can be rejected prematurely, before it has had a chance to develop. The history of science is replete with cases where great discoveries were made because the discoverer persisted with his or her idea in the face of determined opposition. Dr. Freud, Galileo, and Pasteur are obvious examples. The problem then is to avoid dramatizing the blind lover by staying with one effort far beyond the point where clearly it will not develop into anything of value. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
There are likewise many reasons for Don Juan behavior. When the product is tested, sometimes there is the fear of failing. Or interest many fall because the excitement of discovery is past and the development seems unrewarding drudgery. Sometimes the creator does not know how to proceed, since the phase of perseverance takes a different type of activity than the act of creation. Perhaps one of the most critical forces influencing premature surrender is social or interpersonal pressure. One’s World often tells a creator that one who sticks to one’s own idea is selfish, self-centered, rigid, inflexible, and pretentious. Sometimes the inability to follow through is related to attitudes toward authority. To produce something new has, for some people, the meaning, “I can do something better than established experts [authorities].” Because they have not resolved their authority feelings, this implication is much too threatening for these people and prohibits them from carrying their idea to fruition. If the connotations of selfishness and disrespect regarding a creative act can be removed, it is very likely that perseverance can be enhanced. There are also many reasons why people perseverate on an idea beyond usefulness. The authority issue may enter here, too, but in a way opposite from the above. For some children or adults who are rebelling against authority, a non-creative or conforming act has the symbolic meaning of submitting to authority, a feeling they cannot countenance. Therefore, everything they do must be done their way. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
This attitude of my way or the highway lead to creative acts, and indeed gives strong motivation to complete the act. Even when it is appropriate, the difficulty is that the rebel cannot make a good use of already established ideas or products. Thus one’s own creation suffers. Another factor entering into blind lovership is a strong need to succeed. Sometimes a person needs to achieve so desperately that one cannot acknowledge to oneself that one’s creation is inadequate. One feels that it cannot be, it must be good, one must succeed! This may manifest itself also in what appears to be slow work on one’s part, but what is, in fact, an inability to let go of one part of the work and go on to the next. The next method seems to provide a setting for developing the ability to persevere. At a workshop that lasts for one or two weeks, people are placed in dyads early in the week and asked to meet together for about an hour each day, often divided into two half-hour periods. The essential condition is that they continue to meet no matter how difficult their relation becomes. This requirement puts them into a situation that rarely occurs in everyday life, where a common reaction to strife is withdrawal. Remaining together forces new modes of dealing with the situation, modes which normally have been used only rarely. This allows for an expansion of typical behavior, and forces perseverance in an interpersonal relation. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
The results of this exercise are usually very good and quite surprising. The surprise is that people are successfully able to work out relationships that they felt at one point were virtually hopeless and very unpleasant. Having this successful experience enhances the potentiality for coping and increases confidence in one’s ability to follow through a situation to a successful outcome. This new perception of one’s ability to persevere usually generalizes to other situations. The following awareness, though not exactly a technique, is an application of these ideas about perseverance. Stand was caught up in a discussion about marriage and creativity. Some of the conversation suggested an idea to him. Why not have a premarital group like the present encounter group, one where some friends and relatives of the prospective couple are invited? They are encouraged to speak openly and honestly of their impression about marriage, the problems they would anticipate for the couple, their strengths, and so forth. Excitedly he began expanding his idea when Anne interrupted, “The Italians have been doing this informally for years.” Stan kept going, but soon began to feel dampened. Anne’s comment had deflated him. She has said in effect, “Your ideas could use some improvement, this idea has been around awhile.” By concentrating on the aspect of Stan’s ideas which may have been antiqued, rather than looking at the innovative part, Anne had throttled Stan’s creativity. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
This does not mean that the observers’ responses to creative activity should be only supportive. In all reactions, it is of the utmost importance to be realistic. The important consideration is to appreciate the novel parts of the product and be very certain before commenting on the lack of novelty. Often the idea is psychologically or personally creative, even though historically it has precedents. Further, it usually happens that the precedent is not exactly the new idea. In the example above, it turned out in subsequent discussion tat the Italians did not do precisely what Stan was advocating, and the differences were very important. This ploy is used very often in business discussions with the phrase, “we tried that years ago.” The improvement in skill in the area of perseverance, like that in evaluation, results from awareness, overcoming emotional blocks, and practice. Gratification attending the ability to follow through a task to completion is very great. Many people suffer from vacillation and the difficulty referred to in the theatrical Word as third act trouble. In common with techniques used to enhance the other aspects of the creative process, perseverance methods attempt to unleash forces that are already present and, through training, develop these forces and bring them under the conscious control of the individual oneself. The surge of pride and feeling of accomplishment and competence that results is indeed a major source of joy. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
This completes the organized presentation of techniques for enhancing the elements of creative functioning by developing each aspect of the creative process. Two other techniques for removing emotional blocks, and for gaining more access to a person’s internal feelings, have proven so effective that they will now be treated separately and in somewhat more detail. One of these methods is derived from psychodrama and the other is a relatively new and ingenious method using the capacity for fantasy and imagination. The even balance, an image of equal relations of strength, is the symbol of justice from all antiquity, specially in Egypt. It may have had a religious purpose before being used for commerce. Its used for commerce. Its use in trade is the image of the mutual consent, the very essence of justice, which should be the rule in exchanges. The definition of justice as being made up of mutual consent, which is found in the legislation of Sparta, probably originated in the Aegeo-Cretan civilization. The supernatural virtue of justice consists of behaving exactly as though there were equality when one is the stronger in an unequal relationship. Exactly, in ever respect, including the slightest details of accent and attitude, for a detail may be enough to place the weaker party in the condition of matter, which on this occasion naturally belongs to one, just as the slightest shock causes water that has remained liquid below freezing point to solidify. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
Supernatural virtue, for the inferior thus treated, consists in not believing that there really is equality of strength and in recognizing that one’s treatment is due solely to the generosity of the other party. That is what is called gratitude. For the inferior treated in a different way, the supernatural virtue of justice consists in understanding that the treatment one is undergoing, though on the one hand differing from justice, on the other is in conformity with necessity and the mechanism of human nature. One should avoid both submission and revolt. One who treats as equals those who are far below on in strength really makes them a gift of the quality of human beings, of which fate had deprived them. As far as it is possible for a creature, one reproduces the original generosity of the Creator with regard to them. This is the most Christian of virtues. It is also the virtue that the Egyptian Book of the Dead describes in words as sublime even as the Gospel. “I have never caused anyone to weep. I have never spoken with a haughty voice. I have never made anyone afraid. I have never been deaf to words of justice and truth.” When it is pure, gratitude on the part of the unfortunate, is but a participation in this same virtue, for only one who is capable of it can recognize it. Others experience the result of it without any recognition. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
Such virtue is identical with real, active faith in the true God. The Athenians of Thucydides thought that divinity, like humanity in its natural state, always carried its power of commanding to the extreme limit of possibility. The true God is the God with think of as almighty, but as not exercising his power everywhere, for he is found only in the Heavens or in secret below. Those of the Athenians who massacred the inhabitants of Melos had no longer any idea of such a God. The first proof that they were in the wrong is possessed in the fact that, contrary to their assertion, it happens, although extremely rarely, that a mortal will forbear out of pure generosity to command where one has the power to do so. That which is possible for mortal is possible also for God. The examples of this may be challenged, but it is certain that if in one or another example it can be proved that the sole motive is pure generosity, such generosity will be generally admired. All that mortal is capable of admiring is possible with God. The spectacle of this World is another, more certain proof. Pure goodness is not anywhere to be found in it. This personal freedom to think and feel and speak authentically and to be conscious of so doing is the quality that distinguishes humans. The existence of evil here below, far from disproving the reality of God, is the very thing that reveals him in his truth. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
The sky was a faint lilac color now, overcast and reflecting the city glow. As we move on year by year in this life, we learn that telling does not necessarily purge; telling sometimes merely is a reliving and it is a torment. When Picasso paints a portrait of Gertrude Stein with one large eye in the middle of her forehead, what is he trying to communicate? When Cezanne gives this advice to young painters, “Paint nature in cubes, rectangles and planes,” what is he saying? Gertrude Stein has two eyes like the rest of us; Cezanne knows that there is no pure cube or rectangle in nature. Picasso and Cezanne are speaking in symbols. Why are symbols? A symbol is a condensed way of saying something below our customary discursive language. For that reason, symbols speak on several levels at once. A stop sign at the corner says only one thing, namely stop at that corner, and is understood by everyone from two years of age on. However, a symbol is an image, a form which communicates many things at once. This gives the symbol its rich meaning and its power to delight us. Picasso is saying that he sees Gertrude Stein a strong woman with commanding manner; she looks at you with the power of an X-ray machine. It also may symbolize the trinity and God’s omnipresence and divine providence. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
Cezanne sees nature as much more than simple trees and clouds. He sees symbols which take in all the vertical lines in the World from a yardstick to a laser beam, and cones in all the curving lines of mountains and shores, say of Mont Saint Victoire and its lake, which he painted many times. He wants the young painters to grasp nature not superficially but in its heart and soul. A symbol, indeed, assumes two planes, two Worlds of ideas and sensations, and a dictionary of correspondences between them. This lexicon is the hardest thing of all to draw up. However, awakening to the two Worlds brought face to face is tantamount to getting on trail of their secret relationships. If I recount an experience of my own on a shop in the Mediterranean, it may help us to het on this trail of symbols in art. I stood on the prow of a Greek ship steaming into the harbor of Istanbul. I saw the flags of the different nations flying from the masts of the vessels in the harbor. I noticed the red and black of the Turkish flag, the yellow and red of the Rumanian and the French tricolor. I observed these colored cloths with interest, noted the various nations to which they belonged, and mused on how many countries it take to make up Europe. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
Then, as my ship passed round the bend of the Golden Horn, I suddenly saw an American flag. My reaction was entirely different. I had an experience that grasped my total self—a surging moment of joy, then a longing for my country which I had not seen for two years. My mind was flooded with all the rich and potent connotations of homeland. I recalled my childhood in at 19735 Warrington Dr. in Detroit, Michigan in the charming brick English Colonial Tudor mansion located in Sherwood Forest, and I felt a surge of loneliness for my parents and brothers and sisters who were still back there. The sight of the flag also cued off my conflicts about being American and identified with that country: I felt a guilt similar to what I felt when my dad told me about what happened to him from his service in Vietnam. I felt again the moral conflict and the soul sense of nationalistic power. The flags of other countries were signs. The flag of my own country was a symbol. Artistic symbols and myths speak out of the primordial, preconscious realm of the mind which is powerful and chaotic. Both symbol and myth are ways of bringing order and form into chaos. They are the instruments by which we continually struggle to make out experience intelligible to ourselves. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
Myth is a large controlling image which gives meaning to the ordinary facts of life, and symbol is a small image which performs a similar function for specific events. Both are our ways of organizing our experience so that it makes sense. Dreams are so valuable because they are made up of symbols. It a dream I was successful in warding off a threatened disturbance of my sleep; this time the threat came from a sensory stimulus. It was only chance, however, that enabled me to discover the connection between the dream and the accidental dream-stimulus, and in this way to understand the dream. One midsummer morning in a Tyrolese mountain resort I woke with the knowledge that I had dreamed: The Pope is dead. I was not able to interpret this short, non-visual dream. I could remember only one possible basis of the dream, namely, that shortly before this the newspapers had reported that his holiness was slightly indisposed. However, in the course of the morning my wife asked me: “Did you hear the dreadful tolling of the church bless this morning?” I had no idea that I had heard it, but now I understood my dream. It was the reaction of my need for sleep to the noise by which the pious Tyroleans were trying to wake me. I avenged myself on them by the conclusion which formed the content of my dream, and continued to sleep, without any further interest in the tolling of the bells. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
We could say in therapy that one symbol used by a person in a dream has within it the person’s whole life. Hence symbols are so important in psychotherapy and art—and in all life. After experiential elements have been acquired and associated, in order that behavior be creative and useful rather than merely bizarre, it must be evaluated as to its relevance for satisfying the situation. Introducing sound of a screeching chalk into a symphony, or ketchup into a fine liqueur, or using a paper clip to dig a tunnel—all these are usual connections between diverse elements, but their value is somewhat dubious. Evaluating scientific products is often less ambiguous than judging the worth of artistic ones. Usually the techniques of experimentation and testing developed by science are adequate to evaluate the merit of a new achievement. Artistic excellence, however, seems more ephemeral, and depends on the artist’s own feeling of satisfaction, or on public reaction and social trends. The waxing and waning in popularity of Kafka, Sinatra, Telemann, Van Gogh, or Tiffany lampshades illustrates the difficulty of evaluating artistic achievement. Conscious methods of evaluation have been worked at extensively, especially in the scientific realm. The whole superstructure of experimental and statistical design of experiments is an attempt to evaluate ideas or hypotheses. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
Emotional blocks to adequate evaluation occur in the matter of decision-making. On the one hand, fear of disappointing others or the self, general insecurity about personal competence, or a compulsive perfectionism can prevent a deservedly favorable evaluation of a mortal’s own productions. On the other hand, the need for wish fulfilment, the drive for achievement, or a competitive urge can give rise to unwarranted acceptance of one’s work. Conflict, vacillation, or premature decisions may result. (There are also, of course, many other causes of problems of appraisal.) To the degree that these factors are present, an individual will have difficulty in evaluating realistically one’s own productions and will tend either to accept them uncritically, or to reject worthwhile achievement. In either case, creative behavior will suffer. The following technique uses these ideas regarding evaluation. The primary implication for training methods of this analysis of the creative process’s evaluation phase concerns the bodily feeling of right or wrong. People can be taught to trust these intuitions, so that if they are uncertain about a course of action, they will rely upon their feeling about it. Not that these feelings are invariably right. However, teaching an awareness of their existence will allow them to be noticed and evaluated by each person. One individual may find that his or her feelings turn out to be valuable all the time, another may find them useful only in certain areas, while a third may learn to use some other cues in conjunction with them. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
The feels are sometimes called prelogical thinking. This means that the total body is involved in resolving a problem, and there are some stirrings going on prior to the brain comprehending the problem and arriving at a logical solution. If a person can become aware of these preliminary stirrings and make use of them, he or she can acquire a quicker and sounder way to reach conclusions. This phenomenon often occurs during the making of important decisions throughout life. Often one has the experience that one course of action does not feel right although the reasons are not clear. Sometimes this is called hunch or intuition. Ability to use this process is often reported by creative people. Sculptors often speak of their products in these terms. They may look at a piece of sculpture and feel that it works or it does not. Most are reluctant or incapable of saying why it works or not, but they are certain of the feeling. They then proceed to change it until it does work. Cultivation of the sensitivity to prelogical cues expands a person’s capacity for making sensible judgments. It is simply a matter or training oneself to be sensitive to signals already present within, and being able to use them for one’s own benefit. Often we muddy up the swift, bright waters of anger by inserting demands into the situation. Lacking confidence in ourselves and the other person to deal creatively with feeling, we attempt to impose control on that person. At such times we often imply something like, “If you ever do that again, I will punish you [by leaving you, by not having anything to do with you, etcetera. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
Perhaps there are times when it is necessary or desirable to issue a clear ultimatum of some kind. If a person means it and is willing to carry out the threat and is not attempting to manipulate the other, it may be a self-affirming expression. However, ultimatums go far beyond the simple expression of anger, and fighting with those we care for will usually be more creative if demands are not present. Again it needs to be pointed out that there are subtleties involved. There appears to be an unspoken communication that often occurs between people that makes words mean different things. For example, if some women say to their husbands in anger, “Darn it, I do not ever want you to do that again,” neither they nor their husbands will experience it as an attempt to control. Their total relationship says otherwise, whereas coming from some other women it might be experiences as a threat to the man’s freedom. It is hardly creative use of anger if a woman feels free to blow up at her husband at any provocation and then becomes a frightened, quaking, disaster area if he raises his voice. Nor is the husband any more effective who rants and rages, bullying his way through family life, too insecure to let anyone else voice their angry feelings. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
It sometimes happens that, when an individual has been repressed for most of one’s life in the awareness and expression of anger, and then becomes free to have this experience, one appears to feel almost nothing except anger in one’s relationships with others. One seems, for the moment at least, to be cut off from other feelings that are also important, such as feelings of hurt, warmth, tenderness, and love. What happens is that we often mask these other feeling by expressing only our anger or by seeming to be angry when that is not our basic feeling at all. When we do this it is probably because we feel less vulnerable expressing anger. Genuine anger is a way of letting another person know we are involved with one. However, to let one know that one has hurt us is to go a step farther and say to one in effect, “I am not invulnerable to what you say and do. I can be reached. And you know how to do it.” And finally, to express love is to venture out even father on the limb of vulnerability. When we become angry with someone with whom we are closely involved, it can almost be assumed that some degree of hurt and caring is also present. If we are unaware of these feelings it is probably because of our fear of love and the vulnerability involved. Often the natural sequence of these feelings, if not inhibited, is to be first aware of the anger. When that is expressed the hurt comes into awareness. If the hurt is expressed the awareness of love often comes to the fore. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
Christ made this clear enough with regard to the love of our neighbor. He said that he would one day thank his benefactors, saying to them: “I was anhungered and ye gave me meat.” Who but Christ himself can be Christ’s benefactor? How can a man give meat to Christ, if he is not raised at least for a moment to the state spoken of by Saint Paul, when he no longer lives in himself but Christ lives in him? The text of the Gospel is concerned only with Christ’s presence in the sufferer. Yet it seems as though the spiritual worthiness of one who receives has nothing to do with the matter. It must then be admitted that it is the benefactor oneself, as a bearer of Christ, who causes Christ to enter the famished sufferer with the bread he gives one. The other can consent to receive this presence or not, exactly like the person who goes to communion. If the gift is rightly given and rightly received, the passing of a morsel of bread from one mortal to another is something like a real communion. Christ does not call his benefactors loving or charitable. He calls them just. The Gospel makes no distinction between the love of our neighbor and justice. In the eyes of the Greeks also a respect for Zeus the supplaint was the first duty of justice. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
We have invented the distinction between justice and charity. It is easy to understand why. Our notion of justice dispenses one who possesses from the obligation of giving. If one gives all the same, one think one has a right to be pleased with oneself. One thinks one had done a good work. As for one who receives, it depends on the way one interprets this notion whether one is exempted from all gratitude or whether it obliges one to offer servile thanks. Only the absolute identification of justice and love makes the coexistence possible of compassion and gratitude on the one hand, and on the other, of respect for the dignity of affliction in the afflicted—a respect felt by the sufferer oneself and the others. It has to be recognized that no kindness can go further than justice without constituting a fault under a false appearance of kindness. However, the just must be thanked for being just, because justice is so beautiful a thing, in the same way as we thank God because of his great glory. Any other gratitude is servile and even animal. The only difference between the mortal who witnesses an act of justice and the mortal who receives a material advantage from it is that in such circumstances the beauty of justice is only a spectacle for the first, while for the second it is the object of a contact and even a kind of nourishment. Thus the feeling which is simple admiration in the first should be carried to a far higher degree in the second by the fire of gratitude. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
To be ungrateful when we have been treated with justice, in circumstances where injustice is easily possible, it to deprive ourselves of the supernatural and sacramental virtue contained in every pure act of justice. Nothing better enables us to form a conception of this virtue than the doctrine of natural justice as we find it set forth with an incomparable integrity of spirit in a few marvelous lines of Thucydides. The Athenians, who were at war with Sparta, wanted to force the inhabitants of the little island of Melos, allied to Sparta from all antiquity and so far remaining neutral, to join with them. It was in vain the men of Melos, faced with the ultimatum of the Athenians, invoked justice, imploring pity for the antiquity of their own town. As they would not give in, the Athenians razed their city to the ground, put all their men to death, and sold their women and children as slaves. Thucydides has put the lines in question into the mouth of these Athenians. They begin by saying that they will not try to prove that their ultimatum is just. “Let us treat rather of what is possible…You know it as well as we do; the human spirit is so constituted that what is just is only examined if there is equal necessity on both sides. However, if one is strong and the other week, that which is possible is imposed by the first and accepted by the second.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
