He looked at me for a long moment, as though he was seeing me with new eyes, but it was only his weariness. He was seeing what he wanted to see it me, and he thanked me again. This was truly one of the most baffling mortals I had ever met. And to think, he was her husband, and I had though him the perfect husband for her when we had first met. He reached out and took my hand before I could stop him. Could he not feel how hard it was? Only the thinnest layer of flesh was permeable. I was a monster. Yet he peered into my eyes as though plumbing for something separate from the Deadly Sins that prevailed with in me. We can speak of idolatry or alienation not only in relationship to other people, but also in relationship to oneself, when the person is subject to irrational passions. The person who is mainly motivated by one’s lust for power, does not experience oneself any more in the richness and limitlessness of a human beings, but one becomes a slave to one partial striving in oneself, which is projected into external aims, by which one is possessed. The person who is given to the exclusive pursuit of one’s passion for money is possessed by one’s striving for it; money is the idol which one worships as the projection of one isolated power of oneself, one’s greed for it. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14

Many twenty first- century mortals have lost a meaningful World and a self which lives in meanings out of a spiritual center. The mortal-created World of objects has drawn into itself one who created it and who now lose their subjectivity in it. One has sacrificed oneself to one’s own productions. However, mortals are still aware of what he or she has lost or is continuously losing. Yet, they are still mortal enough to experience one’s dehumanization as despair. At this level, power is a sensational exaggeration made for the sake of profit and fame; it is a morbid play with negativities. In this sense, the neurotic person is an alienated person. One’s actions are not one’s own; while an individual is under the illusion of doing what he or she wants, one is actually driven by forces which are separated from oneself, which work behind the individual’s back; one is a stranger to oneself, just as one’s fellow mortals are a stranger to the individual who is consumed by greed, lust, and power. These type of people experiences the other and oneself not as what the really are, but distorted by the unconscious forces which operate in them. The insane person is the absolutely alienated person; one has completely lost oneself as the center of one’s own experience; one has lost the sense of self. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14

What is common to all these phenomena—the worship of idols, the idolatrous worship of God, the idolatrous love for a person, the worship of a political leader or the state, and the idolatrous worship of the externalization of irrational passions—is the process of alienation. It is the fact that mortals do not experience themselves as the active bearer of one’s own powers and richness, but as an impoverished thing, dependent on powers outside of oneself, unto whom one has projected one’s living substance. As the reference to idolatry indicates, alienation is by no means a modern phenomenon. Suffice it to say that it seems alienation differs from culture to culture, both in the specific spheres which are alienated, and in the thoroughness and completeness of the process. Alienation as we find it in modern society is almost total; it pervades the relationship of mortals to their work, to things they consume, to the state, to one’s fellow mortals, and to oneself. Mortals have created a World of human-made things as it never existed before. They have constructed a complicated social machine to administer the technical machine they built. Yet this whole creation of theirs stands over and above them. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14

One does not feel oneself as a creator and center, but as the servant of a Golem, which one’s hands have built. The more powerful and gigantic the forces are which one unleashes, the more powerless one feels oneself as a human being. Mortals confront themselves with one’s own forces embodied in things one has crated, alienated from oneself. They are owned by their own creation, and have lost ownership of oneself. They have lost ownership of themselves. Many individuals have built a golden calf, and says, “these are your gods who have brought you out of Egypt.” What happens to the worker? As the neurotic state progresses, they are unable to understand what is happening in our period. They are unable to distinguish the genuine from the neurotic anxiety. People begin to attack as a morbid longing for negativity what in reality is courageous acceptance of the negative. They decay what is actually the creative expression of decay. They reject as meaninglessness the meaningful attempt to reveal the meaninglessness of our situation. In industry the person becomes an economic atom that dances to the tune of atomistic management. Your place is just here, you will sit in this fashion, your arms will move x inches in a course of y radius and the time of movement will be .000 minutes. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14

Work is becoming more repetitive and thoughtless as the planners, the micromotionists, and the scientific managers further strip the workers of their rights to think and move freely. Life is being denied; need to control, creativeness, curiosity, and independent thought are being baulked, and the result, the inevitable result, is flight or fight on the part of the worker, apathy or destructiveness, psychic regression. The role of the manager is also one of alienation. It is true, one manages the whole and a part, but one too is alienated from one’s product as something concrete and useful. One’s aim is to employ profitably the capital invested by others, although in comparison with the older type of owner-manager, modern management is much less interested in the amount of profit to be paid out as dividend to the stockholder than it is in the efficient operation and expansion of the enterprise. Characteristically, within management those in charge of labor relations and of sales—that is, of human manipulation—gain, relatively speaking, an increasing importance in comparison with those in charge of the technical aspects of production. The manager, like the worker, like everybody, deal with impersonal giants: with the giant competitive enterprise; with the giant national market; with the giant consumer, who has to be coaxed and manipulated; with the giant unions, and the giant government. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14

