Therapy is about helping people find their way, not forcing anyone to subscribe to the views of someone else—that is what gets most people in to trouble in the first place! “Continue in your narrow path which leads to eternal life,” reports 2 Nephi 31.18. The moral improvement of my mind and the regulation of my life is very important. Ideal of conduct, even the pursuit of knowledge is conceived of as a Worldly enticement.  As philosophers and as metaphysicians we hope to use words in ways whose intelligibility is not completely context dependent; we try to speak in sentences which can be paraphrased, taken from their original context, and used to illuminate a range of related issues. This is not always possible. To make a new point it may be necessary for the philosopher, as much as for the poet or the scientist, to speak in a new form of words not simply translatable into any of the old forms. However, the philosopher who speaks too often in semisentences runs the risk of semiunderstanding from only a semiaudience. Since truth is by its nature eternal and immutable this condition can be fulfilled only by ideas which are in the mind of God—that is, manifestations of God’s essence. Thus, the existence of God is deducible from the very nature of truth. There are two kinds of love—desire, which seeks to unify itself with the good it pursues, and benevolence, which seeks good for others. The objects of desire, from a hierarchy—God, the good of the community, intellectual pleasures, and sensual pleasures are all in some measure good. God is the highest, but not the only good. However, I love nobody, but God. #RandolphHarris 1 of 11

People used to have respect for executive’s privileges. We should treat other human beings as means—occasions of happiness to us—and never as ends. Some people believe that humans are made for a sociable life and that we should love our fellow people in the say same way that we love God and that is, of course, possible as long as they display qualities that are Godly. Knowledge is of the eternal and, therefore, of God. We see all things in God, which suggests to the careless reader that sensation is our analogue for knowledge. Divine ideas are the immediate objects of our thought in the perception of things. However, these are minor reformulations. Of much greater significance is the fact that the World is a great mechanism and goes like a clock. God is the efficient cause of all happenings, the only good, the only object of knowledge. We know God directly; everything else is known by way of our apprehension of God’s nature as revealed in the ideas which emanate from the Lord. Spiritual ideas can represent a material World; the material World is, indeed, very beautiful. God put a lot of work into making this World a paradise for us and many people have tried to keep the peace and restore the natural beauty. When we do what is necessary to stay healthy on the inside, we become more attractive on the outside—and we lay a great foundation for remaining healthy longer. “Unto those whom endures to the end shall the Lord give eternal life,” reports 3 Nephi 15.9.  #RandolphHarris 2 of 11

From now on, we should all make it a point to do what people with true physical vigor do: welcome any physical activity as a gift, always ready to give us a boost and life our spirits. May our bodies pay tribute to the incredible, pivotal point of midlife by feeling better, looking great, and staying healthy. It is our job to be in this life and be joyful. Nous is a term that refers to the mind and its functions generally, and it is increasingly identified with knowledge, and with reason as opposed to sense perception. When communication breaks down and people become too emotional to confess truly with their desires are, the World becomes a savage land. Human beings are highly intelligent creators, and as such we have these beautiful tools call language and self-esteem, vocabulary, and laws that are here to protect us and keep society peaceful and safe. Nous is equated generally with the rational part of the individual soul (to logistikon).  Nous is the only immortal part of the soul. Nous is a passive intellect which is affected by knowledge, and an active intellect, which alone is immortal and eternal. We believe that this power is in us and it is the spirit that comes from God. We lived before we came to this Earth, and are here now to strive to perfect the spirit within. “We shall have hope, through Atonement and Resurrection, to be raised into eternal life,” Moroni 7.41.  #RandolphHarris 3 of 11

At sometime in this life, every person is conscious of a desire to come in touch with the Infinite. Our spirit reaches out for God. This sense of feeling is Universal, and all people ought to be, in the deepest truth, engaged in the same great work—the search for the development of spiritual peace and freedom. We can offer the hope promised by God: Peace in this World, and eternal life in the World to come. Anyone regardless of culture or economic circumstance, can go to the depths of our spiritual wells and drink of this water. Self-esteem, peace of mind, and personal contentment can be fully satisfied by faithful obedience to the commandments of God. This is true of any person in any country or culture. Have you take the time to consider what would be without God? Nothing is an awe-inspiring yet essentially undigested concept, highly esteemed by writers of a mystical or existentialist tendency, but by most others regarded with anxiety, nausea, or panic. Nobody seems to know how to deal with it, and plain persons generally are reported to have little difficult one to tread and that altogether the less said of it the better. This escape, however, is not so easy as it looks. Anything a philosopher can find to talk about must somehow be there to be discussed, and so let loose upon the World that unseemly rabble of centaurs and unicorns, carnivorous cows, republican monarchs and wife burdened bachelors, which has plagued ontology from that day to this. #RandolphHarris 4 of 11