The men of Melos said that in the case of a battle they would have the gods with them on account of the justice of their cause. The Athenians replied that they saw no reason to suppose so. “As touching the gods we have the belief, and as touching men the certainty, that always, by a necessity of nature, each one commands wherever he has the power. We did not establish the law, we are not the first to apply it; we found it already established, we abide by it as something likely to endure forever; and that is why he apply it. We know quite well that you also, like all the others, once you reached the same degree of power, would act in the same way.” Such lucidity of mind in the conception of injustice is the light that comes immediately below that of charity. It is the clarity that sometimes remains where charity once existed but has become extinguished. Below comes the darkness in which the strong sincerely believe that their cause is more just than that of the weak. That was the case with the Romans and the Hebrews. Possibility and necessity are terms opposed to justice in these lines. Possible means all that the strong can impose upon the weak. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
It is reasonable to examine how far this possibility goes. Supposing it to be known, it is certain that the strong will accomplish one’s purpose to the extreme limit of possibility. It is a mechanical necessity. Otherwise it would be as though one willed and did not will simultaneously. There is a necessity for the strong as well as the weak in this. When two human beings have to settle something and neither as the power to impose anything on the other, they have to come to an understanding. Then justice is consulted, for justice alone has the power to make two wills coincide. It is the image of that Love which in God unites the Father and Son, and which is the common thought of separate thinkers. However, when there is a strong and a weak there is no need to unite their wills. There is only one will, that of the strong. The weak obeys. Everything happens just as it does when a mortal is handling matter. There are not two will to be made to coincide. Then mortal wills and the matter submits. The weak are like things. There is no difference between throwing a stone to get rid of a troublesome dog and saying to a slave: “Chase that dog away.” Beyond a certain degree of inequality in the relations of mortals of unequal strength, the weaker passes into the state of matter and loses one’s personality. The men of old used to say: “A man loses half his soul the day he becomes a slave.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
The anguish inside her defeated her anger. She drew close to me. No admissions and explanations. Just an image. I felt her strength recede, and her eyes misted. A great glowing fire was quelled, and I had done it, and an ever present grief enfolded it. A protective surge rose in me and the wild fantasies reigned again inside of me as if no one lese was present. Unconscious blocks to associational ability are many. For some people there is a fear of letting one’s mind go uncontrolled and saying anything that occurs, because of a feeling that there is something in the unconscious which is frightening. Such an individual, therefore, cannot allow the free play of association, but must keep them logical and controlled. Restriction of the ability to explore relations among various experiential elements is a serious limitation to producing unusual and interesting new combinations and, therefore, limits one’s ability to develop full potential. There are many acts of omission or commission which enhance the development of the associative abilities. Since the essence of this ability is making connections between events which are not obviously related, development depends upon the opportunity to explore freely the thoughts and feelings that the person experiences and to relate them to each other. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14
Emphasis on imaginative games lays the groundwork for more specific training in developing the skill of associating. However, when we are aware of anger, what then? It would appear that the most natural and spontaneous thing to do would be to express it. However, many of us find it difficult to be spontaneous at such moments. It may be desirable for us to examine some of the reasons we give ourselves for not expressing anger. Here are some of them. “I may say a lot of things I do not mean, and then I will feel terrible about it afterward.” What seem more likely is that we will say things we really do mean and do not accept in ourselves. If we say in anger, “I wish I had never met you,” or even, “I wish you never existed,” we may at that moment really feel that way—or at least part of us feels that way. It does not mean that five minutes or five hours later we may not be holding each other and intensely feeling our love for each other. For some people, humming the song that spontaneously comes into their head, and then reflecting on it, or associating to the words, can lead to a better understanding of the original puzzling situation. Either the title of the song, or the lines that the person has chosen to sing or hum, or the mood of the song, may contain the meaning of the association. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14
Humming is an enjoyable and simple method for uncovering hidden feelings that are not easily accessible to conscious thought. However, often we use fear of getting angry as an excuse because we dread the close involvement of anger. It this fear persists and the person finds one cannot loosen up and gradually express more of one’s anger, one should seek professional help, for suppressing anger increases, rather than decreases, the danger of violence. Everyone has the capacity to associate, most to a remarkable degree. However, the full use of this valuable ability requires realizing its presence, removing emotional blocks to letting it go without controls, practicing it, and gaining confidence that it works and can be a highly valuable assistant to thinking, creativity, and increased internal awareness. Internal thoughts and feelings must be expressed in some fashion. Scientific discoveries are written in technical language; music is written and played; other creative feelings are painted, sung, danced, spoken, acted. In some way a person must communicate one’s experience through the use or posture of one’s body or some part of it. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14
If they get mad at them, some people are afraid that they will damage their children’s lives. When you are angry at them the only alternative to expressing it is some form of phoniness. They can be trusted to handle your genuine feelings more than you think they can. If you are afraid that your anger is not justified that is a valid concern. Perhaps you are under some mistaken impression, but how are you going to find out if you stew in silence and do not talk about your feelings? And so we come to the knotty question, “How can we be creative in the expression of anger? Perhaps it can be stated as a general principle that anger is creative when a maximum of communication occurs with a minimum of destructiveness toward oneself and others. Like most other values, this ideal is one we will never achieve completely. However, the ideas that follow may help us grow toward it. Perhaps scientific and artistic creation differ in their relative emphasis on the expressive aspect of the creative process. In scientific creativity, the primary focus is on the first three phases of the creative process—acquisition, association, and expression. The great discoveries of Dr. Freud came through his sensitivity to and integration of the material of human personality. His writing about these discoveries was only in a minor way an integral part of his creativity. It served primarily as a vehicle for communicating these ideas. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14
A writer, poet, artist, or dancer, on the other hand, must concentrate more on the form in which one’s discoveries are expressed. We honor Browning, not simply for the conceptions behind is poetry, but for the very form of expression itself. When Katherine Dunham, Aaliyah Haughton, or Margot Fonteyn dance, the artistry is largely in the superb movement of their bodies, the mode through which their feelings are conveyed. Conscious, logical factors that enhance a person’s ability to express oneself involve a traditional educational area, the learning of skills. Learning to dance, or sing, or paint, or write is part of one’s ability to express oneself. Further, the development of skill in the use of symbolism, of expressing feelings derived form one medium in terms of another, is very central. A good example of this occurs in Walt Disney’s Fantasia, in which musical composition are represented in visual form. Unconscious factors that inhibit the expressive ability often derive form cultural or interpersonal censure. The belief that ballet dancing is not masculine, or that singing in public is uncouth, or that artists are irresponsible, or the actors are immoral, are all factors that may operate both consciously and unconsciously to inhibit the full expression of feelings in these areas. Also, the unwillingness to display oneself in front of others, as in public singing, is a major deterrent to free expression. To the degree that these inhibitions exist, self-realization is curtailed. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14
When an atmosphere of mutual exploration of creative expression can be established, wherein the whole group is attempting to support the creative efforts of each, remarkable progress can be made. Frequently, expressing the unexpressible provides such a boost in self-confidence that an individual may permanently increase one’s repertoire of modes of expression. Many of us have developed long fuses to or anger. We have learned to wait until later, probably wen we are no longer with the person, to be aware that we are angry. However, as we become more able to accept these feelings and more confident about expressing them, the fuse becomes shorter. Dealing with anger right aware will save us the wear and tear of carrying it around and will give both parties a chance to react while the situation is fresh. If married couple, for example, could follow the biblical suggestion not to let the Sun set on their anger, it would be a good thing. On the other hand, if, for example, bedtime became a time to search through their experiences of the day looking for outstanding irritations, it might quickly become a ritual to help them avoid intimacy. There are probably more fun ways of ending most days. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14
It is tricky to suggest that we express anger without being condemning, for there is a subtlety here that also defies description. Word used do not always seem to be a safe criteria. Some couples, for example, can in moments of anger call each other all kinds of names and come out of it feeling refreshed and neither condemned nor unloved. Others can be much more controlled in their choice of words and yet carry the feeling that they are condemning each other as worthless. And all of us have probably seen unsophisticated, but affectionate, mothers who in a moment of exasperation could give a child a swat on the rear and say, “Get out of here, you stupid no-goodnik, and let me get my work down,” without raising any question in the child’s mind about being loved. Sarcasm is a frequently used, indirect expression of anger that carries the feeling of condemnation since it implies contempt for the other person. Suppose, for example, that wife Anne replies sarcastically when her husband Stan says to her, “I am just so tired of the way things are between us that I sometimes feel like packing up and moving out.” Her reply is, “That is just fine. You pack your precious belongings and get out, because I just could not care less!” Anne’s response would be difficult for stand to deal with creatively even if he did not become very upset by the contempt in Anne’s comment. For by being sarcastic Anne managed to protect herself by concealing all of her feelings except the hostility. She has not allowed him to see that it does matter very much to her, as it undoubtedly does, whether he stays with her or leaves. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14
One principle which arises in our discussion of form is the transforming of one’s self which occurs in the creation of beauty. In all our creativity, we destroy and rebuild the World, and at the same time we inevitably rebuild and reform ourselves. We do this not at all in the sense of the tragedy of The Great Gatsby, who only changed the externals, such as his wardrobe, his accent, his bank account. We do it rather by grasping a deeper level of the form in the Universe which is also in our own selves. We see the scene before us in our imagination, and that means to some extent we see our own selves. This is a very curious paradox but it is present in all creative persons. Often the creative persons in their work see the perspective of a lifetime endeavor, are themselves creating a cosmos of their own. It is as though each mind is progressively unfolding itself as one goes through life. The creative individual is the one who not only attempts to make some order out of one’s music or art but to make some order in one’s own life. A continual searching for one’s forms occurs in art, and this can be automatically a search for one’s own integrity. A clear example is the life of Beethoven. He has a horrendous childhood, but his biographers relate that his creative genius was related to precisely these ordeals he suffered. His father was constantly inebriated, his mother returned to Heaven when he was young, and he had to take charge of the whole family at the age of eighteen. He never married though he passionately wanted to. However, he could create fantastic music! #RandolphHarris 8 of 14
There is no point in Beethoven’s life, where a marked development or transformation in musical styles takes place which is also not the point where an equal spiritual development and musical style go hand in hand. The transformation of the other is also the transformation of ourselves. Sometimes this transformation may not be good in the eyes of the artists’ contemporary World. Such was the situation with Rembrandt. When he was a young man his paintings were sold on all sides; he was then what we call an outstanding success. However, as he grew older and more profound, the tragic experiences in his life—the death of his children, the death of his wife—caused his paintings to take on a more somber and profound quality and made them less saleable to his fellow Hollanders. His self-portraits reflect this: each one looks more tragic than the one before it. His popularity as a painter waned, for he would not toady to the younger generation that was coming into vogue with the glossier and more readily saleable productions. He followed undeviatingly the path of his own genius. These later creative contributions make him now recognized as the greatest painter of his age. He died in sorrow and in poverty. The people in that day considered Rembrandt a failure. We now recognize him as one of the greatest painters of all time precisely because the transformation of himself and his art went hand and hand. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14
There is another question the relation between creativity and values. Certainly values have a great deal to do with psychotherapy, but they may seem to have very little to do with art or beauty. The studies of creative people indicate that the creative persons, so far as values go, are amoral, not immoral. They are not concerned with the generally conformist mortal rules that most of us are brought up with. At the same time—and perhaps because of this freedom from conventional morality—creative persons reveal another kind of ethics. It is not rules learned by rote but rather it is integrity itself. It is not marriage licenses on paper but authenticity of the relationship. It is not rules of health but reverence for nature and reverence for the human body. The artist seeks to overthrow existing values…to sow strife and ferment, so that by the emotional release those who are dead may be restored to life. Then I run wit joy to the great and imperfect ones, their confusion nourishes me, their stuttering is like divine music to my ears. As part of an art exhibit in New York, a wrecked car was dragged to the corner of a park in front of the building which housed my office. This still life was an entry in a show going on inside the building, but was obviously too large to drag indoors. The artist had draped a cow’s intestines over the seats. The conservative people living in the neighborhood were incensed and called the police, and in a couple of hours the wreck was hauled away. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14
However, the artists were simply trying to cry out, in as forceful a language as they could find, “This is what your technology is doing to you—take in our message!” A great deal of modern art could be captioned under the cry, “Wake up, humanity! Be alive! Look at this World in front of you!” This is restoring the emotionally dead, resuscitating the feelingless robot, the mechanical condition into which we have been forced by adjusting to a hyper-technological civilization. There is, on a deeper level, a very powerful relationship between beauty and ethical values. Beauty is that form in which everything is in harmony; and is that not also a definition of ethics? A final consideration, and perhaps the most important, is that art can dispense grace. Art is part of mortal’s quest for grace. Art and the beauty which it reflects enable us to integrate ourselves. We can make a synthesis between what Dr. Freud called primary and the secondary processes. The function of art can also be described by the term revelation. Art is a constant revealing of beauty as well as truth in a sense parallel to science but in the quite different form. Art produces new knowledge, new forms, often catastrophic in its endeavor to awaken people. The revelation in art comes as an immediate and unique experience. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14
We look at a picture and it immediately reveals a new Universe, a new form of experience. This is even true of a picture we have seen hundred of times. The Miro lithograph hanging in my living room brings me a new experience almost every time I look at it. The World is something different from what I had assumed. There is a grace that comes in such moments; a new depth of experience in ourselves is awakened. When persons say a particular piece of music carries them into another World, they are testifying to the revelation that is in this music. Beethoven himself once remarked, “Whoever understand my music will henceforth be free of the misery of the World.” Grace comes as a gift. It is something we do not ask for and cannot command. Indeed, we do not know the new revelation even exists until it opens itself to us. We were living in a narrow World; now, with the grace that comes in art, we suddenly find ourselves in a new World we did not know was there. I recall once, on leaving an exhibit of Hans Hofmann’s work, with the words singing in my mind like a Hallelujah chorus, “If a human being has the courage to paint such paintings, life surely has meaning!” It is the reverse of Dostoyevsky’s sentence in the Brothers Karamazou, “If God is dead, everything is permitted.” If such beauty exists and gives us it grace, then life must be ultimately good. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14
Creativity gives us a grace in the sense that it is a balm for our anxiety and a relief from our alienation. It is grace by virtue of its power to reconcile us to our deepest selves, to lead us to our own depths where primary and secondary functions are unified. Here is the right brain and the left brain working together in seeing the wholeness of our World. And thus my painting and the creative sketching—indeed, everyone’s creative acts, whatever they may be—make constructive form out of the apparent formlessness of our lives. Since the commandment “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God” is laid upon us so imperatively, it is to be inferred that the love in question is not only the love a soul can give or refuse when God comes in person to take the hand of his future bride, but also a love preceding this visit, for a permanent obligation is implied. This previous love cannot have God for its object, since God is not present to the soul and has never yet been so. It must then have another object. Yet it is destined to become the love of God. We can call it the indirect or implicit love of God. This holds good even when the object of such love bears the name of God, for we can then say either that the name is wrongly applied or that the use of it is permissible only on account of the development bound to follow later. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14
The implicit love of God can have only three immediate objects, the only three things here below in which God is really though secretly present. These are religious ceremonies, the beauty of the World, and our neighbor. Accordingly there are three loves. To these three loves friendship should perhaps be added; strictly speaking it is distinct from the love of our neighbor. These indirect loves have a virtue that is exactly and rigorously equivalent. It depends on circumstances, temperament, and vocation which is the first to enter the soul; one or other of them is dominant during the period of preparation. It is not necessarily the same one for the whole of this period. It is probably that in most cases the period of preparation does not draw toward its end, the soul is not ready to receive the personal visit of its Master, unless it has in it all three indirect loves to a high degree. The combination of these loves constitutes the love of God in the form best suited to the preparatory period, that is to say a veiled form. When the love of God in the full sense of the word wells up in the soul, they do not disappear; they become infinitely stronger and all loves taken together make only a single love. The veiled form of love necessarily come first however and often reigns alone in the soul for a very long time. Perhaps, with a great many people, it may continue to do so till death. Veiled love can reach a very high degree of purity and power. At the moment when it touches the soul, each of the forms that such love may take has the virtue of a sacrament. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14
We do have legends. We had a goddess. However, now is not the time for all those things. You need not believe all I have seen. What I do have to give you is a vision. I think a vision is stronger than an illusion. And the vision is that we can exist as powerful beings without hurting anyone who is good and kind. Let us explore the human mind as it engages in the creative act. This capacity to create—which we all have, though in varying degrees—is essentially the ability to find form in chaos, to create form where there is only formlessness. That is what leads us to beauty, for beauty is that form. Beauty reveals a form in the Universe—the harmony of the spheres, as Kepler called it. It is a form which is present in the circling of the planets. It is a form which is felt in the curves and balance of our own bodies. And it is present especially in the way we see the World, for we form and reform the World in the very act of perceiving it. The imagination to do this is one of the elements that make us human beings. Since our assumption is that the chief source of joy is the realization and use of one’s resources, it follows that the failure to use these resources leads to a lack of joy. Setting aside for the moment differences in emotional reactions, this assumption maintains that the master of any skill enjoys one’s area of expertness more than if one were not a master. A good skier enjoys skiing more than one would if one could not ski well, for instance. Similarly for a violinist, a taster, a knowledgeable person, a god typist, a health person, a fine athlete and so on. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
The more of one’s abilities an individual has developed and can use, the more pleasure one feel within oneself. When you want to be better than you are, joy awaits you. The concept of creativity is the most adequate one to express the notion of joy through the optimal development of personal functioning. Creativity implies not only the use of one’s capacities, but also includes going beyond them into previously unexplored areas. For is the essential nature of a thing as distinguished from the matter in which it is embodied. We recall Plato’s ideas of the essences in Heaven. These he rightly calls forms. Form is a pattern, an image and an order given to what would otherwise simply be chaos. Form is the nonmaterial structure of our loves, on the basis of which we live and on which we base our own particular character. We recall the studies of especially creative people that were made by Frank Barron. Dr. Barron showed his cards—cards with many different drawings and paintings on them—to creative people and their counterparts, people who were not especially creative, asking them to pick out the cards that liked best. The latter group chose the orderly cards; they liked things to be clear, understandable, unclutter. However, the creative people chose the chaotic cards. The most striking thing about the creative people was this taste for chaos. They preferred the scribbles where there was no form whatever; they found a challenge in the chaos. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
Creative people yearned to make form out of it, to make of the chaos about them an order which is their own. This is the purpose of their existence. This is the fundamental creative aspect of all human beings whether they are especially talented or not. The human imagination is shown in these strivings—which may sometimes be passion and sometimes simply curiosity—to put things into form. It is what Einstein did when he proclaimed that matter and energy are related in one formula, E= mc2. Our human mind is continuously doing that, obviously on a lesser scale. Before one is able to use one’s experience in unusual, productive, and satisfying (that is, creative) ways, one must acquire a repertoire of experiences. One must be open to experience, able to perceive and sense one’s environment, and be aware of one’s own internal feelings. After being acquired, the experiential elements within a person must be related to each other. An individual must have the ability to associate two or more experiences which can lead to a useful product when they are joined. Many products may be generated in the course f creative activity, but the evaluation as to which of these satisfy the situation, and which are worthless, is essential. This phase distinguishes the bizarre from the creative, and the productive from the mundane. After the generation of an original idea or product, detailed work is usually in order. An enduring contribution involves much underlying effort. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
