To a heart formed of friendship and affection the charms are very short lived. When we stop pressuring others with our expectations, we create an opening for them spontaneously to respond optimistically to us. When we are in a state of pride, our energy is dissipated by constant preoccupation with defending our lifestyle, vocation, neighborhood, clothes, year and make of car, ancestry, country, and political and religious belief systems. There is a tireless preoccupation with appearance and vulnerability to the opinion of others. However, when pride and self-inflation have been relinquished, there is an inner security that takes their place. When we no longer feel called upon to defend our image–criticisms and attacks from others diminish and finally stop. By letting go of our need for validation or to prove ourselves right, then the challenges against us fall away. Perfect solitary alone can never be reconciled to a social mind, but when it relives you from the company of those you strongly dislike. #RandolphHarris 1 of 7

The first thing I must be willing to admit when I begin to examine what controls and dominates me is that I am the one responsible for having yielded myself to whatever it may be. If I am a slave to myself, I am to blame because somewhere in the past I yielded to myself. Likewise, if I obey God, I do so because at some point I yielded myself to Him. Yielding to God will break every kind of slavery in a person’s life. There is a such thing as healthy pride. When we talk healthy pride, we are referring to self-esteem, an inner awareness of one’s true value and worth. A higher feeling state than pride is that of love. If we love that means there is no question of the worth of the things and people we have in our lives. We no longer have to be on the defensive. When we truly love something and, thereby, become one with it, it is because we see its intrinsic perfection. In fact, its faults are part and parcel of its perfection, for all that we see in the Universe is in process of becoming. Each and every individual on the planet is unfolding, growing, learning, and reflecting that same perfection. #RandolphHarris 2 of 7

We must learn here and now to live under the scrutiny of Christ’s pure light, your final judgment will bring you only delight in seeing the work God has done in you. Live constantly, reminding yourself of the judgment of the seat of Christ, and walk in the knowledge of the holiness God has given you. Any goal we have that diverts us even to the slightest degree from the central goal of being approved to God may result in our rejection from further service to Him. I must learn to relate everything to the primary goal, maintaining it without interruption. My worth to God publicly is measured by what I really am in my private life. Is my primary goal in life to please God and to be acceptable to Him, or is it something less, no matter how lofty it may sound? Civil society exists to safeguard the natural rights of individual, which they could not successfully preserve in the state of nature. Nevertheless, humans are considered rational by nature and therefore ideally capable of living in peace according to the law of nature, the condition of conflict is pathological (involving, caused by, or of the nature of a physical or mental disease), not natural. #RandolphHarris 3 of 7

Public means to be enjoyed by everyone. A citizen’s interest is in being a human of a certain kind with characteristic excellences, attainable only in a healthy state. One might misguidedly desire what is not in one’s interest; so might all the citizens, for the will of all is not necessarily the same as the general will. However, as long as your vision is clear, conflict is impossible because the public interest is whatever would be to anyone’s advantage, insofar as one is capable of human excellence. Christ never spoke of His right to Himself, but always maintained an inner vigilance to submit His spirit continually to His Father. I also have the responsibility to keep my spirit in agreement with God’s Spirit. And when I do, Jesus Christ gradually lifts m up to the level where He lived—a level of perfect submission to His Father’s will. Is God having His way with me, and are people beginning to see God in my life more and more? Living a life of faith means never knowing where you are being led. However, it does mean loving and knowing the One who is leading. It is literally a life of faith, not of understanding and reason—a life of know God who calls us to go. #RandolphHarris 4 of 7

The delight of true friendship with God means being so intimately in touch with God that you will never need to ask Him to show you His will. It is evidence of a level of intimacy which confirms that you are nearing the final stage of your discipline in the life of faith. When you have a right-standing relationship with God, you have a life of freedom, liberty, and delight; you are God’s will. The inescapable spiritual need each of us has is the need to sign the death certificate of our sin nature. I must take my emotional opinions and intellectual beliefs and be willing to turn them into a moral verdict against the nature of sin; that is, against my claim I have to my right to myself. Once I reach this moral decision and act on it, all that Christ accomplished for me on the Cross is accomplished in me. Natural evolution is a progression of bodily organizations into which pure spirit descends through successive reincarnations with the aim of producing individual self-consciousness. Equality is a concept applying particularly to the juridical sphere of rights (which includes just compensation for work), liberty to the spiritual domain, and fraternity or voluntary cooperation to the economic organization of production. #RandolphHarris 5 of 7

To maintain friendship and faithfulness to the Bridegroom, we have to be more careful to have the moral and vital relationship to God above everything else, including obedience. Sometimes there is nothing to obey and our only task is to maintain a vital connection with Jesus Christ, seeing that nothing interferes with it. Only occasionally is it a matter of obedience. At those times when a crisis arises, we have to find out what God’s will is. Liberty of the spiritual sphere includes great reaches of cosmic memory. In future stages of evolution, spirit, without loss of self-consciousness, must ascend again through knowledge of its cosmic relation to its universality and transcendence over matter. Special organs (the lotuses) must be cultivated to apprehend the higher Worlds of spirit and the traces left by their events in the cosmic ether. Humans are children of this Earth, and the Sun is a star which is similar to other stars that twinkle like jewels set in the dome of the night sky. The higher aim of humanity is to develop special powers of spiritual insight, the cultivation of moral balance, a harmony of virtuous dispositions intermediate between excesses and defects, is considered a prerequisite. #RandolphHarris 6 of 7

Humans should aim to have very great gifts of rapid narration and clear and lively exposition. Since the healthy survival of the social organism must increasingly coincide with the conditions that bring the greatest happiness to the greatest number of individuals who are the “cells” in the “social tissue,” righteousness elevates you. The healthy survival of society, and of oneself as part of it, can alone serve as sanction for morality, and the rules for that health, which are mirrored in our instincts and our deepest habits and appear in consciousness as intuitively known moral rules, can be put on a scientific basis only when we come to possess, as we do not yet, a scientific sociology. Be a person who worships God and lives in a holy relationship with Him. Get involved in the real work of intercession. Since the concrete substances of the World are teleological both as goal-setting and goal-realizing, the intrinsic value of life is that of genuine, or personal, being. We must learn to maintain a strong degree of character in our lives. Love, religion, art, history, and ethics are deep and perceptive values that produce good results in the symbolism and expression to rationalize the value-oriented assessment of total personality characteristics of one’s psychological of individual differences.  #RandolphHarris 7 of 7