Nothing (of which they are all aliases) can apparently get rid of these absurdities, but for fairly obvious reasons has not been invited to do so. Logic has attempted the task, but with sadly limited success. Of some, though not all, nonentities, even a logician knows that they do not exist, since their properties defy the law of contradiction; the remainder, however, are not so readily dismissed. Whatever Lord Russell may have said of it, the harmless if unnecessary unicorn cannot be driven out of logic as it can out of zoology, unless by desperate measures which exclude all manner of reputable entities as well. Such remedies have been attempted, and their effects are worse than the disease. Lord Russell himself, in eliminating the present King of France, inadvertently deposed the present Queen of England. Quine, the sorcerer’s apprentice, has contrived to liquidate both Pegasus and President Truman in the same fell swoop. The antiquated logicians, who allowed all entities subsistence while conceding existence, as wanted, to an accredited selection of them, at least brought a certain tolerant inefficiency to their task. Of the new it can only be said that solitudinem faciunt et pacem appellant—they make a desert and call it peace. You walk this road alone, you must reach out. Follow God, he will take you all the way home. He is sorry for the hole in your heart. A part of you is lost, that cannot be found. If the curtains come to close, just breathe out. “God has given to humans to choose life or death,” reports Helman 14.31. I do not know what you are waiting for. #RandolphHarris 5 of 11

While realms of being have been abolished without warning, at the mere nonquantifying of a variable. The poetry of Earth has been parsed out of existence—and what has become of its prose? There is little need for an answer. Writer to whom noting is sacred, and who accordingly stop thereat, have no occasion for surprise on finding, at the end of their operations, that nothing is all they have left. The logicians, of course, will have nothing of all this. Nothing, they say, is not a thing, nor is it the name of anything, being merely a short way of saying of anything that it is not something else. Nothing means not-anything; appearances to the contrary are due merely to the error of supposing that a grammatical subject must necessarily be a name. Asked, however, to prove that nothing is not the name of anything, they fall back on the claim that noting is the name of anything (since according to them there are no names anyway). Those who can make nothing of such an argument are welcome to the attempt. When logic falls out with itself, honest people come into their own, and it will take more than this to persuade them that there are not better cures for this particular headache than the old and now discredited method of decapitating a patient. We know you have been lonely, we know that you have been down, for years people have been unkind. However, “This day of life given to prepare for eternal life,” Alma 34.33. reports #RandolphHarris 6 of 11

The friends of nothing may be divided into two distinct though not exclusive classes: the know-nothings, who claim a phenomenological acquaintance with nothing in particular, and the fear-nothings, who, believing, with Macbeth, that nothing is but what is not, are thereby launched into dialectical encounter with nullity in general. For the first, nothing, so far from being a mere grammatical illusion, is a genuine, even beneficial, feature of experience. We are all familiar with, and have a vocabulary for, holes and gaps, lacks and losses, absences, silences, impalpabilities, insipidities, and the like. Voids and vacancies of one sort or another are sought after, dealt in and advertised in the newspapers. And what are these, it is asked, but perceived fragments of nothingness, experiential blanks, which command, nonetheless, their share of attention and therefore deserve recognition? Sartre, for one, has given currency to such arguments, and so, in effect, have the upholders of negative facts—an improvident sect, whose refrigerators are full of nonexistent butter and cheese, absentee elephants and so on, which they claim to detect therein. If existence indeed precedes essence, there is certainly reason of sort for maintaining that nonexistence is also anterior to, and not a mere product of, the essentially parasitic activity of negation; that the nothing precedes the not. “God is unchangeable from all eternity to all eternity,” reports Moroni 8.18 #RandolphHarris 7 of 11