The above steps can be approached not only at the conscious and unconscious levels, but also through a discussion of the role of emotional blocks. The conscious attempts to enhance an individual’s capacity in the acquisition area is institutionalized as scholarship—the quest for more knowledge to add to an individual’s repertoire. Science, the method of determining the worth of a given statement, is the social institution aimed at the evaluation area. And conscious attempts to increase expression are institutionalized as the arts, where a variety of modes of communication are developed. However, methods of enhancement of the creative process that occur on a more unconscious level have not been institutionalized. It is for this level that a variety of techniques are being developed which give promise of widening mortal’s horizons by affording one new access to one’s self, and providing means for capitalizing on one’s latent internal abilities. When I am sitting in an audience listening to a talk, I find myself making lines in my imagination from a light in the ceiling to the other lights, moving my head a little bit so that such and such will be a complete triangle, or such and such will make a perfect circle. What I happen to do it with, lines and objects, other people do with music, forming various tunes in their minds. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
If you are aware, I think you will find you are always subconsciously in the process of breaking something down in your imagination and putting it back together again. We do that in our ordinary reverie and we do it especially at night in our dreams. Odd things are put together—Socrates, say, is talking to the people we met yesterday. Dreams do fantastic things which seem absurd until, in thinking about the dream the next day, we find the key. All of this a making of form. The clearest aspect of form is obviously in architecture. The Parthenon is a dignified, majestic triumph of form. The Cathedral of Chartres is likewise magnificent form. Mont Saint Michel shows a combination of human and natural forms. The triangular for of the Earth, coming up out of the water in a small mountain, is built upon by human ingenuity with the triangles of Gothic architecture. One church is used as the foundation of the ones that succeeding generations erected, until finally, with the triangular peak of the last cathedral, the spire stretches up, again in triangular form, into Heaven itself. We scarcely need to add that the triangle is the central symbol of medieval culture, shown not only in Gothic architecture but also in philosophy and theology in the triangle of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The form dictates the content. We select, say, a sonnet to write or a drama to construct, because the content we have in mind can best be formed out of chaos and put into the particular forms of sonnet or drama or whatever form seems to fit. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
There is a danger in erasing chaos too easily, for it then takes away one’s stimulation. Several years ago, I took the training for transcendental meditation. I have always been interested in meditating and have done it more or less on my own. When I finished that course my mantra was given to me, I was instructed to meditate twenty minutes in the morning as soon as I woke up and twenty minutes at four or five o’clock in the afternoon. So I, being an obedient soul, started out doing that. I found that after meditating I would go down to my desk in my studio and sit there to write. And nothing would come. Everything was so peaceful, so harmonious; I was blissed out. And I had to realize through harsh experience that the secret of being a writer is to go to your desk with your mind fully of chaos, full of formlessness—formlessness of the night before, formlessness which threatens you, changes you. The essence of a writer is that out of this chaos, through struggle, or joy, or grief—through trying a dozen or perhaps a hundred ways in rewriting—one finally gets one’s ideas into some kind of form. So I learned I had to meditate with discretion in the early morning in order not to lose the chaos, and to choose those times when I had finished the day’s work and was ready to be blissed out with pleasure. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
Acquiring knowledge and experience means feeding input to a human system. A person must have some material to work with in order to be creative and to become the person one can be. One must have information and experiences that have been felt and integrated into the individual’s soul. Ability to learn is a prerequisite for the acquisition of information, but there is a different requirement for acquiring experience. Increased awareness of one’s environment through better developed senses greatly increases the material with which a person can create. Sherlock Holmes, identifying a client’s region of origin from the smell of his tobacco; a physician, perceiving a slight shadow in an X-ray; a psychologist, observing recurrent head scratching of a patient; a musician, noting the rhythm of a train’s wheels—all these observations enhance the chances for effective behavior within the respective situations. In addition to acquiring information and developing the senses, there is another area through which experiential elements come. Awareness of feelings and emotions allows experience to be felt and integrated into the self. The person who is open to experience, and able to feel and appreciate, has more experiential elements than the constricted, denying individual who cannot allow oneself to feel deeply. #RandolphHrris 7 of 19
A drama is a drama because of its form, a ballet is a dance because of its form. The Flamenco (baile) is a highly-expressive, Spanish dance because of its form. Rock and roll is a rebellion against the classical form in music, and has its own form which is shown in its discords and in its special beat. The ancient Greek philosophers set out to discover the original substance in the Universe out of which all things were made. Was it air? or ether? or water? Heraclitus proposed fire. However, each philosopher got trapped because the next question was, How did this element get its substance? Then came Pythagoras to cut the Gordian knot. He held that the fundamental element was no substance at a, but was really the form in which everything in nature is related to everything else. Form is nonmaterial, and has its existence only as things are related to other things. When I hold up a finger on each hand, you may say that there is no relation between the two. However, you would be wrong: there is the distance between them. If I put up another finger and draw an imaginary line among them, I would have a triangle. Or I get a cone, or a rectangle, or a circle. And soon I have an abstract drawing which is pure form! #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
It is not by accident that Pythagoras was the inventor not only of a great deal of mathematics (everyone studies the Pythagorean theorem in geometry in high school), but also the inventor of a number of important principles in the theory of music. The tone of a violin is a vibration of a strong of a certain length. Pythagoras made the famous discover that if their lengths are in a simple numerical ratio, vibrating strings under equal tension sound together in harmony. So we have laws of harmony and discord, all derivative from form. To Pythagoras is attributed the lyrical line, “The stars in the Heavens sing a music if only we had the ears to hear.” Now in Pythagoras, art and mathematics were identified. This was a beautiful prediction of what was to come in our modern physics. The older concern with molecules and electron has changed; our physicists are ready to admit that they do not really know what those are. “Something unknown is doing we do not know what,” says Sir Arthur Eddington. What they do know is the relationship of one form to another; they recognize the form. They know if the form is such and such, then we have such and such a physical object. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
The prototype of this significance of form is in the fascinating story of the myth of creation in the beginning of Genesis. “The Earth was without form and void,” it goes. This is a fantastic condition: when I go down to my studio, it is the way I hope to be each morning. “And God separated the light from the darkness.” Those mornings when this happened in my studio, when insights come so fast I can scarcely catch them with my pen, are great mornings! And the legend goes on, “Then God separated the sea from the land and the sky from the sea.” Now separating, diving, relating—these are all words of form. All the verbs in this fascinating legend are verbs relating to form. We read nothing about molecules or electrons, but only that God divides, separates, God forms. Creativity is an emulating of God in that we destroy the cosmos and then build it up again in ways that we hope will be closer to our heart’s desire. We hope and strive for the form in the rhythm which we have in our hearts, and in our heartbeat and the rhythm in our breathing. The chaos about us is continually being reformed, only to be destroyed again by history, by nature, and by human perversity. “My photographs are a picture of the chaos in the World,” remarked the artist-photographer Alfred Stieglitz, “and of my relationship to that chaos. My prints show the World’s constant upsetting of mortal’s equilibrium, and their eternal battle to reestablish it.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
However, the works of art living on year after year are vital proof before our eyes that reconstruction of form, of order, is eternally going on in our World. It is in this sense that the artists are the source of our conscience and our moral courage. Facilitation or inhibition of a person’s ability to be open and sensitive to knowledge, sensation, and feeling can occur on the various levels of awareness or consciousness. On a conscious level, sensitivity is a function of life-background, including exposure to traditional teaching methods for acquiring information about and contact with life experiences. Unconsciously, a person’s ability not merely to learn, but also to sense and feel, is very much connected to one’s emotional development. Emotional blocks to learning are many. Many childhood experiences prevent a person from being able to learn, because of anxiety, fear, conflict, or other immobilizing emotions engendered, for example, when parental competition with a child makes test-taking so full of conflict (the child may possibly excel the parents) that the student cannot study or retain; unresolved emotional problems also block off or distort perceptions, and blunt the ability to sense experience accurately as, for instance, when fear of criticism makes a person hear critical words where none exist. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
One of the first steps many of us may need to take toward the creative use of anger is to become aware of our anger. As has already been noted, many people develop some degree of numbness to their awareness of anger. Some progress needs to be made in reawakening this awareness before anger can be used creatively. How can this be done? If we can examine the process by which we become deadened to anger, it is often helpful. The key often is possessed in our relationship with our parents. One young man, Monsieur Lestat de Lioncourt, had particular difficulty in being aware of and expressing anger toward women. When he examined the relationship that had existed between himself and his mother, it became apparent that she had constantly manipulated and controlled Monsieur de Lioncourt’s life in many ways as he was growing up. It would be natural, of course, that he would feel much frustration and anger as a result. However, he remembered that, if he expressed any negative reaction or rebelled against this control in any way, she would react with such hurt and disappointment in him that he would feel very guilty. Gradually, Monsieur de Lioncourt, even as a child, built a psychological defense against this intolerable situation; be no longer felt his anger when she manipulated him. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
It was only as Monsieur de Lioncourt was able to remember many of these events of his life with mother and was able to experience and express some of the anger pent up since childhood that he became capable of realistic and open relationships with women in his adult life. Sometimes when we allow ourselves to experience long-buried anger and resentment from our childhood, it results in strained relationships between ourselves and our parents, if they are still alive. However, when they boil to the surface, it does usually seem necessary and desirable to deal with these feelings directly; and if the individual can stick with it, a new relationship built on honest reactions and an awareness of our common human failings may emerge from the wreckage of the old, unsatisfying, and unrealistic relationship. Problems of feeling, either emotion-flattening or hyperexcitation, are usually tied to very complex emotional problems. For example, people often cannot allow themselves to feel deep affection of others because of their fear of rejection is too great. Inhibitions of this kind can occur whether the individual is experiencing inanimate objects, ideas, other people, or one’s self. In all these cases, the individual’s openness to experience is seriously curtailed, and the repertoire of elements to enter potentially into one’s creative behavior is sharply diminished. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
The job of helping a person become more open and enriched is therefore threefold: removal of emotional blocks; development of an awareness of one’s self and one’s feelings; and development of a sensitivity and perceptiveness about other people and the World around one. Also, if we can act on or express whatever awareness of anger we do have, it will often help us to awaken to our feelings of anger. To further highlight this illustration, if a person gains the courage to talk about the slight irritations that one feels, the freedom to do this gives one confidence to become aware of more intense feelings. Once the process is started, the relief is so great that anger floods into awareness with increasing ease. Some people who are relatively dead to their anger react almost immediately to anger-producing situations with some physical symptom. Skilled therapists, for example, will often recognize a clenched fist, a tensed body, or a foot making a kicking motion, or a sudden depressed attitude as a probable sign of anger of which the person has not allowed one’s self to be fully aware. Sometimes we can use such symptoms to help ourselves recognize our anger. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
One therapist discovered that when talking to clients, he himself sometimes would very quickly develop a headache. By examining these occasions more closely he discovered that they occurred when unrecognized anger toward the client was building up. Once he had discovered this, he found that when such headaches developed he could examine his feelings and let the anger come into focus where he could deal with it directly. Once the anger was recognized and expressed, the headache would quickly disappear. If we examine the possibility that we may project our feelings of anger onto others, sensitivity to our anger may also be enhanced. All of us have some tendency to read into others the feelings that we are reluctant to recognize and accept in ourselves. If we can face it, very often when we feel that someone dislikes and resents us, we will discover that we resent them. For example, a mother might react very firmly to a child’s outburst against her request that he carry out the trash. She might feel that he carries a resentful grudge about this task, hating her for limiting his freedom to go out and play. In reality he, having had his outburst, may quickly forget the incident. If the mother were able to recognize it in herself, she might discover that she resents him for seemingly limiting her freedom and keeping her trapped in the home. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
Gary James had been in psychotherapy for several month when one day he expressed the idea that his therapist was angry at him. He was asked to play the role of the therapist and express that anger. As he “became” the therapist and talked to a pillow in another chair, which represented himself, Gary James said, “I am angry and impatient with you. I feel like giving you a good kick in the britches so you will get to work and we can get somewhere in therapy!” The therapist then said to him, “Now will you be yourself and try saying the same thing to me.” At first Gary James looked at the therapist in some surprise, then a little gleam of awareness began to appear on his face. “Yeah,” he said, “maybe I am a little angry and impatient with you. You sit there and look wise and do not seem to do a damn thing for me. I think I do feel like giving you a kick in the britches so you will get to work and help me get somewhere in therapy!” After he finished, Gary James’s face lighted up with a grin of pleasure and satisfaction that he had been able to be ware of and express the hitherto unrecognized anger. It was an important step forward for him, and it happened because he was helped to experience his projection. Like many projections, it was based on some truth, also, for the therapist admitted to Gary James the he had felt some impatience toward him, which he had not expressed. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
If we ask ourselves if we are feeling angry at the right people and for the real reasons, it may also help us become aware of our angry. For sometimes we mask from others and from ourselves our real anger by feeling irritation about less threatening things. Sometimes we do this by getting angry at people who are less threatening to us. When we cannot face and deal with our angry at the boss, for example, we may heckle the wife and kids. Or we may nag the wife about leaving dishes in the sink or not keeping the house tidy rather than recognize and deal openly with the fact that we are angry and hurt because she does not express her love for us as much as we would like. To recognize and express this basic anger and hurt would be to reveal our deep need of her and make us feel very vulnerable. Our fear of love makes such an expression of anger seem very risk. It is much safer to be aware only of last night’s dishes! If we are honest, when we become disproportionately angry about things, they must be viewed as relatively inconsequential, it may help to ask ourselves what it is we are really angry about. It seems impossible, but there is a way—a way with which we are familiar. We know quite well in what likeness this tree s made, this tree that has grown within us, this most beautiful tree where the birds of the air come and perch. We know what is the most beautiful of all. No forest bears its equal. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
Sometime still a little more frightful than a gibbet—that is the most beautiful of all trees. It was the seed of this tree that God placed within us, without or knowing what seed it was. If we had known, we should not have said yes at the first moment. It is this tree that has grown within us and has become ineradicable. Only a betrayal could uproot it. When we it a nail with a hammer, the whole of the shock received by the large head of the nail passes into the point without any of it being lost, although it is only a point. If the hammer and the head of the nail were infinitely big it would be just the same. The point of the nail would transmit this infinite shock at the point to which it was applied. Extreme affliction, which means physical pain, distress of soul, and social degradation, all at the same time, is a nail whose point is applied at the very center of the soul, whose head is all necessity spreading throughout space and time. Affliction is a marvel of divine technique. It is a simple and ingenious device which introduces into the soul of a finite creature the immensity of force, blind, brutal, and cold. The infinite distance separating God from the creature is entirely concentrated into one point to pierce the soul in its center. The person to whom such a thing happens has no part in the operation. One struggles like a butterfly pinned alive into an album. However, through all the horror one can continue to want to love. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
There is nothing impossible in wanting to love through pain, no obstacle, one might almost say no difficulty. For the greatest suffering, so long as it does not cause the soul to faint, does not touch the acquiescent part of the soul, consenting to a right direction. It is only necessary to know that love is a direction and not a state of the soul. If one is unaware of this, one falls into despair at the first onslaught of affliction. One whose soul remains ever turned toward God through nail pierces it finds oneself nailed to the very center of the Universe. It is the true center; it is not the middle; it is beyond space and time; it is God. In a dimension that does not belong to space, that is not time, that is indeed quite a different dimension, this nail has pierced cleanly through all creation, through the thickness of the screen separating the soul from God. In this marvelous dimension, the soul, without leaving the place and the instant where the body to which it is united is situated, can cross the totality of space and time and some into the very presence of God. It is at the intersection of creation and its Creator. This point of intersection is the point of the intersection of the arms of the Cross. Saint Paul was perhaps thinking about things of this kind when he said, “That ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; and to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge,” reports Epistle to the Ephesians 3.17-19. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
There is something wrong with the way ghost act. And the same holds true for Angels. I am not saying there is not an afterlife. I am only maintaining that those entities who come down here so beneficently to meddle with us are more than a little cracked. Violence and vitality share a common root—the root of both is force (etymologically, in its Latin form vis). The various plays of force and the radical nature of the encounters of its two forms in essay. Let us first consider in general terms the expression of force in primal instinct and the ways in which it becomes modified as a consequence of the process of socialization, adopting a coldly rational view. The first instinct is to take in enough material from the outside World so that one may be sustained; that is, so that one’s system may replenish itself. The system puts out energy constantly, both to maintain its individual boundaries and to perpetuate its kind; it must take in some source of energy that it does not presently contain. This source is food, which includes air, Sunshine, and other organic matter. For life as a whole, then, death must be constant and almost equal in quantity to life; organisms must die so that other organisms may live. Life therefore depends upon a quantitative superiority of the mechanisms for reproduction. In the average, each organism must reproduce itself and a surplus besides; hence if life is to continue, the pleasures of the flesh must be most powerfully motivated. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
It is of equal rank, so far as motives are concerned, as the drive to ingest. The latter is most necessary to the prolongation of individual life, and through individual forms to life itself; the latter is necessary because of the principle that life feeds upon life. It is a requirement of life that it should expand, that individual forms of it should multiply. A stasis seems theoretically conceivable; it is, in fact, the basic tendency of the supreme being. The strongest organism will seek to limit its own reproduction out of an apparent or misguided self-interest. Because it temporarily has ascendancy and an assurance of sustenance, it finds no need for reproduction more than one of its own kind per unit already existing. It loses supremacy, then, purely as a function of probability arising out of life’s tendency toward diversity. Profile life produces many new forms, in such great numbers that finally there occurs some form that is better suited to be supreme. Thus are old rulers deposed; the rules of life make it certain that supremacy cannot be maintained. Death is simply a rule of life. Dr. Freud was wrong in claiming that Eros and Thanatos are equally strong forces. Life is infinitely stronger than Death, for from the beginning Death is merely a by product of life. He tendency of matter is toward life, and the present tendency of life is toward consciousness. Consciousness itself arises in the interest of the expansion of life; the competition among organisms for food is decided ultimately by such things as attention and memory and logic. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
Eventually organisms must be born incapable of an unconscious; all the power of symbolism for the imaginative construction of experience must finally become conscious, together with all motives. It may be asked, however, is not symbolism itself a diversion on the road to complete consciousness? Wat is symbolism but a disguised mode of representing motives that were once completely unconscious? It not symbolism simply a step toward conscious representation of the motives of all life? Does it not decrease in the individual as motives become conscious? It may be replied that symbols are possible because of a tremendous differentiation of matter (the structure of the human brain) and that this differentiation of structure and direction of development will not be reserved. Hence symbolic forms should continue indefinitely, though functionally they may become less important for life. It remains a question, however, whether completely conscious motives would require the complexity of determination and differentiation that symbols now have. The motives themselves might, of course, change beyond recognition, into something we cannot now conceive, into a form requiring for their representation the very mechanics that the development of symbolization has made a permanent possession of human intelligence. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
