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 waves, or on the almost eternal fold of the mountain? We cannot take a single step toward Heaven. It is not in our power to travel vertical direction. If however we look Heavenward for a long time, God comes and takes us up. We are free only to change the direction of our glance; we cannot walk into Heaven; we cannot rise without being lifted by grace. The vertical is forbidden to us because the World is the province of gravity and dead weight (pasanteur). The whole Universe, as we know it though the senses of the imagination, has been turned over by God to the control of brute mechanism, to necessity and blind force, and that primary physical law by which all things eternally fall. The very act of creation entailed the withdrawal of the Creator from the created, so that the sum total of God and his World and all of its creatures is, of course, in the process of becoming more like God through their own volition. God grace penetrates, like a ray of light, the dark mechanical realm of unlimited mystery. And we love this World, because we can feel God and have virtue. To God, we are like the smile of the beloved through pain, and this makes him want to redeem us and his World. God in his mercy sometimes prevents people from reading the mystics, so that is should be evident to them that they have not invented this absolutely unexpected contact. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
I called out to the very most ancient one, “Aaliyah, I have made promises to those I love. Help me to keep them. Lend your most powerful ear to those whom I love. Lend your most powerful ear to me.” Where was she, the tower of ivory? The great ancestor. The one who now and then came to our assistance. I had no clue, because I had never bent my stiff neck to go in search of her. However, I knew that in her centuries of endurance she had acquired powers that surpassed all dreams and fears of mine, and that she could hear me if she chose. Aaliyah, our guardian, our mother, listen to my plea. Hear me, Sweet Aaliyah, wherever you are. Surely you know this World as no one else knows it. Have you spied these tall children? I do not dare to say their names. And then I wrapped myself in comforting phantasms, roaming the winds for my own sake, dissolved now and then in the poetry of love, and envisioning bowers of love, places of Divine safety foreordained beyond Good and Evil, where I am the one I coveted could dwell. It was a blessed vision, and it is mine to enjoy. I want to lead us on a wonderous journey that weaves art and clinical insight together to project a pattern for more humane psychotherapy and better mental health. Psychological well-being comes from the act of making, from making art of stone or oils, love or death. The task of becoming human is an artist’s task, and art is thus a birthright shared by us all. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Art not only enhances individual lives, it makes authentic social existence possible. If modern art seems unsure of its direction, it is because art is always first to register convulsive changes in culture. A sure index to the future is the way society reacts to its art. That may be why a society in which violence and terrorism are on the increase is actually one in which the ecstasy is actually one in which the ecstasy promised by beauty in art has doubled back on itself in a viciously destructive coil. Art thus reflects a culture’s preferences, predicts its future and provokes it to change. My firm belief is that one paints, as one writes, not out of a theory but out of the vividness of experience. When Lorenzo de’ Medici assumed control of his family in 1469, Florence, Italy was still the cultural center of the Western World. Lorenzo’s predecessors had founded the Platonic Academy of Philosophy, where the artist Sandro Botticelli studied a brand of Neoplatonic thought that transformed the philosophic writings of Plato almost into a religion. According to the Neoplatonists, in the contemplation of beauty, the inherently corrupt soul could transform its love for the physical and material into a purely spiritual love of God. Thus, Botticelli uses mythological themes to transform his pagan imagery into a source of Christian inspiration and love. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
His Birth of Venus (circa 1482), the first monumental representation of the goddess in her birthday suit since ancient times, represents innocence itself, a divine beauty free of any hint of the physical and sensual. It was this form of beauty that the soul, aspiring to salvation, was expected to contemplate. For the short period at the outset of the sixteenth century, Florence was again the focal point of artistic activity. The three great artists of the High Renaissance—Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael—all lived and worked in the city. There is a surprisingly close parallel between art and psychotherapy, and in my life they both came out of the same source. In each a new form is born not out of ideas but out of the intensity of experiences. Rational thoughts follow to anchor theoretically the truths that already have grasped us a vision. To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake. Our free will consists in nothing but the ability to turn, or refuse to turn, our eyes toward what God holds up before him. We are looking at what saves us. Here on Earth we must be content to be eternally hungry; indeed, we must always welcome hunger, for it is the sole proof we have of the reality of God, who is the only sustenance that can satisfy us. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
In the spring of the second year of college, I realized tat the rules, principles, values by which I used to work and live simply did not suffice anymore. I got so completely fatigued that I had to go to bed for four weeks to get enough energy to continue my teaching. I had learned enough psychology at college to know that these symptoms meant that something was wrong with my whole way of life. I had to find some new goals and purposes for my living and to relinquish my moralistic, somewhat rigid way of way of existence. In the Untied States nowadays I would have gone to a therapist, but back then, I was in a psychologically strong culture where only a few people spoke my language and they did not like to bring excess attention to things that go on in their private lives. What to do? Ascending one hill I found myself suddenly knee deep in a field of wild poppies covering the whole hillside. It was a gorgeous sight: brilliantly crimson and scarlet, the poppies were lovely forms as they bent delicately in one direction and the another. Their perfect movements together seem like people in a ballet, perhaps the “Nutcracker Suite” at Christmas time. I stood there, intoxicated, wholly captivated by this sight. My poppies in their dance were swaying in unison and bowing in the slight breeze, each of them having a miraculous perfection of beauty in itself. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
When the poppies nodded toward me they presented their yellow-black centers, and when they nodded away they then seemed a fiery scarlet. I thought how good it would be to sit among these flowers and draw their forms so that I would never forget them. So I went back on the house and borrowed a pencil and pad and came out to kneel among the poppies to sketch them. They made an imprint on my mind that seems as vivid today as it was then. However, I realized that I had not listened to my inner voice, which had tried to talk to me about beauty. I had been too hard-working, too principled to spend time merely looking at flowers! It seems it had taken a collapse of my whole former way of life for this voice to make itself heard. This inner voice hereafter would always be redolent with the slight perfume that covered the hillside that morning. Thus began my devotion to art and to beauty. Beauty is indeed the sphere of unfettered contemplation and reflection; beauty conducts us into the World of ideas, without however taking us from the World of sense. By beauty the sensuous mortal is brought back to matter and restored to the World of sense. Life touches the mysteries of the Divine Encounter, on the other it is rooted in a World with which we are familiar. To those who consider themselves on the safe side of belief, it is a way to become closer to a true love of God and a true sense of his nature, but it is not an easy faith. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
Even though many are submerged in materialism, this is still a peaceful and enchanted World. Some unbelievers rather smugly despise the churchgoer for seeking what they consider an easy consolation, but this reveals the secret of one’s own cowardice, as one’s agnosticism may itself only an opiate, a dodge to avoid facing the grace of God’s reality and the grace of his love. I have been wondering lately about the will of God, what it means, and how we can reach the point of conforming ourselves to it completely. In this domain everything that comes about is in accordance with the will of God, without any exception. Here then we must love absolutely everything, as a whole and in each detail, we must fee the reality and presence of God through all external things, without exception, as clearly as our hand feels the substance of paper through the penholder and the nib. The second domain is that which is placed under the rule of the will. It includes the things that are purely natural, close, easily recognized by the intelligence and the imagination, and among which we can make our own choice, arranging them from outside so as to provide means to fixed and finite ends. In this domain we have to carry out, without faltering or delay, everything that appears clearly to be a duty. When any duty does not appear clearly, we have sometimes to follow our inclination, but in a limited degree; for one of the most dangerous forms of sin, or perhaps the most dangerous, consists of introducing what is unlimited into a domain that is essentially finite. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
The third domain is that of the things, which, without being under the empire of the will, without being related to natural duties, are yet not entirely independent of us. In this domain we experience the compulsion of God’s pressure, on condition that we deserve to experience it and exactly to the extent that we deserve to do so. God rewards the soul that think of him with attention and love, and he rewards it by exercising a compulsion upon it strictly and mathematically proportionate to this attention and this love. We have to abandon ourselves to the pressure, to run to the exact spot whiter it impels us and not go one step farther, even in the direction of what is good. At the same time we must go on thinking about God with every increasing love and attentiveness, in this way gaining the favor of being impelled ever further and becoming the object of a pressure that possesses itself of an ever-growing proportion of the whole soul, we have attained the state of perfection. However, whatever stage we may have reached, we must do nothing more than we are irresistibly impelled to do, not even in the way of goodness. Our prayers often constitute a mystery in so far as they involve a certain kind of contact with God, a contact that is mysterious but real. It is important for us to have real faith and be true lovers of God because it we are just acting, it is like just as a false diamond is like a real one, so that those who have no spiritual discernment are effectively taken in. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
For the matter of that, a social and human participation in the symbols and ceremonies of the sacrament are an excellent and healthy thing in it as it marks a stage of the journey for those who travel that way. For many, it helps put ever more attention and love into their thought of God. If it were conceivable that in obeying God one should bring about one’s own damnation while in disobeying him one could be saved, most people would still choose to obey God because his ways are righteous. This is felt in moments of attention, love, and prayer. God also teaches us that we have the vocation to move among people of every class and complexion, mixing with them and sharing their life and outlook, so far that is to say conscience allows, merging into the crowd and disappearing among them, so that they show themselves as they are, putting off all disguises. It is because we long to know others so as to love them just as they are. For if we do not love them as they are, it will not be they whom we love, and our love will be unreal. God ways teach us how to form a natural purity of the soul. And although crimes may horrify us, they no longer surprise us. We can feel the possibility of them, and this discernment that teaches us to do things so we are not horrified by things we can possibility prevent. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
The natural disposition is dangerous and very painful, but like every variety of natural disposition, it can be put to good purpose if one knows how to make the right use of it with the help of grace. It is the sign of a vocation, the vocation to remain in a sense anonymous, ever ready to be mixed into the paste of common humanity. Now at the present time, the state of mortal’s minds is such that there is a more clearly marked barrier, but most people know that we cannot deny Christ or we will be denied before his Father which is in Heaven. I love God, Christ, and the faith as much as it is possible for a human to love them. I love the saints through their writings and what is told of their lives—apart from some whom it is impossible for me to love fully or to consider saints. I love the people of genuine spirituality whom chance has led me to meet in the course of my life. I love the religious liturgy, hymns, architecture, stained glass windows, rites, and ceremonies. I love the Church and I know all saints felt this love. Some believe this type of love constitutes a condition of spiritual progress, but everyone has their own level of progress and we are not to judge what is right for some for the action of grace in our hearts is secret and silent. It is my business to think about God. It is for God to think about me. The fate of the World is decided out of time; and it is in this recorded legend that humankind has its sense of true history, the eternal idea of salvation and grace. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
If one defines originality as the ability to respond to stimulus situations bot adaptively and usually, and if one defines intelligence simply as the ability to solve problems, then at the upper level of problem-solving ability the manifestation of intelligence will be also a manifestation of originality. People with a disposition toward integration of diverse stimuli suggests an openness in the more original subject to a variety of phenomena, combined with a strong need to organize those phenomena into some coherent pattern. This might best be described as a resistance to premature closure, combined with a persistent effort to achieve closure in an elegant fashion. In brief, everything that can be perceived must be taken cognizance of before configuration is recognized as possibly final one. Our every experience of Divine Love will come to sustain us at the intersection of body and soul. To contemplate the social is as good a means of purification as retiring from the World. Many people experience the joy and bitterness of Christ’s passion as a real event. This leads many people to give their key to the beyond, in thoughtful prayer, as a way to approach an encounter with God. In a moment of intense physical suffering, when I was forcing myself to feel love, but without desiring to give a name to that love, I felt, without being in any way prepared for it, there was a presence more personal, more certain, more real than that of a human being, though inaccessible to the senses and the imagination. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
While it is believed that common minds have no conception of true courage, this is the error which comes from identifying courage with obviously spectacular acts like the soldier’s charge of Michelangelo’s struggles in completing the paintings on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. With our present knowledge of the unconscious working of the mind, we know that struggles requiring courage equal to that of the soldier’s charge take pace in almost anyone’s dreams and deeper conflict in times of difficult decision. To reserve courage for heroes and artists only shows how little one knows of the profundity of almost any alive human being’s inner development. Courage is necessary in every step in a person’s movement from the mass—symbolically the womb—to becoming a person of one’s own right; it is at each step as though one suffers the pangs of one’s own birth. Courage, whether the soldier’s courage in risking death or the child’s in going off to school, means the power to let go of the familiar and the secure. Courage is required not only in a person’s occasional crucial decision for one’s own freedom, but in the little hour-to-hour decisions which place the bricks in the structure of one’s building of oneself into a person who acts with freedom and responsibility. “And the Lord said unto me: Thy fathers have also required of me this thing; and it shall be done unto them according to their faith; for their faith was like unto thine,” reports Enos 1. 18. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
Thus we are not talking about heroes. Indeed, obvious heroism, such as rashness, is often the product of something quite different from courage: in the last war the hot pilots in the air force who appeared to be very brave in taking risks were often the ones who were unable to overcome their anxiety inwardly and had to compensate for it by courting danger in external rash deeds. Courage must be judged as an inner state; otherwise external actions can be very misleading. It requires greater courage to preserve inner freedom, to move on in one’s inward journey into new realms, than to stand defiantly for outer freedom. It is often easier to play the martyr, as it is to be rash in battle. Strange as it sounds, steady patient growth in freedom is probably the most difficult task of all, requiring the greatest courage. This if the term hero is used in this discussion at all, it must refer not to the special acts of outstanding persons, but to the heroic element potentially in every mortal. If we could come back to see that life is like a mirror, tending to reflect back to us the images of our own thinking, then we should realize that by changing our thinking we can change the reflections in the mirror. “And my soul hungered; and I kneeled down before my Maker, and I cried unto him in mighty prayer and supplication for mine own soul; and all the day long did I cry unto him; yea, and when the night came I did still raise my voice high that it reached the Heavens,” reports Enos 1.4. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
The night sounds were at one particular and at the same time a deep hum on the warm breeze, and the Moon was high, sometimes penetrating a break in the garden that suddenly revealed its beautiful glistening light more subtly. I looked at the scattered stars—so cunningly bright in the 
I have called this phenomenon the marketing character because it is based on experiencing oneself as a commodity, and one’s value not as use value but as exchange value. The living being becomes a commodity on the personality market. The principle of evaluation is the same on both the personality and the commodity markets: on the one, personalities are offered for sale; on the other, commodities. Value in both cases is their exchange value, for which use value is a necessary but not a sufficient condition. Although the proportion of skill and human qualities on the one hand and personality on the other hand as prerequisites for success varies, the personality factor always plays a decisive role. Success depends largely on how well personal sell themselves on the market, how well they get their personalities across, how nice a package they are; whether they are cheerful, sound, aggressive, reliable, ambitious; furthermore, what their family backgrounds are, what clubs they belong to, and whether they know the right people. The type of personality required deepens to some degree on the special field in which a person may choose to work. A stockbroker, a salesperson, a secretary, a railroad executive, a college professor, or a hotel manager must each offer a different kind of personality that, regardless of their differences, must fulfill one condition: to be in demand. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
What shapes one’s attitude toward oneself is the fact that skill and equipment for performing a given task are not sufficient; one must be able to put one’s personality across in competition wit many others in order to have success. If it were enough for the purpose of making a living to rely on what one knows and what one can do, one’s self-esteem would be in proportion to one’s capacities, that is, to one’s use value. However, since success depends largely on how one sells one’s personality, one experiences oneself as a commodity or, rather, simultaneously as the seller and the commodity to be sold. A person is not concerned with his or her life and happiness, but with becoming salable. The aim of the marketing character is complete adaptation, so as to be desirable under all conditions of the personality market. The marketing character personalities do not even have egos (as people in the nineteenth century did) to hold onto, that belong to them, that do not change. Foe they constantly change their egos, according to the principle: “I am as you desire me.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
Those with the marketing character structure are with goals, moving, doing things with the greatest efficiency: if asked why they must move so fast, why things have to be done with the greatest efficiency, they have genuine answers, such as, “To keep you from unnecessarily having to wait behind fifty people when your order is always ready,” or “Because this is what the manufacture recommends for safety reason and optimal performance,” or “In order to promote from within and employee retention,” or “This is the way to maximize profits, keep shareholders and customers happy, and it helps the company grow,” and that is much better than rationalizations. Many people are also getting back to having more interest (at least subconsciously) in philosophical or religious questions, such as why one lives, and why one is going in this direction rather than in another. They have their developing consciousness that is opening up to the infinite idea of God and eternal life, and are developing a self, a core, and a sense of identity. However, if people are having an identity crisis it is produced by the fact that its members have become selfless instruments, whose identity rests upon their participation in the corporations (or other giant bureaucracies), as a primitive individual’s identity rests upon memberships in the clan. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
