God sure does answer prayers…sometimes I just have questions and like immediately, the answer comes. I do not look for the answers nor always look for signs, I just let them come to me naturally. Like, I pose a question in my mind sometimes and moments later I get the answer through various mediums. We know our habits, our weaknesses, or strengths, our quirks. If all the fact were in, we would find that the so-called distinction between emotion and reason do not really exist at all. Existentially speaking, there is a real difference because as most of us live our lives, we act, think, believe, and perceive in terms of one or the others. However, we think the difference is only a fiction, created by the minds of humans. In observing things, we not only perceive our perceptions but something which is neither ourselves nor our perceptions. The is wisdom of that in the attempt to communicate an important truth, there is no difference, or rather, no distinction or boundary, between us and our experiences. We are part of all that we experience; all that we can experience is part of us. The threshold created between Emotion (intuition, sensuality, feeling, or soul) and Reason (intellect, knowledge, cognition, logic or mind) was put there because in Western Civilization, there exists a strong tendency to make boxes, pigeonholes, categories, and blueprints. Into these boxes go our ideas, patterns of thought, reasons, relationships, and many other things without which we are quite sure we would be lost. #RandolphHarris 1 of 12

For instance, it is necessary for us to build a box labeled “Good” and another we called “Evil.” By this categorizing what we thought were mutually exclusive opposites or polarities, we could easily sort out experiences by placing them into either one or the other box. We did the same with Truth and Falsehood, Beauty and Ugliness, Love and Hate, Right and Wrong, and hundreds of others things. All this is done in the name of somebody’s need for conveniently obtained answers! Among the convenient distinctions we have all made (one that Existential and Humanistic Psychologist are trying to overcome) is that between Subject and Object. Behaviorists have tried to make this distinction the strongest of all by de-emphasizing any subjective aspects an experimenter’s work and forcing one to deal as objectively as possible with one’s data. The clinicians, beginning with Dr. Freud, were aware of the importance of the subjective experience but were careful to keep the subjective and the objective clearly apart. For example, most of the analysis that Dr. Freud insisted his psychoanalysts undergo in their own training was for the purpose of bringing the analyst’s unconscious to consciousness so that one could clearly and purely interpret one’s patient’s words without contaminating them with one’s own subjective wishes or fears. The analyst’s mind had to be even more sterile than the surgeon’s hands! #RandolphHarris 2 of 12

Humanistic psychologist would like to being the subjective and objective back into the sameness that they actually are, to remove the artificial separation that medieval thinkers have built. Emotional, intuitive, subjective experiences are part of the process of knowing or perceiving any objective person or thing. We know from laboratory and field research that perceptions are greatly affected by what we bring to them. We know, for instance, that hunger in a person can cause one to think that he or she actually sees food or food-related words. We know, also, that is one is hunger a person will see more food, food-words, or signs relating to food in one’s external environment than one does when one’s hunger is satisfied. This is called Perceptual Set. The perceiver has certain expectations and focuses attention on particular aspects of the sensory date: This one calls a Selector. Therefore, the World a person sees is heavily influenced (and biased) by one’s own past experiences, expectations, motivations, beliefs, emotions, and even their culture. Perceptual sets create a tendency for us to view things only a certain way and can impact how we interpret and respond to the World around us and can be influenced by a number of different factors. #RandolphHarris 3 of 12

The perceptual event is more than either the subject doing the perceiving or the object being perceived, separately or added together. In similar terms, there is no difference between knowing something emotionally and knowing something rationally. Our feelings and our ideas are quite realistically and affectively interwoven. Take the following example: When I was on the Squarehead square rigger bound for Buenos Aires, full Moon in the Trades, the old hooker driving 14 knots. I lay down on the bowspirit, facing aster, with the water foaming into spume under me. I became drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of it and for a moment I lose myself—actually lost my life. I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became Moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky. I belong, without past or future, within peace and unity and wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to Life itself! To God, if you want to put it that way. We will have yearnings and desires for certain things, but not until we are at the limit of desperation will we ask. It is the sense of not being spiritually real that causes us to ask. We have to get out past the harbor into the great depths of God, and begin to know things for ourselves—begin to have spiritual discernment. #RandolphHarris 4 of 12