The tendency of life, then, is toward the expansion of consciousness. In a sense, a description of means for the expansion of consciousness has been the central theme; it is in this evolutionary tendency that such diverse phenomena as psychotherapy, surprising or unexpected self-renewal, the personally evolved and deepened forms of religious belief, creative imagination, mysticism, and deliberately induced changes in consciousness through the use of chemicals find a common bond. Engagement as an individual in these efforts to expand consciousness is therefore, in various measure, participation in the job that life in general is now facing. It is itself a mark of vitality. What then of violence? Analyzed coldly in terms of instinctual force, it seems evident that violence itself should provide the primal basis for all relations among individual living systems. One seeks to eat the other, and the superior force succeeds. Communities then develop from mutual recognition that selfish ends will be best served by cooperation—that two can eat better than one, or that the alien aggressor may be more effectively repulsed by a defense in common. The idea of justice, according to this conception, arises from a recognition that communities cannot be maintained unless all members hold it a superior form of interest to desist from eating one another and to cooperate in seizing the enemy and resisting one’s attacks. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
Thus slaying is sanctioned only when committed against an outsider. Otherwise it would lead to disruption of the community pact and eventually to the inferior form of social organization in which everyone is the unqualified enemy of everyone else. Societies may thus be defined as a form of carefully qualified enmity. In the interest of community organization, however, illusions (which are usually a form of self-deception in the interest of survival) must arise. The most important illusions take the form of identifications, which essentially are a claim that another individual is actually oneself, to be treated by one as one would treat oneself. Such identification in their most extreme form are extended to the entire community. In their more restricted form they pertain especially to parents, mates, and offspring, or substitutes for these (for instance, symbolic equivalents of these). Identifications arise for the same basic reason as community itself—for the more efficient securing of sustenance and for the purpose of warding off aggression, not only from outsiders, but from the very person with whom the community is made. One purpose of a pact is to reduce the number of one’s enemies by, at a minimum, the number of one’s allies—by those allies themselves, in fact. Community uses symbolization for this purpose. Sympathy then is based upon the complex perception of community interest, or at least a capacity for justifying complexly one’s friendships or communities. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
This repelling way of putting the matter leaves quite out of account the strange force of love and the impulse to create. The analysis nevertheless has value within the framework of a purely rational psychology, if for no other reason than it forces us to consider carefully how far objective self-interest can take us. There is a real question as to whether through simply this process of symbolization and sympathy, and eventually through attainment of the Ultima Thule of fully conscious rationality, aggression can be mitigated for life as a whole. Even if a species should succeed in including its entire self in a single community (as none has done yet), the reduced motive for reproduction might eventually produce a static state in the species which would ensure the succession of some other species to supremacy. The unknow quantity in all of this, as we have been arguing directly or by implication throughout, is the power of creative imagination, the main instrument of freedom. At this writing, so far as mortals are concerned, it appears possible, even though the problems are extraordinarily complex and difficult, that one will extend community to include all other mortals. The idea is verbalized and current, and it has many advocates. All other living beings, however, have entertained to the death the notion that some infraspecies organization will attain supremacy, so that combat is entered upon even when the strength of the combatants and their equality makes it seem probable that one will die and the other nearly die, or that both will die. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
And life as a whole is indifferent to the success of single species, as much as to the success of single individuals. The one thing of which we can be certain is that life is inextinguishable. One mark of the breadth of the community that mortals have established is that we are able now to contemplate the idea that the very species Humankind—surely an extremely special vehicle for the expansion of consciousness—may be the final supreme form of life. This local interest raised to the highest form it has yet attained, and it would mean the passing of violence as a form of adaptation and the total institutionalization of the remaining energy of the instinct in World law. Religious revelation tells us much the same story as does this sort of analysis, though the terms are different. Consider the chapters of Genesis and the account it gives of the first murder: In the relative innocence of a World but lately paradise, Cain slays Abel. The murderer, confronted by God, denies knowledge of his brother’s whereabouts, for, he says, he is not his brother’s keeper. When the accusation is pressed against him, however, he admits the deed. God condemns him to a life of wandering on the face of the Earth, but mercifully places upon his forehead a distinguishing mark, that mortals may not kill him. Thus is mortal’s violence confessed in this early Biblical story, and its fearfulness acknowledged. The mark of Cain is a sign of human murderousness, but it carries immunity with it. The murderer within us is to be exiled, yet he is awesome because he is a murderous man. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
The scene is placed in the Bible immediately after what theologians call the Fall; as we have argued earlier, biologists might well call it the Accession. Our first parents had just eaten the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, which is to say they became ethical beings, and for the first time in Nature a natural creature passed judgment. Thus, close upon passing of innocence came murder itself, and the first ethical judgment is that murder is a crime against human nature. An exception came quickly to be recognized. The exception is war—a large exception indeed. Its basis is the family. One may not kill one’s blood relatives, but one may kill those outside the family, who are the enemies of the family. Loyalty to the family will sanction the deed. Finally, family need not be defined by blood. Geography will suffice, or race, or economic interdependence, or religious belief. Thus the wars of families become wars of nations, and murder is countenanced once again. Mortals seem in war thus to triumph over their accession to conscience, and the eating of the apple was not so fateful a deed as it had at first appeared. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
However, in the course of the centuries fallen mortals have come more and more to control the World. Control is based in large part on knowledge of the workings of a machine-like Universe, and the creation of new machines. Among the machines are those used for murder, private and public. Among the knowledge is knowledge of the basic structure of matter, and finally of the atom itself. New force has been released, and its release adapted to an ancient and sanctioned end: the killing of an entire family. The new force, however, is gigantic; its murderous power is beyond anything previously dreamt of. So great is this power that one family might destroy al others on Earth, provided there could be no retaliation in kind. Retaliation in kind, however, has come to be a certainty. This is the setting of the modern dilemma of a creature who has nibbled at the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, but who is loath to assume the responsibility given with freedom or to accept the grace of redemption. Unless human consciousness can take another giant step and root out murder from the heart of mortals, or develop the control of violence through law to a new and extraordinary level, some other form of consciousness must become the carrier of vitality. “The devil is source of secret combinations of murder,” reports 2 Nephi 9.9. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
Whether we live in the Renaissance, or in the thirteenth-century France, or at the time of the fall of Rome, we are part-and-parcel of our age in every respect—its wars, its economic conflicts, its anxiety, its achievement. However, no well-integrated society can perform for the individual, or relieve one from, one’s task of achieving self-consciousness and the capacity for making one’s own choices responsibly. And no traumatic World situation can rob the individual of the privilege of making the final decision with regard to oneself, even if it is only to affirm one’s own fate. It may have been superficially easier for a person to be adjusted in another age—those golden ages of Greece or the Renaissance that one might look back to longingly. However, the wish that one lived in those times, expect as an exercise in fantasy, is based on a false understanding of mortal’s relation to tie. In those days it might actually not have been any easier for the individual to find and choose to be one’s self. In our day there is greater need for one to come to terms with one’s self; we are less able to rest in the mothering arms of our historical period. So could one not argue, if it were a matter for drawing room argument, that it is better for a person’s learning to find oneself to live in our day? On the superficial level there are assets or debits to living in any period. On the more profound level, each individual must come to one’s own consciousness of oneself, and one does this on a level which transcends the particular age one lives in. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
The same holds true for one’s chronological age. The important issue is not whether a person is twenty or forty or one hundred: it rather is whether one fulfills one’s own capacity of self-conscious choice at one’s particular level of development. This is why a healthy child at eight—as everyone has observed—can be more of a person than a neurotic adult of thirty. The child is not more mature in a chronological sense, nor can one do as much as the adult, not take care of one’s self as well, but one is more mature wen we judge maturity by honesty of emotion, originality, and capacity to make choices on matters adequate to one’s stage of development. The statement of the person of twenty who says, “When I am thirty-five, I will begin to live” is as falsely based as the one who, at forty or fifty, laments, “I cannot live because I have lost my youth.” Interestingly enough, one generally finds on closer inspection that this is the same person, that the one who makes that lament at fifty was postponing living also at twenty—which demonstrates our point ever more incisively. One has to some extent overcome the tendency to see one’s self only in others’ eyes, and thus see truth to some degree objectively and love outwardly. These are all ways of living sub specie aeternitatis; they show the human being’s capacity to transcend the given situation of the moment. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
The task and possibility of the human being is to move from one’s original situation as an unthinking and unfree part of the mass, whether this mass is one’s actual early existence as a foetus or one’s being symbolically a part of the mass in a conformist, automaton society—to move from the womb, that is, through the incestuous circle, which is but one step removed from the womb, through the experience of the birth of self-awareness, the crises of growth, the struggle, choices and advances from the familiar to the unfamiliar, to ever-widening consciousness of one’s self and thus broadening freedom and responsibility, to higher levels of differentiation in which one progressively integrates one’s self with others in freely chosen love and creative work. Each step in this journey means that one lives less as a servant of automatic time and more as one who transcends time, that is, one who lives by meaning which one chooses. Thus the person who can die courageously at thirty—who has attained a degree of freedom and differentiation that one can face courageously the necessity of giving up one’s life—is more mature than the person who is on one’s deathbed at ninety cringes and begs still to be shielded from reality. The practical implication is that one’s goal is to live each moment with freedom, honesty, and responsibility. One is then in each moment fulfilling so far as one can one’s own nature and one’s evolutionary task. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
When we are living our lives with honesty, freedom, and responsibility, now only are we fulfilling our evolutionary task, but this is also the way one experiences the joy and gratification that accompany fulfilling one’s own nature. Whether the young instructor eventually completes one’s book or not is a secondary question: the primary issue is whether he, or anyone else, writes and thinks in the given sentence or paragraph what he believes will gain the praise of another, or what he himself believes is true and honest according to his lights at the moment. The young husband, to be sure, cannot be certain of his relation with his wife five years hence: but in the best of historical periods, could one ever have been certain that he would live out the week or month? Does not the uncertainty of our time teach us the most important lesion of all—that the ultimate criteria are the honesty, integrity, courage and love of a given moment or relatedness? If we do not have that, we are not building for the future anyway; if we do have it, we can trust the future to itself. The qualities of freedom, responsibility, courage, love and inner integrity are ideal qualities, never perfectly realized by anyone, but they are the psychological goals which give meaning to our movement toward integration. When Socrates was describing the ideal way of life and the ideal society, Glaucon countered: “Socrates, I do not believe that there is such a City of God anywhere on Earth.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
In regard to the question about the City of God being on Earth or not, Socrates answered, “Whether such a city exists in Heaven or ever will exist on Earth, the wise mortal will live after the manner of that city, having nothing to do with any other, and in so looking upon it, will set one’s own house in order.” When he told us to consider the lilies of the field that neither toil nor spin, Christ proposed the docility of matter to us as a model. This means that they have not set out to clothe themselves in this or that color; they have not exercised their will or made arrangements to bring about their object; they have received all that natural necessity brought them. If they appear to be more beautiful than the richest stuffs, it is not because they are richer but a result of their obedience. Materials are docile too, but docile to mortals, not to God. When it obeys mortals, matter is not beautiful, but only when it obeys God. If sometimes a work of art seems almost beautiful as the sea, the mountains, or flowers, it is because the light of God has filled the artist. When manufactured by mortals uninspired by God, in order to find things beautiful, it would be necessary for us to have understood with our whole soul that these mortals themselves are only matter, capable of obedience without knowledge. For anyone who has arrived at this point, absolutely everything here below is perfectly beautiful. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
In everything that exists, in everything that comes about, one discerns the mechanism of necessity, and one appreciates in necessity the infinite sweetness of obedience. For us, this obedience of things in relation to God is what the transparency of a window pane is in relation to light. As soon as we feel this obedience with our whole being, we see God. And if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful: one cuts away here, one smooths there, one makes this line lighter, the other purer, until a lovely face has grown upon one’s work. So do you also: cut away all that is excessive, straighten all the is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, labour to make all one glow of beauty and never cease chiseling your statue, until there shall shine out on your from it the Godlike splendor of virtue, until you shall see the perfect goodness surely established in the stainless shrine. When we hold a newspaper upside down, we see the strange shapes of the printed characters. When we turn it the right way up, we no longer see the characters, we see words. The passenger on board a boat caught in a storm feels each jolt as an inward upheaval. The captain is only aware of the complex combination of the wind, the current, and the swell, with the position of the boat, its shape, its sails, its rudder. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
As one has to learn to read or to practice a trade, so one must learn to feel in all things, first and almost solely, the obedience of the Universe to God. It is really an apprenticeship. Like every education, it requires time and effort. One who has reached the end of one’s training realizes that the differences between things or between events are no more important than those recognized by someone who knows how to read, when one has before one the same sentences reproduced several times, written in red ink and blue, and printed in this, that, or the other kind of lettering. One who does not know how to read only sees differences. For one who is literate, it all comes to the same thing, since the sentence is identical. Whoever has finished one’s apprenticeship recognizes things and events, everywhere and always, as vibrations of the same divine and infinitely sweet word. This does not mean that one will not suffer. Pain is the color of certain events. When a mortal who can and a mortal who cannot read look at a sentence written in red ink, they both see the same red color, but this color is not so important for the one as for the other. When an apprentice gets hurt, or complains of being tired, the working person and less affluent have this fine expression: “It is the trade entering one’s body.” #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
Each time that we have some pain to go through, we can say to ourselves quite truly that it is the Universe, the order and beauty of the World, and the obedience of creation to God that are entering our body. After that how can we fail to bless with tenderest gratitude the Love that sends of this gift? Joy and suffering are two equally precious gifts both of which must be savored to full, each one in its purity, without trying to mix them. Through joy, the beauty of the World penetrates our soul. Through suffering it penetrates our body. We could no more become friends of God through joy alone than one becomes a ship’s captain by studying books on navigation. The body plays a part in all apprenticeships. On the place of physical sensibility, suffering alone gives us contact with that necessity which constitutes the order of the World, for pleasure does not involve an impression of necessity in joy, and that only indirectly through a sense of beauty. In order that our being should one day become wholly sensitive in every part to this obedience that is the substance of matter, in order that a new sense should be formed in us to enable us to hear the Universe as the vibration of the word of God, the transforming power of suffering and of joy are equally indispensable. When either of them comes to us we have to open the very center or soul to it, just as a person opens one’s door to messengers from one’s loved one. If the messenger be polite or rough, what does it matter to a love, so long as one delivers the message? #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
The creative relationship of anger and love is even more evident in our dealings with those we care for. Anger and love are not opposites, as we often assume. Anger says you care enough to become emotionally involved. And when we suppress anger, we often give the other person the feeling that we do not really care. Expression of anger is also creative because it often clears the way for us to become aware of other feelings, especially hurt and love. There is an interesting sequence of paragraphs in the section of the New Testament that was used earlier to illustrate the anger of Jesus. The angry words go on, and on, and on: “You…play actors…you blind leaders…you blind fools…you utter frauds…you serpents, you viper’s brood…” However, when the anger is spent, the hurt and love flood into awareness. You can almost see Jesus’ features soften and hear the tears in his voice as he says, “Oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem! You murder your prophets and stone the messengers that are sent to you. How often have I longed to gather your children round me like a bird gathering her brood together under her winds and you would never have it.” Whether or not this sequence of Jesus’ words is historically accurate, it is psychologically true to life. For when we can express anger we become freer to discover our deeper feelings. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
Some of the most dramatic events which occur in group therapy follow this pattern. Participants in mist such groups are encouraged to be aware of their emotional reactions to each other. Often there are feelings of anger, and if this anger is expressed directly, sometime even shouted, a sequence of feelings frequently follows. When the anger has been expressed, the person often becomes aware of feelings of hurt which underlie most anger. Perhaps tears flow. And finally, after the anger and hurt, awareness comes that feelings of love are also present. Thus the expression of anger often opens the door to the experience of love. This sequence of feelings provides an explanation for the not uncommon experience of couples who report that some o their most intense feelings of love and intimacy occur after their disputes when they make up. So we see that the creative expression of anger often leads to more satisfying love relationships. When we conceal our anger from others and from ourselves, we limit our capacity to love, for we are denying one facet of love. When we express our anger in honest directness, on the other hand, we are permitting ourselves to be seen as we really are at that moment. Sometimes others will not be able to respond as freely with their feelings and the experience of love will be limited as a result. However, at least we will have opened a door in the wall that separates us, which will provide the opportunity for a more emotionally intimate relationship. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
Here, as elsewhere, of course, we are afraid of the experience of love. To express anger, and then to be aware of our hurt and our love, increases our vulnerability. So to express anger creatively inevitably means a lowering of our defenses against being hurt. And that is frightening. So despite our hunger for the love that might well be experienced through revealing our anger, it may well be that our fear of love is the most basic reason why we shy away from expressing anger. Affliction is not suffering. Affliction is something quite distinct from a method of God’s teaching. The infinity of space and time separates us from God. How are we to seek for him? How are we to go toward him? Even if we were to walk for hundreds of years, we should do no more than go round and rough the World. Even in an airplane we could not do anything else. We are incapable of progressing vertically. We cannot take a step toward the Heavens. God crosses the Universe and comes to us. Over the infinite of space and time, the infinitely more infinite love of God comes to possess us. He comes at his own time. We have the power to consent to receive him or to refuse. If we remain unaware, he comes back again and again like a boomerang, one day he stops coming. If we consent, God puts a little seed in us and he goes away again. From that moment God has no more to do; neither have we, except wait. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
We only have not to regret the consent we gave God, the nuptial yes. It is not as easy as it seems, for the growth of seed within us is painful. Moreover, from the very fact that we accept this growth, we cannot avoid destroying whatever gets in its way, pulling up the weeds, cutting the good grass, and unfortunately the good grass is part of our very flesh, so that this gardening amounts to a violent operation. On the whole, however, the seed grows of itself. A day comes when the soul belongs to God, when it is not only consents to love but when truly and effectively it loves. Then in its turn it must cross the Universe to go to God. The soul does not love like a creature with created love. The love within it is divine, uncreated; for it is the love of God for God that is passing though it. God alone is capable of loving God. We can only consent to give up our own feelings so as to allow free passage in our soul for this love. That is the meaning of denying oneself. We are created for this consent, and for this alone. Divine Love crossed the infinite of space and time to come from God to us. However, how can it repeat the journey in the opposite direction, starting from a finite creature? When the seed of Divine Love placed in us has grown and become a tree, how can we, we who bear it, take it back to its origin? How can we repeat the journey made by God when he came to us, in the opposite direction? How can we cross infinite distance? It seems impossible, but there is a way—a way with which we are familiar. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
I want to thank you for sharing your secrets with us. You have trusted us, and treated us as if we were sinless and kind. You big old great thing, you sure are pretty as an Angel, and you have got plenty charm enough to be a gangster. I have seen every gangster movie ever made three times and I know what I am talking about. They put a little boot black on your hair, you could play Bugsy Siegel. From the foregoing, one might be led to think that the most desirable state is to feel free. This is true, but the situation, as usual, is not so very simple. Very often the feeling of freedom and of power to act is the most desperate of defenses against a deep and totally unconscious sense of powerlessness and constraint. A familiar clinical example is vigorous phallic activity covering an unconscious sense of smallness. The kinds of character defenses that are classified in general as counterphobic go along most frequently with an exaggerated sense of conscious freedom, or euphoria, or power to act at will. This is seen in its most vivid and most pathological form in the manic-depressive psychosis. When the patient is in a manic state, one is perfectly happy, perfectly powerful, and perfectly free—absurdly so, of course, so that one is not surprised to find one a short time later in such a state of stupefaction and despair that one cannot speak or move at al. As in most affect, intensity of the experience is an excellent indicator that the extreme opposite is close to expression. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
