There are hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started with such tremendous hopes and expectations and yet fails so regularly as love. There are many reasons why one’s own ability to love is limited or bound to fail. The nature of love exhibited by one’s mother and father are of particular meaning for every human being. For this can either inhibit or accelerate one’s own ability to love. After undergoing surgery for prostate cancer, a critically ill man reported that above all a person needs to be understood. Dying is a misunderstanding one has to get straightened out before one passes into Heaven. And one cannot be understood, one’s situation cannot be appreciated, until one’s family and friends, staring at the individual with an embarrassed love, come to know, with an intimate, absolute knowledge what your illness is like. Every attempt to explain how we cope with hardship contains its own definition of successful aging and therefore its own idea of what constitutes a good life. We think of imagination as a kind of symbolic thinking with a latent and a manifest meaning. There are a multitude of unnamed spirits that motive and guide life. The Greeks call them daimons (the unconscious). Socrates claimed to have lived his life according to the dictates of his daimon. Three armies can be deprived of their commanding officer, but even a common person cannot be deprived of one’s purpose. #RandolphHarris 1 of 8

In every human being there is an optimum of what one could become, there are things one could never become. So many people waste their lives by trying to become what they could not be and by neglecting to be what they could become. A person, in the first place, should have a certain image of what one could and what one could not become, what are the limitations and what are the possibilities. Whoever examines oneself thoroughly will find one’s own daimon, which is a guardian with us from the beginning. Go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows. The soul wants to be in touch with that deep place from which life flows, without translating its offerings into familiar concepts. The best way to full fill this desire is to give attention to the images that arise as independent beings from the springs of day-to-day imagination. People have been warned against living in conflict with the daimon as one will succumb to the worst kind of soul sickness. It is like deciding where to live without taking into full consideration the demands of the soul, which may appear as an intuitive attraction or inhibition. The source from which life flows is so deep that it is experienced as something beyond human creation and intention. To live our ordinary life artfully is to have this sensibility about the things of daily life, to live more intuitively and to be willing to make use of our gifts from the soul. #RandolphHarris 2 of 8

Helplessness has become the dreaded underside of modern life, out of the view and all the more harrowing for its unfamiliarity. It is now possible to go through the first half and sometimes the first two-thirds of life having no direct contact with someone who has a serious ailment. Society no longer observes a pause; the disappearance of an individual no longer affects it continuity. Many people’s lives are built on a frozen lake. We all go on with our activities. We work on the house and play golf and entertain and have our fun. We put in long hours at work and think we are doing well. Then every once in a while, some stop to realize that the ice they are standing on is melting. Many people try to flee such feelings, rather than attempting to come to terms with them. No amount of compensation is enough to finally and totally screen out this background of dread. An individual will create, or latch on to, a whole host of external or objective wants, desires, properties, and possessions, goods, and materials. Attempting to flee dread only intensifies it. From then on, we have to keep averting our eyes from further evidence of physical deterioration and suffering. The work of avoidance itself becomes consuming. #RandolphHarris 3 of 8

When a friend or relative becomes ill or suffer an injury, we have the choice of participating in the care or backing away. Taking the time to give assistance may run counter to the pace or the ostensible purpose of our lives. The organizing principle of modern life has become almost wholly economic. We have almost succeeded in leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and providing for their abundance. Whatever we do, we are supposed to do for the sake of making a living; such is the verdict of society. There is a pervasive devotion, in middle-class families, to individual purposes and a wariness toward getting involved in the lives of others. Individualism has marched inexorably through our history and it may have grown cancerous. Only by opposition to letting our hearts wax cold can we make life and frailty less frightening. Earlier in our lives, we must stop clinging to independence as if it were the only meaning of strength. The ongoing process of attachment is what creates and sustains human community. Make it your guiding principle to do your best for others and to be trustworthy in what you say. Do not accept as friend anyone who is not as good as you. When you make a mistake, do not be afraid of mending your ways. #RandolphHarris 4 of 8

