With glazed eyes she looked up at me. The sweet taste of life was on her lips, just a touch, and all her pain was gone, and the moment had come, the moment of peace from pain, peace from struggle, peace from fear. She simply could not believe it. Thought is one aspect of the soul. Thought is aware only of ideas about reality; it does not know reality, for knowledge and reality can never be identical. Identity with reality or object can be achieved as experience, never as thought, for thought is purely representative. Truth is attained in ways different from thought. Thought must fuse with the total feeling experience, since it is in feeling that we have direct awareness of good and evil, beauty and unattractiveness, worth and unworthy, contradiction and harmony; these rest in the soul’s original capacity to experience pain and pleasure. Feeling is the ultimate arbiter of consistency and intellectual harmony, the ultimate creator of imagination and its works. Moreover, feeling is the nisus that drives an individual to seek whatever total unity of comprehension and action is possible for one. An echo of our own mental voice sometimes comes back at us. It might strike one, sharp and hard, that we have been given so many chances to save our souls and our entire lives are constructed around these chances! #RandolphHarris 1 of 9

That is our nature—going from temptation after temptation, not to sin, but to be redeemed. One’s love of knowledge, goodness, and beauty arises from, and finds its fulfillment in, feeling. Thus, the essential nature of feeling is love, which constantly drives an individual toward a greater over-all comprehension of one’s life and the cosmos. If love was not possessed at the foundation of the World, this World would be left without truth and law. Many of us want to see into the soul of others. We can sense secrets in them, a trove of them, and sometimes can feel an electric connection. Whiskey voice, they call it. It is so seductive. Feeling convinces most of us that the World is physical and thus consists of souls as well as a personal deity. A soul is not simply a stream of impressions united by memory; it is a substantival entity, causally related to the body and interacting with it. Nevertheless, the soul is a greater influence and governs the body in ways close to it. Both soul and body act according to law, but the laws of the bodies as such are purely physical. The laws of the soul are on a higher level; they are teleological and unite the physical and mental. They do not contradict the laws of the physical World, but they do control and reorder them. #RandolphHarris 2 of 9

A personal deity, God, follows from the existence of souls and ends. How else can they be explained? The World and everything in it is the personal creation of God and the means by which he attains his ends and the ends of his creatures. God attains his ends through the mechanisms or causa nexuses that science discovers, and these mechanisms are characteristic of both the living and nonliving. These mechanisms should not be identified with materialism. Mechanism does not imply the nonexistence of ends or of psychic beings; it implies only the existence of uniform modes by which things come into being. The World can just as easily be psychic as material, but the psychic interpretation is rationally to be preferred because it does not make a mystery or a paradox of the presence of feeling and values in the World. This is why some find themselves besieged by prayerful petitions. The voices from indigenous persons on Earth as well as the descendants of colonists will bring them in contact with the suffering and the misery of the planet they have escaped. #RandolphHarris 3 of 9

Many people are hard at working, trying to get God to dip down through the astral layers into our human souls, as we listen earnestly to the faithful and relay our petitions to the All Knowing One. Mechanism is simply a method of research; it is not a fundamental explanation of life and mind. Only the most exhaustive survey of the life of humans can provide such an explanation and relate to one’s life to the cosmos and God. Furthermore, mechanism does not repudiate free will; it is simply the necessary condition for the will to express its autonomy. There are three realms of observations: the realm of fact, the realm of universal law, and the realm of values, which serve as standards of meaning for the World. These realms are only logically separable; they cannot be separated in reality. Fact and law are the mean, the mechanisms, by which values are attained in this World; they are also the means by which people can discover that certain values are foolish, contradictory, unrealizable, or in other words, false. Since fact and universal law are not existentially separable from value, God must also be the creator of everything and the quintessence of whatever deserves to exist for its own sake. Moreover, since feeling is fundamental, a sort of pluralistic idealism in which the only realities are living spirits and God in interaction is justified. All other realities are so only secondarily, as manifestations of these spiritual activities. #RandolphHarris 4 of 9