The experience of delving deeply into subjective awareness is a total self process, not just a mental exercise in book learning or logic. There are three systems of knowing: Sensate Truth: Obtained through responses of the Sense Organs. Rational Truth: Obtained through logic, reason, and the Scientific Method. And, Ideational Truth: Super-rational and super-sensory, it is obtained through direct intuition, revelations, and the sudden enlightenment of Insight. In a real sense, then, we are answering the question of relationship between Emotion and Reason by throwing the question away! Yet, something must be done with the existential fact that, though in nature there may be no distinction, our unnatural minds have created the fiction of such a distinction and we live, most of us, with fiction. Since we live as if emotion and reason were separate and not only exclusively separated but mortal enemies of each other, we get caught in several binds or dilemmas. As a scientist a person is expected to del uncompromisingly with the facts of objective reality and never let one’s own subjective reality intrude into one’s research. The most important part of one’s subjective reality that must be kept out, or at least corrected for, is one’s own feelings. To further highlight this illustration, a scientist with cancer should be capable of being disinterested in the results of one’s research on a cancer cure! #RandolphHarris 5 of 12

To be effective, a scientist should be able to abstract oneself out of one’s work, so that if the formula fails to cure cancers one will not feel disappointment nor anger, and if it succeeds in curing cancers in one’s laboratory animals, one should not feel anticipation nor hope nor joy that it might spare one’s own life. In actual practice scientists are not capable of such superhuman abstraction. They are human. They experience the full range of emotions and acknowledge that there is tension in their research: they are aware of the strength of their emotional reactions and motivations and at the same time of the need to keep them from interfering with research. Why do our relatives, the animals, not exhibit any such cultural struggle? We do not know. Very probably some of them—the bees, the ants, the termites—strove for thousands of years before they arrived at the State of institutions, the distribution of functions and the restrictions on the individua, for which we admire them today. It is a mark of our present condition that we know from our own feelings that we should not think ourselves happy in these animal States or in any of the roles assigned in them to the individual. #RandolphHarris 6 of 12

An illustration from outside the field of science presents itself as these words are being written. One of the authors is missing a party he would like to be at and is angry and resentful, but his reason tells him that the editor’s deadline for this essay will be reached only by working at this very time. Conflict! The emotion is strong and real because at the party are people he very much enjoys and would like to be with. However grudgingly he recognizes the validity of his reasoning: he is rushed in meeting his deadline because of his own poor scheduling of time. A renationalization (poor timing calls for sacrifice of pleasure!) is called forth to soothe the strong emotion which otherwise might interfere with his effectiveness at writing. Therefore, it is clear that nothing is free. The opportunity cost of an item is what you give up to get the item. When making any decision, such as whether to sit down and write, decision makers should be aware of the opportunity costs that accompany each possible action. In fat, they usually are. Writers who can earn millions if they miss a party and sit down and finish a chapter are well aware that their opportunity costs of going to a party is very high. It is not surprising that people often decide the benefit of the party is not worth the cost. #RandolphHarris 7 of 12

Rational people systematically and purposefully do the best they can to achieve their objectives. Therefore, the author had more of an incentive to get his work done, after all, he will make a lot of money by working, and there will be other parties.  An incentive is something (such as the prospect of a punishment or a reward) that induces a person to act. Because rational people make decisions by comparing costs and benefits, they respond to incentive. Fate is looked upon in the strictly religious sense of being nothing else than an expression of the Divine Will. The people of Israel had believed themselves to be the favourite child of God, and when the great Father caused misfortune after misfortune to rain down upon this people of his, they were never shaken in their belief in his relationship to them or questioned his power or righteousness. Instead, they produced prophets, who held up their sinfulness before them; and out of their sense of guilt they created the extremely strict commandments of their priestly religion. They had incentive to appease God in order to gain eternal life. It is remarkable how differently a primitive human behaves. If one has met with misfortune, one does not throw the blame on oneself but on one’s fetish, which has obviously not done its duty, and one gives it a thrashing instead of punishing oneself. #RandolphHarris 8 of 12