The person of wisdom is never in two minds; the individual of benevolence never worries; the one of courage is never afraid. We either face the truth of our fragility directly, or we immerse ourselves still more intently in other priorities. There is no middle course, because spending time beside a person who is suffering puts us into contact with the dire underside of life. There is terror and relief in allowing the awareness that we will all someday pass away and suffer pain to rear its full impact. We may begin to live in terms of, rather than in flight from, the approach of our ending. We are spirit children of Heavenly parents. When we come to this Earth life, our spirit is united with our body. We experience all the joys and challenges associated with mortal life. When a person passes into Heaven, their spirit is separated from their body. Resurrection makes it possible for a person’s spirit and body to be united again, only this time that body will be immortal and perfect—not subject to pain, disease, nor other problems. The drive to question allows the human being to life one’s eyes from the sequence of daily routines to perceive the law of one’s own death, and to struggle for ways of life that assuage death’s bitterness. After such experiences, change may emerge in the way we spend our time, conduct our relationships, and look at the future. #RandolphHarris 5 of 8

The experience of nursing someone who is sick, dying, or disabled strips away, for most people, the mystery, horror, and disgust. It is not surprising, therefore, that people who are deeply experienced in caring for sick parents or a disabled child, in the latter’s old age, tend to take their own sickness and disability in stride. They have known before in an intimate manner the difficulties they might encounter later in their own lives. Prior to getting sick or reaching advanced age, we can choose to grant ourselves a close acquaintance with physical suffering and its alleviation. We can draw near to the sickbeds of friends and relatives and involve ourselves in the experience of helplessness, hoping that this foreknowledge will help us to age well. However, after resurrection, the spirit will never again be separated from the body because the Savior’s Resurrection brought total victory over death. In order to obtain our eternal destiny, we need to have this immortal soul—a spirit and body—united forever. With spirit and immortal body inseparably connected, we can receive a fullness of joy.  In fact, without the Resurrection we could never receive a fullness of joy, but would be miserable forever. #RandolphHarris 6 of 8

 Even faithful, righteous people view the separation of their bodies from their spirits as captivity. We are released from this captivity through the Resurrection, which is redemption from the bands or chains of death. There is no salvation without both our spirit and our body. Each of us has physical, mental, and emotional limitations and weaknesses. These challenges, some of which seem so intractable now, will eventually be resolved. None of these problems will plague us after we are resurrected. The miracle of resurrection, the ultimate cure, is beyond the power of modern medicine. However, it is not beyond the power of God. We know it can be done because the Savior is resurrected and will bring to pass the Resurrection of each of us, too.  And each of us can be part of a cloud of witnesses who know through the power of the Holy Ghost that what we celebrate on Easter actually happened—that the Resurrection is real.  Life through God is so much hope. Always. Through everything. We love Easter to remind us. The entire basis for spiritual mind healing rests in the assumption that we are now living in a spiritual and psychological Universe; that law is mind in action; that thinking and action are the same. And if thinking and action equal the same thing, certain kinds of thinking must constitute certain kinds of action. #RandolphHarris 7 of 8

It logically follows that if one kind of thought produces a certain effect, then an opposite thought must produce an opposite effect. For all who had laid a child in a grave or wept over the casket of a parent or someone they loved, the Resurrection is a source of great hope. What a powerful experience it will be to see them again—not just as spirits but with resurrected bodies. Our ship’s destination is the full blessing of the gospel, the kingdom of Heaven, the celestial glory, and the presence of God! God’s plan is in place. He is at the helm, and his great and powerful ship flows toward salvation and exaltation. Remember that we cannot get there by jumping off the boat and trying to swim there by ourselves. The process of reasoning in treatment must be one which establishes human beings upon a spiritual basis, which enthrones God in a kingdom of good, and gives him dominion over all apparent evil. We must understand our relationship to being itself, to God, to the Universe, and to Reality. There must be an interior awareness, a realization that God is all the power there is. As a matter of fact our state of consciousness is what we are, and if we happen to be in business and wish to treat for right action we must realize that right action means being busy in the thing that we are doing. “God himself shall come down and bring to pass Resurrection,” reports Mosiah 13.34-35. #RandolphHarris 8 of 8