May an intense feeling of compulsion and of lack of power be a defense against the achievement of greater freedom of the self? Why, indeed, should freedom of the self be defended against, when it is presumably what all mortals want? Christ having returned to Earth and to the Church he had founded appears and is recognized, for his grace shines among all mortals as in the days of his life. As a crowd gathers in wonderment and love about him, the Grand Inquisitor passes by, and, immediately understanding the situation, orders him arrested. That evening, in the darkness of the dungeon in which Christ is imprisoned, the Grand Inquisitor himself, alone, enters with a light in his hand. He speaks sternly and bitterly to Christ and recalls to him the temptation in the desert, during which the cursed and dread Spirit, the spirit of self-destruction and non-existence had put him the three temptations. These three temptations are to offer Christ something less than freedom; bread, or miracle, or mystery, or authority, but not freedom. For, as the dread Spirit had said, “Thou wouldst go into the World, and Thou art going into the World with empty hands, with some promise of freedom which people in their simplicity and their natural unruliness cannot even understand, which they fear and dread—for nothing has ever been more insupportable for a mortal and a human society than freedom.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
And, in the words of the Grand Inquisitor: I tell Thee that mortals are tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly to whom one can hand over that gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creature is born….Didst Thou forget that mortals prefer peace, and even death, to freedom of choice in the knowledge of good and evil? In place of the rigid ancient law, Thou wouldst have it that mortals must hereafter with free heart decide for oneself what is good and what is evil, having only Thy image before one as one’s guide. However, didst Thou not know that one would at last reject even Thy image and Thy truth, if one is weighed down with the fearful burden of free choice? Is the nature of mortals such that one can reject miracle, and at the great moments of one’s life, the moments of one’s deepest, most agonizing spiritual difficulties, cling only to the free verdict of the heart? Thou didst think too highly of mortals therein, for they are slaves. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
We must ask ourselves what arrangement of the parts of the self might produce the feeling of freedom which Christ is represented as offering to mortal, then we may get an important clue from this passage. Consider this sentence of the Grand Inquisitor: “Didst Thou forget that mortals prefers peace, and even death, to freedom of chose in the knowledge of good and evil?” And, again, “In place of the rigid, ancient law, Thou wouldst have it that mortals must hereafter with free heart decide for oneself what is good and what is evil…” Here is a psychoanalytic sort of interpretation: the knowledge of good and evil refers to conscious knowledge of all the usually unconscious, internalized prohibitions and prescriptions, particularly those that relate to the most primitive and most energy-laden of our drives. Knowledge of good and evil implies the availability to consciousness both of impulses and of the forces that control impulse. It means, further, that the expression or renunciation of impulse would become a matter of conscious decision, made by the whole self, rather than a matter of the triumph of blind forces of either desire or restraint. Another way of putting this, in terms of such theoretical constructs as psychoanalysis provides, would be to say that, in freedom, the ego would no longer relate to the superego as a child to a punishing parent, but that the superego would become entirely integrated with the ego. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
The feeling of constraint, then, may be said to derive from a fearful and hating orientation of the ego to the superego—that is, from an arrangement of parts of the self that would be the inner equivalent of being constrained from without, by alien and powerful forces. Such an arrangement is learned, of course; it occurs as a result of the experience of having been constrained by others, chiefly the parents. Still, it is evident that some such specialization of parts of the self is the normal and desirable state of affairs. If discipline is orderly, rational, and loving, it will not lead to severe repression and to consequent domination by unconscious forces. The feeling of freedom and the absence of inner, irrational compulsions will then be determined chiefly by the extent to which the superego is rational and conscious, and impulse is gratified or renounced in accordance with the decision of the ego. The existence of internalized irrational parents is thus a prime source of the feeling of compulsion, and indeed may actually restrict ability to respond adaptively—recall the phrase “the rigid, ancient law.” If, however, the ego itself were to become the source of ethical prescriptions, having assimilated the old function of the superego, the source of the prescription would no longer be unconscious and the feeling of compulsion would vanish. This is the aim of the psychoanalytically-based psychotherapies. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
It should be noted that the production of a relatively rational superego by loving and rational parents is still something very short of that hypothetically possible if rarely realized state in which superego and ego are one. The client-centered therapy whose theory and practice is particularly impressive in its emphasis on the unconditional self-worth of the client and the total acceptance by the therapist of the fundamental goodness of the client. In terms of this analysis, such therapy would offer the client a loving and rational parent to internalize, but it would not have the further goal—and one that is rarely achieved in any case—of making available to consciousness once again the most primitive of impulses and the most powerful and most repressed of prohibitions. However, this latter is something of a digression. Let us return to the defensive character of compulsion, and to one of the most important of the arguments made against Christ by the Grand Inquisitor—that “nothing has ever been insupportable for mortal and a human society than freedom.” Why should the majority of people find such an arrangement of the self an intolerable one? Largely, one must answer, because of infantile fears—or, more accurately, because of fears that were very great during the period of early childhood, and that have persisted with undiminished intensity in the unconscious. Such fears were, to begin with, fears of outer forces of great power—literally, I believe, fear that one would be destroyed for expressing impulses unrestrained. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
In civilized society (which, unhappily, a baby does not realize it has been born into) such fears might be called, from our civilized, adult viewpoint, unrealistic. Most parents really do not mean their children any harm. The baby, however, is not yet civilized, and he invests the outer forces with every bit as much intensity of desire, and rage when frustrated, as he himself possess. Thus he has good reason, when he is angry or insatiate, to fear the giants with whom he interacts and on whom he depends. He fears them because of the strength of his own impulses, which he experiences fully, and because the boundary between inner and outer is still fluid, so that he is not always certain who is enraged. In the adult, such fears persist, first of all, as fear of impulses from within, and, secondly, as fear of destruction from the internalized parents. It would be easy to say, “unrealistic fears,” but the fact is that persons kill themselves for their own impulses—that is, they deal out the most extreme punishment to themselves for a crime they were impelled to commit, though the crime they do in fact commit is murder of the self rather than of the other. Where impulses are so fearsome and the forces of restraint so ferocious, it seems safer not to be free—or, to put the matter in other terms, it seems safer not to know anything about the situation of the self. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
However, here one is reminded of a most significant quotation from the New Testament—“one who would save one’s life shall lose it…” The moral message of Christ, insofar as it is embodied in this question, consisted exactly of the advocacy of the wisdom of self-forgetfulness, which objectively in psychoanalytic terms means the establishment of a relationship of harmony and love between the ego and the superego, or the dissolution of the wall that separates what we are from what we think we should be. I cannot develop the thesis in detail here, but it seems to me that the New Testament is best understood in terms of the relationship between personified conscious knowledge—the Word made flesh, alive and changing, taking its chances, open to beauty and decay—and the ancient, rigid law and lawgiver, fixed, abstract, decided. The constantly recurring imagery of the Son and the Father suggests that the specific content of the conflict and the disharmony which Christ sough to resolve. To recapitulate: freedom, or conscious knowledge of the primitive forces of id and superego, is greatly feared, even in adulthood, because of the persistence in the unconscious of the earliest and most intense of fears. Thus the prospect of freedom is intolerable. One further aspect should be touched upon. The condition of freedom, or complete consciousness, would entail complete assumption of responsibility for one’s self. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
One could not claim to know not what one did, for the impulse in all its vulnerable state would be experienced. The intention would be fully realized and, if consented to, accomplished in full knowledge. However, if one follows the dictates of an internalized parent and is thereby somewhat less free to act according to one’s deepest inclinations, one is at the same time not wholly responsible for the consequences. The parent is responsible, and the ego is still a child. Thus the individual may avoid judging for one’s self what is right and what is wrong. One is not weighed down by the fearful burden of free choice, and one is consequently actually less free. For it remains to be said that the truth shall make one free. The essential point of this analysis is that objective freedom, in the sense of response variability, is at a maximum when a genuine feeling of freedom exists, and that such a feeling of freedom occurs in the presence of a broadened consciousness both of impulse and of ethical prescriptions. So far as the postulate of determinism is concerned (for instance, absolute predictability in principle), it should be quite evident that such a postulate is irrelevant to both the objective and the subjective meanings of freedom. If one assumes a closed system of knowledge and a perfect description of the given state of affairs, then all events are absolutely predictable, including the actions of human beings of quite different degrees of objective freedom and of subjective sense of freedom. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
The acceptance of determinism as a working hypothesis is basic to psychology as a science. When it become more than that, as it so often does, and is elevated from modus vivendi to sentiment and then to principle for one’s whole life, it is surely itself a form of self-imposed restriction upon imagination and the capacity to create. For myself, I believe there is a recalcitrant oddness at the heart of things—I had almost written at the heart of hearts—and I am pleased when my mind wanders off to think no more of this or that. There are many experiences which jar us out of the quantitative, routine treadmill of time, but chief among them is the thought of dying. A modern English author describes how he endeavored for years to write by following conventional methods. “I thought I could write to formula,” as he put it; and during the war, he continued, “I found out why I had not been published before. When we were all thinking we might die the next day, I decided to write what I wanted.” When we point out, as actually happened, that his writing then became successful, some persons might interpret the illustration with a conventional success moral, “If you wish to be successful write what you want.” However, such a moral, of course, entirely misses the point. The author’s previous need to write according to external standards and for ulterior purposes—success being the chief one in our day—was exactly what was blocking him in tapping his qualities and powers as a writer. And it was precisely this need that he gave up at the time of facing death. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
If one may die tomorrow, why knock one’s self out trying to fit this standard or that formula? Assuming tat success and rewards might be achieved by writing to formula—which is a toss-up in any case—one may not be around long enough anyway to enjoy the rewards, so why not treat one’s self to the joy at the moment of writing according to one’s own integrity? The possibility of death jars us loose from the treadmill of time because it so vividly reminds us that we do not go on endlessly. It shocks us into taking the present seriously. Thinking that tomorrow is also a blessed day no longer comforts and excuses; one cannot wait around forever. It makes more crucial for us the fact that whole we are not dead at the moment, we some time will be: so why not choose something at least interesting in the meantime? The so-call cynical poet of the Old Testament, Ecclesiastes, is in fact very realistic at this point. Amid his recurrent refrain, “all is vanity,” he points out that the wise man will not wait around for future rewards and punishments. “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do” Ecclesiastes continues, “do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor substance, nor knowledge, nor wisdom in the grave whiter thou goest.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
A mortal should act under the form of eternity. For I understand Eternity to be existence itself. For the existence of a thing, such as an eternal truth cannot explained by duration or time. The existence of something depends on its essence—and idea which is not as abstruse as it sounds at first glance. To apply it to one’s self, a person acts under the form of eternity to the extent that one’s actions arise from one’s own essential center. In example of the author we talked about previously, such an act was his decision to write, not according to external changing fads, which rise and fall from week to week, but from the inward, unique, original character which makes one an individual. Living in the eternal moment does not mean mere intensity of living (though self-awareness always adds some intensity to one’s experience): nor does it mean living by an absolute doctrine or covenant, religious or otherwise, or by a moral rule. It means, rather, making one’s decision in freedom and responsibility, in self-awareness and in accord with one’s own unique character as a person. If a person is to be creative in one’s use of anger, two basic conditions need to prevail. In the first place one needs to be aware of anger and accept is as a valued part of the self. Secondly, one needs to be able to express one’s anger directly and responsibility. If these conditions can be met in some degree, various values can be achieved. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
For one thing, this creative use of anger will mean less punishment of ourselves. We will not be so likely, for example, to suffer physical illness. It is unquestionably true that many instances of heart trouble, high blood pressure, and ulcers (to name the most obvious problems) are related to the suppression of anger. When a person is filled with chronic unexpressed hostility (of which one may or may not be aware), the body is overworked by being in an almost constant state of preparation for emergency in which the heart works harder, the blood pressure rises, and digestive processes slow down. Eventually the body is likely to suffer permanent physical damage under this strain. If the person is able to deal with anger as it arises and get it out of one’s system, however, the natural rhythm of the body can be maintained as the reactions caused by the anger quickly subside. Since depression also often results from turning anger in on oneself, creative expression of anger can frequently eliminate this punishment we inflect on ourselves. Kelley, a college girl, made an almost successful suicide attempt by taking a large number of sleeping tablets. In the weeks that followed, with the encouragement of a therapist, she began to express some of the anger toward her parents that she had previously felt she dare not talk about. Kelley’s depression quickly subsided, assisted in part by the fact that her parents accepted her feelings much better than she had thought they would. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
The creative expression of anger not only helps us to be less self-destructive, but it also makes for more effective relationships with others. Many of us, because of early teaching, go through our lives assuming the opposite. If we become angry, we are likely to feel guilty because we feel we have destroyed something between ourselves and the other person. So instead of improving ourselves in the skill of expressing anger, we try to become better at controlling and suppressing it. How can getting mad at others improve our relationship with them? Well, for one thing, when we express anger, we are more emotionally honest in our relationships. Too often we do not really know each other, even when we desire to be intimate. Our encounters with each other have a shadowy, unreal quality, because there are so many gaps in our communication. We hide many of our feelings. Often the feelings we hide is anger. And when we do not express our anger to those who matter to us, we do both ourselves and them a disservice. Our lack of candor perpetuates the psychological distance that exists in the relationship and cheats us of satisfying experiences of intimacy. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
A cunning part of Satan’s strategy is to dissociate anger from agency, making us believe that we are victims of an emotion that we cannot control. One couple discovered after fifteen years of marriage that the wife had harbored resentment about a pet peeve for most of that time. Whenever they went out for and evening or weekend with other couple, she thought he did not pay their share of the costs. However, she never expressed her anger. Finally, when it did come out in a group-therapy session, she discovered that all the time he had been contributing their share or more in a quiet, unassuming way. If she had been more emotionally honest and had been able to express her anger years earlier, this particular could would not have impaired their relationship. It begins to become clear, then, that to show anger is often an expression of love and concern, a way of saying, “You matter to me.” On a community level, for example, significant social reforms have usually occurred in situations where someone has expressed anger about existing conditions, saying in effect to some segment of society, “You are hurting yourself and all of us by what you are doing.” We learn in the proclamation on the family that the family is central to the Creator’s plan and that husband and wife have a solemn responsibility to love and care for each other and a sacred duty to rear their children in love and righteousness. The family is also Satan’s primary target. He waging war on the family. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
One of his schemes is the subtle and cunning way he has of sneaking behind enemy lines and entering our homes and lines. Satan often damages and destroys families within the walls of their own homes. His strategy is to stir up anger between family members. Satan is the father of contention, and he stirs up the hearts of people with anger, one with another. To lose one’s temper is an interesting choice of words that has become a widely used idiom. To lose something implies not meaning to, accidental, involuntary, not responsible—careless perhaps but not responsible. “He made me made.” This is another phrase we hear, also implying lack of control or agency. This is a myth that must be debunked. No one makes us mad. Others do not make us angry. There is no force involved. Becoming angry is a conscious choice, a decision; therefore, we can make the choice not to become angry. We choose! Choice and accountability are inseparable principles. May the Lord bless you and inspire you to walk without anger. “One who is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and one that rules one’s spirit than one that takes a city,” reports Proverbs 16.32. It is when we become angry that we get into trouble. Most of the inmates of our prisons are there because they did something when they were angry. “Be not hasty in thy spirit to be angry: for anger rests in the heart of the unfortunate,” reports Ecclesiastes 7.9. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
A loneliness slowly began to penetrate down through his throat and into his quivering heart. Give me a little time. If they still exist, if they have parented a colony, if they are anywhere in the wide World, I know those who will know where they are—without a question. It is right that you love your country. There is only one thing greater than our devotion to our country. That is our love of the City of God. Never forget the words of our father Augustine, “The citizens of the City of God fight with spiritual weapons—love and prayer and truth.” God will have mercy upon us. He will grant strength to these people who fight to save us! If we do not pray as we ought, as long as we keep God in our hearts, he will forgive us. We believe in God’s power of truth and love, we have given our lives to him. And we love our nation and our families. Christ will have mercy! He will forgive the sin upon our souls. Christ will forgive! Christ has suffered like us, he became a man to know our sins, and does know our hearts. He too did love a land—he taught us about the lilies of the field! And Christ did love his family and his friends as we love ours! Christ will take us into his care. Ah, he will forgive us, blessed Christ! When we are free, it will feel as though we are being lifted up by everlasting arms…the walls of the chapel will be erased and we will merge with our prayer, united wit Spirit. #RandolphHarris 1 of 10
As we merge with our prayers, there will be a great burst of light, and the radiance and harmony expands and takes the whole Earth and the sky…all is harmony and beauty and resplendence…one will feel an ecstasy, the dizziness within one will become joyful and at the same moment one will be filled with a vast peacefulness. The everlasting arms hold one, but one needs no support for all is a brilliant light. We will breath the air of infinity, all about us is Being in a great exaltation. Is this everlasting beauty the glimpse into the City of God, a new city where all is peace? A thing of beauty is a joy forever: It is loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness; but still will keep a bower quiet for us, and a sleep full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing. Each of us sees the World as an individual, alone, caught up in a vast maelstrom; but by our culture we learn to communicate with our fellow human beings. Poetry, dancing, painting and other arts are all ways of communicating. We not only see the World but the World conforms to our way of seeing it. This is certainly true in the field of art. The great contribution of art is that, in our centuries on this planet, we have been enabled to share, to give to each other, to communicate, to love the World and, in the broad sense, to love each other. This will sound strange to those who think the World is a cold mass of whirling star dust, but not to those who can form their World in communication by whatever beauty they can see and experience. #RandolphHarris 2 of 10
The anxiety in creating—which we see most clearly in persons like Giacometti or Michelangelo or Beethoven—is overcome by playing. This playing (which may also be hard work) is our human way of overcoming the dualism—finite and infinite—in producing a work of art. The art unites both of these. The World becomes lonely no more, for one experiences being an integral part of it. It used to be asked, in view of the invention and progress of photography, whether painting would not be superseded or at least made only an innocent and unnecessary pastime. The question is absurd. It rests on a radical misunderstanding of painting, the function of which is not to make a record of the external World but to share some special conception of life and the World which the painter experiences. Sometimes artist and people who share essays never know how they will turn out. It is just a conception of the World and will not let go of the individual until one responds. It gives one a sense of participating in the Universe. One experiences a kind of ecstasy, great or small as it may be. And when the product is finished, the producer looks at it and feels a kind of surprise because a view of reality was communicated to them, and they formed it on the medium to communicate it to their friends. The most one can hope for is that you like their production, that it gives you some joy, and that it tells you something about the World as he or she communicates with it. #RandolphHarris 3 of 10
It is by no means as easy as it may look to live in the immediate present. For it requires a high degree of awareness of one’s self as an experiencing “I.” The less one is conscious of oneself as the one who acts, that is, the more unfree and automatic one is, the less one will be aware of the immediate present. As one person who was trying to avoid boredom in a meaningless (well, not job is meaningless because they provide a life and security) routine job described it, “I work as though I were someone else, not myself.” In such situations we feel as though we were a million miles away from what we are doing, acting as though in a daze or as though in a dream or half asleep or as though there were a wall between one’s self and the present. However, the more awareness one has—that is, the more one experiences oneself as the acting, directing agent in what one is doing—the more alive one will be and the more responsive to the present moment. Like self-awareness itself, this experiencing of the reality of the present can be cultivated. It is often useful to ask one’s self, “What do I experience at this very moment?” Or “Where am I—what is most significant to me emotionally—at this given moment?” To confront the reality of the present moment often produced anxiety. On the most basic level, this anxiety is a kind of vague experience of being exposed and vulnerable; it is the feeling of being face to face with some important reality before which one cannot flinch and from which one cannot retreat or hide. #RandolphHarris 4 of 10
