Virtue is doing good to humankind, in obedience to the will of God, and for the sake of everlasting happiness. Virtuous people are proper self-lovers who, in the process of promoting the self, will not hard others. Love is divine because it comes from God and unites us to God; through this unifying process it makes us a community which transcends our divisions and makes us one, until in the end God is all in all. The psychology concerns the person, who loves, and the mutuality of persons in love. The psychology of mutual love is based on a gift that is first received from other human beings—parents, spouses, children, friends—and primordially from God. Love recognizes the interdependence of human and divine love and their being rooted in knowledge and faith. God is love and has created all humankind in the divine image as knowing and loving persons. It is God’s love that makes possible human love of God, neighbour, and oneself. Since human love is both divine in origin and human in expression, we are constantly reminded of that because of the effects of sin, the divine likeness is wounded in humankind. Nonetheless, the Atonement bestowed a new dignity on human nature and redeemed human kind in a majestic act of love. God’s continuous and sustaining gift, which is manifest in loving personal relationships and the living religious tradition, serves as the basis for the practice of the art of love in a faith-based psychology of love. #RandolpHarris 1 of 8

Psychology is the study of the human psyche or spiritual soul, which includes behavior and the mine, but more as well. There is a basic need for safe emotional connection and people often seek safe relationships, as they are a manifestation of health and strength. As relationships develop, they tend to flourish because they are a secure base to help deal with life and the World. Typically, emotional accessibility and responsiveness are desirable. If people have self-love, they respect their thoughts, feelings and beliefs and experience a deep sense of pride; a framework is designed to resist compression, and allows us the right to have ideas, speak them, and expect others to be respectful. People that love themselves acknowledge and accept the fact that they have some faults and, for the most part, excuse themselves. People who are able to self-actualize learn from the mistakes made in life. All knowledge is relative and concerns only what is conditioned by the fact that we know it. Absolute or unconditioned reality is unknowable at this time. We can conceiver it even have faith that it exists, but at best we can have only negative knowledge of it. The experience of our humanness depends on our self-knowledge and the experience of ourselves. The difference between a healthy self-love and a distorted self-love lies in the ability to tell reality from fantasy and the ability to empathise and to love others. #RandolphHarris 2 of 8

The great spiritual teachers do not preach only to the converted, but engage with an entire people, and by their ability to reach into the hearts and minds of many they exert a profoundly transformative influence on individuals and society. There is a deeper sense of spiritual affection, a love that unites God and humankind, souls and soul in divine communion.  God cannot be submitted to humanly rational standards of morality so we build a connection and guide humanity to God’s grace, God’s unselfish love, and it is given freely by God. God’s love is sovereign and is directed to the good for those who stand in a relationship with it; it creates value in its object. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not be in want. He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters, he restores my soul. God guides me in paths of righteousness for is name’s sake. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows. Surely goodness and love will follow me all these days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the LORD forever,” reports Psalm 23.1-6. #RandolphHarris 3 of 8

Some people only think about how old they look, and that is an indication that they need to work on their self-esteem. If an individual invests too much of one’s self-worth in the way he or she looks nature’s gentle changes begin to seem like personal insults. Many people who care about the way they look resort to cosmetic surgery to keep themselves looking young. These patients are never satisfied with their surgeries, because no plastic surgeon is capable of erasing age. No matter how many wrinkles the doctor eradicates, a patient’s face will reveal its chronological age within five years. There is another kind of patient, too, a type who does not care about looking young; they want to look good. It sounds like a fine distinction, but someone who wants to look his or her best at forty-five will always be happier with his or her surgery than someone who wants to look thirty at sixty-five. If you do it for the right reasons, plastic surgery can really be terrific. No one can decide how much attention you will give your looks. For most of us, it is enough to dress well, get a good haircut, and generally make the best of what we have. All of us are in some age shock experience. However, who we are is in fine shape somewhere deep inside. So why worry about the flesh so much? Cast your minds back to your first spiritual experience. You are a fierce, energetic, living person. #RandolphHarris 4 of 8