However, verbal refutations apart, the short answer to this view, as given, for instance, by Bergson, is that these are but petty and partial nothings, themselves parasitic on what already exists. Absence is a mere privation, and a privation of something at that. A hole is always a hole in something: take away the thing, and the hole goes too; more precisely, it is replaced by a bigger if not better hole, itself relative to its surroundings, and so tributary to something else. Nothing, in short, is given only in relation of what it is, and even the idea of nothing requires a thinker to sustain it. It we want to encounter it an sich, we have to try harder than that. Better things, or rather nothings, are promised on the alternative theory, whereby it is argued, so to speak, not that holes are in things but that thing are in holes or, more generally, that everything (and everybody) is in a hole. To be anything (or anybody) is to be bounded, hemmed in, defined, and separated by a circumambient frame of vacuity, and what is true of the individual us equally true of the collective. The Universe at large is fringed with nothingness, from which indeed (how else?) it must have been created, if created it was; and its beginning and end, like that of all change within it, must similarly be viewed as a passage from one nothing to another, with an interlude of being in between. “What evidence have you that there is no God?” reports Alma30.40. #RandolphHarris 8 of 11

Such thoughts, or others like them, have haunted the speculations of nullophile metaphysicians from Pythagoras to Pascal and from Hegel and his followers to Heidegger, Tillich and Sartre. Being and nonbeing, as they see it, are complementary notions, dialectically entwined, and of equal status and importance; although Heidegger alone has extended their symmetry to the point o equipping Das Nichts with a correlative (if nugatory) activity of noth-ing, or nihilating, whereby it produces Angst in its votaries and untimely hilarity in those, such as Carnap and Ayer, who have difficulty in parsing nothing as a present participle of the verb to noth. Nothing, whether it noths or not, and whether or not the being of anything entails it, clearly does not entail that anything should be. Like Spinoza’s substance, it is causa sui; nothing (expect more of the same) can come of it; ex nihilo, nihil fit. That conceded, it remains a question to some why anything, rather than nothing, should exist. This is either the deepest conundrum in metaphysics or the most childish, and though many must have felt the force of it at one time or another, it is equally common to conclude, on reflection, that it is no question at all. “Plan of redemption can be brought about only on condition of repentance in this proclaimed state. Continue the straight and narrow path until the end of proclaim,” reports Alma 42.13 and 2 Nephi 2.21. “ We must prepare our souls so we will not remember our awful guilt in perfectness, reports 2 Nephi 9.46. #RandolphHarris 9 of 11

The hypothesis of theism may be said to take it seriously and to offer a provisional answer. The alternative is to argue that the dilemma is self-resolved in the mere possibility of stating it. If nothing whatsoever existed, there would be no problem and no answer, and the anxieties even of existential philosophers would be permanently laid to rest. Since they are not, there is evidently nothing to worry about. However, that itself should be enough to keep an existentialist happy. Unless the solution be, as some have suspected, that it is not nothing that has been worrying them, but they who have been worrying it. The ultimate character of self-consciousness is absolute free will. This absolute free will, when genuine, cannot be reflected upon, for it transcends reflection and is that which causes reflection. The center of tis will, the self, is always the eternal now; paradoxically it is also unlimited development. Place is the substratum within which all forms become actualized. We have seen absolute free will as emerging from creative nothingness and returning to creative nothingness. Further, it must be basically a certain place wherein everything else exists. This transcends subjectivity completely and is the place of nothingness. Nothingness, however, it not merely nothingness in opposition to phenomenal existences, that is a relative nothingness. It is the unity of opposites, as discovered through our investigation of the relationship between the self and the World. #RandolphHarris 10 of 11

The contradictions of human’s existence, where the satisfaction of desire means the extinction of desire and the will makes it own extinction its object. In these problems is religion established, for in the awareness of the absolute contradictoriness and nothingness of the self’s existence we first touch the absolute and God. Although spirit develops under the influence of external stimuli, it is something unique in its own right. Spirit cannot be explained by, nor can its occurrence be predicted on, the basis of a consideration of sense experience alone. Spirit and its operations emerge under certain conditions but are not explained fully by these conditions. Thus, God’s existence is either logically necessary or logically impossible. However, it has not been shown to be impossible—that is, the concept of such a being has not been shown to be self-contradictory—and therefore we must conclude that God necessarily exits because we exist, the World exist, the Galaxy exist, the Universe(s) exist. In this way, we can validly infer from it that God’s existence is ontologically necessary. Give no one your faith undeserved. God exists without beginning or end and always as a whole. (This is virtually the scholastic notion of aseity, from a se esse, self-existence, that is, eternal and independent existence.) For if an eternal being exists, he cannot, compatibly with the concept of him as eternal, cease to exit: thus his existence is necessary. “Of course, the Lord is one eternal round,” reports Alma 7.20. #RandolphHarris 11 of 11