The reality of confronting the present moment also produces anxiety because it is like the feeling one might have in coming suddenly face to face with a person one loved and admired: one is confronted with an intense relationship one must react to, do something about. It is an intensity of experience, this immediate and direct confronting of the reality of the moment, similar to intense creative activity, and it carries with it the same susceptibility and creative anxiety as well as the same joy. The more obvious reason why confronting the present produces anxiety is that it raises the question of decisions and responsibility. One cannot do much about the past, and very little about the distant future—how pleasant, then, to dream about them! How free from bother, how relieved from troublesome thoughts about what one has to do with one’s life! The mortal who has quarreled with one’s wife can talk of one’s mother with relief, but to consider the quarrel with one’s wife sooner or later entails the question of what one proposes to do about it? It is easier to dream of “when I get married” than to face the question, “Why do I not do something about my social life now?”; simpler to muse of “my future job when I get out of college” than to ask why one’s studies are not more vital at the moment, and what one’s motives for being in college anyway. #RandolphHarris 5 of 10
The most effective way to ensure the value of the future, as we have mentioned, is to confront the present courageously and constructively. For the future is born out of and made by the present. The traces of our Earthly being will outlast aeons. That is to say, every creative act has its eternal aspect. This is not by ecclesiastical fiat, or merely because of the immortality of influence, but because, as we have shown, an essential characteristic of the creative act done in human consciousness is that it is not limited by quantitative time. No one values a painting according to how long it took to paint it or how big it is: should we judge our actions by more superficial standards than a painting? This brings us to the deteriorated forms of the religious idea of eternal life. The phrase eternal life is popularly used to imply endless time, as though eternity meant going on year after year limitlessly. One sees this view implied in the question frequently painted by some persons—with what motives Heaven only knows—on the dies f buildings to challenge the passer-by on the highways, “Where will you spent eternity?” When you think about it, this is an odd question. “Spend” implies a given quantity—if you spend half your money, you have only half left; and could one spend half or two-thirds of eternity? Such a view of eternity is not only repugnant psychologically—what a boring prospect, that one spends year after year endlessly!—but it is also absurd logically and unsound theologically. #RandolphHarris 6 of 10
Eternity is not a given quantity of time: it transcends time. Eternity is the qualitative significance of time. One does not have to identify the experience of listening to music with the theological meaning of eternity to realize that in music—or in love, or in any work which proceeds from one’s inner integrity—that the eternal is a way of relating to life, not a successions of tomorrows. Hence Jesus proclaimed, “the Kingdom of Heaven is within you.” That is to say, your experience of eternity will be found in how you relate to each given moment—or not at all. Eternity comes into the present moment as a quality of existence. The deteriorated uses of the term eternal have caused many intelligent people to avoid it. And that has been unfortunate, for it has meant omitting an important side of human experience, and constricting our views psychologically and philosophically. The problem of time may well be the fundamental problem of philosophy. An instant in time possesses value to the extent to which it is united to eternity and provides an issue out of the issuelessness of time—only in virtue of being an atom of eternity. The present moment is thus not limited from one point on the clock to another. It is always full of instants, always ready to open, to be produced. One has only to try the experiment of looking deeply within oneself, let us say, trailing almost any random idea, and one will find, so rich is a moment of consciousness in the human mind, that associations and new ideas beckon in every direction. #RandolphHarris 7 of 10
Or take a dream—it occurred in just one flash of consciousness as the alarm went off, yet it might take many minutes for you to tell all it pictured. To be sure, one picks and chooses. One does not live out one’s dreams or fantasies—except temporarily, if one is composing music, or in a psychoanalytic session, or constructing some plan in fantasy for one’s work. And even then one keeps a clear awareness of the relation of the beckoning possibilities which are being uncovered to actual reality. This the moment always has its finite side, to use a philosophical term, which the mature person never forgets. However, the moment also always has its infinite side, it always beckons with new possibilities which are being uncovered to actual reality. Thus the moment also always has infinite side, it always beckons with new possibilities which are being uncovered to actual reality. Thus the moment always has its finite side, to use a philosophical term, which the mature person never forgets. However, the moment also always has its infinite side, it always beckons with new possibilities. Time for the human being is not a corridor; it is a continual opening out. The mechanism of necessity can be transposed to any level while still remaining true to itself. It is the same in the World of pure matter, in the terrestrial World, among nations, and in souls. Seen from our present standpoint, and in human perspective, it is quite blind. #RandolphHarris 8 of 10
If, however, we transport our hearts beyond ourselves, beyond the Universe, beyond space and time to where our Father dwells, and if from there we behold this mechanism, it appears quite different. What seemed to be necessity becomes obedience. Matter is entirely passive and in consequence entirely obedient to God’s will. It is a perfect model for us. There cannot be any being other than God and that which obeys God. On account of its perfect obedience, matter deserves to be loved by those who love its Master, in the same way as a needle, handled by the beloved wife he has lost, is cherished by a lover. The beauty of the World gives us an intimation of its claim to be a place in our heart. In the beauty of the World brute necessity becomes an object of love. What is more beautiful than the action of gravity on the fugitive folds of the sea wave, or on the almost eternal folds of the mountains? The sea is not less beautiful in our eyes because we know that sometimes ships are wrecked by it. On the contrary, this adds to its beauty. If it altered the moment of its waves to spare a boat, it would be a creature gifted with discernment and choice and not this fluid, perfectly obedient to every external pressure. It is this perfect obedience that constitutes the sea’s beauty. All the horrors produced in the World are like the folds imposed upon the ways by gravity. That is why they contain an element of beauty. #RandolphHarris 9 of 10
Mortals can never escape from obedience to God. A creature cannot but obey. The only choice given to mortals, as intelligent and free creatures, is to desire obedience or not to desire it. If a mortal does not desire it, one obeys nevertheless, perpetually, inasmuch as one is a thing subject to mechanical necessity. If one desires it, one is still subject to mechanical necessity, but a new necessity is added to it, a necessity constituted by laws belonging to supernatural things. Certain actions become impossible for one; others are done by one’s agency, sometimes almost in spite of oneself. When we have the feeling that on some occasion we have disobeyed God, it simply means that for a time we have ceased to desire obedience. Of course it must be understood that, where everything else is equal, a mortal does not perform the same actions if one gives one’s consent to obedience as if one does not; just as a plant, where everything ese is equal, does not grow in the same way in the light as in the dark. The plant does not have any control or choice in the matter of its own growth. As for us, we are like plants that have the one choice of being in or out of the light. “I say unto you, can you look up to God at that day with a pure heart and clean hands? I say unto you can you look up, having the image of God engraven upon your countenances?” reports Alma 5.19. #RandolphHarris 10 of 10
The Sun was setting behind us, and the grass at our feet glowed alight with the reflection from the orange sky. There was a faint tinkle of bells echoing up this ridge. The evening breeze which touched my skin with coolness brought the perfume of wisteria. The is Heavenly peace. How abundantly God has spread his beauty here! The trivial operations of the heart are burnt away in quietude. Burnt away in humility that I could feel this, know this, and contain it within my prudent soul. How you could stay innocent so long is a miracle to me. No doubt tat is what the love of books does for you. Some of us are made to marry a faith—just as the colonel here has married a flag. Spiritual forces are stronger than firearms. The citizens of the City of God use spiritual weapons—prayer and love and truth. The City of God is Heaven, but its splendor comes into the City of the World in the truth and love which finally will conquer even the sword. It is a greater joy to aspire to the City of God, to live in the beauty which is greater than words can describe, and to converse with the eternal spirits of our Fathers and to love the truth of God. There is not real affliction unless the event that has seized and uprooted a life attacks it, directly or indirectly, in all its parts, social, psychological, and physical. The social factor is essential. There is not really affliction unless there is social degradation or the fear of it in some form or another. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
The great enigma of human life is not suffering but affliction. However, it is surprising that God should have given affliction the power to seize the very souls of the innocent and to take possession of them as their sovereign Lord. At the very best, one who is branded by affliction will keep only half of one’s soul. Affliction makes God appear to be absent for a time, more absent than light in the utter darkness of a cell. What is terrible is that if, in this darkness where there is nothing to love, the soul ceases to love, God’s absence becomes final. The soul has to go on loving in the emptiness, or at least to go on wanting to love, though it may only be with an infinitesimal part of itself. Then, one day, God will come to show himself to this soul and to reveal the beauty of the World to it, as in the case of Job. However, if the soul stops loving it falls, even in this life, into something almost equivalent to Hell. That is why those who plunge mortals into affliction before they are prepared to receive it kill their souls. On the other hand, in a time such as ours, where affliction is hanging over us all, help given to souls is effective only if it goes far enough really to prepare them for affliction. That is no small thing. Affliction hardens and discourages us because, like a red hot iron, it stamps the soul to its very depths with the scorn, the disgust, and even the self-hatred and sense of guilt and defilement that crime logically should produce but does not. Evil dwells in the hear of the criminal without being felt there. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Evil is felt in the heart of the mortal who is afflicted and innocent. Everything happens as though the state of soul suitable for criminals had been separated from crime and attached to affliction; and it even seems to be in proportion to the innocence of those who are afflicted. If Job cries out that he is innocent in such despairing accents, it is because he himself is beginning not to believe in it; it is because his soul within him is taking the side of his friends. He implores God himself to bear witness, because he no longer hears the testimony of his own conscience; it is no longer anything but an abstract, lifeless memory for him. Our senses attach all the scorn, all the revulsion, all the hatred that our reason attaches to crime, to affliction. Expect for those whose whole soul is inhabited by Christ, everybody despises the afflicted to some extent, although practically no one is conscious of it. This law of sensibility also holds good with regard to ourselves. In the case of someone in affliction, all the scorn, revulsion, and hatred are turned inward. They penetrate to the center of the soul and from there color the whole Universe with their poisoned light. Supernatural love, if it has survived, can prevent this second result from coming about, but not the first. The first is of the very essence of affliction; there is no affliction without it. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
All neurotic problems are manifested in the structure and functioning of the body. This thesis implies that by proper training in what to observe, a great deal about a person may be discerned merely from looking at the individual. There is no neurotic problem which does not manifest itself in ever aspect of the individual’s function. Because we express our personalities or character in every action and in every attitude it becomes possible to determine character traits from such diverse expressions as handwriting, the walk of the person and so forth. Most important, however, is the physical appearance at rest in movement. No words are so clear as the language of body expression once one has learned to read it. [Each part of the body is the repository of some difficulties.] The legs and feet are the foundation and support of the ego structure. However, they have other functions. It is through our legs and our feet that we keep contact with one invariable reality in our lives, the Earth or the ground. We speak of a people as being Earthy to mean that they have a good sense of reality. The contrary, to be up in the air, denotes a lack of contact with reality. The lack of contact with the feet and the ground is related to another common symptom, falling anxiety. This symptom is manifested in dreams of falling, in fear of heights, and in the fear of falling in love. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Where there is a basic insecurity in the lower half of the body, the individual compensates by holding on with arms and eyes to objective reality. One may question why I include fear of falling in love with symptoms of basic insecurity. Of course the very expression to fall in love relates this phenomena to the others, but we also know that to fall in love is a form of ego surrender. All forms of falling anxiety translate the fear of loss of ego control. It is a drenching storm inside. Another effect of affliction is, little by little, to make the soul its accomplice, by injecting a poison of inertia into it. In anyone who has suffered affliction for a long enough time there is a complicity with regard to one’s own affliction. This complicity impedes all the efforts one might make to improve one’s lot; it goes so far as to prevent one from seeking a way of deliverance, sometimes even to the point of preventing one from wishing for deliverance. Then one is established in affliction, and people might think one was satisfied. Further, this complicity may even induce one to shun the means of deliverance. In such cases it veils itself with excuses which are often ridiculous. Even a person who has come through one’s affliction will still have something left in one compelling one to plunge into it again, if it has bitten deeply and forever into the substance of one’s soul. It is as though affliction had established itself in one like a parasite and were directing one to suit its own purposes. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
When we study the expression of the face as a measure of the character and of the personality we are on more familiar ground. Our attention should be directed first to the eyes. It must be with some reason that the eyes are regarded as the mirrors of the soul. Some eyes are bright and sparkle, some shine like stars, others are dull and many are vacant. Of course, the expression changes. We seek, therefore, for the typical look. Some eyes are sad, others are angry; some are cold and hard, others are soft and appealing. Of greater significance are those unconscious expressions which are frozen into the countenance, so much so that we take them for granted as part of the personality. Sometimes these impulses triumph over all the movements of the soul toward happiness. If the affliction has been ended as a result of some kindness, it may take the form of hatred for the benefactor; such is the cause of certain apparently inexplicable acts of savage ingratitude. It is sometimes easy to deliver an unhappy person from one’s present distress, but it is difficult to set one free from one’s part affliction. Only God can do it. And even the grace of God itself cannot cure irremediably wounded nature here below. One can only accept the existence of affliction by considering it at a distance. God created through love and for love. God did not create anything except love itself, and the means to love. God created love in all its forms. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
God created beings capable of love from all possible distance, the infinite distance. This infinite distance between God and God, this supreme tearing apart, this agony beyond all others, this marvel of love is life. Noting can be further from God than that which has been made accursed. This tearing apart, over which supreme love places the bond of supreme union, echoes perpetually across the Universe in the midst of the silence, like two notes, separate yet melting into one, like pure and heart-rending harmony. This is the Word of God. The whole creation is nothing but its vibration. When human music in its greatest purity pierces our soul, this is what we hear through it. When we have learned to hear the silence, this is what we grasp more distinctly through it. Those who preserve in love hear this note from the very lowest depths into which affliction has thrust them. From that moment they can no longer have any doubt. Sin is not a distance, it is a turning of our gaze in the wrong direction. It is true that there is a mysterious connection between this distance and an original disobedience. From the beginning, we are told, humanity turned its gaze away from God and walked in the wrong direction for as far as it could go. That was because it could walk them. As for us, we are nailed down to the spot, only free to choose which way we look, ruled by necessity. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
A blind mechanism, headless of degrees of spiritual perfection, continually tosses people about and throws some of them at the very foot of the Cross. It rests with them to keep or not to keep their eyes turned toward God through all the jolting. It does not mean that God’s Providence is lacking. It is in his Providence that God has willed that necessity should be like a blind mechanism. If the mechanism were not blind there would not be any affliction. Affliction is anonymous before all things; it deprives its victims of their personality and makes them into things. It is indifferent; and it is the coldness of this indifference—a metallic coldness—that freezes all those it touches right to the depths of their souls. They will never find warmth again. They will never believe any more that they are anyone. Have you not seen people who show a perpetual expression of pain on their face? Are these people in pain? Certainly! Depth analysis of the unconscious would reveal that these expressions portray repressed feelings—surprise, disgust or pain. Affliction would not have this power without the element of chance contained by it. Those who are persecuted for their faith and are aware of the fact are not afflicted, although they have to suffer. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
People only fall into a state of affliction if suffering or fear fills the soul to the point of making it forget the cause of the persecution. The martyrs who entered the arena, singing as they went face wild beasts, were not afflicted. Christ was afflicted. He did not die like a martyr. He died more like a common criminal, confused with thieves, only a little more ridiculous. For affliction is ridiculous. Only blind necessity can throw mortals to the extreme point of distance, right next to the Cross. Human crime, which is the cause of most affliction, is part blind necessity, because criminals do not know what they are doing. We have already seen that we are frightened of the anger within us, because we have been taught to fear it and to consider its direct expression to be evil and dangerous. We have also seen that chronic suppression of anger does damage to ourselves and to our relationships with others. It is time now to look at the beneficial side in order to see that anger is a natural and legitimate part of our lives and that it has creative uses in our relationships with others. Perhaps the naturalness of anger can best be observed in people who have not yet learned to suppress their feelings. In its most pure form, anger is a reaction to frustration of desire. Anger is often coupled with other emotions. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
If a person is threatened by a bully one will feel frightened, but one is also likely to feel angry, too. If the fear is strong enough to keep person from attacking, one may feel a helpless rage. One’s fear tells the individual to run and one’s anger says to attack. Momentarily, at least, one is immobilized. Although adult situations are usually more subtle and sophisticated than this, similar feelings are more common. Hurt, too, is often accompanied by anger. If the bully attacks and bloodies someone’s nose, there will be anger as well as pain. If the threat is not removed the person will also fear further hurt. Most often the pain that is experienced will have been inflicted psychologically rather than by physical injury. Certain automatic bodily reactions are the natural accompaniment of the emotion of anger. These probably differ very little from those that occur when we become frightened. These changes in the body serve the practical purpose of preparing the individual to meet the emergency situation at hand. What happens to Barron Schutz when he becomes angry? If Barron’s stomach is at work, that digestive process slows to a virtual halt. The blood supply in those regions and in the skin is sharply reduced and this supply rushes to the muscles and to the brain, where the body assumes it will be needed. His heart beats faster and blood pressure rises. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Meanwhile, the adrenal glands have pumped adrenaline into the blood stream, which causes certain chemical changes to take place. Sugar is released into the blood stream, and more oxygen becomes available, increasing potential output energy. Changes also occur to provide for more rapid clotting of the blood than usual if a physical wound is suffered. In a dramatic way the body has prepared itself for action. If Barron decides to fight, his body is ready. If he decided to run away, his body is ready for that, too! And so Barron probably really can run faster if he is being chased across a meadow by rampaging bull than he could if his emotions, fear in this case, were not creating changes in the body. So it is natural that on occasion we become angry and our bodies react with natural and automatic changes. It is in relation to people we care for, however, that we often find it most difficult to accept our anger as natural and legitimate. Granted, we say to ourselves, “that it is acceptable for me to get mad at people I may not care for or do not know, but surely it is not right for me to get angry with someone I love.” However, this reasoning we use on ourselves does not hold up under close examination. It persists only because we have been infected with the teaching the love and anger cannot coexist. It rests on the assumption: “If you are angry at me, you must not love me.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
In reality the opposite is probably more nearly correct; “If you are never angry at me, you must not live me.” For anger is inevitable in relationships that matter to us. If someone whom we care for is sarcastic to us, the sarcasm cuts deeper. If one we love hurts us, the pain is more acute. And if we are frustrated in our desires by a person we love, the loss is more deeply felt. The likelihood of an angry reaction is therefore increased. Furthermore, the more emotionally intimate we are with a person the more certain it is that anger producing situations will arise. Intimacy includes the expression of needs and desires, and these are never completely parallel for any two people. So our desires will often clash with those of a person we love, and one or both of us will be frustrated. Some anger is bound to occur as a result of frustration. If, as sometimes happens, a man and wife claim never to have had an argument or a dispute during their marriage, they must be: newly married; concealing their issues; very insensitive to their feelings; or very emotionally distant from each other. The first thing necessary for a constructive dealing with time is to earn to live in the reality of the present moment. For psychologically speaking, this present moment is all we have. The past and future have meaning because they are part of the present: a past event has existence now because you are thinking of it at this present moment, or because it influences you so that you, as a living being in the present, are that much different. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
The future has reality because one can bring it into one’s mind in the present. Past was the present at one time, and the future will be the present at some coming moment. To try to live in the when of the future or the then of the past always involves an artificiality, a separating one’s self from reality; for in actuality, one exists in the present. The past has meaning as it lights up the present, and the future as it makes the present richer. When a person looks directly into oneself, all one is aware of is one’s instant of consciousness at that particular moment of the present. It is this instant of consciousness which is most real, and must not be fled from. God produces himself and knows himself perfectly, just as we in our miserable fashion make and know objects outside ourselves. However, before all things, God is love. Before all things God loves himself. This love, this friendship of God, is the Trinity. Between the terms united by this relation of divine love there is more than nearness; there is infinite nearness of identity. However, resulting from the Creation, the Incarnation, and the Passion, there is also infinite distance. The totality of space and the totality of time, interposing their immensity, put an infinite distance between God and God. “God knows all these things; and it suffice me to know that this is the case—that there is a time appointed that all shall raise from the dead. Now there must needs be a space betwixt the time of death and the time of resurrection,” reports Alma 40.5-6. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
