Our physical and mental well-being is not only a priceless blessing to yourself, but a heritage that you may pass on to your descendants. With good health, all other activities of life are greatly enhanced. A clean mind in healthy body will enable us to render far more effective service to others. It will help us provide more vigorous leadership. It will give us every experience in life more zest and meaning. Good health is a noble and worthwhile attainment. Western minds, dividing things up into dichotomies like subjective and objective, rational and emotion, have to solve the problems caused by such thinking. In the Eastern mode, since there are no false divisions, there is no need for what the French call rapprochement or bringing together-again. However, Westerners, who set up polarities, have to deal with the gap. When a Thesis, like Reason, calls forth an Antithesis, like Emotion, we neatly dispose of the gap by delivering a Synthesis, a proper balance, a good or appropriate unification. Or in Taoist fashion, we bring the two back into a more natural relationship. This synthesis is precisely what humanistic psychologist are attempting with the concepts of Reason and Emotion. #RandolphHarris 1 of 7

As Homo Sapiens (Humans, the Wise or Discerning), we have a superior brain that enables us to think logically and rationally, to control the passions and instinct-like drives, and to live in ways that transcend our natural existence. We learn, remember, associate, innovate, create, and transmit our insights in written symbols. We are, clearly, superior beings! Yet too often we find people ruled by their passions and denying any intellectual abilities other than those that serve or justify the passions. And, when emotions overrule and deny the intellect, humans once again become the brute animal from which one supposedly evolved. Newspapers daily carry descriptions of people ruled by greed, lust, hate, love, ambition, and so on. Just as often, however, we find people ruled by their logic or intellect, denying any emotions or feelings, giving attention to science and technology often to the total exclusion of considerations for the rest of humankind. Complaints are voiced daily that the American government is thus oriented, that more government funds are spent on increasing research and technology and assistance to foreign than are spent on solving social problems such as racism, pollution, poverty and overpopulation. #RandolphHarris 2 of 7

The proper synthesis may not be easy to define and certainly will not be easy to arrive at. However, it appears that there is an optimum life style that includes a balance of both emotional reactivity and the rational approach  and this is how we get a full-functioning person in terms that come very close: Psychological adjustment exists when the concept of self is such that all sensory and visceral experiences of the organism are, or may be, assimilated on a symbolic level into a consistent relationship with the concept of self. This means that any experience, emotional, perceptual, or rational, should be consistent and congruent with the person’s own concept of who one is. The Word of Wisdom leads to clean habits, thoughts, and actions. Obedience to it will make one more receptive to the Spirit of God, which cannot dwell in an unclean tabernacle. Follow the gospel plan that provides for solid work, clean entertainment, and activity to promote growth of stature. Possibly the best measure of the stature of a person is in their own home, at their own fireside. As one looks hopefully forward, what conclusions has one reached about marriage, the home, and family? #RandolphHarris 3 of 7

What valued does one place on the old-fashioned American home with its goodly number of children, its religious atmosphere, its prayer, its blessings and its rather Puritanical idea about duties and obligations, including deference and respect for parents and older folk? The foundation of a happy home must be laid during premarital days. Young people should keep their associations on an uplifting, spiritual, level Moral purity is an eternal principle. Its violation destroys the noblest qualities and aspirations of human beings. Purity is life-giving; unchastity is deadly. Human beings have an essential nature of their own, some skeleton of psychological structure that may be treated and discussed analogously with one’s physical structure, that one has needs, capacities and tendencies that are on their face good or neutral rather than evil. There is also involved the conception that full healthy and normal and desirable development consists in actualizing human nature, in fulfilling these potentialities, and in developing into maturity along these lines that this hidden covert, dimply-seen essential nature dictates, growing from within rather than being shaped from without. #RandolphHarris 4 of 7

Apparently, we have to come to grips with the ongoing conflict in our institutionalized way of viewing ourselves. Since we currently have some patterns of living that view humans as a Thinker, they need to be enlarged to recognize human’s needs to be a Feeler too. To do so would involve our educational systems, literary and publishing ventures, scientific, technological, and government agencies. Similarly, the agencies that view humans only as emotional, like the entertainment, recreational, theological, ecclesiastical, and art media, need to be retooled to take into account the important place intellect and reason have in out lives. “May the LORD answer you when you are in distress. The Earth is the LORD’s and everything in it, the World, and all who life in it; for he founded it upon the seas and established it upon the waters” reports Psalm 20.1 and Psalm 24.1-2. We must be true to God’s holy laws. Remember, they cannot be broken with impunity. If we would be happy and successful in our Earthly association, courtship, and home building, we must conform our lives to the eternal laws of Heaven. There is no other way. Remember that no great nation has ever fallen without first becoming morally corrupt. #RandolphHarris 5 of 7

There are many things that set us apart from our animal relatives. Among the chief of these is our cognitive ability. Our rational processes have enabled us to put two and two together in a fantastic number of ways. The tools we build are the physical proof of our cognitive abilities. The artifacts and the edifices we create are monuments to our intellect. We need, however, to cultivate the cognitive ability in everyone, not just among the small elite group who will be set aside as The Thinkers. We dare not let this kind of thing occur or we will become, even more than we are now, a society of narrow, restricted specialists, with the Thinkers at the top of the heap. Each human being is Homo sapiens, not just those with diplomas and degrees after their names. The society must take this into serious account and redesign its programs and policies to allow for the thinking capacities of all its members. In addition, human beings are also blessed with an abundance of emotions with which one can react, which can motivate one, and which certainly can, if fully known and appreciated, enrich and enhance one’s life. The body is the soul presented in its richest and most expressive form. In the body, we see the soul articulated in gesture, dress, movements, shape, physiognomy, temperature—in countless expressive forms. #RandolphHarris 6 of 7

We can respond to the pleasures and pains of each person around us, not in a pathological sense which brings us too much into the lives of others, but in the fulfilling sense which brings us too much into the lives of others, but in the fulfilling sense of knowing each other and becoming able to empathize more fully with others. Self-understanding comes only with the optimum development of the capacity to identify with and experience the feelings of other people. This is called the capacity social interest or social feeling. The realization of the dual nature of human life, the cognitive and the emotional, should excite our interest, not frighten us away. If, through letting bot aspects of our nature out, we can more completely experience situations, then possibly we will have come a lot closer to the deal of self-fulfillment or self-actualization. Are we sometimes asked to do for others what may seem to be beneath us, or what is tiresome and momentous? Was not the Son of God born in a stable? Did he not make himself a servant, even to washing the feet of his disciples? Love one another. Serve you’re your fellow humans. The example has been given you. Therefore, let us never get tired of being patient and preserving and generous, living in harmony and, if possible, at peace with all people. “My soul standeth fast in that liberty in which God hath made us free,” reports Alma 6.9. #RandolphHarris 7 of 7