Thus, we know the two origins of the sense of guilt: one arising from fear of an authority, and the other, later on arising from the fear of the super-ego. The first insists upon a renunciation of instinctual satisfactions; the second, as well as doing this, presses for punishment, since the continuance of the forbidden wishes cannot be concealed from the super-ego. We have also learned how the severity of the super-ego—the demands of conscience—is to be understood. It is simply a continuation of the severity of the external authority, to which it has succeeded and which it has in part replaced. We now see in what relationship the renunciation of instinct stands to the sense of guilt. Originally, renunciation of instinct was the result of fear of an external authority: one renounced one’s satisfactions in order not to lose its love. If one has carried out this renunciation, one is, as it were, quits with the authority and no sense of guilt should remain. However, with fear of the super-ego the case is different. Ere, instinctual renunciation is not enough, for the wish persists and cannot be concealed from the super-ego. Thus, in spite of the renunciation that has been made, a sense of guilt comes about. This constitutes a great economic disadvantage in the erection of a super-ego, or, as we may put it, in the formation of a conscience. #RandolphHarris 9 of 12

Instinctual renunciation now no longer ha a completely liberating effect; virtuous continence is no longer rewarded with the assurance of love. A threatened external unhappiness—loss of love and punishment on the part of the external authority—has been exchanged for a permanent internal unhappiness, for the tension of the sense of guilt. Basically, first comes renunciation of instinct owing to fear of aggression by the external authority. (This is, of course, what fear of the loss of love amounts to, for is a protection against this punitive aggression.) After that comes the erection of an internal authority, and renunciation of instinct owning to fear of it—owing to fear of conscience. In this second situation bad intentions are equated with bad actions, and hence comes a sense of guilt and a need for punishment. The aggressiveness of conscience keeps up the aggression of the authority. This tell us that conscience (or more correctly, the anxiety which later becomes conscience) is indeed the cause of instinctual renunciation to begin with, but that later the relationship is reversed. Every renunciation of instinct now become a dynamic source of conscience and every fresh renunciation increases the latter’s severity and intolerance. #RandolphHarris 10 of 12

However, our charge is to increase in Wisdom and favour with God and with our fellow beings. “And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and humans,” reports Luke 2.52. All of us, like the Savior, can, and must, continue to advance all the days of our lives in all that really matters. How shall we do this? How shall we continue to increase in wisdom and statue and favour with God and humans until we reach the perfection that should be our destiny? The road lies before us. It is clearly marked out. Our course is clear. We must follow the strait and narrow road marked out for us by the Son of God in all that we desire, think, and do. We must imitate him in our mental growth as we search for truth. Let us never fear truth, but only its misuse. On the contrary, let us love truth above all else—for God himself is truth. “Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom: and with all they getting get understanding,” reports Proverbs 4.7. The genesis of conscience is in point of fact not so very great, and we see a way of further reducing it.  “Blessed are they who seek to learn wisdom. Seek not for riches but for wisdom, and behold, the mysteries of God shall be unfolded to you, and then shall you be made rich,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 6.7. #RandolphHarris 11 of 12

Some read that lamp of their own conceit; who interpret by rules of their own contriving; who have become a law unto themselves. This does not harmonize well because it is intellectual pride that leads one to think one is self-sufficient in matters of mind and spirit. Let us ever realize the difference that exists between a discoverer of the truth and the Lawgiver of all truth. The first is human; the other divine. There is an all-too-prevalent spirit of experimenting with things that have already been proved beyond doubt. It finds expression in such phrases as, “You only live once,” “I will try anything,” “You are only young once,” “Be a good sport,” “Times are different,” and so forth. Times are different, but fundamental remain unchanged. Honesty is still honesty. Virtue is still virtue. Truth is still trust. Honest effort is still rewarded. Gravity still pulls all things to Earth. Disregard for law still brings punishment. Two and two still makes four. The Ten commandments are still in force, as are all the other laws of life, nature, and the Universe. People and nations cannot break the Ten Commandments; they can only break themselves upon them. “And we, ourselves, also, through the infinite  goodness of God, and the manifestations of his Spirit, have great views of that which is to come; and were it expedient, we could prophesy all things,” reports Mosiah 5.3. #RandolphHarris 12 of 12