We have to make sure our character either loves or hates. These old-fashion emotions have to fit into a character structure that functions almost entirely on the cerebral level and accepts feeling, whether good or evil ones, because they are what assist us with the marketing characters’ main purpose: selling and exchanging—or to put it even more precisely, functioning according to the logic of the Universal Soul, of which we are a part, and we must of course be concerned with how well we function, as indicated by our advancement in the bureaucracy. Since we are in marketing and people can sense and feel us, we must have deep attachment to ourselves and to others, we have to care, in a deep sense of the word, because we want our reactions to feel real and for people to like us. This may also explain why we are concerned with dangers in our communities and ecological catastrophes, even when the data that point to these dangers is being hidden. That we are concerned with our community, people in it, and the environment might still be explained by the idea that we have great courage and unselfishness; and that we have a concern for our children and grandchildren is included in such an explanation. The expressiveness of concern on all these levels is the result of the increase of emotional bonds, even to people were merely associate with as well as those nearest to us. The fact is, we are close to marketing characters; and we are close to ourselves. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
Many contemporary human beings love to buy and consume, and they are so attached to what they buy, and this significant display of the marketing character phenomenon is so appear with how architects design homes, then builders furnish them so you can see the many lovely moments you can have in a house with similar items. The marketing character is seen in how people groom and educate their children to make them as attractive and respectful as possible in faith that they will lead a successful life. And look at the prestigious cars people buy, not only for the comfort and safety they give, but for the style and brand recognition. For many people, they love their car as much as their dogs or other pets. The things we own are utterly indispensable, along with our friends and relations, who are irreplaceable, too, since some deeper bind exists to tall of them. The marketing character goal, proper functioning under all circumstances, makes us respond to the World mainly cerebrally. Reason in the sense of understand is an exclusive quality of Homo sapiens; controlling intelligence as a tool for the achievement of practical purposes is common to animals and humans. Controlling intelligence without reason is dangerous, however, because it makes people move in directions that may be self-destructive from the standpoint of reason. In fact, the more brilliant the uncontrolled intelligence is, the more dangerous it is. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
It was no less a scientist than Charles Darwin who demonstrated the consequences and the human tragedy of a purely scientific, alienated intellect. He writes in his autobiography that until his thirtieth year he had intensely enjoyed music and poetry and pictures, but that for many years afterward he lost all his taste for these interests: “My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of fact…The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.” The process Darwin describes here has continued since his time at a rapid pace; the separation from reason and hearts is not something we want. We have to put God first, have love in our hearts, and we can still have nice material possessions. However, it is a loss of special interest that this deterioration of reason had taken place in the majority of the leading investigators in the most exacting and revolutionary sciences (in theoretical physics, for example) and that they were people who were deeply concerned with philosophical and spiritual questions. I refer to such individuals as Martin Luther, Francis Bacon, Harriet Tubman, Buddha, Empress Dowager Cixi, Sarah and William Winchester, William Randolph Hearst, Albert Einstein, N. Bohr, L. Szillard, W. Heisenberg, E. Schrodinger. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
The supremacy of cerebral, controlling thinking goes together with an atrophy of emotional life. Since it is not cultivated or needed, but rather an impediment to optimal functioning, emotional life has remained stunted and never matured beyond the level of a child’s. As a result the marketing characters are peculiarly naïve as far as emotional problem are concerned. They may be attracted by emotional people, but because of their own naivete, they often cannot judge whether such people are genuine or fakers. This may explain why so many pseudo human beings can be successful in the spiritual and religious fields; it may also explain why politicians who portray strong emotions have a strong appeal for the marketing character—and why the marketing character cannot discriminate between a genuinely religious person and the public relations product who fakes strong religious emotions. The term marketing character is by no means the only one to describe this type. It can also be described by the term alienated character; persons of this character are alienated from their work, from themselves, from other human beings, and from nature. In psychiatric terms the marketing person who is detached and not genuine could be called a schizoid character; but the term may be slightly misleading, because a schizoid person living with other schizoid persons and performing well and being successful, because of one’s schizoid character entirely lacks the feeling of uneasiness that the schizoid character has in a more normal environment. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
In a study of two hundred and fifty executives, managers, and engineers in two of the best-run large companies in the United States, it was discovered that many of these people are found to possess features of the cybernetic person, particularly the predominance of the cerebral along with the underdevelopment of the emotional sphere. Considering that the executives and managers are and will be among the leaders of American society, the social importance of this study is substantial. It was found that 0 percent of these people had a deep scientific interest in understanding, dynamic sense of the work, animated. 22 percent were centered, enlivening, crafts-person- like, but lacks the deeper scientific interest in the nature of things. 58 percent found the work itself stimulates interest, which is not self-sustained. 18 percent were moderate productive, not centered. Interest in work is essentially instrumental, to ensure security, income. 2 percent are passive unproductive, diffused. 0 percent rejecting of work, rejects the real World. Two features are striking: deep interest in understanding (reason) is absent, and for the vast majority either the stimulation of their work is not self-sustaining or the work is essentially a means for ensuring economic security. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
In complete contrast is the picture of what we call the love scale. 0 percent were loving, affirmative, creatively stimulating. 5 percent were responsible, warm, affectionate, but not deeply loving. 40 percent possessed moderate interest in another person, with more loving possibilities. 41 percent were found to have conventional concern, decent, and are role oriented. 13 percent are passive, unloving, uninterested. And 1 percent were considered to be rejecting of life, hardened heart. No one in the study could be characterized as deeply loving, although 5 percent show up as being warm and affectionate. All the rest are listed as having moderate interest, or conventional concern, or as unloving, or outright rejecting of life—indeed a striking picture of emotional underdevelopment in contrast to the prominence of cerebralism. The cybernetic religion of the marketing character corresponds to that total character structure. Hidden behind the façade of agnosticism or Christianity is a thoroughly pagan religion, although people are not conscious of it as such. This pagan religion is difficult to describe, since it can only be inferred from what people do (and do not do) and not from their conscious thoughts about religion or strict doctrines of religious organization. Most striking, at first glance, is that mortals have made themselves into a god because one has acquired the technical capacity for a second creation of the World, replacing the first creation by the God of traditional religion. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
We can also formulate: We have made the machine into a god and have become godlike by serving the machine. It matters little the formulation we choose; what matters is that human beings, in the state of their greatest real impotence, imagine themselves in connection with science and technique to be omnipotent. This aspect of cybernetic religion corresponds to a more hopeful period of development. However, the more we are caught in our isolation, in our lack of emotional response to the World, and at the same time the more unavoidable a catastrophic end seems to be, the more malignant becomes the new religion. We cease to be the masters of technique and become instead its slaves—and technique, once a vital element of creation, shows its other face as the goddess of destruction (like the Indian goddess Kali), to which men and women are willing to sacrifice themselves and their children. While consciously still hanging onto the hope for a better future, cybernetic humanity represses the fact that they have become worshippers of the goddess of destruction. “And thus we see the great call of diligence of people to labor in the vineyards of the Lord; and thus we see the great reason of sorrow, and also rejoicing—sorrow because of death and destruction among mortals, and joy because of the light of Christ unto life,” reports Alma 28.14. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
This thesis has many kinds of proof, but none more compelling than these two: that the great (and even some smaller powers continue to build nuclear weapons of ever-increasing capacity for destruction and do not arrive at the one sane solution—destruction of all nuclear weapons and the atomic energy plants that deliver the material for nuclear weapons—and that virtually nothing is done to end the danger of corruption, economic and ecological catastrophe. In short, nothing serious is being done to plan for the survival of the human race. “And thus we see how great the inequality of mortals is because of sin and transgression, and the power of the devil, which comes by cunning plans which he hath devised to ensnare the hearts of mortals,” Alma 28.13. Attitudes of superiority provide another way of expressing anger indirectly. It is quite hostile after all to say to another person, in effect, “I am so more better than you and any opinions or feelings you may have count for nothing, my human!” And when such superiority feelings are used cleverly, such as portraying oneself as condescendingly tolerant of another, they become a powerful and cutting weapon. Many mortals who feel themselves to be trained in logic and the scientific method use this distancing device with great effectiveness. Such a mortal will convey the feeling to one’s wife that there is something suspect about any emotional reaction she may have. “After all,” he says, “you have to approach life rationally. You are letting your emotions influence your judgment.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
And, of course, the wife may turn the tables and adapt her own superior attitude and declare, “Well, I was just reading in a book the other day that it is important and right to show our emotions. So there!” (Well, of course she is right, but she is using it in an assertive way, which could lead to a fight!) Sometimes we express hostility indirectly by misplacing our anger. We may nag and express irritation about many little things, while avoiding the genuine anger which we are afraid to reveal. For example, a wife might “pitch a fit” continually about her husband not fixing the things on the “honey do list,” when she is really afraid that if he lets it go too long, it might reflect poorly on him as an employee and create a lack of advancement in the company organization when his boss comes over for dinner or finds out about it otherwise, as it is a small community. Sometimes we misplace our hostility to other people. Often this involves a pecking order in which we misplace anger from a person who is a considerable threat to us, like a spouse or a boss, and place it on someone less threatening, like our children, who in turn may pull the display deviant behavior as a result. We sometimes express anger indirectly by projecting it onto another person and seeing that individual as being hostile toward us. This process, too, serves the purpose of maintaining emotional distance, for if we can purpose of maintaining emotional distance, for is we can preserve the idea that another person is unfriendly and hostile there is little danger of our becoming close. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
In fact, the person may become increasingly unfriendly and hostile as one reacts to our reactions to one’s imagined hostility. A discussion of the costs we pay in damage to ourselves and damage in our relations with others when we suppress anger cannot be concluded without a discussion of the violent explosions that sometimes occur. And the fact that such explosions do occur is often frightening to those who sense something of this potential violence within themselves. It is not unusual to feel as one man who stated, “I have so much anger bottled up in me that I am afraid if I ever let myself express it, it would be the point of no return.” Often this fear has little or no basis in fact. It serves as an excuse for imposing control on ourselves. We are really afraid of an open relationship in which we could express our anger freely. The fear that we will do violence is substituted to give ourselves a more plausible reason for not being genuine. On the other hand, the fear of violence may have some basis of truth. The fallacy of continuing a rigid control of our anger, however, is that this simply increase the inner tension and makes the possibility of violence more real. The frequently used analogy of the steam boiler under pressure is probably the most appropriate one. If hostility is permitted to build up and none of the pressure is allowed to escape, the possibility of an explosion increases. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
The person who fears violence within oneself may need to consult professional help immediately to assess the reality of his or her fear and help him or her to find safe ways to dissipate the inner pressure. Nick was such a person. He was in construction work; and when irritating situations arose on the job, he often became frightened with himself. He seethed with so much anger, particularly toward his foreman on these occasions, that he was afraid he might end the life of one of them if he ever got carried away and began to express his feelings. The therapist he sought out helped him talk through a lot of his feelings, including a huge backlog of anger toward his father that he had probably misplaced on the foreman. Nick also discovered that he could talk over some of his irritations with his boss and that when he did this his feeling of wanting to do violence disappeared even when he and his boss did not reach complete agreement. In brief, we are trying to help people become more intelligent, widely informed, concerned wit basic problems, cleaver and imaginative, socially effective and personally dominant, verbally fluent, and possessed of initiative. Instead of being seen as conforming, rigid and stereotyped, uninsightful, commonplace, apathetic, and dull. Whatever you believe to be truth about God, declare to be the Truth about yourself. Know that the power within you is God, and the law of good establishing right action in your life. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
I have given them every opportunity. Every type of advancement and profit sharing as well, but they want me in residence. Resident curator! Ah, that sounds brilliant. However, will I take the job? I have finished my Ph.D. and am ready to start teaching. I wish I could take the job. I spent years in Europe with you and Aunt Queen. It was a luxurious journey. I am thoroughly ruined for ordinary life. I would love nothing better than to be curator here, to maintain the Easter and Christmas traditions for the sake of the parish, and whatever else I want, whie earning a high salary, having a gorgeous house and ample time to write a couple of books in my academic field. Some people believe that I have the style and grace to pull it off. Oh, this could be the answer, but I have a few reservations. However, think about it. In my idle hours, I could begin to build a proper library on shelves put on the inside walls of the double parlor. And I could write a short history of Rocklin, to be printed up for the tourists, you know, with architectural details and blueprints and legends and such. Throw in the limousine and driver twenty-four hours a day, and a new car of my own every two years, and a deep-pocket expense account and paid vacations to New York and Tennessee, and I think it would be possible, but only time will tell. #RandolphHarris 1 of 8
That homely yearning for simplicity which we have been discovering in ourselves and in the great majority of people who have taken our preference tests has not escaped the hearts of educators any more than of the parents and the children they teach. One sign of it is the immense popularity of the notion that intelligence can not only be measured, but can be expressed in a simple number, with a base of reference something like a dollar—the I.Q. (intelligence quotient), one hundred units of which can be counted upon to indicate that the Lord dealt out to his servant an average number of talents, to be buried or used according to one’s character and personal worthiness, for better of for worse. The enduring vogue of the I.Q. is certainly testament to our natural desire to keep the story simple, and psychologist and teachers have been the worst offenders in supporting this popular simplification. The fact is, of course, that intelligence is a complex set of interrelated aptitudes and abilities, some of them verging closely upon the temperamental rather than being limited to what we usually think of as intellective. Of course, we also have to consider the results of a studies designed especially to discover some of the determinants, other than a simple one-number estimate of intelligence, that are important in the production of the sorts of original perceptions and problem-solutions. #RandolphHarris 2 of 8
Another study we have seen, employed a wide variety of psychological tests in the usual living-in assessment setting. Both because of the nature of the sample and because of the method employed for discovering significant relationships, several restrictions upon the generalizability of the results must be organized. For one thing, correlation coefficients between the measure of originality and several hundred other variables were computed in a search for significant associations, and the observed correlations have not as yet been checked in any other sample that is this similar to the general population (simply because we changed track and decided to work particularly with a view to discovering the traits of original persons; they had not engaged themselves in work that called for a high order of original thought, nor was originality an important value in their lives. In brief, the correlations to be reported may not reflect anything concerning the way in which highly creative people differ from the norm. The results therefore are germane to the question of how originality varies with other personal characteristics only if originality be considered as a variable that is distributed continuously throughout the general population. #RandolphHarris 3 of 8
In spite of these strictures inherent in the design of the study, there is some reason to believe that the results are generalizable to the problem of creative process in the highly original person. In the past, we saw that originality in free-response performance tests is sufficiently consistent across test to be considered a dimension, and that in addition the test dimension itself is related to personality variables which were hypothesized on theoretical grounds to be characteristics of highly original persons. Thus the testing of theory in that respect suggests that generalizable relationships may be discovered in this sample, and perhaps in fact that it particularly favors the finding of valid relationships. The central characteristic of the various indirect expressions of anger is that they create barriers of emotional distance between ourselves and the other person. Thus they keep us from experiencing emotional intimacy. Since, as we have seen, we are very much afraid of the experience of love, it seems likely that we often use these indirect expressions of anger as a way of preserving the safety of distance. Evasion of direct expression of anger thus becomes a tool of our fear of love. Looking at it from the other side, then, expression of anger in indirect ways becomes a means of cheating ourselves of what we most want—the experience of love. #RandolphHarris 4 of 8
One indirect expression of anger that we sometimes use is apparent indifference. Now, of course, if we are really angry, we are not all indifferent. However, that is the point! We resist letting the other person know that we care enough to let them get under our skins. To express the anger directly would be to risk a genuine encounter. So instead we express our hostility by saying in effect, “You do not matter to me.” One man recalls that, when we felt angry, hurt, and frustrated, as a child on certain occasions, by his mother’s stipulations, he would shout through tears, “I do not care! I do not care!” One can guess that those were rather unsuccessful attempts to appear indifferent! Grievance collecting is another indirect expression of anger in which we store up anger for future use, particularly at times when there is danger of intimacy we fear. So, for example, one woman often countered any expression of love from her husband with something like, “Well, you should have thought of that six years ago when you were off getting drunk at the Ritz Hotel bar, slow dancing with that frisky bleached-blonde tramp, buying her Paris Hiltons (sex on the beach) because she can’t drink whiskey, while I was in the hospital giving birth to your baby!” And this particular weapon in her grievance arsenal is so effective and important that she may never let herself be aware that her husband was so “shook up” by his caring for her and by the possibility of becoming a father (and experiencing love for his child) that he could not face his emotions at the moment. #RandolphHarris 5 of 8
Often our grievance collecting take less dramatic, but just as effective, form. We may have an almost inexhaustible supply of minor resentments. Probably, if we tried, it would be hard for us to put them all into words, but they provide enough impetus to keep us almost constantly irritable or moody with the other person without bringing about the explosion that might clear away the tension between us and permit some frightening moments of closeness. The quality that above all deserves the greatest glory in art—and by that word we must include all creation of mind—is courage; courage of a kind of which common minds have no conception, and which is perhaps described here for the first time…To plan, dream, and imagine fine works is a pleasant occupation to be sure….However, to produce, to bring to birth, to bring up the infant work with labor, to put it to bed full-fed with milk, to take it up again every morning with inexhaustible maternal love, to lick it clean, to dress it a hundred times in lovely garments that it tears up again and again; never to be discouraged by the convulsions of this mad life, and to make of it a living masterpiece that speak to all eyes in sculpture, or to all minds in literature, to all memories in painting, to all hearts in music—that s the task of execution. The hand must be ready at every moment to obey the mind. And the creative moments of the mind do not come to order…And work is a weary struggle at once dreaded and loved by those find and powerful natures who are often broken under the strain of it. #RandolphHarris 6 of 8