All these giants have their own lives, as it were. They determine the activity of the manager and they direct the activity of the worker and clerk. The problem of the manager opens up one of the most significant phenomena in an alienated culture, that of bureaucratization. Both big business and government administrations are conducted by bureaucracy. Bureaucrats are specialists in the administration of things and of mortals. Due to the bigness of the apparatus to be administered, and the resulting abstractification, the bureaucrats’ relationship to the people is usually one of complete alienation. They, the people to be administered, are objects whom the bureaucrats consider neither with love nor hate, but completely impersonally; the manager-bureaucrat must not feel, as far as one’s professional activity is concerned; one must manipulate people as though they were figures, or things. Since the vastness of the organization and the extreme division of labor prevents any single individual from seeing the whole, since there is no organic, spontaneous co-operation between the various individuals or groups within the industry, the managing bureaucrats are necessary; without them the enterprise would collapse in a short time, since nobody would know the secret which makes it function. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14

Bureaucrats are as indispensable as the tons of paper gigabytes and terabytes consumed under their leadership. Just because everybody senses, with a feeling of powerlessness, the vital role of bureaucrats, they are given an almost godlike respect. If it were not for the bureaucrats, people believe, everything would go to pieces, and we would starve. Whereas, in the medieval World, the leaders were considered representatives of god-intended order, in modern Capitalism the role of the bureaucrat is hardly less sacred—since he or she is necessary for the survival of the whole. Karl Marx gave a profound definition of the bureaucrat saying: “The bureaucrat relates oneself to the World as a mere object of one’s activity.” It is interesting to note that the spirit of bureaucracy has entered not only business and government administration, but also trade unions and the great political socialist parities in England, Germany, and France. In Russia and America, too, the bureaucratic managers and their alienated spirit have conquered these countries, Russia and America could perhaps exist without terror—if certain conditions were given—but it could not exist without the system of total bureaucratization. However, somehow, many people feel that this is not a true safety; one has to suppress inclinations to accept the visions of bureaucrats as revelations, and some feel seriously threatened by it. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14

However, one does not feel spiritually threatened by something which is not an element of oneself. And since it is a symptom of the neurotic character to resist nonbeing by reducing being, one can turn to God for traditional safety. There should be no question of what Christian theology has to do in this situation. It should decide for truth against safety, even if the safety is consecrated and supported by the churches. Certainly there is a Christian conformism, from the beginning of the Church on, and there is a Christian collectivism—or at least semicollectivism, in several periods of Church history. However, this should not induce Christian theologians to identify Christian courage with the courage to be as a part. They should realize that the courage to be as a part—even if they rightly assume that neither of these forms of the courage to be gives the final solution. It is the endless compassion of God that allows us to see others for who they are. Through the lens of pure love, we see immortal beings of infinite potential and worth and beloved sons and daughters of Almighty God. Once we see through that lens, we cannot discount, disregard, or discriminate against anyone. In the Savior’s work, it is often by small and simple means that great things are brought to pass. We know that it requires repetitive practice to become good at anything. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14

Because of your unique talents, abilities, and personality, you will help others become better and happier. Yes, life can be hard at times. Certainly we all have our times of despair and discouragement. However, regardless of our differences, we seek to embrace one another as sons and daughters of our beloved Heavenly Father. God loves his children enough to give them a blueprint for the architecture to happiness and meaning in this life and a way to experience eternal joy in the halls of glory in the life to come. Being truly self-actualized is considered the exception rather than the rule since most people are working to meet more pressing needs. A peak experience involves feelings of limitless horizons opening up to the vision, the feeling of being simultaneously more powerful and also more helpless than one every was before, the feeling of ecstasy and wonder and awe, the loss of placement in time and space with, finally, the conviction that something extremely important and valuable had happened, so that subject was to some extent transformed and strengthened even in one’s daily life by such experiences. These are moments of transcendence in which a person emerges feeling changed and transformed. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14

We have long believed that love and will are interdependent and belong together. Both are conjunctive processes of being—a reaching out to influence others, molding, forming, creating the consciousness of the other. However, this is only possible, in an inner sense, if one opens oneself at the same time to the influence of the other. The self-actualizer can appreciate the irony and the absurd in life, and especially in the behaviors of mortals in general, but one has no patience with ethnic jokes, sick jokes, cruelty jokes or those situations in which a particular person is made the butt of a joke. This sense of humor enables one to transcend unimportant concerns, and of course, enables one to laugh at oneself when one becomes foolish or ridiculous. Will without love becomes manipulation. Love without will in our own day becomes sentimental and experimental. Therefore, we must display more than average creativeness, originality, and inventiveness. We are not always artistic or mechanically oriented people, nor always involved in problem solving occupations. Even though work tends to be fairly ordinary, one displays innovative skills, more creativity, and a joy from strong encouragement to follow one’s own lead. There is a feeling of the everlasting going and coming, the eternal return, the growing and mating and dying and growing again, which is part of the spiritual process. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14