There is an immense sweep of modern knowledge, but there is no single unity or oneness to existence. Direct experience reveals an irreducible multiplicity of things. Reality is always in flux, the doing, and the suffering occur within a fixed order, a pre-established harmony between God and the multitude of spirits. To limit ourselves to what science understands is to exclude unjustifiably the realms of feeling and values, and to exclude the latter is to render our experience unintelligible. Natural life and the social life are the two fundamental sources for religious ideas. From nature we derive the concept of God; from our social life, the concepts of ethical living. Paganism has tended to emphasize the cosmological; Christianity, the ethical. Christianity has sought to fuse both into one complete theological scheme. The ethical element in religion is far more significant than the cosmological (which can properly be left to science), even though the emphasis upon cosmology leads to recognition of God. The true mark of the religious person is not one’s cosmology but one’s feeling for, and search after, what ought to be, one’s passion for, and loyalty to, the highest possible ideals. This passion and loyalty, however, are not so much activistic as contemplative. #RandolphHarris 5 of 9

Piety is found in the inner life, in a feeling for the holy that attains so high a state of intuitive comprehension that logic, reason, becomes futile and inessential. Piety rests beyond any sectarian interest, Christian or not, for it drives people to seek a totality of feeling in which truth is completely fused with goodness and beauty. In consequence, the holy is not merely what people think it is; it is rather the unattained, the beyond in our lives that is without contradiction, defect, or dissonance. It is manifested in the endless striving for that immortal sea that is the infinite parent of all things. In this contemplative striving, in this endless search for total harmony and for the ought-to-be rests the possibility of progressively uniting science, religion, and art. However, the overwhelming realization of this unity occurs only at particular moments when one is moved by the experience of total beauty. In such moments, one knows absolutely that the fusion has, as far as possible, been accomplished. #RandolphHarris 6 of 9

Love as a concept enters philosophy at one point through religion, particularly when the origin of the World is expressed as an act of procreation or the Creator is conceived of as loving his creation either as a whole or in part (i.e., the human race). However, the concept of love is also a subject for philosophic mediation in regard to ethical problems. Love, as one of the most powerful of human impulses, is seen to be much in need of control, especially if people as rational beings are to be able to use their rational capacities. Pleasures and other values of loving may be preserved without entailing the supposed evils of intemperate sexuality. Love has a unique metaphysical status, for it exists in both the material and the ideal Worlds. Love can take on many forms, from gross sexual passion to a devotion to learning, but, it is argued, the ultimate object of love is the beautiful. The goodness that God sees in his creation is its beauty and to feel the beauty of the World is to love it and its Creator.  One of the great blessings of the plan is that we are organized into families. We have parents whose greater wisdom and experience will help us reach our divine potential. Trust them. They want what is best for us. #RandolphHarris 7 of 9
Four thirty A.M, I am awake again. Singing to the dark through open eyes while dreaming I see only you and me stuck between desire and compromise. If I said I want you back I’d be a liar. There is nothing left of us to long for anymore, but inside the ashes burns an endless fire and every night I can’t help reaching out for more.
And I cannot sleep… You are so far away from me. You are leaving me scars scattered in my heart, a road map of all the places you have been. And I cannot escape, cannot wash this away. Love has burned your mark so deep within. If I said I want you back I would be a liar. There is nothing left of us to long for anymore, but inside the ashes burns an endless fire. And every night I cannot help reaching out for more. Sometimes I feel so happy, sometimes I feel so sad. Sometimes I feel so happy, but mostly you just make me mad. Baby, you just make me mad. Linger on, your pale blue eyes. Linger on, your pale blue eyes. Thought of you as my mountain top, thought of you as my peak.  #RandolpHarris 8 of 9

Thought of you as everything, I have had but could not keep. Linger on, your pale blue eyes.  If I could make the World as pure and strange as what I see, I would put you in the mirror, I put in front of me. Skip a life completely. Stuff it in a cup. She said, “Money is like us in time, it lies, but cannot stand up. Down for you is up.” It was good what we did yesterday. And I would do it once again. The fact that you are married, only proves, you are my best friend. But it is truly, truly a sin. Linger on, your pale blue eyes. God’s love for the World is redemption brought to humanity. God loves his creatures as they love him. Both love of God and religious faith are thought to be subject to volition. Great emphasis are put on ceremonious expressions of devotion and upon the refusal to carry our certain rites. Loyalty is the relationship between persons–for instance between Lord and one’s vassal, between parent and children, or between friends. #RandolphHarris 9 of 9