If the artist does not throw one’s self into his or her work like a soldier into the breach, unreflectingly; and if, in that crater, one does dig like a miner buried under a fall of rock…the work will never be completed; it will perish in the studio, where production becomes impossible, and the artist looks on at the death by suicide of one’s own talent…And it is for that reason that the same reward, the same triumph, the same laurels, are accorded to great poets as to great generals. One of the reasons creative activity takes so much courage is that to create stands for becoming free from the bonds to the infantile past, breaking the old in order that the new can be born. For creating external works, in art, business or what not, and creating one’s self—that is, developing one’s capacities, becoming freer and more responsible—are two aspects of the same process. Every act of genuine creativity means achieving a higher level of self-awareness and personal freedom, and that, as we have seen in the Promethean (who stole fire from the Gods), and Adam from the Garden of Eden legends, may involve considerable inner conflict. A landscape painter, whose main problem was freeing himself from ties to a possessive mother, had for years wanted to paint portraits but had never dared. Finally pulling his courage together, he dove in and painted several portraits in the course of three days. #RandolphHarris 7 of 8
The portraits turned out to be excellent. However, strangely enough, he felt not only considerable joy but strong anxiety as well. The night of the third day he had a dream in which his mother told him he must commit suicide, and he was calling up his friends to say good-bye with a terrifying and overwhelming sense of loneliness. The dream was saying in effect, “If you create, you will leave the familiar, and not create.” It is highly significant, when we see the nature of this powerful unconscious threat, that he could paint no more portraits for a month—until, that is, he had overcome the counterattack of the anxiety which had appeared in the dream. Believing that the Universal Spirit comes to fullest consciousness in mortal’s innermost Self, we strive to cultivate the inner life, knowing that spiritual certainty is the result of an impact on God upon the soul. We seek the witness of the Inner Spirit. There is a presence pervading all, an intelligence running through all, a power sustaining all, binding all into one perfect whole. The realization of this presence, intelligence, power, and unity constitutes the inner nature of the mystic Christ, the indwelling spirit, the image of God. The mind has the possibility of projecting limitless expressions of itself, but each expression is unique and different from any other. Thus the infinite is not divided, but multiplied. #RandolphHarris 8 of 8
Oh, this was nothing short of providential! I was absolutely furious and delirious happy at the same time. I closed my focus. In any age courage is the simple virtue needed for a human being to traverse the rocky road from infancy to maturity of personality. However, in an age of anxiety, an age of herd morality and personal isolation, courage is a sine qua non. In periods when the mores of the society were more consistent guides, the individual was more firmly cushioned in his crises of development; but in times of transition like ours, the individual is thrown on one’s own at an earlier age and for a longer period. In the past courage has been oversimplified: we suppressed our awareness of death, told ourselves that happiness and freedom would come automatically and assumed that loneliness, anxiety and fear were always neurotic and could be overcome by better adjustment. It is true that neurotic anxiety and loneliness can and should be overcome: the chief courage needed in dealing with them is in taking steps to get professional help. However, there still remain the experiences of normal anxiety which confront any developing person, and it is in confronting rather than fleeing these that courage is essential. Courage is the basic virtue for everyone so long as one continues to grow, to move ahead; it is they only lasting virtue. #RandolphHarris 1 of 8
We do not refer chiefly to the courage needed to face external threats, such as war and destructive weapons. We refer rather to courage as an inward quality, a way of relating to oneself and one’s possibilities. As this courage in dealing with oneself is achieved, one can with much greater equanimity meet the threats of the external situation. Courage is the capacity to meet the anxiety which arises as one achieves freedom. It is the willingness to differentiate, to move from the protecting realms of parental dependence to new levels of freedom and integration. The need for courage arises not only at those stages when breaks with parental protection are most obvious—such as the birth of self-awareness, at going off to school, at adolescence, in crises of love, marriage and the facing of ultimate death—but t every step in between as one moves from the familiar surroundings over frontiers into the unfamiliar. Courage, in its final analysis, is nothing but an affirmative answer to the shocks of existence, which must be borne for the actualization of one’s own nature. The opposite to courage is not cowardice: that, rather, is the lack of courage. To say a person is a coward has no more meaning than to say one is lazy: it simply tells us that some vital potentiality is unrealized or blocked. The opposite to courage, as one endeavors to understand the problem in our particular age, is automaton conformity. #RandolphHarris 2 of 8
The courage to be oneself is scarcely admired as the top virtue these days. One trouble is that many people still associate that kind of courage with the stuffy attitudes of the self-made mortals of the late nineteenth century, or with the somewhat ridiculous no matter how sincere “I-am-the-master-of-my-fate” theme in such a poem as “Invictus.” With what qualified favor many people today view standing on one’s own convictions is revealed in such phrases as “sticking one’s neck out.” The central suggestion in this defenseless posture is that any passer-by could swing at the exposed neck and cut off the head. Or people describe moving ahead in one’s beliefs as “going out on a limb.” Again what a picture! The only things one can do out on a limb are to crawl back again, saw the limb off and come down, dramatic as Icarus in a martyr-like and probably useless crash, dramatic as Icarus in a martyr-like and probably useless crash, or remain out on the limb, vegetating like a Hindu tree-sitter and exposed to the ridicule of a populace which does not think highly of tree-sitting, till the limb breaks off of its own dead weight. #RandolphHarris 3 of 8
Both of these expressions highlight the fact that what is most dreaded is getting out of the group, protruding, not fitting in. People lack courage because their fear of being isolated, alone, or of being subjected to social isolation, that is, being laughed at, ridiculed or rejected. If one sinks back into the crowd, one does not risk these dangers. And this being isolated is no minor threat because primitive people may be literally killed by being psychologically isolated from the community. There have been observed cases of natives who, when socially ostracized and treated by their tribes as though they did not exit, have actually withered away and died. To be cut dead by social disapproval has much more truth than poetry in it. It is thus no figment of the neurotic imagination that people are deathly afraid of standing on their own convictions at the risk of being renounced by the group. What we lack in our day is an understanding of the friendly, warm, personal, original, constructive courage of a Socrates or a Spinoza. We need to recover an understanding of the beneficial aspects of courage—courage as the inner side of growth, courage as a constructive way of that becoming of oneself which is prior to the power to give oneself. Thus, when in this chapter we emphasize standing on one’s own belief, we do not at all imply living in a vacuum of separateness; actually, courage is the basis of any creative relationship. #RandolphHarris 4 of 8
It takes courage not only to asset oneself but to give oneself. When we suppress anger, insofar as its direct expression is concerned, we inevitably pay some price for this denial of ourselves. As a matter of fact, the idea of suppression of anger involve some self-deceit, for we always express our anger in some way. Attempting to suppress anger is like trying to push an inflated inner tube under water. When we manage to push one side of it under, it pops out at some other point. So when we suppress the direct expression of anger it manifests itself in some indirect way. We may take it out on ourselves or others. Usually our reactions involve some form of both. There is an emotional logic in our tendency to turn our anger inward in some self-damaging expression. After all, as we have seen, we have been taught to hate and mistrust this part of ourselves. We have been taught that anger is condemnable, so when we feel angry our feelings of self-hate are increased. Some punishment of ourselves for having these feelings that we do not accept in ourselves is therefore in order. Sometimes turning anger in on oneself results in physical illness. The symptoms may be relatively simple and fleeting. Many people, for example, will develop a slight headache following a conversation in which there was more anger than they expressed or perhaps even realized. #RandolphHarris 5 of 8
Often more chronic problems develop, such as ulcers or high blood pressure. Indeed, although there is much additional research to be done into the relation of anger and physical illness, it seems clear that such emotional factors can have much to do with either the onset or the progress (or both) of most physical ailments. The physical illness itself can then become a weapon for the expression of hostility, too. The wife, for example, who does not allow herself to express her anger toward her husband and children directly may mete out considerable punishment toward them as well as herself when she has frequently recurring sick headache. Depression is another frequent result of turning anger in one one’s self. Marge, a middle-aged woman, sought professional help because much of the time she was in moods of gloomy despair and because she seemed to have no motivation to do her work. Her thoughts were sufficiently suicidal that she asked the therapist to keep her supply of sleeping pills lest she take an overdose in the midst of an acute depression. As she talked, it rapidly became apparent that she had deep feelings of self-hatred stretching back into childhood, when her parents seemed to have had some need to take a very pessimistic attitude toward her, her adequacy, and the possibility of her ever amounting to anything. So sensitized had she become to this attitude that any sign of rejection or criticism by others was interpreted by her as total rejection and an indication of her complete worthlessness. #RandolphHarris 6 of 8
It is not surprising to learn that Marge was filled with rage about these slights, whether they were real or fancied. However, since she had also learned to despise her anger, her rage remained almost totally unexpressed and not fully experienced, since to be aware of it would be further confirmation to her of her worthlessness. Instead, the anger was converted into feelings of depression and helplessness. It was only as she was gradually able to express some anger directly in day-by-day situations that her depression slowly lifted and she became freer to devote energies to productive pursuits in her profession and in her personal life. Perhaps the most subtle but most damaging price we pay for the suppression of anger is in the gradual deadening of the self that often occurs. The child learns it is risky to express anger and even wrong and worthy of rebuke to feel angry. Yet anger-producing situations are constantly occurring. One solution to this dilemma that the child faces is gradually to shut anger out of immediate awareness. Years of practice lead to some degree of success at this task. In this process of cutting off one’s awareness of a significant part of one’s self, it is almost as though we were making a psychological command out of the biblical verse suggesting that “If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out.” As a matter of fact, this verse is probably often quoted in ways that encourage us to keep ourselves unaware of our feelings of anger or desire of pleasures of the flesh. #RandolphHarris 7 of 8
Extreme examples of this tendency, which probably we all have to some extent, can be seen in advanced schizophrenic patients who seem unable to have any genuine emotional experience. It is true that such persons may occasionally appear to become enraged, and they may erupt in violence. Even then, however, there appears to be a mechanical quality to the rage. They are too emotional deadened to connect their explosion with any deep, meaningful feeling. Many of us who are not as seriously emotionally damaged as that might be described as having a slow fuse to anger. All of us probably had the experience of having an encounter with a person during which we feel vaguely uncomfortable. Later on, when the person was safely absent, we suddenly realized that we were quite angry. And then (safe again) we thought of all the things we would have liked to have said if we had only thought of them at the right moment. In addition to damaging our relationship to ourselves, we also pay a price in our relationship to others when we suppress our feelings of anger, for almost invariably we find some way of taking our anger out on them. Behind most anger is hurt, resentment, or frustration. If you dig deep enough into the anger that you have felt, one of these three roots will probably be there. #RandolphHarris 8 of 8
And so down the long centuries it comes down to this. Was it you, you traitor to everything the believed? It had to be, did it not? You petty deserter. May God forgive you that you made peace with your enemy. Did you lead them here by the hand yourself? You made are people as hard as ice, that is what you did. Frozen solid. If there is a soul left in them, I cannot feel it. But what do I know? Humans really should be called the valuator. No people could live without first valuing; if a people will maintain itself, however, it must not value as its neighbor valueth. The existence of a very general attitude toward experience, of a sort that disposes toward complexity of outlook, independence of judgment, and originality, has been suggested by the result of the studies. Valuing is created; hear it, ye creating ones! Valuation itself is the treasure and jewel of the valued things. Through valuation only is there value; and without valuation the soul of existence would be hollow. Hear it, ye creating ones! Individuals who refuse to yield to strong pressure from their peers to concur in a false group opinion described themselves, on an adjective check-list, as original and artistic much more frequently than do subjects who yielded to such group pressure. In addition, the independent (nonyielding) subjects show a definite preference for complex and asymmetrical line drawings, as opposed to simple and symmetrical drawings. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
This preference for the complex and asymmetrical has been show previously to be highly correlated both with the choice of art as a vocation and with rated artistic ability among art students. Furthermore, in a sample of Ph.D. candidates in the sciences, preferences for the complex and asymmetrical figures proved to be significantly related to rated originality in graduate work. This relationship was found among graduating medical school seniors who were rated for originality be the medical school faculty. Other evidence indicated that the opposed preferences, for complexity or for simplicity, were related to a generalized experiential disposition: the preference for complexity is associated with a perceptual attitude that seeks to allow into the perceptual system the greatest possible richness of experience, even though discord and disorder result, while the preference for simplicity is associated with a perceptual attitude that allows into the system only as much as can be integrated without great discomfort and disorder, even though this means excluding some aspects of reality. From all these considerations, certain hypotheses as to the characteristics of original persons were derived and put to the test in the present study. Hypothesis one is that original persons prefer complexity and some degree of apparent imbalance in phenomena. The second hypothesis is that original persons are more complex psychodynamically and have greater personal scope. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
The third hypothesis is that original persons are more independent in their judgments, and the fourth hypothesis is that original persons are more self-assertive and dominant. The fifth hypothesis is that original persons reject suppression as a mechanism for the control of impulse. This would imply that they forbid themselves fewer thoughts, that they dislike to police themselves or others, that they are disposed to entertain impulses and ideas that are commonly taboo, and in general that they express in their person the sort of indiscipline that psychoanalytic theory would ascribe to a libidinal organization in which derivatives of the early anal rather than of the late anal stage in which psychosexual development predominate. What is common to both rational and irrational authority is that it is overt authority. You know who orders and forbids; the father, the teacher, the boss, the king, the officer, the priest, God, the law, the moral conscience. The demands or prohibitions may be reasonable or not, strict or lenient, I may obey or rebel; I always know that there is an authority, who it is, what it wants, and what results from my compliance or my rebellion. Thus the ability to respond in an unusual or original manner will be greatest when freedom is great. Now freedom is related in a very special manner to degree and kind of organization. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
In general, organization in company with complexity generates freedom; the more complex the level of integration, the greater is the repertoire of adaptive responses. However, the tendency toward organization may operate in such a fashion as to maintain a maladaptive simplicity. We are familiar in the political sphere with totalitarian stats which depend upon suppression to achieve unity; such states are psychodynamically similar to the neurotic individual who suppresses one’s own impulses and emotions in order to maintain a semblance of stability. There are at hand enough case histories of both such organizations, political and private, to make it clear that the sort of unity and balance that depends upon total suppression of the claims of minority affects opinions is maladaptive in the long run. Suppression is a common way of achieving unity, however, because in the short run it often seems to work. Increasing complexity puts a strain upon an organism’s ability to integrate phenomena. One solution of the difficulty is to inhibit development of the greater level of complexity and thus to avoid the temporary disintegration that would otherwise have resulted. Originality, then flourishes where suppression is at a minimum and where some measure of disintegration is tolerable in the interests of a higher level of integration which may yet be reached. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
If we consider the case of a human being who develops strongly the disposition toward originality, we must posit certain personal characteristics and personal history which facilitated the development of such a disposition. In our hypotheses, the term dominance was used to describe one trait of the regularly original individual. Dominance may be translated as a strong need for personal mastery, not merely over other persons, but over all experience. It initially involves self-centeredness (which in its socialized form may come to be known as self-realization). One aspect of it is the insistence on a high degree of self-regulation, and a rejection of regulation by others. For such a person, the most crucial development crisis in relation to control of impulse comes, if we accept the psychoanalytic formulation of stages of psychosexual development, at the anal stage of socialization. At this level one learns independence is important and necessary, as well as toilet training and to keep one’s clothes clean. What our hypotheses have suggested is that there is a beneficial rebellion against the prohibition of unregulated anal production, and a carrying of the derivatives of anal indiscipline into adult life. The original person, in adulthood, thus often likes things messy, at least at first. The tendency is toward a final order, but the necessary preliminary is as bis a mess as possible. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
Viewed developmentally, the rejection of externally imposed control at the anal stage is later generalized to all external control of impulse, with the tendency toward socially unlicensed phallic activity, or phallic exhibitionism in its more derivative forms, being simply another expression of the general rejection of regulation of impulse by others, in favor of regulation of impulse by oneself. The disposition toward originality may thus be seen as a highly organized mode of responding to experience, including other persons, society, and oneself. The socially disrated traits that may go along with it include rebelliousness, disorderliness, and exhibitionism, while the socially valued traits which accompany it include independence of judgment, freedom of expression, and novelty of construction and insight. Every act has an infinite number of deterministic elements in it, to be sure, but at the moment of personal decision something occurs which is not just the product of these conditioning forces. A man, for example, is confronted with a picket line as he arrives to board a steamer for a trip to fill a speaking engagement. The strike, say, is one which the issue of justice is far from simple, as in the recent disputes in the New York harbor between two stevedore unions. The man is confronted with what for him, let us assume, is a strong ethical issue—shall he cross the picket line? #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
The man may endeavor by countless means to determine the justice of the strike, to weigh his own needs to take the trip, or alternate means of transportation. However, the point of decision to board the ship or not, he draws himself together and assumes the risk in his decision. This risk will be present no matter which way he decides. The action, like a dive into water, is done by the person as a whole or not at all. To be sure we are speaking in somewhat ideal terms; many persons would tend to act by a rule—I never cross picket lines,” or “The hell with strikers”—and to rationalize out of the responsibility this way or that. However, to the extent that the person is able to fulfill his human capacities in any action—that is, to choose in self-awareness—he makes the decision as a relative unity. This element of unity does not arise merely out of the integration of his personality—though the more mature he is, the more will he be able to act in this way. Rather, it arises from the fact that any action chosen in self-awareness is a placing of oneself on the line as it were; it involves a commitment, to a greater or lesser extent a leap. It is as though one were saying, “To the best of my lights at the moment this is what I choose to do, even thought I may know more and choose differently tomorrow.” The person’s act of choosing itself throws a new element into the picture. The configuration is changed, if ever so slightly; someone has thrown his weight on one side or the others. This is the creative and the dynamic element in decision. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