Human beings are part of this eternal going and returning, part of its sadness as well as its song. However, mortals, the seeker, is called by one’s consciousness to transcend the eternal return. Our own convictions are to seek the inner reality, with the belief that the fruits of future values will be able to grow only after they are sown by the values of our history. When the full results of our bankruptcy of inner values is brought home to us, it is especially important that we seek the source of love and will. Although we may not be well adjusted in the naïve sense of being always approved of or totally identified with our culture, we can still be well adjusted personally—that is, congruent and authentic in and to ourselves—even if we reject the ideals of social adjustment. So, it is not concerning that some may see others as eccentric or even somewhat odd when compared with the run-of-the-mill, conforming, look-alike people around us. Our value system results automatically from acceptance of ourselves and others. Most self-actualizers are not petty moralizers. What most people are offended by, what most people consider moral problems, are usually of no concern to self-actualizing people. Belief in the flexibility and potentiality of the human being is so strong that one assumes that, unless interfered with, people will usually be just fine. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14

Many people cannot identify with the theory of self-actualization because it seems to point to a state of excellence. Nonsense! No one’s life is flawless. We all have our own Hells we are trying to work ourselves out of, not day by day, but inch by inch. Self-actualizers are far from faultless. They are human. As a consequence of their kinship, deep feeling, sensitivity, and awareness, they suffer more of the pains of being alive. They also experience more of the joys! Because they find so much pleasure in being alive and being authentic, they often expect too much of the same kind of behavior from people who are less able to live the same way. This makes them frequently impatient, even somewhat resentful, concerning those they care about. The striking thing about love and will in or day is that, whereas in the past we were always held up to as the answer to life’s predicaments, we now have ourselves become the problem. It is always true that love and will become more difficult in a transitional age; and ours is an era of radical age; and ours is an era of radical transition. The old myths and symbols by which we oriented ourselves are gone, anxiety is rampant; we cling to each other and try to persuade ourselves that what we feel is love; we do not will because we are afraid that if we choose one thing or one person we will lose the other, and we are too insecure to take that chance. #Randolphharris 12 of 14

The bottom then drops out of the conjunctive emotions and processes—of which love and will are the two foremost examples. The individual is forced to turn inward; one becomes obsessed with the new form of the problem of identity, namely, Even-if-I-know-who-I-am, I-have-no-significance. I am unable to influence others. The next step can be apathy. And the following step may be violence. For no human being can stand the perpetually numbing experience of one’s own powerlessness. So great is the emphasis on love as the resolution to life’s predicament that people’s self-esteem ascended or feel depending on whether or not they had achieved it. Those who believed they had found it indulged in self-righteousness, confident in their visible proof of salvation as the Calvinist’s wealth used to be tangible evidence of one’s being numbered among the elect. Those who failed to find it felt not simply bereft to a greater or lesser extent, but, on a deeper and more damaging inner level, their self-esteem was undermined. They felt marked as a new species of pariah, and would confess in psychotherapy that they awoke in the small hours of the morning not necessarily especially lonely or unhappy but plagued with the gnawing conviction that thy had somehow missed the great success of life. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14

And all the while, with the rising divorce rates, the increasing banalization of love in literature and art, and the fact that physical intimacy for many people has become more meaningless as it is more available, this love has seemed tremendously elusive if not an outright illusion. Some members of the community came to the conclusion that love is destroyed by the very nature of our bourgeious society, and the reforms they proposed had the specific purpose of making a World in which love is more possible. “You and me could be enough. We will ride the storm. When the skies get rough, I will stay though cold and dark. I will take your hand and I will pick you up. And I will give you love until the Worlds run dry and I will give you love. Never question why. No hesitation. I will be on your side and I will give you love. It is you and I. We have no need for the light of day, while the World is asleep, we will be miles away. To innocence, through right or wrong, you take my hand and you lead me on,” reports Emma Hewitt (Give You Love). In such a contradictory situation, the sexual form of live—lowest common denominator on the ladder of salvation—understandably became preoccupation; for sex, as rooted in mortal’s inescapable biology, seems always dependable to give at least a facsimile of love. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14

CRESLEIGH HAVENWOOD

Lincoln, CA | from the low $700s

Now Selling!

No appointment needed! Cresleigh Havenwood features four distinct floor plans ranging from 2,293 – 3,377 square feet and offering up to five bedrooms.  Each plan has been thoughtfully designed and includes great features such as single story homes, guest suites, optional offices, garage workshops, and more! Get the most out of your new home with Cresleigh’s All Ready smart home featuring all the connectivity needed to keep your house running. Best of all, each Cresleigh home comes with owned solar included! 

Located off of Virginiatown Road and McCourtney Road, residents of the 83 homesites of Cresleigh Havenwood will benefit from a brand-new neighborhood in the charming City of Lincoln. Palo Verde Park is just down the street and there’s plenty of recreation to take part in all around town. https://cresleigh.com/havenwood/