The thinking-self separates mind or soul from the bodily material World and has the effect that emotions, sensations, and feelings, necessary for self-reflection, can be neglected. How many times do you force your body to so something at its own expense? We may push ourselves to run faster, lose more weight, stay up later, get up earlier, work longer, loft one more box plant one more tree—at a time when our bodies are screaming “STOP!” in fatigue or pain. Many people fight back, maybe pop some acetaminophen or oxycodone, and keep going. However, this can cause high risk for addiction and dependence, respiratory distress and death when taken in high doses or when combined with other substances, especially alcohol. We learn how to mentally dominate our physical needs early in life. That is what potty training is all about. However, often what starts out as a healthy effort to adapt bodily function to fit social dictates ends up causing strain and damage. Without contemplation, sense, experience, feelings, etcetera, the idea of a personal identity is not possible and the self as a rational and relational being experience Empty Suit Syndrome. When a person is subject to relentless, abusive demands, the physical mechanisms of the body start to break down, and the brain-washing slowly erodes one’s sense of self-worthy, security, and trust in humanity. #RandolphHarris 5 of 8

Many physical symptoms that we attribute to getting older are actually manifestations of physical strain. For instance, high blood pressure trouble digesting certain foods, and chronic pain, along with more debilitating cancer and heart attacks, are more often manifestations of unrelenting strain. Honor the wisdom of the body by slowing down long enough to figure out how to alleviate the stress it is under. Listening to our bodies has many rewards. We will be healthier, of course, and we will feel better. The better we become at listening to your bodies, the better our bodies will treat us. Aches and pains, poor sleep, or lack of stamina may be the early warning signs of unresolved stress on our bodies. We are probably pushing ourselves too hard, perhaps as a result of some internal pressure to perform. Rarely are symptoms such as these related solely to the aging process. If we leave them unresolved, we are opening the door to physical decline. “The Earth is the LORD’s, and everything in it, the World, and all who live in it; for God founded it upon the seas and established it upon the waters,” reports Psalms 24.1-2. God designed our bodies to communicate with us, to help us achieve mind-body balance. The mind, body, and sensations are working together in creating awareness of self with memory and one’s sense of personal identity. #RandolphHarris 6 of 8

The Experience of an integrated self-love, mind, along with emotions and will is a core reality. Although the mind work through reasoning, it works closely with one’s emotions and will, but the mind is the part where all experiences are intellectually observed and where one consciously and unconsciously learns to deal with the inner as well as the outer World. The mind, by the process of reasoning and analysis, assists us to learn lessons about ourselves and makes us conscious about the World. The illative sense sustains a real assent to the existence of God on the basis of the deliverance of conscience. To have a natural theology, that is, to know God exists through reason, we need to recruit our illative sense. The illative sense is what allows us to take our concrete human experiences—whether they be of nature’s beauty, of the demands of conscience (the feeling of guilt, the pangs of remorse, the search for forgiveness), of the sense of the contingency of life, and come to the conclusions that there is a transcendent reality behind it all, ultimately God. Truths and beliefs that we inherit from the ancestors, who discovered the Unknowable toward which they shared the religious emotions, transcended the belief that quantity of life is the supreme value is uneasily qualified by admission of the importance of a surplus of agreeable feeling. The task of morality is to counteract the cruel injustices of the natural order of things. #RandolphHarris 7 of 8

The whole net of relationships which we find ourselves in, in one way or another, influences our life-experiences, and thus also our experience of self. The lack of an integrated view point of the self clearly has dire consequences for the understanding of the relationships we have with God, other human beings, ourselves, and the Universe. If we do not experience self, we cannot experience anything else. In short: the ability to think, to reason, in other worse, the rational, is of fundamental importance in discerning the importance of relationships and the development of relationships. It is an ability that draws on and is influenced by our personhood as a holistic experiential experience of past and present realities and future anticipations. Our evaluations, our perceptions of what we experience, are fundamental not only to how we relate to ourselves, but to everybody and everything, God included. It is the light in the Biblical teaching that God’s love towards humans and all of creation is realized within the context of a covenant relationship, is a core truth. Love in Scripture is always within clearly defined relationships governed by certain distinctive responsibilities. “For the grace of God that brings salvation has appear to all people. It teaches us to say ‘No” to ungodliness and Wordly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and Godly lives in this present age,” reports Titus 2.11. #RandolphHarris 8 of 8