Somedays we may be tired and do not feel like doing anything. However, when you have the courage to ask God for miracles, you will see the greatness of God’s power. The stages of mysticism are like watering a garden by various means, building yourselves up on your most holy faith. Once the weeds have been uprooted, irrigation is needed. Those who bring water from a well are compared to beginners in prayer and meditation. It is a laborious activity, involving the taming of the senses so that they are no longer distracted. The second stage of meditation is reached with the prayer of quiet. This is compared to irrigating the garden by the water wheel. The third mode of watering is by a running brook: this corresponds to a state of contemplation in which effort is no longer needed, as if the work were done by the Lord. It is a celestial frenzy, in which the faculties of sense perception no longer function. The soul no longer wishes to live in the World, but solely in union with God. The intellect is worth nothing, for ordinary modes of understanding are considered irrelevant or nonsensical. Reconciliation is the tenderest part of love and friendship: the soul here discovers a kind of elasticity, and, being forced back, returns with an additional power. #RandolphHarris 1 of 6

Ask God to do things unthinkable, to help you reach your highest potential. In the fourth stage, which is compared to a shower falling on the garden, the soul is totally passive and receptive, all faculties somehow united with God. The soul cannot properly understand what is occurring, but afterwards it is certain that there has been a union with God. The Spirit of God witnesses to the redemption of our Lord and to nothing else. It is like entering a castle or palace in which there are many rooms. These are arranged concentrically in six rings of rooms, or mansions, round an inner chamber where kings live. To enter this castle, prayer is needed. Ordinary Christians can enter the first three mansions through humility, meditation, and exemplary conduct; and the attainment of the third mansion represents the life achievement of many worthy Christians. However, more remains in the spiritual life than such a virtuous existence. The forth mansion corresponds to the second water simile. In the fifth, the soul seems to be asleep and unconscious both of the external World and of itself (although such language is analogical; the contemplative is not literally asleep). The soul is illuminated in this stage by God. #RandolphHarris 2 of 6

The sixth mansion is like a couple’s first sight of one another at a betrothal. Finally, the soul enters the holy of holies. It seems as if this place is dark, because of the overpowering light of the divine light. Here the soul has a direct vision of God, like the beatific vision to be enjoyed hereafter in Heaven. God’s purpose for humankind stands; His purpose to give us eternal life will succeed! God continually creates influencing matter as a magnet influences iron. The sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. We will be set free from bondage. God insists on freedom from necessity. God created by His free will and therefore is not limited by matter. The soul is actually corporeal and originates from a soul-producing seed at the moment of its conception. We will obtain the liberty of God. Our hope is the redemption of our bodies. Whatever suffering or pain or frustration or disappointment a child of God endures now in this present age, it will seem as nothing when compared with the glory that a child of Cod will experience in the age to come. #RandolphHarris 3 of 6

Redemption is an element of salvation that broadly means the deliverance from sin. Redemption is important in salvation because it is part of a great system against which human power is helpless. Redemption is God’s power to deliver us from sin and freedom from captivity. The concept also applies to redemption of real property such as fields and houses, stock animals, produce, and it also means the liberation of an estate in real property from a mortgage. Inasmuch, there is natural change everywhere. Unity is God and immutable and eternal. The divine unity in an ineffable way absorbs the forms of all beings in itself, but only images of these forms are joined to matter. The proper perspective of a child of God must not simply be as near to the highest level he or she can get, but it must be the highest. We can be freed from sin and have God’s very righteousness imparted as a gift to us. Faith always works in a personal way because the purpose of God is to see that perfect faith is made real in His children. There should be something you are praying for that seems impossible, extraordinary, something you cannot achieve on your own. #RandolphHarris 4 of 6

Nothing gives such life and soul to youthful gaiety as the consciousness that is successful received. Faith is a tremendously active principle that always puts Jesus Christ first. Our faith is limitless. Faith is the entire person in the right relationship with God through the power of the Spirit of Jesus Christ. Faith by its very nature must be tested and tried. And the real trial of faith is not that we find it difficult to trust God, but that God’s character must be proven as trustworthy in our own minds. Faith being worked out into reality must experience times of unbroken isolation. Never confuse the trial of faith with the ordinary discipline of life, because a great deal of what we call the trial of faith is the inevitable result of being alive. Thinking is an essentially human activity occurring in two basic forms. We may think in order to attain knowledge of what it, must, or may be the case; we also may think with a view to making up our mind about what we will or will not do. We are called into intimacy with the gospel, and things happen that appear to have nothing to do with us. However, God is getting us into fellowship with Himself. Let God have His way. God wants to give you the desires of your heart, but you have to be willing to ask. #RandolphHarris 5 of 6

Prayer moves the hand that moves the World.  If you refuse to obey God, you will be of no value to God in His redemptive work in the World, but will be a hindrance and a stumbling block. Thinking is either a dialogue in the soul involving mental words that refer to Forms (such as Redness, Triangularity, Flying) and, possibly, to individuals (such as Socrates) or a spiritual activity of inspecting or recollecting forms and discerning their natures and interrelations. Thinking is an act of the intellect in which a thing’s essence, or intelligible form, actually qualified the intellect; to think about humanity is for one’s intellect to the informed by—literally, to share—the essence humanity. Thinking is an activity of bringing concepts or ideas before the mind, these being either innate and applicable to the World in virtue of God’s grace or else formed by abstraction from sense experiences and this actually sharing the abstract features of those experiences. Pray for great things, expect great things, work for great things, but above all pray. “Ask me, and I will make the nations your inheritance, the ends of the Earth your possessions” (Psalm 2.8). #RandolphHarris 6 of 6