We need to learn the secret burning in our heart. To do that, sometimes it is necessary to step back from the World and assess our life. Adjustment is the ability to balance demands of the ego with id and superego demands; being effective in reason, emotion, and interpersonal relations; a definition having to do with reaching some sort of external, socially established goal; and so forth. The difficulty we have found with most of these approaches is in seeing adjustment in terms of something outside of, and apart from, the life of any human being. Unless we take the time to reflect, we may not realize the impact of this fast-paced environment on our daily lives and the choices we make. Every human being carries within one’s own life the only real and possible goal or standards by which to measure adjustment—the actualization of selfhood. This may mean, for some, that personal adjustment may take place at the expense of social adjustment. People who attain self-actualization are neither sociopaths nor anarchists. They know that we live in social World and benefit greatly from social experiences, and are able to approach the external World more deliberately, with their own best interests at heart. These individuals are also able to discover aspects of themselves that had once been neglected or pushed away. #RandolpHarris 1 of 11

As we negotiate a new balance between our internal World and the external one, both changes help us face the World with confidence. Getting this balance right is the key to wisdom. Becoming wise is one of the major objectives of Selfhood. How wise we become depends in large part on our ability to watch our public self with the curiosity of a detective and the compassion of a saint. Assessing our lives also gives us an opportunity to step back from the World, reflect on where we stand on the covenant path, and, if necessary, adjust ensure a firm grip and a forward gaze. If anything in our lives need to be changed, today is the perfect day to change it. The attempt we make is to actualize our selfhood as fully as possible while keeping a realistic understanding of the social demands made upon us. This often calls for compromise in behavior, though not always for compromise in thought and attitude. We have to forego some good things in order to choose others that are better or best because they develop faith in God and strengthen our families. What we observe ourselves doing in the course of our journey to eternal life may at times startle us, discourage us, confuse us, and overwhelm us. Therefore, it is important to be gentle with ourselves. Understanding that we will renegotiate this balance over and over in the years to come may help us be patient. #RandolphHarris 2 of 11

A higher state of mind and spiritual vision can only be achieved through the higher practice of personal character. If we live up to the highest and best that we know in the outer level of our lives, God will continually life us even higher. When God elevates us by his grace into Heavenly places, we will find a vast plateau where we can move about with ease. “Come up here, and I will show you things,” reports Revelation 4.1. The requirements for self-actualization include a full appreciation of the social relations and needs of each person. Every self-actualizing individual, then, is as fully meaningfully oneself as one can be without infringing upon nor limiting the Selfhood of any other human being. We are life affirming itself in the midst of other lives affirming themselves. “Blessed are the pure heart, for they shall see God,” reports Matthew 5.8. The search for significance has to be a very personal, even solitary experience: each person must figure out one’s own identity and live out one’s own life. Though it may, it need not, be a lonely search. The population on Earth has double in the past 50 years. There are now nearly 8 billion other human beings currently alive at this moment who may also be interested in what it means to be alive. Therefore, there is a sense we learn empirically what being is. #RandolphHarris 3 of 11

There must therefore be a cause (in a metaphysical, not a physical, sense of cause) of their existence; this must be a necessary being, identified with God, who exists by one’s own nature. Contingent beings, like horses and houses, are obviously contingent because being composed of matter, their existence is finite—they begin to exist and cease to exist. Matter also accounts for the individuality of things: things that are identical insofar a what they are, or in other words, things that have the same nature, are still different things because of the matter of which they are composed is different. God, on the contrary, is immaterial and, hence, one and unchanging. The struggle to be alive, stay alive, to find meaning and significance in life is perhaps the only real purpose humans have. The experience of discovering that we are a Being-in-the-process-of-becoming is a wonderful and fearsome one. However, it can be so much more rewarding and thrilling than the mere ongoing, business-as-usual, type of life lived by so many people that we find it difficult to believe that we will not be stimulated and goaded and challenged by this idea. At the very least, we feel, we will have to do something with the ideas we are considering. We may be able to forget or repress them, but they will remain part of our experience. #RandolphHarris 4 of 11

All of us are familiar with people who repress memories to block out pain too terrible for them to feel. Some of these children even develop two or more personalities as a way of coping with the trauma. Adults who has survived great pain or danger often report going outside themselves as crucial moments. Our mind can protect us, but dealing with the facts of life in a realistic fashion is part of the struggle. Many people never make the transition from self-consciousness to self-awareness. They get stuck in self-sabotage: they stop caring altogether. The man who just lets himself go, or the woman who says, “Oh, I am just no good at cooking,” are engaging in self-limiting behavior. A self-aware person makes conscious choices about what to do about simple facts. In contrast, a self-sabotaging person will see the facts, may even see what needs to be done, but will go on no further. Living life fully is not a straight-line path toward some external other-directed goal of adjusting or mental health or perfection. “For behold, this life is the time for people to prepare to meet God; yea, behold the day of this life is the day for people to perform their labors,” reports Alma 34.32. We are trying to reach eternal life by experiencing mortal life all deeply, richly, dangerously, riskily, and humanly. Life is blood, sweat, and tears, and joy and glory. #RandolphHarris 5 of 11