Lovers or friends desire two things. The one is to love each other so much that they enter into each other and only make one being. The other is to love each other so much that, with half the globe between them, their union will not be diminished in the slightest degree. All that mortals vainly desire here below is perfectly realized in God. We have all those impossible desires within us a mark of our destination, and they are good for us when we no longer hope to accomplish them. The love between God and God, which in itself is God, is this bond of double virtue: the bond that unites two beings so closely that they are no longer distinguishable and really form a single unity and the bond that stretches across distance and triumphs over infinite separation. The unity of God, wherein all plurality disappears, and the abandonment, wherein Christ believes he is left while never ceasing to love his Father perfectly, these are two forms expressing the divine virtue of the same Love, the Love that is God himself. God is so essentially love that the unity, which in a sense is his actual definition, is pure effect of love. Moreover, corresponding to the infinite virtue of unification belonging to this love, there is the infinite separation over which it triumphs, which is the whole creation spread throughout the totality of space and time, made of mechanically harsh matter and interposes between Christ and his Father. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
As for us mortals, our misery gives us the infinitely precious privilege of sharing in this distance placed between the Son and his Father. This distance is only separation, however, for those who love. For those who love, separation, although painful, is a good, because it is love. Even the distress of the abandoned Christ is good. There cannot be a greater good for us on Earth than to share in it. God can never be perfectly present to us here below on account of our flesh. However, he can be almost perfectly absent from us in extreme affliction. This is the only possibility of perfection for us on Earth. That is why the Cross is our only hope. “No forest bears such a tree, with such blossoms, such foliage, and such fruit.” This Universe where we are living, and of which we form a tiny particle, is the distance put by Love between God and God. We are a point in this distance. Space, time, and the mechanism that governs matter are the distance. Everything we call evil is only this mechanism. God has provided that when his grace penetrates to the very center of a mortal and from there illuminates all his being, he is able to walk on the water without violating any of the laws of nature. When, however, a mortal turns away from God, one simply gives oneself up to the law of gravity. Then one thinks that one can decide and choose, but one is only a thing, a stone that falls. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
If we examine human society and souls closely and with real attention, we see that wherever the virtue of supernatural light is absent, everything is obedient to mechanical laws as blind and as exact as the laws of gravitation. To know this is profitable and necessary. Those whom we call criminals are only tiles blown off a roof by the wind and falling at random. Their only fault is the initial choice by which they became such tiles. In most relatively efficient neuroses, the feeling of lack of freedom is suppressed almost all the time, just as the feeling of unhappiness and the sense of loneliness is suppressed. It is commonly true that patients who seek psychotherapy do so at just that moment not because of their neurosis, but because of a temporary breakdown of their usual defenses. Thus the psychoneurotic patient at the beginning of therapy is depressed, anxious, and confused, overwhelmed by feelings that may be characterized in general as psychic impotence. The inability to act is usually caused by a conflict of forces of almost equal strength, a conflict which cannot be dealt with by whatever defenses the patient had previously been wont to employ. The very urgency of the conflict most powerfully brings into consciousness the feeling of inability to act. This painful feeling brings home to the patient one’s need for help, and thus it is usually the initial motivating force in psychotherapy. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
Psychoanalysis proper cannot begin until the crisis that brought the patient to analysis has subsided. In brief psychotherapy, only too often the patient is discharged as improved at the point where the crisis is successfully passed, and where if the relationship were to continue the neurosis itself would have to be analyzed (which would require above all an analysis of the transference and the countertransference). The aim of the superficial therapies, whether explicitly recognized or not, is to re-establish, on a somewhat more efficient basis, the same response patterns that have been the patient’s chief life achievement in relation to one’s self. Improvement in this sort of psychotherapy may therefore at times be a sad thing, for the patent’s initial agitated state might have served as the lever to life one out of one’s neurotic pattern. Such agitation is often the first stirring of a desire for a feeling of freedom after years of unconscious bondage. It should be said here that the feeling of lack of freedom, when it comes to consciousness under such circumstances, may be taken as a genuine expression, or a correct perception, of real lack of freedom in the objective sense of the term. In the individual’s situation—and it must be remembered that the structure of one’s self is part of one’s situation—in that situation, one’s response repertoire is indeed exceedingly limited, so that one is actually not very free. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
The important point is that the feeling of being compelled arises from within, and that it is not proportionate to what we have called potential freedom; rather, it is a function of what we have defined above as actual freedom. To recall those definitions: potential freedom is the total repertoire of responses available to the individual in the whole range of situations in which one might be placed; actual freedom is given by the response repertoire in a particular situation. One of the most poignant aspects of neurotic suffering is the realization by the frustrated individual that objectively it is perfectly within one’s capacities for one to bring about the conditions for which one yearns. One is potentially free—but actually not, because of the structure of the self, and because one one’s self is one’s situation. It is, of course, not freedom of will that one lacks, objectively, one no longer experiences a sense of inner constraint. The increasing demand for psychotherapy is, I believe, due to the fact that it offers, or is seen as offering, greater freedom for the self. It is because of the nature of this inducement, so dear to humankind, that psychotherapy may be, at its worst, one of the baser forms of commerce, and at its best, one of the most heartening of human relationships. “Now, concerning the state of the soul between death and the resurrection—Behold, it has been made known unto me by an Angel, that the spirits of all mortals, as soon as they are departed from this mortal body, yea, the spirits of all mortals, whether they be good or evil, are taken home to that God who gave them life,” reports Alma 40.11. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
This secret has to be kept by you from anyone else. If you keep it from everybody else, then in time I can come to be with them. I mean the rest of the family. I can know them for a little while. The way Reese know everyone at Cresleigh Rocklin Trails. I have always loved that place. Let us talk in the garden. When one deals with values and with action in the realm of values is a question that has been with us throughout this series, whether one can really separate psychology from philosophy. If we place the philosophic positions of other people in the context of objectively discernible fact and consider philosophy of life as a psychological attribute of the persons whom we study, what we have been trying to say is that scientific inquiry is possible. This skating on thin ice, let us admit again, and the ice gets thinner and thinner as we get closer to the great issues. Towards the end of his life (in 1932), Dr. Freud responded to a letter from Albert Einstein, in a correspondence initiated by the ill-destined League of Nations, in which Einstein asked him to state his views as to the possibility of the mitigation of human aggression to a degree sufficient to allow Homo sapiens to survive the immediate crisis and to evolve towards a World community in which peace on Earth would be secured. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
Dr. Freud refers here to the evolution of culture, whose most characteristic features are, in his view, the strengthening of the intellect and the internalization of aggressive impulses. Individuals at the forefront of the cultural evolution exhibit these traits to the highest degree, ergo, we pacifists. Looking at history, it is apparent that the cultural process working within the individual will avail us little unless the culture is able to produce supra-individual institutions that will be decisive in institutionalizing human violence and curbing it by law. The most substantial finding is that sane attitudes are related in the character structure of egalitarian values, interest, and behavior patterns, in males as well as in females. They are also related negatively to Extraversion (traits that indicate how outgoing, energetic, and social people are) and positively to Psychasthenia (psychological disorder characterized by phobias, obsession, compulsions, or excessive anxiety). All three characteristics suggest a lessening of aggression directed outward and more control over its external expression through sublimation and a turning inward. At the same time, sane attitudes go along with curiosity, a higher level of self-development, independence, vitality, originality, creativity, motivation to achieve, and visual ability. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
Higher scorers on the scale show greater preference for complexity, are more original in the responses to the consequences of life, produce better poetic metaphors, are more esthetically sensitive, and score higher on a scale designed to measure the disposition towards originality. All in all, then, it does seem that pacifistic tendencies are related to personality development and are found most prominently in persons whose inner life and creativity are more highly developed and who reflect the general direction of evolution of culture. To be sure, every individual’s private problems and anxiety play into this concern about the clock running out in our World. As everyone knows it is easy enough to use the insecurity of the age as an excuse for one’s own neurosis. We can sigh, “The times are out of joint,” and then excuse ourselves from inquiring whether something may not well be severely out of joint within ourselves. However, quite apart from the fact that our neurotic tendencies love to masquerade behind the imposing phase, “catastrophic World situation,” there remains a wide margin in which the issue raised by the questioners is entirely realistic and sound. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
Our World will continue in its stage of anxiety for some time to come: and everyone who does not choose to play ostrich must confront that fact and learn to live with insecurity. However, it does no good to avoid such questions by some stoical answers like, “We were born in this age and we would better make the most of it.” Let us, rather, inquire into mortal’s relation to time—actually a very curious relation—to see whether we may gain insights which help us to make our time rather than our enemy. We have seen that one of the unique characteristic of mortals is that they can stand outside their present time and imagine themselves ahead in the future or back in the past. This power to look before and after is part of mortal’s ability to be conscious of themselves. Plants and animals live by quantitative time: an hour, a week or a year past, and the tree has another ring on its trunk. However, it is a quite different thing for human beings: mortals are the time-surmounting mammal. The key characteristic which distinguishes mortals from all other living things is their time-binding capacity. The capacity to use the fruits of past labors and experiences as intellectual or spiritual capital for developments in the present. The capacity of human beings to conduct their lives in the ever increasing light of inherited wisdom. The capacity in virtue of which mortals are at once the heritor of the by-gone ages and the trustee of posterity. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
Psychologically and spiritually, mortals do not live by the clock alone. Their time, rather, depends on the significance of the event. Yesterday, let us say, a young man spent an hour traveling on the subway each way to his work, eight hours on his relatively fascinating job, ten minutes after work talking to a young lady he has recently fallen in love with and dreams of marrying, and two hours in the evening at an advance placement adult career education class. Today he remembers noting of the two hours on the subway—it was an entirely empty experience, and he, as is the practice of many people, had closed his eyes and tried to sleep, that is to suspend time until the trip was over. The eight hours on the job made only a little impression on him, as it was mostly routine assignments that day; of the evening class he can recall a little more. However, the ten minutes with the young lady occupies him most of all. He had four dreams that night—one about his class, and three about the young lady. That is to say, ten minutes with the young lady takes up more room space than twenty hours in the rest of the day. Psychological time is not the sheer passage of time as such, but the meaning of the experience, that is, what is significant for the person’s hopes, anxiety, growth. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
Or take a thirty-year-old adult’s memories of his childhood. During the year he was five, thousands of events happened to him. However, now at thirty he can recall only three or four—the day when he went to play with his friend and their grandmother took them to get two scoops each of rainbow sherbet at Lucky, and his ice cream fell as soon as they walked outside the store, or the instant when he saw his new diamond back bicycle under the Christmas tree, or the night his father come home with a cheese cake and he thought it was a pie. This is all he can recall but, interestingly enough, he remembers this handful of events which occurred twenty-five years ago more vividly than ninety-nine percent of the events that occurred just yesterday. Memory is not just the imprint of the past time upon us; it is the keeper of what is meaningful for our deepest hopes and fears. As such, memory is another evidence that we have flexible and creative relation to time, the guiding principle being not the clock but the qualitive significance of our experiences. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
This does not mean that quantitative time can be ignored: we have simply pointed out that we do not live by such time alone. Mortals are always part-and-parcel of the natural World, involved in nature at every point; we will rarely live over one hundred and fifty years, at this point in life, no matter what we think about it. We age, or we get tired if we work too long at a stretch, and we cannot escape the necessity of being realistic about the clock and calendar. Mortals die like every other form of life. However, they are the being who knows it and can foresee their death. By being aware of time, we can control and use it in certain ways. The free will-determinism problem has the quality of a paradox because it opposes a poignant and universal human experience (freedom of choice) to a most impelling assumption (that there is a reason for everything), and a choice must be made between them. It appears, of course, that is one admits that all events are absolutely predictable, then one must admit that what one is about to do a moment from now can be stated with certainty; but if this is so, then one cannot do otherwise. And if there is some possible action that one cannot do, then one is not free. One is, in fact, compelled. To deny such compulsion, it appears, one must assert that in principle not all events are predictable. Thus one seems to regain freedom to act differently a moment from now, in spite of all the psychological responses-catalogues that can ever be invented. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
In the absence of predictability, what obtains is not freedom, but chance. Free will versus determinism is a mistake opposition. There is chance versus predictability, and there is freedom versus constraint, but freedom and predictability belong to two different Universes of discourse. In the nature of the case they cannot be brought into any relationship with one another, save the mistake opposition with which classical philosophy has so long concerned itself. There is no solution to the problem of free will versus determinism; there is possible, and proper, only resolution. Freedom is a personal feeling. It is a range of possible adaptive responses available to organisms in all situation in which they may find themselves. Freedom generally increases univocally as the response repertoire increases. In a particular situation, it is a function as well of the constraints imposed by the situation. In effect, the situation together with the organism defines the organism’s freedom at any given moment. Thus one may speak of potential freedom and actual freedom, actual freedom being freedom at the moment in a given situation, and potential freedom being some value expressing the relation of the organism’s response repertoire to the population of possible situations in which the organism might be placed. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
Freedom in this sense is worth considerable thought. It can be given such thought by the human brain, the freest of all organizations. It is the happy and unique characteristic of the brain that its manifold possibilities of action may all take place inwardly, and that it may act invisibly. This capacity for inward action is a bother to tyrants and defeats the most valiant efforts at imposing constraints. That is why freedom of thought is an indefeasible natural right. One’s brain is inside one’s own skull, and within that limited space it exercises an utterly amazing potential for varied response. The more a person is able to direct one’s life consciously, the more one can use time for constructive benefits. The more, however, that one is conformist, unfree, undifferentiated, the more, that is, one works not by choice but compulsion, the more one is then the object of quantitative time. One is the servant of the time clock or whistle; one teaches such and such number of classes per week or punches so many rivets per hour, one feels good or bad depending on whether it is Monday and the beginning of a work week or Friday and the end; one gauges one’s rewards or lack of them on the scale of how much time one puts in. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
The more conformist and unfree an individual is, the more time is the master. A particular in instance of freedom (for instance, indefeasible freedom of thought, or its intrinsic solitariness), while it seems most important at times wen forces are hostile to civilization are in the ascendancy, it is a relatively minor and unimportant aspect of the freedom that the development of a complicated nervous system has given mortals. It is safe to say that our potential freedom is unimaginable. A small extension of it may be seen in the most complex of our calculating machines, and a prevision of its scope enlivens the pages of science fiction. The essence of our human freedom is this, that matter has acquired the capacity to work radical modifications in itself. Thus, among its available responses is the ability to act in such a manner as to increase its own flexibility, or deliberately to maximize its own response variability. One of the products of this ability in the human case is the invention and cultivation of psychotherapy, which provides a unique meeting ground of the objectivity and subjective meanings of freedom. In any event, in this sense of freedom, as the range of possible adaptive responses, freedom is a characteristic of material organization, and the range of values it takes is infinite. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
Some of the anxiety on the time is running out theme in our day comes from something deeper than the potential of what could happen to the World. For the passage of time in any age has the power to frighten the human being. Many people are caught in the short when they feel time slipping by. Some people had life plans that have been interrupted and will take time. For instance, a man who has been delayed in buying his house might be downtrodden because he wanted his trees to be mature by a certain age. Other people, in general, may feel that time is their archenemy. Our conscious time always confronts us with the question of whether we are alive, growing, or merely trying to ward off being finite beings. When people are afraid of maturing, it is usually because they are not really living. Hence it follows that the best way to meet the anxiety about maturing is to make sure one at the moment is fully alive. However, even more significantly, people are afraid of time because, like being alone, it raises the specter of emptiness, of the frightening void. If our awareness of the passage of time tells us that only that day comes and goes and Winter follows Autumn and that nothing is happening in our life expect hour succeeding hour, one must desensitize oneself or else suffer the painful boredom and emptiness. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
It is interesting that when we are bored, we tend to go to sleep—that is, to blot out consciousness, and become as nearly extinct as possible. Every human being experiences some boredom; a great deal of one’s work, for example, must be gone through more or less by routine; but it becomes unendurable only when it has not been freely chosen or affirmed by the individual as necessary for the attainment of some greater foal. On a not so everyday level, the anticipation of empty time can be a horror for people because they feel that if they had nothing to do, no dates and no regular plans, they would suffer from neurosis or psychosis due to the uncertainty. That is why people develop hobbies, read books and plant gardens, human need something to make their time on this Earth feel meaningful. A good time is usually defined as escaping boredom. As we face hard things in the Lord’s way, may we lift up our heads and rejoice. Sometimes the Lord asks us to do a hard thing, and sometimes our challenges are created by our own or others’ use of agency. The generation gap refers to fundamental differences in experience and in philosophy of life between today’s young men and women and their parents, considered as generations separated in time by twenty or thirty years. It is interesting that some fathers are more concerned with their children thinking they are trendy, instead of them being stuffy. A few of them just want to be seen as the type of dad who drives a sports car. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
Nonetheless, all parents want to instill hope into their children. What a pleasant thing it is when your children are hopeful about their future. Hope in its creative and healthy sense—whether it is hope for religious fulfillment or for a happy marriage or for achievement in one’s profession—can and should be an energizing attitude, the bringing of part of the joy about some future event into the present so that by anticipation, we are more alive and more able to act in the present. Thinking of the past can, of course, have the same escape function as thinking of the future. Whenever a difficult problem appears in the present, one can say, “At least things were better at such and such a time,” and let one’s mind bask in that memory. Indeed, so strong and universal are the tendencies to find comfort in the distant past or future that there are recurrent myths in almost every culture picturing each pole—the Garden of Eden and its variants of the longing for the happier day in a state of childlike innocence, and the myths of paradise ahead in the form of Heaven or the Earthly utopias of those who believe in perpetual, automatic progress. As living in hopes for the future is said to be the usual escape of unsophisticated people, so living in the past may be the common escape of sophisticated persons. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
In therapy, people who live in the past know that it is not always a good idea to flee into hopes of the future rewards in Heaven, but they have learned that it is entirely respectable to talk about the past: for do not one’s basic problems have their roots in early childhood? This truth can then be used as a neat rationalization. For when a person comes to a session after a quarrel with his wife, he can then leap back into talking about childhood and how it affected him, or how he got along with his last girlfriend. This is often easier for him than to confront the immediate question of what caused the quarrel and what are his motives in his present relation with his wife. Fortunately the therapist can generally tell whether the person is using one’s past as an escape (in which case to talk about it will never make any psychological change in him) or as a source of illumination and a release of dynamic for the present. One can be aware of the passage of time because we are so alive in the present moment, not just because we keep ourselves busy to escape time. Sometimes an hour is like a week because it lumbers so slowly and painfully: in the former—being unaware of time because of the heightened aliveness of the moment—an hour is like a week because it gives so much joy and happiness. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
Also, many people complain just because some want to watch a television program that the TV is telling them a vision of how to act, dress, and what to think. While they may be true, the TV also has a way of reinforcing norms, like the law, and it shows you what happens to people who break the law. Some people complain about the television because they think it is inhibiting their control over a person. However, many people read books and seek religion for enlightenment. So, the TV is not telling them how to feel. Recently, something happened in our community and for weeks, I was unable to really put into words how I felt because the situation was also tied to something I experienced. Yet, after a few weeks of reflection, I was able to express what I was feeling. No one could tell me what to think or what to feel because for me the situation was very unique. Sometimes when people are trying to control you and they see you growing and their programming slipping, they will try to confuse you. Face it, some people like TV because they like the action packed programs, or designing, it gives them a level of excitement they are not experiencing in their own lives and probably never will. The citizens of the City of God use spiritual weapons—prayer and live and truth. The City of God is Heaven, but its splendor comes into the City of the World in the truth and love which finally will conquer even the sword. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