As everyone knows, a person is influenced in a multitude of ways by unconscious forces. However, it is often overlooked that conscious decisions, if they are soundly and not precipitately or defiantly made, can change the direction in which unconscious forces push. This is illustrated most fascinatingly in drams in therapeutic sessions when a person as been struggling for months to make the decision, let us say, to leave home and get a job on one’s own. During these months one’s dreams have been roughly equally on the pro and con side of the issue, some dreams warning one to stay home, others saying it is better to go. One finally makes the decision to leave and one’s dreams suddenly become strongly on the optimistic side, as if the conscious decision releases some unconscious power likewise. It seems that there are potentialities within us for healthy which are not released until we make a conscious decision. Allegorically, the individual’s decision is like that of the Israelites in their battle against the army of Sisera: “the stars in their courses fought Sisera,” but not until the Israelites decided to fight, too. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
An ethical act, then, must be an action chosen and affirmed by the person doing it, and act which is an expression of one’s inward motives and attitudes. It is honest and genuine in that it would be affirmed in one’s dreams as well as one’s waking thoughts. Thus an ethical mortal does not act on the conscious levels as though one loves someone when on unconscious levels one hates the individual. To be sure, no integrity is perfect; all human actions have some ambivalence, and no motives are entirely pure. An ethical action does not mean one must act as a completely unified person—with no doubts at all—or one would never act. One will always have struggle, doubt, conflict. It means only that one has endeavored to act as nearly as possible from the center of oneself, that one admits and is aware of the fact that one’s motives are not completely clear and assumes responsibility for making them clearer as one learns in the future. In this emphasis on inner motives in ethical acts, the findings of modern psychotherapy and the ethical teachings of Jesus have their clearest parallel. For the essential point in Jesus’ ethics was his shifting the emphasis from the external rules of the Ten Commandments to inward motives. Out of the heart are the issues of life. The ethical issues of life, he held, are not simply “thou shalt not kill,” but rather are inward attitudes toward other persons—anger, resentment, exploitative lust in the heart, railings, jealousies, and so on. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
The wholeness of the mortal whose external actions are at one with one’s inner motives is what is meant by the expression in beatitudes, the pure in heart. Purify your hearts, ye double-minded! Some persons will be frightened by the freedom in such an ethics of inwardness, and made anxious by the responsibility which this places on each mortal’s decisions. They may yearn for the rules, the absolutes, the rigid ancient law, which relieves us of this fearful burden of free choice. And in the longing for a rule, one might protest, your ethics of inward motives and personal decision lead to anarchy—everyone can then act as one wishes! However, freedom cannot be avoided by such an argument. For what is honest and true for a given person is not totally dissimilar from what is true for others. Dr. Tillich has stated that “the principles which constitute the Universe must be sought in mortals,” and the converse is true, that what is found in mortal’s experience is to some extent a reflection of what is true in the Universe. This can be clearly illustrated in art. A picture is never beautiful if it is not honest, and to the extent that it is honest, that is, represents the immediate, deep and original perceptions and experience of the artist, it will have at least the beginnings of beauty. This is why the art work of children, when it is an expression of their simple and honest feelings, is almost always beautiful: any line one make as a free, spontaneous person will have it in the beginning of grace and rhythm. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
The harmony, balance and rhythm which are principles of the Universe, present in the movement of stars as well as atoms, and underlying our concepts of beauty, are likewise present in the harmony of rhythm and balance of the body as well as other aspects of the self. However, at the moment the child begins to copy, or to draw to get praise from adults, or to draw by rules, the lines become rigid, constricted, and the grace vanishes. The truth in the inner light tradition in religious history is that one must always begin with oneself. No one has known God who has not known oneself—fly to the soul, the secret place of the Most High. Relating this truth, each individual is one’s own center, and the entire World centers in one, because one’s self-knowledge is a knowledge of God. This is not the whole story of ethics and the good life, but certainly if we do not start there we will get no place. The religious and philosophical development after the end of the Middle Ages is too complex to be treated within the present volume. It can be characterized by the struggle between two principles: the Christian, spiritual tradition in theological or philosophical forms and the pagan tradition of idolatry and inhumanity that assumed many forms in the development of what might be called the religious of industrialism and the cybernetic era. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
Following the tradition of the Late Middle Ages, the humanism of the Renaissance was the first great flowering of the religious spirit after the end of the Middle Ages. The ideas of human dignity, of the unity found in it an unencumbered expression. The seventeenth—and eighteenth-century Enlightenment expressed another great flowering of humanism. If we examine the foundation of this faith, we find that at every turn the Philosophers betrayed their debt to medieval thought without being aware of it. The French Revolution, to which Enlightenment philosophy had given birth, was more than a political revolution. It was a political revolution which functioned in the manner and which took on in some sense the aspect of a religious revolution. Like Islamism and the Protestant revolt it overflowed the frontiers of countries and nations and was extended by preaching and propaganda. Radical humanism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is descried later on, in my discussion of the humanist protest against the paganism of the industrial age. However, to provide a base for that discussion we must now look at the new paganism that has developed side by side with humanism, threatening at the present moment of history to destroy us. The change that prepared the first basis for the development of the industrial religion was the elimination, by Martin Luther, of the motherly element in the church. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
Although it may appear an unnecessary detour, I must dwell on this problem for a while, because it is important to our understanding of the development of the new religion and the new social character. Societies have been organized according to two principles: patricentric (or patriarchal) and matricentric (or matriarchal). The matricentric principle is centered in the figure of the loving mother. The motherly principle is that of unconditional love; the mother loves her children not because they please her, but because they are her (or another woman’s) children. For this reason the mother’s love cannot be acquired by good behavior, nor can it be lost by sinning. Motherly love is mercy and compassion (in Hebrew rachamim, the root of which is rechem, the womb”). Fatherly love, on the contrary, is conditional; it depends on the achievements and good behavior of the child; father loves that child most who is like him, for instance, whom he wishes to inherit his property. Father’s love can be lost, but it can also be regained by repentance and renewed submission. Father’s love is justice. The two principles, the feminine-motherly and the masculine-fatherly, correspond not only to the presence of a masculine and feminine side in any human being but specifically to the need for mercy and justice in every man and woman. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
The deepest yearning of human beings seems to be a constellation in which the two poles (motherliness and fatherliness, female and male, mercy and justice, feeling and thought, nature and intellect) are united in a synthesis, in which both sides of the polarity lose their antagonism and, instead, color each other. While such a synthesis cannot be fully reached in a patriarchal society, it existed to some extent in the Roman Church. The Virgin, the church as the all-loving mother, the pope and the priest as motherly figures represented motherly, unconditional, all-forgiving love, side by side with the fatherly elements of a strict, patriarchal bureaucracy with the pope at the top ruling by power. Corresponding to these motherly elements in the religious system was the relationship toward nature in the process of production: the work of the peasant as well as of the artesian was not a hostile exploitative attack against nature. It was cooperation with nature: not destructive but transforming nature according to its own laws. Martin Luther established a purely patriarchal form of Christianity in Northern European that was based on the urban middle class and the secular princes. The essence of this new social character is submission under patriarchal authority, with work as the only way to obtain love and approval. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
Behind the Christian façade arose a new secret religion, industrial religion, that is rooted in the character structure of modern society, but is not recognized as religion. The industrial religion is completely incompatible with genuine Christianity. It reduces people to servants of the economy and of the machinery that their own hands build. The industrial religion had its basis in a new social character. Its center was fear of and submission to powerful male authorities, cultivation of the sense of guilt for disobedience, dissolution of the bonds of human solidarity by the supremacy of self-interest and mutual antagonism. The sacred in industrial religion was work, property, profit, power, even though it furthered individualism and freedom within the limits of its general principles. By transforming Christianity into a strictly patriarchal religion it was still possible to express the industrial religion in Christian terminology. How do we learn to mistrust our anger and pass this mistrust on from one generation to another? After all, the idea that anger has a legitimate and inevitable place in life has been stated many times before. Yet the suppression of anger remains an actual, though sometimes disavowed, ideal for most of us. Our mistrust of our anger is learned, of course. And we learn it because it is taught to us. And the teaching begins early. Even small babies are frequently punished for angry behavior and rewarded for behavior that is more pleasing to the parents. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
As the child grows older, the training becomes more specific and explicit. The child is told not to express anger toward parents, or brothers and sisters, or others. He is taught that anger is bad and that it is bad because it is the opposite of love. Most parents are too sophisticated these days to say, “If you get angry with me, it means you do not love me.” Or: “If you get mad at me, I will not love you any more.” Or: “If you do something, and I get angry with you, it means I do not love you.” However, despite our intellectual sophistication about these matters, we still give them because we are not so sure that they are not true. This is probably the most important way in which the ideal of the suppression of anger is maintained in our culture. A perpetual cycle is set up. We, as parents, having been subtly indoctrinated as children, cannot accept within ourselves the anger that we all experience. Our inclination is to avoid admitting our anger and dealing directly with our guilt about it. It is much easier for us to recognize and condemn the anger we see in our children. So when our children express anger toward us, we react quickly to their talking back or smarting off. The anger we express under these circumstances is, of course, justified because we are doing it for the good of the child and to teach one a lesson. In other words, we have been righteously indignant. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Our children, then, through many of these experiences, come to feel guilty about their anger when they feel it and more so when they express it. In order to please us and society they may try to suppress entirely this evil side of their nature. Unless the continuing cycle is interrupted, they, too, will eventually become parents well prepared to teach their children to mistrust their feelings of anger. Another reason we learn to mistrust our anger is that we often have little opportunity to learn as children that we can be very angry without being dangerous. Often the only message the child hears is that if he or she becomes angry the outcome is likely to be disastrous. He is apt, for example, to understand that if one becomes angry with the boy next door one is liable to be in danger of being harmed. Under these circumstances one has little opportunity to learn that one can express anger directly and openly without the necessity of resorting to harmful violence. One frightening reality is that there is indeed danger when a person has been encouraged to view oneself along these extreme lines, so that one says of oneself, “If I do not keep my anger suppressed, I am likely to hurt someone.” When the emotional overload of anger eventually piles up beyond the point where is can be suppressed, such a person is not prepared to act any way but violently, with the flood of backed-up emotion suddenly released. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
Children also learn to mistrust their feelings of anger because their parents make it apparent that they are afraid of their own anger. Some parents go to great lengths to avoid letting the children see them fight. They feel so frightened and guilty about their anger that they assume it would be very frightening and emotionally damaging to their children for them to witness their parents in a heated argument. What the children often witness are sullen silences between their parents that are probably frightening to the child because one has no idea what they are about and yet sense the anger. The child often interprets these silences as much more serious breaches between the parents than they actually are. And when the child does happen to overhear a fight between the parents (perhaps without their knowledge), it may seem as though the family is disintegrating, since one has been taught by word and implication that anger is a cataclysmic and catastrophic occurrence in human relationships. However, even if the parents were successful in hiding all their disagreements, the results would probably still be harmful; for the child would be likely to feel even more guilty and frightened about one’s own anger when one has no opportunity to observe similar feelings in one’s parents’ dealings with each other. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
On the other hand, when parents make little or no attempt to hide their anger from their children, but have not learned to fight creatively, it is certain to be frightening to the children. Such fights lead nowhere. Perhaps when the argument begins, dad stomps out of the hose or mother withdraws behind a bitter wall of silence. Or perhaps the fighting degenerates into an incessant bickering back and forth that fails to clarify the real issues. The fears that keep the parents from dealing creatively with their anger are almost certain to infect the child under such circumstances. For the child has been denied the opportunity to see those one loves dealing openly and realistically with anger. One as not been able to witness one’s parents in a natural ebb and flow of anger openly and directly expressed, resulting in relief of tension, clearing of the air, and the good feeling of having been oneself, followed by the reassertion of their deep affection also being expressed openly and directly. “But behold, my limbs did receive their strength again, and I stood upon my feet, and did manifest unto the people that I had been born of God,” reports Alma 36.23. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
I paced, having just risen from my secret hiding place, and I mourned bitterly for another true believer. You bet I have got on my black velvet frock coat (close-up: tapered at the waist, brass buttons) and my motorcycle boots, and a brand-new linen shirt loaded with lace at cuffs and throat (pity the poor slob who snickers at me on account of that!), and I have not cut my shoulder-length-blond mane tonight, which I sometimes do for variety, and I have chucked my violet glasses because who cares that my eyes attract attention, and my skin’s still dramatically tanned from the raw Sun of the Gobi Desert. An American Church is having its annual business meeting. Reports of the various church organizations read in monotonous tones suggest that the meeting is occurring more because someone believes it necessary rather than because of any vital interest. Sparks of life appear briefly. A momentary flurry arises over whether the women’s donation from the proceeds of their annual bazaar should be sent to foreign missions or put in the fund for a new carpet in the sanctuary. However, this sporadic flash hardly ruffles the surface as the meeting drones on drearily. Finally, the last report ends; the congregation stirs restlessly. The moderator now also appears anxious to be done. He asks routinely if there is other business as he gathers up his papers. He looks up, surprised, when a man at the back of the room stands up. #RandolphHarris 1 of 6
The room rustles with curiosity as the man steps to the aisle and makes his way forward. Something about him commands attention. It is not the way he is dressed. His clothes are average enough—clean and neat, but with a careless air, as though he did not give much thought to them. It is more the man himself. His determined stride speaks of strength. His face is somewhat flushed. The room is quiet by the time he reached the front and turn around. Then he begins to speak: “I am sick and tired of this church—and you people! You are miserable frauds and hypocrites! You talk fine word about loving one another, then you cut each other to pieces behind each other’s backs. You do not even have the courage to let people know to their faces how you really feel about them. It is disgusting! What miserable frauds you are! Oh, you have a beautiful building here. And you are fine-looking and well-dressed people, but your church is dead inside, and you are dead inside, full of rottenness and pretense! You ‘fine Christians’ are just about as low as you can get!” If such an event really happened, can you imagine the shock and surprise of the congregation? At the very least it would be safe to say that no one in the room would any longer be bored! Most of those present would probably be critical. Some might say, “Well, there may be some truth in what he is saying. However, why does he have to get so worked up about it? That is not going to accomplish anything!” #RandolphHarris 2 of 6
Above all else there would probably be a reaction of fear on the part of the audience. The intensity of the man’s anger would be frightening, for we are not used to hearing such feelings so clearly expressed, particularly in this setting. And there would be fear about what it would mean to the church, fear that the congregation would be split asunder by the angry blast and the reaction that would follow. And for those who would disagree with the man and feel their anger mount within themselves, there would be fear of their own feelings and how they might express them. For we have learned to be afraid of our anger. Yet it is an interesting, though usually ignored, fact that the founder of the Christian faith is portrayed in the New Testament as having become as angry with the religious leaders of his day as was this “fictional” character. And Jesus expressed his anger just as openly and as vehemently. The anger rings through unmistakably, especially when it is translated into the modern vernacular, as Phillips has done. Here are some of the phrases from the twenty-third chapter of the Gospel of Mathew that are attributed to Jesus: “Alas for you, you scribes and Pharisees, play actors. You blind leaders…you blind fools…you utter frauds…what miserable frauds you are…white-washed tombs, which look fine on the outside but inside are full of deadmen’s bones and all kinds of rottenness. You are a mass of pretense and wickedness…You serpents, you viper’s brood, how do you think you are going to avoid being condemned to the rubbish heap…On your hands is all the innocent blood spilled on this Earth.” (Philips) #RandolphHarris 3 of 6
It is not surprising that the church has tended to ignore the angry Jesus in its use of him as an example of a mature and creative person. For the Christian church, most other religious groups, and our culture in general have been mistrustful of feelings of anger and frightened of any spirit of freedom that would encourage its direct expression. The message comes to us in many ways and from many sources. We are encouraged to feel guilty of wrong doing, or immature, or temperamental and unstable when we are aware of feelings of anger, especially when we give in to these emotions and express them. Listen to some of the ways we persuade ourselves to avoid anger in various relationships. “Parents, never become angry with your children. Their personalities will be warped, and they will feel rejected. Above all, do not punish them while you are angry. If you have to punish them, do it on cold blood!” “Children, never get angry with your folks. You must respect them and to be angry is to be disrespectful. Furthermore, if you are angry at them, they will not love you.” “Husbands and wives, do not get mad at each other. A happy marriage comes only when you ignore the things that irritate you and choke down any anger you feel. Above all, never let the children hear you in any kind of disagreement.” “Bosses, do not tolerate anger from your employees. If you allow them to get away with any expression of anger, they will never respect you.” “Employees, never let the boss see you are angry at him or her. Swallow your anger. You may get ulcers, but you will keep your job longer.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 6
You see how we handle this business of anger? We say it is wrong to feel angry and dangerous to our relationships to express it. Thus we have made the suppression of anger in our society ideal. This attitude is expressed in a letter written to the editor of a magazine in which an article by the author of this book, “The Creative Use of Anger,” appeared. The correspondent wrote: “Perhaps I am psychologically abnormal, I do not know. But this I do know, that is, like the husband mentioned, I has scolded my wife so angrily as to hurt her and make her cry, I should feel that I had definitely sinned and ought to seek forgiveness both from her and from God; and the shame my behavior would have stayed with me a long time.” Self-expression is a popular word, but somewhat indefinite. One speaks of his better self, implying the existence of some other less good. Which one ought we to express? I, for one, feel that whenever an unworthy emotion (and I include here anger toward one’s nearest and dearest) is expressed in action, a person is really degrading himself. This is an excellent statement of the attitude that would be expected to develop from the explicit and implicit teachings of most representatives of the Christian church. “For verily, verily I say unto you, one that hath the spirit of contention is not for me, but is of the devil, who is the father of contention, and he stirreth up the hearts of people to contend with anger, one with another,” reports 3 Nephi 11.29. #RandolphHarris 5 of 6