The challenge of living fully is well illustrated by a poem from the fertile mind of the contemporary American poet, Dwayne Tipton Cannon: Lord, light my fire with purpose beyond the thought that life, happy or unhappy, successful or unsuccessful, is extraordinarily interesting. Mighty warriors, celebrated and honored, allow me the pleasure of living the multitudes of humankind, of escaping intolerance, a unique adventure. Beautiful starts, is it so wrong to embrace the Sun, to enjoy Spring air, and to love, to think, and act courageously? Powerful faith, do not betray me in my hour of need and despair, a superior person is marked by rising the fallen hawks and doves, an ultimate triumph. Mountain peaks, do not reject me while my direction wavers, for all things must change to something new, to something strange, for flowers grow. Ocean winds, might you offer more than fresh silence to my solitude, and allow me the conviction that only the little minds are subdued by misfortune, and sadly mistaken? Dark granite, forget your cold rewards, your solidarity is needed, a virtuous deed should never be delayed, the impulse is too strong, and hesitation unnecessary. Bold rose, do not weary of life, your thorny stems lead inward to secret doors, and are doors outwards, out of self, out of smallness, out of wrong, to eternal peace. #RandolphHarris 6 of 11

We have looked at the many crises each of us faces. The one with which we want to deal is that of insignificance: the feeling that our personal existence is not only meaningless but does not matter, is not relevant or even related to anything or anybody at all. To begin to understand, we must confront the most important fact of life: our own mortality. “Do not procrastinate the day of your repentance until the end; for after this day of life, which is given us to prepare for eternity, behold, if we do not improve our time while this life, then comes the night of darkness wherein there can be no labor performed,’ reports Alma 34.33. Our significance is directly related to how we live our lives in accord with a full appreciation of the fact that we will someday leave this World. This is dealing with the existential anxiety that all of us must confront one time or another in our lives. Our goal is to understand the very real dilemmas of human existence and attempt to guarantee that all our study and research can be applied to make human life more fulfilling, richer, and more significant. We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. #RandolphHarris 7 of 11

 Understanding our divine origins is essential to our eternal progress and can free us from the distraction of this life. “If you continue in my word, then you are my disciples indeed; and you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free,” reports John 8.31-32. Selfhood is described as one’s consciousness of who one is. The goal is for us to learn how we can actualize our own selves for more significant, meaningful, and above all, joyful, living. Adulthood presents us with a gift: the virtual end of self-consciousness. Any of us can use this gift to pursue wisdom. All we have to do to become wiser is to listen to our own internal rhythms and use them in our daily lives. Sounds simple, right? However, anyone who has tried it knows that it is constant work. Wisdom is not a goal but a process. “If any person needed wisdom from God, I did; for how to act I did not know, and unless I could get more wisdom than I had, I would never know,” reports Joseph Smith History 1.12 The greatest achievement humankind can make in this World is to familiarize ourselves with divine truth, so thoroughly, so perfectly, that the example or conduct of no creature living in the World can ever turn us away from the knowledge that we have obtained. #RandolphHarris 8 of 11

The practical yet complex aspect of human intelligence either remains stable through life or continues to grow as we age. Making it grow involves nothing more than staying mentally challenged. No humanistic writer is blind to the fact of human foolishness, their cruelty, their faithlessness. Yet, the words can be read and understood, apart from their irony, as fitting descriptions of the potential self lying formant in each human being. They are not myths nor lies. They are simply too often unfulfilled. People can claim such wonderful inventions, such ingenious insights, such remarkable creations. Yet one is capable of the most supreme folly. The creature who can paint a Sistine Chapel ceiling is the same creature who can turn Lake Erie into a cesspool. The same nature that can conceive of the most altruistic love can also butcher millions of their fellow humans. Contradictions? Possibly. More likely we will find as we explore the nature of humans—our own nature—that seeming contradictions pop up because we take limited glances. Much like in the 1994 film IQ, no one could see that Ed Walters (Tim Robbins), an auto science engineer, was only pretending to be a physicist and cheating to answer questions correctly because they so desperately wanted to believe in him. #RandolpHarris 9 of 11

Our perspectives are fogged or fenced-in by our needs, wishes, fears, and unconscious ambitions. Hatred can cause us to see only hate in people about us. Love can truly limit our vision to that of loving. Human beings are more than any one picture of them can accurately portray, and they are more than all the pictures assed together can say. If we are to have any hope of sifting through the myriad of voices and the philosophies of people that attack the truth, we must learn to receive revelation. We must learn to rely on the Spirit of Truth. “For the Spirit speaks the truth and lies not. Wherefore, it speaks of things as they really are, and of things as they really will be; wherefore, these things are manifested unto us plainly, for the salvation of our souls. But behold, we are not witnesses alone in these things; for God also spoke them unto prophets of old,” reports Jacob 4.13. People have been the subject of billions of works of very fine poetry, literature, drama, music, and oratory. We have fashioned our images out of wood, marble, clary, oil, acrylic, soap, sand, wire, cheese, papier-mâché, glass, ice, and welded iron. We have dissected, analyzed, studied, and X-rayed ourselves in every way conceivable. Yet for all the experiences in recorded history of which people have been the subject, the one thing that cannot be made or reproduced is that slipper something called one’s essence, one’s nature. #RandolphHarris 10 of 11

Even if we succeed in setting down in black and white the most descriptive, accurate, meaningful words ever used to try to set forth the nature of humans, all we would have succeed in doing is talking about it. All this fire our soul, and, provided that we are not disturbed, our subject enlarges itself, becomes methodized and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished by our mind, so that we can survey it, like a fine picture or a beautiful statue, at a glance. Nor do we hear in our imagination the parts successively, but we hear them, as it were, all at once. Wat a delight this is we cannot explain it! All this inventing, this producing, takes place in a pleasing, lively dream. This means that words are too frail, too limited to capture a live-and-kicking experience. The nature of human beings is such an alive, personal, fluid thing that as soon as the words are dry on paper, the nature of human beings moves on to be something else. However, it is possible to talk about what has been considered to be the nature of humans by various people in various times. Thus, by a process of both elimination and simplification we can almost conclude that since other descriptions have not yet captured it, whatever is left just might begin to do it, at least in written form. God will turn these expressions into a wonderful lesson of growth for the future. #RandolphHarrs 11 of 11