You are not going to walk away from here with any answers. Get angry at me. Go ahead. Some night, many years from now, maybe Aaliyah will choose to explain what happened, but for now you have to accept what you have seen. You no longer need to worry about Aaliyah. Aaliyah is on her own. One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained shaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence differently. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application. No account of the Universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness disregarded. How to regard them is the question—for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness. Yet they may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a region though they fail to give a map. At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
First I met Conrad in a hotel in Athens. To say I met him is not quite accurate—I was first attracted by his laugh as he stood near his elevator. I turned to observe him, but my eyes were still blinded by the dazzling light from the street. I had just crossed Constitution Plaza in the heart of Athens, and the midmorning Sun, reflected from the concrete pavement beneath my feet and the ivory-colored Pentelicus marble of the marble of the buildings on all sides of the Plaza, had rendered my eyes almost useless. There is no spot in the World quite so bright as Athens on a July morning. The tends of thousands of beautiful houses, some pink or yellow-tinted, toss the Sunlight back, back, forth and forth like mirrors. Even the mountains lying low around the city like a great horseshoe added their glowing yellow-brown to the warmth, and the endless stretch of blue sky is rarely broken by clouds. The few cypress trees and palms only add to the oppressiveness of the light, for their yellow-green is overpowered until it becomes almost the color of the Sun. Still one cannot resist raising one’s eyes to have a look at the Acropolis rising on its long battlements just a half mile to the left above the Plaza. There the broken columns of the Parthenon stand in wounded dignity against the sky, giving a splendid impression of the colors which make Greece—gold and blue. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Standing for a moment in the lobby of the Hotel Mediterranean Plaza, I blinked to adjust my eyes to the dusky interior. It was then that I heard Conrad laugh. His laughter was full, not raucous like that of most Greek boys, and somewhat humble as befits a boy who lives in hotels, as though he were expecting you to laugh with him. I noticed his long rows of teeth, shining and perfect, and his nice mouth. His face was perfectly chiseled, and his laughter accentuated his cheek bones. His golden hair, brilliant and thick, was brushed back over his head in the pompadour style which used to be so popular among American boys. He must have been about fifteen at the time, but because of his slim build he appeared younger than his age—a kind of man and boy in one. I never did learn the cause of his laughter that morning; I merely looked at him with half a smile and accepted his courtesies as he asked my floor and let me off the elevator with those effusive “sirs” by which the Greeks show politeness. However, I noticed a book opened and turned upside down in his hands, the Dramas of Sophocles. Later as I sat in my room writing, gazing out into the shared patio at the rear of the hotel, I thought how Conrad resembled my own younger brother back in America. Except the reading of Sophocles—I marveled at that. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
It would have surprised me to know then that this laughing boy would be in a few years picking his way through the fir trees of Albanian mountains. One evening, two weeks later, I came across him sitting on a bench in the Plaza, and I heard a story which has remained deeply etched in my memory ever since. I sat down beside him, partly because I was curious to learn more about this boy and partly because I wised to enjoy the refreshing loveliness of the evening. Summers evenings in Athens, when for two hours after Sundown (Sun changing angles in the sky) they sky plays with shades of pink and turquoise, can be as invigorating as the days are stifling. A languid breeze comes up from the Bay of Salamis, loaded with rich fragrance which has been accumulating in the drying, semi-tropical vegetation on the island of Aegina several miles out in the bay. The breeze brings with it an occasional pungent odor from the harbor of the Piraeus. Music seems to carry farther on such an evening, and the sporadic taxi horns did not clash too cacophonously with we could hear Ready Between the Lines by Aaliyah emerging from a restaurant at the far end of the Plaza. I had often sat on this bench, letting myself be lulled by the lazy movement of palm fingers moving in and out of the darkness above my head, then turning to watch the lights come on way up Mt. Lycabettus. I often counted the stars as they sprang out with a brilliance possible only in the transparent atmosphere of Mediterranean countries. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Conrad had been reading a book before the Sun had set, and he answered my question about what he was reading with his irrepressible laugh that accompanied every utterance, humorous or not. “The history, sir of the Persian Wars, sir.” That curious “sir” twice in one sentence! It did seem to me that they overdid their courtesy. “You find it interesting?” “O yes sir, yes sir! One of my ancestors fought at Thermopylae. His name was Argyros, and he was a very brave man.” “You do not believe, Conrad, that the ancient Greeks who fought those Persians were the same race as the modern Greeks, do you?” I baited him. “O yes, yes sir!” he cried earnestly, using the word malista which carries a strong affirmation like our English certainly. “I come from Asia Minor,” he went on so quickly that he stammered, “from Asia Minor, sir, the Ionian Greeks lived there, and they are the descendants directly from the Greeks who fought at Thermopylae.” “How did they get over to Asia Minor?” “The people of the Peloponnesus, sir, migrated to Asian Minor. Our family lived in the Peloponnesus in ancient times. My great ancestors went with the Spartan army under Leonidas to fight at Thermopylae. He was one of the three hundred who stayed to hold the pass for three days so they would have time to fortify Athens. He died there. My father often told me about our ancestor Argyros. Then many years later the Greeks from the Peloponnesus made a colony in Asia Minor.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
Conrad was spouting this history like a religious faith. I knew it was fairly dubious—modern Greeks are mainly Slavic in race, and historians do not know where the glorious races of the ancient Hellenes ended. However, I saw there was no use arguing ethnology with the zealous Conrad, and furthermore I did want to pump him up about himself. Rather than speaking of measured intelligence that is stable for the individual over time because it is defined as the ratio of mental age to chronological age, we shall speak of intelligence as the content of what is intellected and the developing capacities for further intellection. In this sense of the term, intelligence is continuously growing for both the individual and the species; it is meaningful to say that we are more intelligent than we were a few years ago, and that our children will be more intelligent than we are. Something of the sort has indeed been happening in the development of the increasing superiority of mortals over other organisms and their increasing scope in comprehending the World about them and themselves. Although we are on unsure speculative ground in attempting to identify the crucial stages in the evolution of consciousness, we may at any rate guess that Homo sapiens gradually differentiated themselves from the family of Hominidae by acquiring the ability not only to use tools but to use tools to make tools, an accompanying awareness of superior adaptability occurred. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
Conrad went on to tell me about the massacres of 1922. “Almost every Greek in our town was killed. You do not know, sir, about those massacres?” I did know something of the war between Turkey and Greece in 1922, which ended with the terrible battle of Smyrna when the city was brined, and the Greek army with thousands of refugees was driven right into the sea and would have been annihilated, had it not been from the timely assistance of some British warships that picked up those who could swim or get hold of boats. However, evidently Conrad was thinking of something else. “We lived in the town of Merzifoun, way back near the Caucasus. I was a small boy then, but I remember the town well. Almost all the people were Greeks—the only Turks around were government officials. They did not bother us much and we had a happy life. My father used to ride about the country on horseback buying tobacco to sell to American companies. He sometimes took me riding with him on his trips—I would sit on the old horse behind him. There were not many towns in our province, you see, only barren hills and plateaus. When we arrived in a village the men were always glad to see my father. They would take him to the café and sit at the tables in the street and drink Turkish coffee and a little ouzo and laugh and talk. These were Greeks, sir, the Turks in the village would stand around smiling; they always seemed sour at something. However, my father got along with them well, he never quarreled with them, and he used to greet them cheerfully and offer them cigarettes. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
“The Turks would sit at their own café, never talking or laughing like my father and his friends, only silently smoking their long waterpipes. I used to sit at the edge of the street a little way from my father’s table and watch those Turks smoking. Have you seen those Turkish pipes, sir?” “Yes,” I answered. Then I added, “You must have been very fond of your father.” “I loved him very much,” said Conrad. The boy was not sitting moodily, looking out across the Plaza toward the sparkling lights on Mt. Lycabettus, and he went on talking not as a student to an Amerikanos but as one human being to another. “The happiest memories of my whole life are those trips I took with my father. Oh, we had good enough times at home, my mother and two sister and I. However, how I loved to go with my father! As we were riding the many hours between villages he would tell me stories of the ancient Greeks, how the Persians came down with a huge army and the Athenians fought them at Marathon and drove them into the sea and killed so many that the mound where they are buried looks like a mountain. And he told me about Leonidas the Spartan general who made the stand at Thermopylae. That was when my father would speak about Argyros, our great ancestor. I used to be filled with pride I almost burst when I heard how my ancestor had volunteered to stay with the three hundred soldiers in the narrow pass in the mountains, and how he fought there even through the Persian arrows were so thick the hid the Sun. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
“Then my father would tell me about the shepherd traitor who took the Persians around by a secret pass to attack Leonidas and the Spartans from the rear, and my anger would boil up and my father would laugh as I clenched my fists. However, he was proud that I begged to hear those stories over and over again. And he used to say, ‘Conrad, never forget that your great ancestor was Argyros’.” The boy was talking so animatedly now, his hands gesturing aimlessly around in the dark. In the dim lights of the Plaza lamps I got a glimpse of his black eyes dancing with delight at these boyhood memories. However, suddenly he sat quietly, vacantly, his face sober and his jaw heavily set. In the realm of suffering, affliction is something apart, specific, and irreducible. It is quite a different thing from simple suffering. It takes possession of the soul and marks it through and through with its own particular mark. Affliction is inseparable from physical suffering and yet quite distinct. With suffering, all that is not bound up with physical pain or something analogous is artificial, imaginary, and can be eliminated by a suitable adjustment of the mind. Even in the case of the absence or death of someone we love, the irreducible part of the sorrow is akin to physical pain, a difficulty in breathing, a constriction of the heart, an unsatisfied need, hunger, or the almost biological disorder caused by the brutal liberation of some energy, hitherto directed by an attachment and now left without a guide. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
At some very early point too must have some the kind of self-awareness that makes death an important subjective fact, an awareness which, coupled with primitive awe or bewilderment at the fact of being, serves as the basis of magic and religion. Some even believe there were another form of primates, from the British Iles, who looked human, but were far more intelligent, extremely naïve, and lacked aggression. Being far less aggressive than humans by nature, they lost out to the new species, and were scattered and went into hiding. They pretended to be humans. These primates concealed their birthing rites, but coupling with humans did happen. And unbeknownst to early civilizations, they developed a kind of human who carried a giant helix of genes, twice the number of a normal human. There were legends about their spirits in Louisiana. They were so powerful some thought the spirits has the psychic powers to possess unborn fetus who shared their DNA and be reborn with it. As animism grew more subtle in its personifications, mythic explanations of the origin of things became possible, and human-like gods were created. The passage to the idea of a single god, originated or at least dramatized by Akhnaton, led, by linkage to the god of the Israelites, to the idea of Christ. Meanwhile the development of a conscious science (essentially, the evolution of canons of evidence for belief in the regularity of events in nature) had occurred, beginning with the Meletians in early Greece. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Perhaps it is not too fanciful to suggest that the analogue to the achievement of early mortals in making tools to make tools is the scientific method: not just knowing how to learn but knowing how to make sure we know. These twin achievements, separated by at least a hundred thousand years, are the fundaments f technology and science. They increased vastly the range of what might be intellected as well as the capacities for intellection. Scientific thought itself then produced several radical developments in mortal’s self-awareness: the Copernican revolution, showing us something of the place of our Earth in the Universe; the Darwinian revolution, showing us something of our place in organic evolution; and what I shall call the Cartesian-Freudian revolution, for Dr. Freud completed what Descartes began, showing us the existence of vast reaches of mind beyond our conscious, rational mental processes. Hundreds of geniuses of the life of the psyche had of course known and expressed intuitively before Dr. Freud the mysteries of the unconscious; his achievement was simply the climax of an increasingly popular development in European thought. Dr. Freud had shown quite convincingly the idea of the unconscious was conceivable around 1700, topical around 1800, and effective around 1900. By 1950 its exploration by individuals through psychoanalysis could be described as commonplace. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
What we are witnesses today is the easy accessibility and mass distribution of means for producing experience of the usually unexperienced aspects of mental functioning. With the use of chemical technology made available to the millions the experience of transcendence of the individual ego, which a century was available only to the disciplined mystic. However, there are, of course, more varied phenomena than the feeling of ego-transcendence produced by mind altering substances, and there are more motives than the religio-mystical motive lying behind the present widespread use of psychotropic substances. The claim that psychotropic substances expand the consciousness refers to changes in several dimensions of experience. Persons interested in the experience primarily for reasons of esthetic appreciation or expression, or for its intrinsic novelty may or may not be artists, but their attitude toward experience tends to be perceptually open and non-judgmental. These individuals especially seek and enjoy the perceptual changes, such as increased vividness of color, visual harmonies, change in depth perception, sharper definition of detail, synesthesias, change in time sense (especially when listening to music), increased volume of unusual imagery, and so on. The effects are, as we have noted, not always beautiful, and in fact may be quite unpleasant: hellish experience, for instance, features garish or horrible colors (sickly greens, ugly dark reds, poisonous orange), or sometimes an impression of threatening blackness accompanied by feelings of doom and gloom and isolation. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
The person’s perception of one’s own body may become unpleasant: one’s limbs may seem to be distorted or flesh decaying; in a mirror one’s face may seem to be distorted or eyes blank, reflecting a meaningless emptiness at the self’s center; all attempts at communication may seem a mockery, the shell of the self a prison from which there is no exit. Yet even the negative; surrealism has in fact accustomed us to just such visions of the World. Among the esthetic adepts there is even a phrase for the negative experience when it occurs: it is known as “paying your taxes.” In this a group of users, only a boor would complain of a bad trip. Their goal is novel experience for its own sake. Some think this is how Judy Chicago came of with The Dinner Party, how Frida Kahlo invented Las Dos Fridas. Psychotropic substances were also thought to have influenced the work of Andy Warhol, which some think is evident in his paintings like Shot of Marilyns, Self Portrait, Triple Elvis, Race Riot, Prince, Rorschach, and many more. Of course, Andy Warhol is one of the most prolific popular culture artists in modern times. Rock Guitar singer and song writer Jimi Hendrix was also thought to be under these psychotropic substances which lead to some of his most popular songs: Purple Haze (where he talks about trying to escape some reality), All Along the Watchtower (which could also be a religio-mystical song), Little Wing, Hear My Train Coming, and many more. And while Bill Gates was stealing computer time, The Beatles were thought to also be under the influence as well as groups like The Animals. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
Altered states of consciousness has been thought of as ways to produce some of the most creative work in the World, but some people never come down or in other words, spend a life time paying their taxes, or they perish. Some even have reported that their girlfriend’s eyes turned yellow and she had snakes for hair. Some use the substances primarily for religious experience, whether in their own search for transcendent meaning or out of an interest in the psychology of religion or its philosophical bases. It may produce a feeling of oneness with the Universe and a reduction or complete loss of the sense of personal identity. A few have thought to, while in fascinosum or tremendum, feel a sense of joy, gratitude, pleasure, or onrush of grace, at catching a glimpse of the Ultimate, or numen; the tremendum is a reaction of awe, horror, fear, or a feeling of being overwhelmed. As in the esthetic experience, both the negative and the positive are seen as valid and therefore endurable. Others use psychotropic drugs as a cure for alcoholism. People who have used psychotropic drugs because they are disturbed or potentially suicidal or psychotic have reported it fails to produce a breakthrough and leaves them feeling hopeless and in an even chaotic psychic state than before. A certain number of persons have in essence already quit life and are simply looking for something to carry them over the edge to oblivion. These are rare cases, of course, but they do provide the headlines when they come to grief. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
Keep in mind, also, that laws make the possession and knowing use of the psychedelic or unauthorized use of psychotropic drugs a crime because they are known to be habit forming, and may not be safe for use for some people and can lead to death. Psychologists and psychiatrists are working closely with student groups both to educate them to the dangers of the situation and to understand what is going on. A major problem arising from the new laws is that civil authority thus becomes alienate from young people who have great potential for contributing to the society of the future. In a healthy society, the intellectually able and creative citizens serve to vivify and support the social authority; but if they are defined as enemies of society for pursuing activities that they consider constructive, they will incorporate in the personal identity significant elements of anti-sociality. Many people are looking for new relationships between the individual and the state, and the development also of new social institutions to replace marriage and the family. These young people feel very keenly about the invasion of privacy by the police and by state information-collectors. They seek a human nature which will be free of the tyranny of the machine. These individuals do not want to be on a space journey where the new is using their imagination. Another recurring themes in this group is that history is ending, or sometimes, less cosmically, that Christianity is ending. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
Some indeed say that the World is about to end, and that the expansion of consciousness is isomorphic with the expansion of the physical Universe; that both will fall back to the center simultaneously and instantaneously, and will vanish in a trice. Still others see the World as ending in a nuclear explosion. Whatever the vision, the World as we know it now, for example, modern society, is seen as fleeting, perishable, not viable. And it does no good to ask what rearrangement of things as they are is being proposed by these youth; nothing is being proposed, and they see it as the nature of the case that nothing can be proposed. You can ask a person to imagine pink elephants or rhinoceroses with horses’ heads or skyscrapers that walk and talk, but you cannot ask him or her to imagine an unknown primary color. There is a new time coming, and we will know what it is when it happens. Pour us your poison that it may renew our strength. Fire burns our brains. Now let us leap—Heaven or Hell, what matter?—into the deep, at the bottom of the Unknown to find the new. The motive for this sort of exploration of the potentialities of the mind is an extraordinarily powerful one. It is in essence highly idealistic and moral, regardless of its associations with behaviors that much of society many consider immoral. Indeed, it may even arise in part because of the basic human need to feel worthwhile through knowing that one is behaving responsibly and in a way that makes sense to others. Be a person on whom nothing is lost. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
A new mortality must be created—realization of depth or heights of the self for which no words exist. Express the value of sensitive and unforgetting attention. The great act of attention is all-inclusive; the more of life that is remembered and brought to bear upon the present movement in living expression, the more fully conscious a person is declared to be. As you might expect, this dimension is rather difficult to define. I can only appeal from my introspection to your introspection in offering it for consideration. What I mean here is something akin to Plato’s idea of the musical unconscious, or as he also called it, the spiritual unconscious. Be the magic power of this immense midnight at the crossroads of your senses, be the purport of their strange meeting. The sensitivity to the breadth of consciousness of others, includes animals and nature. This also involves a recognition of the game character of social interaction and personal relationship: at a low level, an awareness of the games people play, including oneself of course, and at a high level an appreciation of mythic enactment in human affairs, the extent to which the roles that are possible to us because of our evolutionary history find expression in any given time-stretch in out lives. I would not be willing to say consciousness has been expanded or extended unless it could be shown to be so when the person is in his or her normal state, free of drug effect. In brief, my view is that the intact ego, in which all the capacities of mind are used to the fullest, is the best vehicle we have for bring ourselves into valid and discriminating relationship with the protean forms of reality. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
The evolutionary task, in the individual and in the species, is to create an ego that itself capable of including the states of consciousness now called paranormal. The states the psychedelic and psychotropic drugs produce should not themselves be confused with expanded consciousness. That comes later, if it comes at all, when and if the experience of unusual realities is brought into the ego and the ego itself is thereby enlarged in scope. A corollary of this is that the ego already possessed of considerable scope is more likely to be able to use such an experience further to grow and enlarge itself, just as it is the stronger ego that can use psychotherapy more effectively. A sorrow that is not centered around an irreducible core of such a nature is mere romanticism or literature. Humiliation is also a violent condition of the whole corporal being, which longs to surge up under the outrage but is forces, by impotence or fear, to hold itself in check. On the other hand pain that is only physical is a very unimportant matter and leaves no trace in the soul. Toothache is an example. An hour or two of violent pain caused by a decayed tooth is nothing once it is over. It is another matter if the physical suffering is very prolonged or frequent, but in such a case we are dealing with something quite different from an attack of pain; it is often an affliction. “God shall consecrate thine affliction for thy gain,” reports 2 Nephi 2.2. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