And a similar attitude tends to be adopted by most of us whether we are religiously oriented or not. One man was describing how he avoided express any anger or irritation toward his wife. When he was asked if he were afraid of his anger, his reply was immediate, “Of course I am. Everybody should be. When I’m angry I say things I don’t mean. And that’s not good.” And often we frown at or laugh at (which may be much worse) those who become concerned enough over matters to express anger. Often, for example, in public hearings on community issues the person who becomes emotionally involved enough to speak heatedly about an issue are subject them to ridicule; and their ideas are frequently discounted because they are expressed angrily. The implication is made that the person got carried away with his or her emotions. Therefore, what the person said must not have made sense. Yet in fact we often speak most lucidly in the heat of emotion. Somehow we have a sort of pseudoscientific attitude by which we fulfill our need to suppress anger. We have concluded that when the ideas are presented logically, rationally, and without emotion they must be objective and therefore nearer the truth than ideas about which we become excited and emotional. Keep in mind at all times, God is the only power and the only presence there is, and God is right where I am. I live and move and have my being in God. God’s being moves through me and manifests itself in what I am doing. #RandolphHarris 6 of 6
Hello, you have the most amazing digs. I simply love your paintings. We also express our fear of freedom by seeing much of our lives in terms of demands and obligations. Few of us can claim we lack talent, for whatever shortage of abilities we may have, most of us have a real knack for playing this game! Getting along in the World as it is, adequate degree of social conformity, capacity to adapt to a wide range of conditions, ability to fit in—this kind of adjustment is not an unmixed blessing; the unadjusted complex person, who does not fit in very well in the World as it is, sometimes perceives the World more accurately than does one’s better adjusted fellow. Deceitfulness is identified with duplicity, lack of frankness, guile, subterfuge. Again, one recalls the adjective self-descriptions of the complex people: gloomy, pessimistic, bitter, dissatisfied, demanding, pleasure-seeking, spendthrift. There is certainly some suggestion here of early deprivation, of pessimism concerning the source of supply, which is seen as untrustworthy and which must be coerced, or perhaps tricked, into yielding. It is as though the person had reason to believe that one would not get what was coming to one unless one made sure that one did, by whatever device might be available. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
It is this lack of infantile trust that leads to adult duplicity and craftiness. One aspect of complexity then (and perhaps a penalty sometimes attaching to it) is, to render it in the common phrase, a sort of “two-facedness,” an inability to be wholly oneself at all times. The more simple, natural, and likeable person finds it easier to be always oneself. As compensation, the complex person may possess the capacity to be ironic or sardonic, which can be valuable attitudes. The preference for complexity is clearly associated with originality, artistic expression, and excellence of esthetic judgment. Originality was one of the three criterion variables around which the assessment research program was organized, and every subject was rated by the faculty members of one’s department on the degree or originality one had displayed in one’s work. It is Saturday afternoon and the wife says, “Matthias, how about watching the kids for the rest of the afternoon while I go shopping?” Now, Matthias may not feel at all enthusiastic about this plan for his afternoon. However, there is a good chance that he will feel some obligation (“After all, she does work pretty hard, too!”) and will agree (by a grunt) with the proposal. However, he may also feel that she has made an unreasonable demand. So he makes a few grumbling “bitches” about it, and the wife goes off feeling hurt, angry, or guilty, with some of the fun taken out of her expedition. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
By playing the demand-obligation game Matthias has blinded himself to the alternatives that he had. What are some of the things he might have said? “Honey, I was just going to call a couple of the guy and get together with them. How about calling a baby-sitter?” Or, “Gee, I was looking forward to spending the afternoon with you and the kids. Is there any other time you could do it?” Or, “I was planning to do somethings around the house that I can’t do if I have to watch the kids. Please call in a sitter.” Of course, there is always the chance, and perhaps not so remote either, that if Matthias were aware of his alternatives and felt free to exercise them, he might genuinely enjoy playing with the children for the afternoon, but with the help of the demand-obligation game he manages to keep himself miserable and unfree. If you think you do not play this game, look at your gift-giving habits. See how often you tell yourself that a gift is expected or that you owe it to a person, thereby blunting your enjoyment in giving as an expression of your love. One of the tricky aspects of the demand-obligation game is that, when we rebel against what others expect of us and against our own feelings of obligation, we are no more free than when we accede to them. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
If Matthias flatly refuses to stay home with the children because it is expected of him, he has not really acted freely on the basic question of whether he would enjoy that time with his youngsters. Probably many hipster types are so busy rebelling against society’s expectations that they are not free to ask themselves whether they are living the life most satisfying to themselves. Whenever we perceive life primarily in terms of others’ expectations, we are less than fully free. Not being ourselves with others is another way we often express our fear of freedom. None of us is completely ourselves all of the time in our encounter with others, and no doubt some lack of candor is often necessary, even desirable, in our complicated society. However, we overwork if, for we constantly tell ourselves in all kinds of situations that we cannot really be ourselves. We say that we cannot be genuine with another because: “He’s not really capable of understanding how I feel.” Or: “He wouldn’t love me any more.” Or: “She is too mature [or too young] to understand what I’m talking about.:” Or: “He hasn’t read as much about these psychological things as I have, and it would be completely over his head if I told him how I feel.” Or “He has so many troubles at the office I don’t want to burden him with my feelings about what goes on here at home.” Or: “She reacts emotionally whenever I say how I feel, so I’ve just learned to keep my mouth shut.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
Many other things some of us do could be interpreted as expressions of our fear of freedom. Some people live vicariously, substituting imaginary lives for the adventure of living: “I guess I read an average of six of seven mystery novels a week.” Psychosomatic illnesses probably perform this, among other, services: “I’m sorry, but I have another one of my sick headaches tonight and just can’t go out. Intellectualism provides a way of substituting rumination for spontaneous living: “Doctor, I’ve read just about every psychology book I can get my hands on. I can’t understand why I keep on having troubles.” Perhaps a person must have more commerce with oneself and one’s feeling states and less with the environment during childhood if one is later to have sufficient communication with one’s own depths to produce original thought. In this view, originality evidenced in maturity is to some extent dependent upon the degree to which the person in early childhood is faced with a complicated relationship to the maternal source of supply, combined with one’s capacity to persist at and eventually to achieve some mastery of this earliest problem situation. The argument would be that this primitive experience of phenomenal complexity sets a pattern of response which results in slower maturation, more tentativeness about the final form of organization, a resistance to early crystallization of the personality, and finally, greater complexity in one’s view both of the outer and of the inner Worlds. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
Perhaps such speculation is unwarranted, however, and in any case it is clear that a great many other factors are involved in determining originality. What can be said is that originality and artistic creativeness and discrimination are related to the preference for complexity. The complex person’s greater flexibility in thought process is shown by a correlation with rated rigidity, defined as inflexibility of thought and manner; stubborn, pedantic, unbending, firm. That repressive overcontrol may sometimes be associated with the preference for simplicity has already been indicated by the correlation of complexity with constriction, and by another correlation with impulsiveness. It is shown also in the relation of the complexity measure to psychiatric variables that are scaled with hysteria, which also correlates with Schizophrenia and psychopathic deviate. Thus complexity goes along both with lack of control impulse and with the failure of repression which characterizes the schizophrenic process. This is by no means to suggest that because a person is complex, unresponsive, and lazy that they show schizophrenic tendencies of a pathological degree, but it is reasonable to supper that it correlates the sort of free-floating symbolic activity and frank confrontation and expression of the unconscious that is often so startling present in schizophrenic patients. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
Healthy people are usually able to repress aggressive and erotic impulses, or to render them innocuous by rationalization, reinterpretation, or gratification in a substitutive manner which will not cause conflict. At the risk of being over-simple, we might say that preference for the complex in the psychic life makes for a wider consciousness of impulse, while this sort of simplicity, when it is preferred, is maintained by a narrowing of that consciousness. The perceptual decision in favor of admitting complexity may make also for greater subjectively experienced anxiety. To tolerate complexity, one must very often be able to tolerate anxiety as well, this finding would seem to day. The person who prefers complexity is socially nonconformist. With all the ways people have of expressing their fear of freedom it may be fair to say that the most unlimited ability that the human being has is that of building cage around itself. And once we build our cage, we work hard to keep them in constant report. What is so frightening about freedom? We cherish it. We fight for it. Yet we run from it and go to great lengths to avoid an awareness of it. Why? One reason we are afraid of freedom is that we do not trust ourselves. If we were not restricted in some way, we are afraid of what we would do. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
One woman described a lifelong fear of high places. When she began to explore her feelings further, she became aware that she had always been afraid that if the opportunity presented itself, she might jump to her death. By being afraid of and avoiding such places she was able to bypass the risk that her mistrust of herself told her was involved. Another young wife and mother suffers considerable inconvenience because she has never learned to drive. As she talked about it, it became clear that the freedom to come and go as she pleases is too frightening. “I’m afraid of what I might do,” she said. “I might start running around be begin neglecting my home and family.” And so she keeps herself immobile and as dependent on her husband as possible. All of us, no doubt, have some kind of fear like this. We are afraid that is we ever let ourselves go we would be likely to run wild or become savages, or lazy, no-good transients, or neglecting parents. It follows, of course, that our distrust of ourselves is rooted in our self-hate. It is as though we were constantly warning ourselves to be on guard against ourselves: “Look out, now, this guy is no damn good. Let him our of your sight and he’s liable to do most anything. Keep him hobbled. And do not let down your guard for a moment.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
In reality, however, it is not the genuinely free person who runs wild, becomes a savage, or lack the motivation to be productive. On the contrary, behavior that is destructive to the self or to others is an indication that the person is enslaved to repressed feelings that drive one and that one cannot face openly. Such behavior is the by-product of self-hate. If we have lived our lives denying freedom to ourselves, perhaps there is some justification for our mistrust or freedom. Just as a bid who has spent all its life in a cage might bewildered if released and not to know how to handle life in the wild, so we, too, may not be very well prepared to handle freedom. Many people need professional help as they seek to grant themselves greater personal freedom. A second reason we are afraid of freedom is that freedom, like love, means vulnerability. When we are free and spontaneous in our relationships with others, our guard is down. We are open to the possibility of being hurt. Consequently, we often keep ourselves bound emotionally. Coupes often have the mystifying and frustrating experience of discovering shortly after marriage that they no longer have such a strong, delicious desire for each other as they had before. Sometimes they immediately conclude that they no longer love each other. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
This is probably incorrect, for love is not so unstable a quality as all that. What has happened is that the couple has become frightened, since marriage is so intense a relationship with so much potential for being hurt. They react to their fear by unconsciously cutting off their freedom to experience and express their love. And, of course, they discover all kinds of misleading and irrelevant reasons for their change of feelings. Sometimes we pick safe moments to be free. One wife complained that the only time her husband was affectionate was invariably when he was about to leave for work. At that moment he would become the loving, cuddly teddy bear of a husband whom she had dreamed of all her life. At practically all other times he would be cool and aloof. It appears evident that he felt free to be loving at that moment when he just had to leave within quick five minutes. For then it was relatively safe for his love to come out of hiding. It could not possibly lead to anything further, which might mean more vulnerability. He could hug her and run! And she was left thinking to herself, “Fell well my lonely one, nothing else here can be done. So hit the freeway. I don’t ever want to see you again. You didn’t do me right, so a long good-bye tonight. Maybe in some other life, I will see you again. I will bet the Dow Jones if you didn’t come back, I’ll be just fine. Imagine how crushed she was for you to say I was not the one. My friends say I was in denial defending you as a perfect friend, but no one was held prisoner. It’s you again! Maybe someday in your dreams, my love, maybe you can say ‘Damn, it’s you again!’” (Hit the Freeway by Toni Braxton). #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
So our fear of freedom does make some kind of sense, emotionally. We feel we cannot be trusted with freedom and to be free is to risk being hurt. However, understanding why we fear freedom does not make it any less desirable as a goal in life. For in actuality our enslavement to fear is more hurtful to us than freedom. Avoidance of freedom exacts a heavy toll in our lives. Some readers may have been thinking, during our discussion of the los of the center of values in our society, that what is necessary is simply to work out a new set of values. And others may have the thought, “There is nothing wrong with the values of the past—such as love, equality and human fellowship. We need simply to bring these values back again. Both of these pints miss the central problem—namely, that modern mortals have to a great extent lost the power to affirm and believe in any value. No matter how important the content of the values may be, or how suitable this or that value may be on paper, what the individual needs is a prior capacity, namely, the power to do the valuing. The triumph of barbarism in such movements as Hitlerian fascism did not occur because people forgot the ethical traditions of our society as one might misplace a code. The humanistic values of liberty and the greatest good for the greatest number, the Hebrew Christian values of community and love for the stranger, were still in the textbooks, were still taught in Saturday and Sunday school, and no archeological expedition was needed to unearth them. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
People rather have lost the value of individual competition, the pursuit of competitive enterprise, and individual effort and initiative, and the inner capacity to affirm, to experience values and goals as real and powerful for themselves. There is, furthermore, something artificial about setting out to find a center of value, as though one were shopping for a new coat. The endeavors to discover values outside oneself generally slide the individual directly into the question of what the group expects of one—what the style these days, in values as in coats? And this, as we have seen, has been part-and-parcel of the trends toward emptiness in our society. There is even something wrong in the phrase discussion of values. One never receives one’s convictions about values through intellectual debates. The things in a person’s life which one actually does value-one’s children and one’s love for them and theirs for one, the pleasure one has in drama or listening to music or playing gold, the pride one has in one’s work—all these one accepts as realities. One would regard any theoretical discussion of the value of one’s loving one’s children, or one’s pleasure in music, for example, as irrelevant if not impertinent. If you pushed one, one would say, “I value the love of my children because I actually experience it,” and if you pressed far enough to irritate one, one might well say, “If you have not experienced it yourself, I cannot explain it to you.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
In actual life the real value is something we experience as connected with the reality of our activity, and any verbal discussion is on a quite secondary level. We do not mean to psychologize values, or to imply that anything toward which one is inclined at the moment is good and true. Nor are we implying any depreciation of the role of the sciences of mortal, as well as philosophy and religion, in clarifying values. Indeed, I believe that the combined contributions of all these disciplines are requires for the solution of our crucial problem of what values modern mortals can live by. However, we do mean to emphasize that unless the individual oneself can affirm the value; unless one’s own inner motives, one’s own ethical awareness, are made the starting place, no discussions of values will make much real difference. Ethical judgment and decision must be rooted in the individual’s own power to evaluate. Only as one oneself affirms, on all levels of oneself, a way of acting as part of the way one sees reality and chooses to relate to it—only thus will the value have effectiveness and cogency for one’s own living. For this obviously is the only way one can or will take responsibility for one’s action. And it is the only way that one will learn from one’s action how better to act next tie, for when we act by rote or rule we close our eyes to the nuances, the new possibilities, the unique ways in which every situation is different from every other. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
Furthermore, it is only as the person chooses the action, affirms the goal in one’s own awareness, that one’s action will have conviction and power, for only then will one really believe in what one is doing. For one thing, our fear of freedom results in inner tension. We have a virtually irrepressible desire to be more spontaneous and free. Since this desire is frightening, a conflict situation is present. We have to expend great amounts of energy keeping our cages in constant repair. Energy thus expanded in maintaining rigid control of ourselves puts a strain on us physically and emotionally. No doubt many physical and emotional problems are associated with this strain. Our fear of freedom also frequently leads to numbness of oneself. When we do not feel free to be ourselves, one way out is gradually to cut ourselves off from awareness of our feelings. Extreme instances of this occur in certain schizophrenic patients who seem totally incapable of experiencing a genuine emotion of any kind. Life and the freedom to feel have become so frightening that they have retreated into a World where there is no feeling. However, deadness to the self is not limited to such individuals. All of us in some degree have retreated from complete awareness. And to this extent we have deprived ourselves of the opportunity of living life at its fullest. Often this numbness affects our relations with others, and we find it difficult to sense how we really feel toward others. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
Apparently, even the most basic sense can become somewhat dulled, giving all of life a kind of gray bleakness. And it is not unusual for a person who has been making progress in psychotherapy to report a new sense of awareness. The grass may seem greener. Natural beauty, unnoticed before, is seen with new eyes; and there is a fresh feeling of aliveness in one’s body. Fear from freedom also often cuts us off from the experience of love. When we are not free to be ourselves, we are staying at a distance from others. Since we do not let others see us as we are and since we withhold our true feelings from them, we make it almost impossible for them and ourselves to feel emotionally close. And if the other person, in spite of our masks, appears to care for us, we always have an out. We can say, “He doe not love me for what I am. I have seduced him into caring for me, and he likes me only because of what I let him see of me. If we really knew me, he would no longer care for me.” Thus we persuade ourselves that we dare not give up our slavery to our masks. And at the same time we also protect ourselves from making the frightening discovery that those who love us, love us in spite of—not because of—the masks we wear. In this way we perpetuate our fear of spontaneity. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
Our fear of freedom is especially evident in two particular areas that deserve individual examination. We are afraid of the freedom to be angry and of the freedom to be aware of and enjoy of pleasures of the flesh feelings. Pleasure, joy, and happiness all involve a sense of well-being, a sense of being up, and having good feelings toward yourself and/or others. “And the Lord God doth work by means to bring about his great and eternal purposes; and by very small means the Lord doth confound the wise and bringeth about the salvation of many souls,” reports Alma 37.7. The price we pay for avoiding the pain of being fully alive is that we are excluded from the pleasure as well. Preference for simplicity is associated with social conformity, respect for custom and ceremony, friendliness toward tradition, somewhat categorical moral judgment, an undeviating patriotism, and suppression of such troublesome new forces as inventions that would temporarily cause unemployment. It seems evident that, at its best, preference for simplicity is associated with personal stability and balance, while at its worst it makes for categorical rejection of all that threatens disorder and disequilibrium. In its pathological aspect it produces stereotyped thinking, rigid and compulsive mortality, and hatred of instinctual aggressive and erotic forces which might upset the precariously maintained balance. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
There is a passage in Hugo’s Les Miserables which is remarkably coincident with these observations. It occurs at that point in the narrative when Javert, the single-minded and merciless representative of the law, has turned his own World upside-down by allowing Jean Valjean, the outlaw whom he has so relentlessly pursued, and whom he finally had in his grasp, to escape. He says to himself, in this surprising moment, “There is something more than a duty.” At this, “he was startled; his balances were disturbed; one of the scales fell into the abyss, the other flew into the sky.” To be obliged to acknowledge this: infallibility is not infallible, there may be an error in the doctrine, all is not said when a code has spoken, society is not perfect, authority is complicate with vacillation, a cracking is possible in the immutable, judges are mortal, the law may be deceived, the tribunals may be mistaken…to see a flaw in the immense blue crystal of the firmament! Certainly it was strange, that the fireman of order, the engineer of authority, mounted upon the blind iron-horse of the rigid path, could be thrown off by a ray of light! that the incommutable, the direct, the correct, the geometrical, the passive, the perfect, could bend! Until now all that he had above him has been in his sight a smooth, simple, limpid surface; nothing there unknown, noting obscure; nothing which was not definite, coordinated, concatenated, precise, exact, circumscribed, limited, shut in, all foreseen; authority was a plane; no fall in it, no dizziness before it. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
Javert had never seen the unknown except below. The irregular, the unexpected, the disorderly opening of chaos, the possible slipping into an abyss; that belonged to inferior regions, to the rebellious, the wicked, the miserable. This passage brings together many observations made intuitively by Hugo and arrived at in more pedestrian manner in this research. A precise simplicity is seen to be related to authority, stick doctrines, tradition, morality, constriction, and repression. The opposite of all these things is typified by the flaw in the crystal, by the irregular, by disorderly chaos, by such qualities as are to be found in the inferior regions, where reside the rebellious, the wicked, and the miserable. The emphasis here is pathological, and the dichotomy absolute, but if we extend the range into normal behavior and admit the many shortcomings of the typology, there is considerable agreement between Hugo’s intuition and this set of correlations. We would suggest that the types of perceptual preference we have observed are related basically to a choice of what to attend to in the complex of phenomena that makes up the World we experience; for the World is both stable and unstable, predictable and unpredictable, ordered and chaotic. To see it predominantly as one or the other is a sort of perceptual decision. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
One may attend to its ordered aspect, to regular sequences of events, to a stable center of the Universe (the Sun, the church, the state, the home, the parent, God, eternity, etc.), or one may instead attend primarily to the eccentric, the relative, and the arbitrary aspect of the World (the briefness of the individual life, the blind uncaringness of matter, the sometime hypocrisy of authority, accidents of circumstance, the presence of evil, tragic fate, the impossibility of freedom for the organism capable of conceiving freedom, and so on). Either of these perceptual decisions may be associated with a high degree of personal effectiveness. It is as though there is an effective and an ineffective aspect of each alterative. Our thinking about these various aspects is as yet based only upon clinical impressions of our subjects, but it is perhaps worth recording while we go on with the business of gathering more objective evidence. At its best, the decision in favor of order makes for personal stability and balance, a sort of easy-going optimism combined with religious respect for authority without subservience to it. This sort of decision will be made by persons who from an early age had good reason to trust the stability and equilibrium of the World and who derived inner sense of comfort and balance from their perception of an outer certainty. #Randolphharris 19 of 21
At its worst, the decision in favor of order makes for categorical rejection of all that threatens disorder, a fear of anything might being disequilibrium. Optimism becomes a matter of policy, religion a prescription and a ritual. Such a decision is associated with stereotyped thinking, rigid and compulsive morality, and hatred of instinctual aggressive and erotic forces which might upset the precariously maintained balance. Equilibrium depends essentially upon exclusion, a kind of perceptual distortion which consists in refusing to see parts of reality that cannot be assimilated to some preconceived system. The decision in favor of complexity, at its best, makes for originality and creativeness, a greater tolerance for unusual ideas and formulations. The sometimes disordered and unstable World has its counterpart in the person’s inner discord, but the crucial ameliorative factor is a constant effort to integrate the inner and outer complexity in a high-order synthesis. The goal is to achieve the psychological analogue of mathematical elegance: to allow into the perceptual system the greatest possible richness of experience, while yet finding in this complexity some over all patter. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Such a person is not immobilized by anxiety in the face of great uncertainty, but is at once perturbed and challenged. For such an individual, optimism is impossible, but pessimism is lifted from the personal to the tragic level, resulting not in apathy but in participation in the business of life. At its worst, such a perceptual attitude leads to grossly disorganized behavior, to surrender to chaos. It results in nihilism, despair, and disintegration. The personal life itself becomes simply an acting out of the meaninglessness of the Universe, a bitter joke directed against its own maker. The individual is overwhelmed by the apparent insolubility of the problem, and find the disorder of life disgusting and hateful. One’s essential World-view is thus depreciative and hostile. The Universe is a spiritual system and we are part of it; God is right where we are and is discovered at the center of our own being. Turning from everything that denies this and quietly contemplating the Perfection of the Inner Mortal, who is an incarnation of God, we meet the Great Reality in the only place we shall ever discover it, within our own hearts and souls and minds. The immediate availability of good conscious is the practical application of spiritual thought as a force to the solution of human problems; the inevitable necessity that good shall come to every soul; this leads to the belief in immortality and the continuity of the individual stream of consciousness, and eternal expansion of the individual life. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
I was graced by the divine and sacramental! People talk about the gift of faith, well, I am telling you it was more like miracle! It did sheer pleasure to my psyche. One of the first things necessary for a creative relationship to the inherited wisdom in the religious traditions is to remove religious discussion from such deteriorated forms as the debates over the belief in the existence of God. The tendency to make that issues central—as thought God were an object alongside other objects, whose existence can be emphatically proved or disproved as we prove of disprove Quadrilateral and triangle area theorems or if there is enough DNA in the average person’s body to stretch from the Sun to Pluto and back 17 times—shows our modern tendency to split up reality. It is noteworthy that in some ways the subjects who hold to a personally evolved religious belief are similar to the group of atheists and agnostics, while in other ways they are distinctly different. The ways in which they are similar are in their relatively high valuation of the thinking process and of intellectual achievement, and in the absence of ethnocentrism or authoritarianism in their make-up; the ways in which they are different are in their robust psychological health, their genuine independence, originality, and growth-orientation, and in their relatively high degree of desire for positions of community leadership and status, as contrasted with the degree of social isolation and preference for going-it-alone which marked the radically skeptical group. #RandolphHarris 1 of 12
There is a good deal of psychological strength in the subjects we have interviewed, whatever their troubles may be. They are able to take account equally of the inner and the outer experience; while they are highly interoceptive and have much self-insight, they are also socially perceptive and are able to use techniques of manipulation and mastery in relation to the environment in order to achieve security and to attain gratification of the needs which the culture itself defines as gratifiable. They are both self-aware and aware of others. Their life experience is broad as well as deep. While they have had happy childhoods and feel very affectionate towards their parents, they at the same time are capable of experiencing considerable anxiety, for they do not utilize repression to deal with unpleasant memories or affects, but rather face things as they are, including their feelings and impulses. They are complex rather than simple psychodynamically, and they admit new experiences into their perceptual systems even at the cost of insoluble contradictions. The ability to do this is based in part on one’s faith that one can finally achieve a synthesis, that reality ultimately makes sense and that one can oneself discern that sense. Most important, as a result of this pattern of attributes, the person has great capacity for further growth, which involves somehow being able to leave oneself behind, to shed old coast, to molt, to metamorphose, to find a new order of selfhood in obedience to internal demands for change. #RandolphHarris 2 of 12
This capacity for self-renewal is related to the whole problem of precocity and impedance in the formation of the self; it is of the great importance in the psychology of individual development. It involves the way in which a person places oneself in the time span which is defined by oneself as process. The most distinctive characteristic of the self is its unceasing growth and change within the matrix of sameness given by memory. Memory seems to make the self timeless even while it presents to reflection the evidence for irreversibility of all that has occurred. The extent to which a person acts in the present seems to me an index of whether the self is perceived as continuing to evolve or perceived as static and essentially no longer alive. My guess is that perception of the self in relation to time is most crucial in determining attitude towards biological death, as well as the very experience of dying, which surely must show as much variation among people as does their experience of living. What this means in terms of religious belief is that belief is not a rigid doctrine, not a set of forever-prescribed particularities, not static abstraction at all, but a formative process with faith as its foundation and vision as its goal—faith in the intelligibility and order of the Universe, leading through necessary difficulties of interpretation and changing meanings to moments of spiritual integration which are themselves transient. #RandolphHarris 3 of 12
To make God an entity, a being over against other beings, located in space Heaven only knows where, is a carry-over of a primitive view, full of contradictions and easily refutable. The existence of God implies as much atheism as to argue against it. It is as atheistic to affirm the existence of God as to deny it. God is being itself, not a being. We define religion as the assumption that life has meaning. Religion, or lack of it, is shown not in some intellectual or verbal formulations but in one’s total orientation to life. Religion is whatever the individual takes to be one’s ultimate concern. One’s religious attitude is to be found at the point where one has a conviction that there are values in human existence worth living and dying for. We obviously do not mean that all religious traditions or attitudes are equally constructive: they may be destructive, as illustrated in the religious fervor of the Nazis, or in the Inquisition. The problem always remains for theology, philosophy and ethics, with the assistance of the sciences and history of mortals, to determine what beliefs are most constructive and most consistent with other truth about human life. Psychologically religion is to be understood as a way of relating to one’s existence. “By their fruits ye shall know them.” There is much less difference between a mystic’s faith in God [the indigenous convictions of the religious person rather than other-Worldly creeds] and an atheist’s rational faith in humankind than between the former and that of a Calvinist whose faith in God is rooted in the conviction of one’s own powerlessness and in one’s fear of God’s power. #RandolphHarris 4 of 12
When one is able to relate creatively to the wisdom of one’s fathers in the ethical and religious traditions one finds that one discovers anew one’s capacity for wonder. It is self-evident that the capacity for active, responsive wonder has been largely lacking in modern society. This is one side of the vacuity and emptiness which so many people feel in our period. Wonder may be described in many ways, from two things incline the heart to wonder, the moral law within and the starry sky above, to the wonder which grips us as one aspect of the feelings of pity and terror which purge the soul when we see dramatic tragedy. Though certainly not the exclusive province of religion, wonder is traditionally associated with it: and I would consider wonder, when it appears as is so often the cause in scientists or artists, as the religious aspects of these other vocations. Those who take a rigid view either of religious or scientific truth become more dogmatic and lose the capacity to wonder; those who acquire the wisdom of their fathers without surrendering their own freedom find that wonder adds to their zest and their conviction of meaning in life. The importance of wonder underlies Jesus’s high regard for the attitudes of children: “Except ye become as a little child, ye cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” This statement has nothing whatever to do with childishness or infantilism; it refers to the child’s capacity for wonder, a capacity for wonder, a capacity found likewise in the most mature and creative adults, whether they are scientists like Einstein or artists like Matisse. #RandolphHarris 5 of 12
Wonder is the opposite to cynicism and boredom; it indicates that a person has a heightened aliveness, is interested, expectant, responsive. It is essentially an opening attitude—an awareness that there is more to life than one has as yet fathomed, an experience of new vistas in life to be explored as well as new profundities to be plumbed. Nor is it an easy attitude to hold. The faculty of wonder tires easily. Life would seem a great deal fuller than it does if we understood this is the World that we must empathize with. We must give ourselves to it in a Universe of basic forms in which our own life is grounded. This is the challenge to our consciousness. Wonder is a function of what one holds to be of ultimate meaning and value in life. Though it may be cued off by a tragic drama, it is not a negative experience; since it is essentially an enlarging of life, the over-all emotion which accompanies wonder is joy. The highest to which mortal can attain is wonder and if the prime phenomenon makes one wonder, let one be content; nothing higher can it give one. Our whole conduct of life presupposes that we are protected from the direst poverty and that the possibility exists of being able to free ourselves increasingly from social ills. The less affluent people, the masses, could not survive without their thick skins and their easy-going ways. Why should they scorn the pleasures of the moment when no other awaits them? #RandolphHarris 6 of 12
The less affluent are too helpless, to exposed, to behave like us, even thought they are first class citizens. When I see the people indulging themselves, disregarding all sense of moderation, I invariably think that this is their compensation for being a helpless target for all the taxes, epidemics, sickness, and evils of social institutions. They can never see the World in the old way again, never experience life in the old way; once the old consciousness is shattered, there is no chance of building it up again. We have to present strong, solid forms on which life can look secure, we should not be lulled into failing to realize that in life wonder also goes with humility—not the pseudo-humility of submission, which generally is the reverse side of arrogance, but the humility of the generous-minded person who can accept the given just as one, in one’s own creative efforts, is able to give. The historical term grace has a rich meaning at this point, despite the fact that for many people the World has been so much identified with deteriorated forms of the grace of God that it is useless. One speaks of the graceful flight of a bird, the grace of a child’s movements, the graciousness of the generous person. Grace is something given, a new harmony which emerges; and it always inclines the heart to wonder. #RandolphHarris 7 of 12
We must emphasize that in every use of these terms—wonder, humility, grace—the connotation is not that of the person being passive and acted upon, as in some traditional religious attitudes. There is a very common misconception in our society that one gives oneself over to creative ecstasy, or to the loved one, or to religious belief. It is as though one falls in love by way of gravitation, or is seized by the hounds of Heaven, or write music or paints in a state of being carried away. It is amazing both how prevalent these passive ways of thinking are in our culture, and how false they are. Any artist or writer or musician—those who are supposedly carried away—will tell you that in the creative experience there is a greatly heightened consciousness and very intense acidity on one’s own part. This is the opposite of the divide-and-conquer fragmentation which has characterized modern mortal’s relation to nature since Francis Bacon and has led us to the brink of catastrophe. We can, and must, will and love the World as an immediate, spontaneous totality. There is a new language of myth and symbol which will be more adequate to love and will in the new conditions we must confront. It is the passion of the artist, of whatever type or craft, to communicate what one experiences as the subconscious and unconscious significance of one’s relation to our World. Communicate is related to commune, and, in turn, both are avenues to the experience of communion and community with our fellow beings. #RandolphHarris 8 of 12
We love and will the World as an immediate, spontaneous totality. We will the World, create it by our decision, our fiat, our choice; and we love it, give it affect, energy, power to love and change us as we mold and change it. This is what it means to be fully related to one’s World. I do not imply that the World does not exist before we love or will it; one can answer that question only on the basis of one’s assumptions, and, being a Californian with inborn realism, I would assume that it does exist. However, no reality, no relation to me, as I have no effect upon it; I move as in a dream, vaguely and without viable contact. One can choose to shut it out—as New Yorkers do when riding the subway—or one can choose to see it, create it. In this sense, we give responsiveness which implies aliveness. And certainly the grace, or given quality of any experience is in direct proportion to how much one participates in it. A patient in therapy expressed it simply but beautifully, “The grace of God is the capacity to change.” What does this mean concerning our personal lives, to which, at last, we now return? The approach we are here recommending as the creative use of tradition makes possible a new attitude toward conscience. The microcosm of our consciousness is where the macrocosm of the Universe is known. It is the fearful joy, the blessing, and the curse of mortal that one can be conscious of oneself and one’s World. #RandolphHarris 9 of 12
For consciousness surprises the meaning in our otherwise absurd acts. Love, infusing the whole, beckons us with its power with the promise that it may become our power. And the soul—that often nettlelike voice which is at the same time our creative power—leads us into life if we do not terminate these soulful experiences but accept them with a sense of the preciousness of what we are and what life is. Intentionality, itself consisting of the deepened awareness of oneself, is our means of putting the meaning surprised by consciousness into action. We stand on the peak of the consciousness of previous ages, and their wisdom is available to us. History—that selective treasure house of the past which each age bequeaths to those that follow—has formed us in the present so that we may embrace the future. If our insights, the new forms which play around the fringes of our minds, always lead us into virginal land where, like it or not, we stand on strange and bewildering ground, what does it matter? The only way out is ahead, and our choice is whether we shall cringe from it or affirm it. For in every act of love and will—and in the long run they are both present in each genuine act—we mold ourselves and our World simultaneously. That is what it means to embrace the future. #RandolphHarris 10 of 12
It is important as the creative use of tradition to take a new attitude toward conscience. As everyone know, conscience is generally conceived of as the negative voice of tradition speaking within one—the “thou-shalt-not’s” echoing down from Moses on Mount Sinai, the voice of prohibitions which the society has taught its members for centuries. Conscience is then the constrictor of one’s activities. This tendency to think of conscience as that which tells the individual not to do things, is so strong that it seems to operate almost automatically. When I was discussing this point with a class of students in a college, one student volunteered that it is quite possible to use one’s conscience beneficially. When I agreed and asked him for examples, he offered, “When you don’t want to go to class, your conscience tells you to.” I pointed out that this actually was a negative sentence. He then searched his mind and came up with a second example, “When you don’t want to study, your conscience makes you.” He was at first entirely unaware that this example too was negative. Conscience in each case was seen as acting against what one supposedly wants to do; it was the taskmaster, the whip. The significant point is that the young man said nothing about conscience in his examples as a guide to help him get the most value from the class, or conscious as the voice of one’s own deepest purposes and goals in the enterprise of studying and learning. #RandolphHarris 11 of 12
Conscience is not a set of handed-down prohibitions to constrict the self, to stifle its vitality and impulses. Nor is conscience to be thought of as divorced from tradition, as, in the liberalistic period when it was implied that one decided every act de novo. Conscience, rather, is one’s capacity to tap one’s own deeper levels of insight, ethical sensitivity and awareness, in which tradition and immediate experience are not opposed to each other but interrelated. The etymology of the term reveals this point. Composed of the two Latin words meaning “to know” (scire) and “with” (cum), conscience is very close to the term consciousness. In fact in some countries, such as Brazil, the same word (“consciencia”) is used both for “conscience” and “consciousness.” Conscience is our ability to recall ourselves, the recall is not opposed to historical traditions as such, but only to the authoritarian use of the tradition. For there is a level on which the individual participates in the tradition, and on that level tradition assist mortals in finding one’s own most meaningful experience. We wish thus to emphasize the beneficial aspect of conscience—conscience as the individual’s method of tapping wisdom and insight within oneself, conscience as an opening up, a guide to enlarged experience beyond good and evil. This is the transmoral conscience. With this view it will no longer be true that conscience does make cowards of us all. Conscience, rather, will be the taproot of courage. #RandolphHarris 12 of 12
She was painfully confused, trying to crush her sobs, trying to crush her rage against me. The word “crisis” is Greek in origin, and in that language its primary meaning is “decision.” In medical pathology, a crisis is that point in the course of a disease at which a decisive change occurs, leading either to recovery or to death. In general, a crisis is a turning point, the end of one epoch and the beginning of another. In speaking of “the crisis in belief,” I refer to a point in the course of individual development at which the person must decide for oneself whether the picture one has been given of the nature of the World is a true one. It is the point at which one is called upon to think for oneself about the important matters of cosmology and ethics. It is time of decision about the meaning of life, the existence of God, the coerciveness of moral law, the place of mortals in nature, the freedom of the individual will, and all other great issues with which philosophy deals. Not all of us are philosophers, of course, but if we are human we must have a philosophy. Our intellect demands that experience should be accounted for; the need for things to be intelligible is a basic human need. Thus we are all, willy-nilly, philosophers of a sort, in the sense that we tell ourselves one story or another about most of the enduring issues with which systematic philosophy deals, and without which we cannot face life with any sense that it has meaning and worth. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
The crisis in belief need not occur at any special age, and in fact it need not occur very conspicuously at all. For most people, however, it comes with adolescence, and it is ushered in partly by the challenge that the newly awakened and intense pleasures of the flesh and aggressive urges of puberty offers to morality and the civilized code of the pleasures of the flesh. It is a function as well, I think, of the growth of intelligence, which is beginning to reach full power concurrently with physiological maturation. It comes at that period when the mind, like the body, is getting ready to leave home in search of a new home of its own. Less dualistically, we may say that the maturing human form, freeing itself, under the push of natural development, of the habitat of its childhood, emerges into a new World in which it is no longer provided for and ministered to, but in which it must seek its own sustenance and meaning, and must choose anew for itself. With choices comes responsibility, self-valuation, and self-affirmation or self-rejection. The crisis in belief is often a time of categorical repudiation or total acceptance, of radical chance of rigid stasis. It is no exaggeration to say that it is a time of the greatest psychological danger, in which the integrity of the self is challenged, and in which old selves die and new selves are born. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
As psychologist interested in the way in which psychological forms develop, and therefore, I shall add, intensely interested in the individual life, we assessors necessarily pay a great deal of attention to that part of the individual’s history in which one was faced with a serious crisis of development. The work of assessment requires us to understand how a person came to one’s beliefs about the nature of the World and one’s own place in it, and how solidly founded and ready for action one’s philosophy of life really is. I need hardly say that in order to arrive at such an understanding we must not only inquire deeply into one’s beliefs on great issues, but must synthesize what we know of the nature and genesis of those beliefs with what we have been able to understand about one’s entire character and life history. Moral posture and beliefs about the cosmos are themselves frequently determined at least in part by psychodynamic forces, and a complete personality formulation gives an account not only of what actions our philosophy determines, but what forces our philosophy is determined by. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
The question of the existence of God is of course of central importance, in terms both of its implications for the nature of belief or disbelief in Providence, in Heavenly justice and mercy, in life after death, and in the efficacy of prayer, and hence in the dependability of a benevolent supernatural power. It is designed to elicit opinions and feelings and determinism, theism, good and evil, and the like. One problem, for example, describes events leading up to a criminal action, in which the external and internal determinants of the person’s behavior were made manifest. This problem served as the point of departure for discussion of individual responsibility in affairs in which individual appeals compelled by forces within and without to act in an apparently irresponsible way. Another problem concerned a man shipwrecked along on a desert island, with certain knowledge that he could never get off it. The question then was, could such a man, being part of no human community, do an evil action? This immediately led into the difficult problem of the locus of ethical sanctions, whether in society or in the individual, which in turn, of course, is central to the psychological problem of the internalization or externalization of the superego, with all its implications for the management of aggression and sexuality, and anarchic impulse in general. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
There was this woman who was rated by the assessment staff as being exceptionally well adjusted, and indeed her life seemed agreeably proportioned with secure community position, healthy and happy children, a professionally successful husband, and constructive social service activities through which she expressed something of her individuality and in which she felt worthwhile. This woman said that she decided to drop religion early in college, having reached a conclusion that it was all a little too incredible. Chapel services were compulsory at the college at that time, and she always went to services, taking along an interesting non-religious book to read during the sermon. Shortly after graduation she married a man of exceptional eligibility in terms of the status symbols of that time and place, but with whom, she confessed she was not altogether in love. She had two children, and while they were still very young, she began to feel quite unhappy, always worn-out and cross. She began, she says, “looking around for a philosophy which would bring contentment.” She found it in Lecomte du Nouy’s book, Human Destiny, which she says enabled her to feel justified in returning to church membership and to religious belief. She now believes in a personal God, to whom she prays and in whom she finds support. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
Of her belief, she says, “It’s satisfactory enough, and it fills a definite need. Sometimes I wonder, though, whether I just thought it all up to fill a gap in my life.” She does not believe in the after-life. However, she says that her unbelief in this respect is not complete or final; I may some day, in the future, come to believe in an after-life as well.” The implication was that if she needed to believe it, she would believe it. That she suspects that she has perhaps made rather too much of a good thing out of the flexibility is indicated, however, in her Thematic Apperception Test (which is a psychological personality test) stories, several of which communicate a sense of shallowness (as she sees it) and a lack of profound meaning in her life. On Card 19, for example, she tells this story, which purports to deal with a single day in a girl’s life, but which suggests the emotional tone of the subject’s own life in its totality, as she perceives it: Virginia has had a thrilling say. She has had a good start on learning to ski. She emerged with no broken bones or even sprains, though she had a glorious day of climbing, sliding, leaping, staggering, and falling with her legs, skis, and ski poles all mixed up. The air was so clear, so wonderful—not as cold as all her friends had told her the horrid north would be. And how nice Johnny Evans was. So friendly, no more and no less. Everyone laughed a lot, and they the most of all. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
Better get ready, now! The day is by no means over. Square dancing tonight, with Johnny and all the others, then the long ride home, and serious business—job hunting in a day or two. “How silly I was,” thought Virginia, “to be so childishly frightened about my luck up north. It’s just like anywhere!” But will Virginia find her grandfather’s watch with the lost ruby of the Whitehall family? Or trace her friend Johnny’s surprising ancestry? Read the December issue of Bang to find out!!! This story, like all complex symbolic productions, may be interpreted at many levels of meaning. I find it most touching and poignant, and to interpret it is in some sense a shame. Yet: she tells us that she has emerged happily from the first years of her feared adulthood (the horrid north) with no damage done (no broken bones, or even sprains; in fact, it has been a glorious and exciting and lucky day up north). However, the day is not yet over; indeed, it is “by no means over.” There are things not yet found our; Johnny, for instance, though is so nice and friendly (no more and no less) has a surprising ancestry (where did the beasts begin?). And then there is the lost ruby which should pass on from generation to generation, encased in a patriarchal time-piece (this jewel of sexuality, agent of transmission of the matter of life through the generations). And fear with it, that true generation has not passed through her, or seized her for its fulfillment. And the final sentence: “Read the December issue of Bang to find out”: the sum of the tale. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
A “bang” is, of course, what one gets out of life, and December is the last issue of the year. The final crisis of selfhood is still before her, and the very facility of her adjustment seems to represent the greatest danger to her integrity. So far as religion is concerned, I vaguely believe this woman would have evolved a very different interpretation of experience out her transitory atheism if she had had the courage to sound her own depths instead of accepting pragmatically what seemed to satisfy her immediate needs. As things stand, I believe that she perceives herself unconsciously as having forfeited profound experiences in the interests simply of facile adjustment. (Which is not to say that she is right in his self-perception; the story is a deeply experienced one.) I should perhaps pause at this point to make it plain, if it is not already so, that we are not here concerned with the validity of religious beliefs in their cognitive aspect. Rather, we are concerned with the depth of feeling with which a cognitive belief is experienced and with the question of integration or dissociation of such feelings in the structure of the self. Quite another aspect of this problem is the deepening of religious faith in persons who have not experienced doubt, but who have rather experiences semi-mystical confirmation, or even transfiguration of their beliefs. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
In general, however, it should be noted that I am addressing myself to these problems as a psychologist interested in inner experience, and not as a philosopher interested in discerning the truth about the outer cosmos (if there can be such a true difference). Speaking as a psychologist, then, what I find primarily in this subject in both these ways of resolving the crisis in belief (i.e., in the atheistic resolution and in the repudiation of a transitory atheism in favor of a return to religion) is an acceptance of emotional polarities as being genuine oppositions which necessitate a choice between them. This slavery to the antinomies shows itself wherever repudiation is necessary to the maintenance of some way of living, whether it be in matter of private philosophy, religious belief, ethnic group-membership, affairs of the heart, allegiances to opposed scientific theories, esthetic preferences, or psychodynamic mechanisms. Rebellion is a form of submission, suppression of impulse is a form of belief. Essentially what I think we have observed in this crisis is not resolution at all, in the sense of estrangement of a higher-level integration, but rather perpetuation of the conflict through acceptance of polarities as real, and deferment of the decision to a later point in life. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
Women who have indeed settled the crisis belief communicate quite a different sense of selfhood from the case we have considered, and they have much greater serenity and spontaneity, and freedom of both feeling and thought, in their make-up. I need hardly say that in the assessment of the strength of any personality it is most important to know what is settled and what is unsettled, which crises are past and which are present or still ahead. Our fear of freedom also expresses itself in other ritualistic and compulsive behavior. So, for example, when a person—like Lady Macbeth—has a compulsion to wash one’s hands many times a day, the behavior not only provides a symbolic way of dealing with guilt feelings, but is also gives the person something with which to be preoccupied. It is almost as though he has an unconsciously concluded that “idle minds [and hands] are the devil’s workshop” and has substituted a meaningless activity to keep us both busy. All of us probably do some of this sort of thing in one way or another, f it is only making a game of stepping on every crack (or avoiding stepping on any cracks) in the sidewalk. Some executives become busier and busier, having to work longer and longer hours. Although they may not be consciously aware of it, they may be doing this because they feel much more comfortable and safe at work than they do in their free time when they could be with their families or engaged in other exciting, but frightening, activities. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
Extreme emphasis on cleanliness and its preservation often performs similar functions. One young woman described how her mother had set aside the living room of the hose so that no member of the family entered it except on Christmas and Easter. Although there was no physical barrier to the room, even the family dog avoided it, because he somehow got the message that to enter it was to invite disaster. “As a matter of fact,” she said, “the cleaning lady was a very important part of our household because she got to go in there very week!” One wonders how the parents feel about their perfectly preserved living room with its unmarred furniture now that the children are married and gone. It certainly represents some lost opportunities in living. However, living is frightening. Fear of freedom can always be expressed in other specific fears that limit our freedom. Many such fears have been catalogued and given phobia names. There is fear of open places, closed places, high places, crowds, snakes, spiders, heart attack, death, being alone, and so forth. All of us experience some of these fears. They may be very mild or very intense. There may be considerable grounds for them in reality, or they may be quite unrealistic. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
Much can probably be said about the symbolic meaning and origin of these fears in our lives, but their function appears to be that of limiting our freedom. Any one of these fears, if taken seriously, can limit our activities. And even if we attempt to ignore them and act in spire of them, they are likely to enter our minds and keep us from enjoying freedom. A young married woman tells how she becomes very uneasy whenever she goes a few miles from home. And she remains anxious until she returns. It is easy to see how she might live out her life in a geographical box if she does not find relief from this fear. She might well deprive herself of a whole World of adventure. A young executive was bothered daily by the fear that his children would die. Every morning, before leaving on the long commuting trip to his office, he would have to go into each child’s room and check to make sure each was breathing. During the working day the fear would frequently recur and he would call home to check up on things. To go out of town on a business trip of several days would be almost intolerable. This he kept himself in bondage. He was too preoccupied with his fear to relax with his children or fully express his love for them or allow himself the freedom to enjoy them while he had them. Fatherhood was more frightening than it was fun. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
Love and will take place within the forms of the society. These forms are the myths and symbols viable at that period. The forms are the channels through which the vitality of the society flows. Creativity is the result of a struggle between vitality and form. As anyone who has tried to write a sonnet or scan poetry is aware, the forms ideally do not take away from the creativity but may add to it. And the present revolt against forms only proves the point in reverse: in our transitional age, we are hunting, exploring, reaching about, struggling to assert whatever we can find in the experiment for some new forms. In homely illustration, Duke Ellington recounts that when we writes music, he must keep in mind that his trumpeter cannot hot the very high notes securely, whereas the trombonist is very good at them; and writing under these impediment, he remarks, “It’s good to have limits.” Not only with strength and passion, but other forms of love as well: full satisfaction means the death of the human being; love runs itself out with the death of lovers. It is the nature of creativity to need form for its creative power; the impediment thus has a beneficial function. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
These forms of the society are molded and presented first of all by the artist. It is the artists who teach us to see, who break the ground in the enlargement of our consciousness; they point the way toward the new dimensions of experience which we have, in any given period, been missing. This is why looking at a work of art gives us a sudden experience of self-recognition. Giotto, precursor to that remarkable birth of awareness known as the Renaissance, saw nature in a new perspective and for the first time painted rocks and trees in three-dimensional space. This space had been there all the time but was not seen because of medieval mortal’s preoccupation with their vertical relationship to eternity reflected in the two-dimensional mosaics. Giotto enlarged human consciousness because one’s perspective required an individual mortal standing at a certain point to see this perspective. The individual was now important; eternity was no longer the criterion, but the individual’s own experience and one’s own capacity to look. The art of Giotto was a prediction of the Renaissance individualism which was to flower a human years later. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
The new view of space pictures by Giotto was basic for the new geographical explorations of oceans and continents by Magellan and Columbus, which changed mortal’s relation to their World, and for the explorations in astronomy by Galileo and Copernicus, which changed mortal’s relations to the Heavens. These new discoveries in space resulted in a radical upheaval of mortal’s image of oneself. Ours is not the first age to be confronted with loneliness arising from mortal’s discovery of new dimensions of external space and similarly requiring new extensions of one’s own mind. The psychological upheaval and spiritual loneliness were shaped mainly by its consequence. On beholding the blindness and misery of mortals, on seeing all the Universe unknow, and mortals without light, left to themselves, as it were astray in this corner of the Universe, knowing not who has set one here, what one is here for, or will become of one when one dies, incapable of all knowledge, I begin to be afraid, as a man who has been carried while asleep to a fearful desert island, and who will awake not knowing where he is and without any means of quitting the island. Just as mortals of the past were able to find the new planes of consciousness which did, to some extent, fill the new reservoirs of space, so in our day a similar shift is necessary. “Now, behold, I say unto you, if I had not been born of God I should not have know these things; but God has, by the mouth of his holy Angel, made these things known unto me, not of any worthiness of myself,” reports Alma 36.5. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
In life, we have to find things we enjoy to stay happy and make things beautiful. The overall picture from the life-history interview would seem to support the generalization that aggressiveness in persons of excellent ego-strength stems from life circumstances marked by relatively greater discord in the home during childhood and by friction in significant personal relations. The first and most obvious consideration in the relationship of rebelliousness to mortality and psychological health is one which by now has passed from iconoclastic protest to virtual stereotypes. Nonetheless, it should not be disregarded. It is simply this: rebellion-resistance to acculturation, refusal to adjust, adamant insistence on the important of the self and of individuality—is very often the mark of a healthy character. If the rules deprive you of some part of yourself, then it is better to be unruly. The socially disapproved expression of this is delinquency, and most delinquency certainly is just plain confusion or blind harmful striking out at the wrong enemy; nut some delinquency has affirmation behind it, and we should not be too hasty in giving a bad name to what gives us a bad time. The givers to humanity often have profound refusal in their souls, and they are aroused to wrath at the shoddy, the meretricious, and the unjust which society seems to produce in appalling volume. Society is tough in its ways, and it is no wonder that those who fight it tooth and nail are tough people. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
If it recognized the potential value of the wayward characters who make its business for it, I think that much of the research and of the social action in relation to delinquency would be wiser. A person who is neither shy nor rebellious in one’s youth is not likely to be worth a farthing to oneself nor to anyone else in the years of one’s physical maturity. A second consideration which is certainly no news to most people, but which tends to get lost to psychologists who use phrases like guilt feelings, hostility, and anxiety, is that the healthy person psychologically is usually virtuous in the simple moral sense of the term. Psychologically healthy people do what they think is right, and what they think is right is that people should not lie to one another or to themselves, that they should not steal, slander, persecute, intrude, do damage willfully, go back on their word, fail a friend, or do any of the things that put them on the side of death against life. This probably sounds like old-time religion, and in fact I am willing to be straightforwardly theological about this. “It may suffice if I only say they are preserved for a wise purpose, which purpose is known unto God; for he doth counsel in wisdom over all his work, and his paths are straight, and his course is one eternal round,” reports Alma 37.12. #RandolpHarris 2 of 17
I think there is an objective character to guilt, and wen a person is false to one’s nature or offends against the nature of others then one is in sin and the place in which one has one’s existence is well descried by the word “hell.” I take “sin” ere to be descriptive of the state of separation from the most basic sense of selfhood, or what some existentialist philosophers have called “the grounds of being.” In whatever terms it is put, the fact is that a person is most alive and is functioning in such a way that one knows who one is and you know who one is and one knows who you are when one’s thoughts and actions are in accord with one’s moral judgment. The corollary is that when one does what one thinks is wrong one gets a feeling of being dead, and if you are steeped in such wrongful ways you feel very dead al the time, and other people know that you are dead. There is such a thing as the death of the spirit. Many of the people whom we know as patients in our mental hospitals or as prisoners in our jails are n a condition of spiritual death, and their only hope is that someone can reach out to them, break through the walls of their isolation, recognize them. I think that too much has been made of the word love in this connection, for usually it connotes a feeling on the part of the person who is to give love. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
The essence of the act of love as I understand it is the action of attention, and the affect that accompanies it in the person who is paying attention may be love, hate, sadness or what you have. Love pushes us toward this new dimension of consciousness because it is based on the original we experience. Contrary to the usual assumption, we all begin life not as individuals, but as we; we are created by the union of male and female, literally of one flesh. However, the individual person is a human because one can accept the crumbling of the first freedom, painful as it is, can affirm it, and can begin one’s pilgrimage toward full consciousness. A real fight is an act of attention, a genuine condemnation is an action of attention, an understanding of final defeat is an act of attention. These as well as their absolute counterparts are on the side of life, and the person who experiences them is in communication with other living beings and offers to them the possibility of community. The sort of philosophy of psychotherapy that prescribes blandness, nonjudgmentalness, and essential indifference on the part of the psychotherapist is simply a form of human debasement. Paying attention, caring, and being there yourself is all that counts. When discussing psychotherapy as relationship, recall that one of the therapists there was clearly an incompetent by all standards—AMA, APA, and probably the Bureau of Internal Revenue as well. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
Everything this one therapist did was wrong. After about six months of his residency, however, it became apparent that many of his patients were unaccountably getting better. Among his aberrant behavior were such gross actions as telephoning a patient’s foreman at work and telling him to stop bullying the patient, suggesting an unusual technique in pleasures of the flesh to another patient whose wife was apparently frigid, and bluntly suggesting to a third patient that he should give up his job as an automobile repairman and get into the dispensing of food. The climax of the latter case was especially gruesome to the clinic, for the patient opened a doughnut shop of his own and on his final appointment appeared with a dozen doughnuts of his own making which he presented as a gift to the therapist, who without any insight at all offered them around to various other therapists and his supervisor, all to whom had difficulty swallowing them. Goodness knows, I am not suggesting, in recalling the case of this incompetent fellow, that all psychotherapists go forth and do likewise, for he was he and we are we. However, I will say that he was alive, even though so obviously misguided; to his patients, the only thing that was of consequence was that he cared about them and that he though there was something different they could do which would be right. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
Religious ideology is needed in order to keep people from losing discipline and this threatening social coherence. Fear of freedom also expresses itself in various legalistic approaches to life. We see or perceive what we want or need to perceive, and our nervous system can come to act as if the other sensation did not exist. This phenomenon is called perceptual vigilance (or perceptual set). We are on guard, or ready, to concentrate on certain kinds of stimuli and filter out those that we do not want or need to receive. This selective perception can work for one in many cases (like looking for a particular shirt in your closet and not paying attention to the others), it can work against one when our own security needs are so strong tat they distort or limit our perceptions of the World and people around us. However, generalization is not always a bad thing to do. The ability to generalize is useful in forming concepts—a vital part of thinking and reasoning. Even though it is unscientific or silly, we generalize about people all the time. This is the cause for a lot of serious conflicts between people. When we generalize about people and then use that generalization as the image or symbol for a whole group, we are stereotyping. Stereotyping is a handy way of lumping things together for easy reference; we all do it at one time or another. Sometimes stereotypes are creations of an entire society or nation. We have a great propensity for regulating life in minute detail and insofar as possible deciding in advance what is right and what is wrong or what is socially acceptable or unacceptable. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
And if we are successful in doing this, usually with the assistance of religious groups or social class, then we can know in almost every situation what we should do. Then we no longer have to think or feel. We can rather automatically do what we know is right; or, failing that, we suffer the appropriate guilt for the sin or social blunder that we have committed. This makes for a safe, regulated kind of life. However, it also tends to be a joyless life from which most of the spontaneity and creativity has been removed. Although it is often maintained that a sense of responsibility demands a clear-cut view of right and wrong, it is more likely that such legalistic approaches actually undermine personal responsibility. For there are regions of human behavior and action that may not be so clear as to what is the right decision in ethical situations. And when we ignore these unobscured areas, arbitrarily seeing all factors as absolutes, we take ourselves off the hook of wrestling with the subtleties of the situation. We are in a position where we can uphold the right and denounce the evil. Some people live up to stereotypes because it is easier or more profitable to go along with what is expected. People who are firm believers in Christ as the great lover, the self-sacrificing God, can turn this belief, in an alienated way, into the experience that it is Jesus who loves them for them. A new set of higher expectations are being created for people. These, too, are beginning to fulfill themselves. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
In society, the great medieval thinkers held that all people are equal in the sight of God and that even the humblest has an infinite worth. In economics, they taught that work is a source of dignity not of degradation, that no mortal should be used for an end independent of one’s welfare, and that justice should determine wages and prices. In politics, they taught that the function of the state is moral, that law and its administration should be imbued with Christian ideas of justice, and the relations of ruler and ruled should always be founded on reciprocal obligation. The state, property, and the family are all trusts from God to those who control them, and they must be used to further divine purposes. Finally, the mediaeval ideal included the strong belief that all nations and peoples are part of one great community. Above nations is humanity. However, the concepts may differ, one belief defines any branch of Christianity: the belief in Jesus Christ as the Savior who gave his life out of love for his fellow creatures. He was the hero of love, a hero without power, who did not use force, who did not want to rule, who did not want to have anything. He was a hero of being, of giving, of sharing. These qualities deeply appealed to the Roman poor as well as to some of the rich, who choked on their selfishness. Jesus appealed to the hearts of the people, even though from an intellectual standpoint he was at best considered to be naïve. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
This belief in the hero of love won hundreds of thousands of adherents, many of whom changed their practice of life, or become martyrs themselves. The greatest achievement was to dedicate one’s life to God. Because Jesus loves us for who we are, the belief in him becomes the substitute for one’s own act of loving. In a simple, unconscious formula: Christ does all the loving for us; we can go on in the pattern of the Greek hero, yet we are saved because the alienated faith in Christ is a substitute for the imitation of Christ. Human beings are so deeply endowed with a need to love that acting as wolves causes us necessarily to have a guilty conscience. Our professed belief in love anesthetize us to some degree against the pain of the unconscious feeling of guilt for being entirely without love. However, the soul cannot live without love and friendship. Being able to relax in the presence of the beloved and accept the other’s being as being, is simply liking to be with the other, living to rest with the other, liking the rhythm of the walk, the voice, the whole being of the other. This gives a width to the soul; it gives it time to grow; time to sink its roots down deeper. We understand that we are not required to do anything for the beloved except accept him, her, or them, and enjoy being in their company. It is friendship in the simplest, most direct terms. This is why religion makes so much of acceptance. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
We are the independent people who, often taking our powers too seriously, continuously act and react, unaware that much of the value in life comes only if we do not press, comes in quietly when it is not pushed or required, comes not from a drive from behind or an attraction in front, but emerges silently from being together. Sometimes it seems love is honored as a kind of vestige of bygone periods when people had time for friendships. We now find ourselves so rushed, going from work to meetings to a late dinner to bed and up again the next morning, that the contribution to love to our lives is lost. Or we get it mistakenly connected with homosexuality; American men are especially afraid of male friendship lest it have in it some trace of the homosexual. However, at least, we must recall that the importance of love is very great in helping us to find ourselves and begin the developing of identity. Love, in turn, needs altruism. We have to have an esteem for the other, the concern for the other’s welfare beyond any gain that one can get out of it; disinterested love, typically, the love of God for mortals. Charity, as the word is translated in the New Testament, is a poor translation, but it does contain within it the element of selfless giving. It is an analogy—though not an identity—with the biological aspect of nature which makes a person defend their youth, and the human being love his or her own baby with a built-in mechanism without regard for what that baby can do for him or her. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
We are aware that no human being’s motivations are purely disinterested, that everyone’s motivations are, at best, a blending of these different kinds of love. Just as I would not like someone to love me purely ethereally, without regard for my body and without any awareness of whether I am male or female, I also do not want to be loved only for my body. A child senses the lie when he is told that adults do something only for your good, and everyone dislikes being told he or she is loved only spiritually. Each kind of love, however, presupposes care, for it assets that something does matter. In normal human relations, each kind of love has an element of other types of love, no matter how obscured it may be. Yet, we have lost much of our creative relationship to the wisdom of the past. History is our social, communal body: in it we live, move and have our being; and to cut one’s self off from it, to hold it is inconsequential, is about as sensible as to say, “My physical body is bunk.” It shuts that person off from a creative relationship to an important segment of the wisdom of thy fathers. This situation is unfortunate not only for the society but also for the person one’s self for it robs that individual of an important part of one’s historical body, and thus contributes much to the diffuse perplexity and feelings of rootlessness of individuals of our day. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
Another very common way of keeping tight reins on freedom is by overplanning and overorganizing life. Many a housewife or househusband, for example, finds it difficult—if not almost impossible—to drop everything on a moment’s notice and go on a picnic with the family. Perhaps there are dirty dishes in the sink, a roast simmering in the oven, or a pie cooling on the windowsill or a disarray in the house and she or he is certain that one could not relax and enjoy one’s self if one left these jobs undone. And there is every likelihood that one might not, for many find it difficult to enjoy the spontaneity that can enrich life. The freedom appears to be too frightening. It will come as no surprise to some to hear that family vacation are sometimes unhappy occasions despite the high hopes entertained when the family stated out, car loaded down, for distant destination. One couple who had experiences such disappointments made another attempt after some months in psychotherapy. The therapist was delighted when he received a picture postcard from Canada with a very brief message: “Having wonderful time! Why?” Well, why not? Likely there are a couple of reasons why we often manage to be miserable on vacations. For one thing the family is together—let that read TOGETHER—more than at any other time, and that physical closeness that creates the possibility of emotional closeness is probably frightening to us, with the effort to eliminate this frightening possibility, manages in one way or another to get on the nerves of everyone else. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
The other reason is that we are confronted with all that freedom. We have two weeks in which we can do as we please and go where we please. No alarm clocks jangling, no school bells telling us to move from one class to another, no time clocks to punch, no precise hour when dinner must be on the table, no projects to be completed by such-and-such time. We are free, and it scares us! So how do we meet this crisis in freedom? Many of us meet it with a frenzy of planning. We go to the drawer, pull out maps, and make an itinerary. “Now let’s see, we’ll sleep here the first night, then go over there, eat lunch in this town, spend an hour on this beach, and drive on to that place before dark, and….and, oh yes, we’d better call the BMW automobile club and have them make all the reservations along the way for us so there won’t be any hitches in THE PLAN.” Planning, organization, and reducing some routine tasks in life to habit can perform the useful function of permitting the individual to live a freer and more creative life. If, for example, a housewife or househusband can sit down and plan a week’s menus for the family so that one can do one’s shopping in a single trip, a lot of time will be saved and needless last-minute worry eliminated about “What in the World are we going to eat tonight?” She or he has gained some free time by her or his planning. If one becomes a slave to one’s menus, however, it is quite another story. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
If one is no longer free to change one’s mind for a personal or family whim, one has sacrificed one of the pleasures of spontaneous living. One’s rigidity becomes one’s defense against freedom, which frightens the individual. Every home and almost every work situation provides countless opportunities to overplan and overorganize our lives. Many a businessman or businesswoman has spent one’s life tending to details without ever asking one’s self how relevant and how necessary the details are. The freedom to see creative ways of changing one’s routines and expanding one’s productivity with all of the necessary risks involved may have been too frightening. It is important, therefore, whether we are intellectuals or sophisticates or merely alert human beings seeking bearings in a confused and perplexed time, to ask “How can one relate to the inherited traditional so that one’s own freedom and personal responsibility are not sacrificed in the process? One principle, to start with, is clear: the greater a person’s awareness of one’s self, the more one can acquire the wisdom of our fathers to make it ours. It is the persons who are weak in the sense of their own personal identity who are overcome by the power of tradition, who cannot stand in its presence, and who therefore either capitulate to it, cut themselves off from it, or rebel against it. One of the distinguishing marks of strength as a self is the capacity to immerse one’s self in tradition and at the same time be one’s own unique self. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
This is what the classics, in literature or ethics or any other field, should do for one. For the essence of a classic is that it arises from such profound depths in human experience that, like the works of Isaiah, The House of Mirth, A Brave New World, it speaks to us who live centuries later in vastly different cultures as the voice of our own experience, helping us to understand ourselves better and enriching us by releasing echoes within ourselves which we may not have known were there. “Deep calleth unto deep,” as the psalmist puts it. One need not go along literally with Jung’s concept of archetypes or the collective unconscious to agree that the deeper one goes into one’s own experience (let us say in confronting death, or experiencing love, or in the elemental relations in the family), the more one’s experience has in common with similar experiences of other mortals in other ages and cultures. This is why the dramas of Sophocles, the dialogues of Plato, and the paintings of reindeer and bison on the cave walls in Southern France by anonymous Cro-Magnon mortals some twenty thousand years ago many speak more powerfully and elicit greater response in us than the bulk of the writings or pictures of five years ago. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
However, the more profoundly one delves into one’s own experience, the more original are one’s reactions and productions. Here is the seeming paradox, which no doubt everyone knows to be true in one’s own experience, that the more profoundly one can confront and experience the accumulated wealth in one’s tradition, the more uniquely one can at the same time know and be one’s self. The battle, therefore, is not between individual freedom and tradition as such. The issue, again, is how the tradition is used. We must ask, “What does the tradition have to teach me about human life, in my particular time and with my problems?” Then we are using the wealth of wisdom accumulated through historical tradition for our own enrichment and guidance as a freedom. For instance, when the United States of America entered World War I on 6 April 1917, baseball became the national pastime because people used it as a means to distract themselves from the war. Baseball even boosted morale of American forces overseas. The American military created 77 baseball diamonds in France, and on any given day some 200 games were played throughout the country. Many baseball fans are familiar with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “Green Light” letter, in which he encouraged baseball owners and executives to keep baseball going in the states to keep Americans happy. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
Other efforts were made to distract Americans from the war and make them feel safe like some of the architecture in Oakland, California USA. On Picardy Drive in East Oakland, in the 1920s Storybook houses were built to make people feel like they were entering a fairytale. Picardy Drive was developed by builder Robert Cleveland Hillen and architect Walter W. Dixon, whose houses have been called modest mansions for the whimsical glory and romantic style, which made them feel like castles. To be a vital part of the marvelous work and a wonder of these days, you must submit your will to God, letting it be swallowed up in his will. As you press forward with steadfastness in Christ, having a perfect brightness of hope, and love of God and of all people feasting upon the Word of Christ. We must keep searching diligently for blessings and salvation, praying always, and believing, then as the Lord promises that all thing shall work together for your good. Let this desire inspire you to greet each new morning with enthusiasm and let it fuel your thoughts and actions throughout each day. If you do this, you will be blessed amid a World that need love and guidance, and you and your loved ones will be secure and happy. This will allow us the spiritual power to handle life with faith and trust in God. And is you are looking for more new story book houses, check out one of my favorite builders Cresleigh Homes Rocklin Trails. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
