Angels are individual, that is the key. We Who Fell are no single species, unless being the brightest, the most clever, and the most comprehending makes us a species, which I do not think it does. When God sent us down to Earth to Watch, specifically to observe all Humankind, we were curious about the dead as the living—this wreath of souls we could see and hear, gathered about the Word, and which we called Sheol immediately because it seemed to us that the realm of these weeping souls was the realm of pure gloom. “Sheol” means gloom. A gathering of Angels decided to go with me, to draw as close as possible to Matter in order to pull together for ourselves our entire knowledge, to better comprehend, as God had asked us to do. We discovered that some beings more sensitive, often more gifted. They want their lives to have some meaning, some fulfillment. They want the feel of living for some worthwhile end. However, often there is something wrong with the seeking. They too suffer from the intrusive ego. Their seeking lacks adequate sincerity. This need of success is greater for them than the need of the thing that is sought. If, for example, they pursue some art, the art itself counts less then the renown of the artist. They would be great artists, great writers, opera singers, pathfinders. They would aim high, but the mark is higher than their reach. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

When we reached the Earth, we went our separate ways to perceive things, and came together often and instantly and agreed upon what we had seen. What united us was our interest in the statement of God that Humankind was part of Nature. We just could not see how this was true. We went exploring. When humans miss their mark for success, they grow disillusioned. They are thrust back on their unsatisfied egos, and the great emptiness is possessed before them. They try to escape, but they run from themselves. They try to forget, but their only recourse is an excitation of the senses. This stimulant needs to be incessantly repeated. The little spell of liberation, the false glow, the hour of oblivion, leave them the more desolate and adds new tensions to the returning emptiness. Then there is leisure no more, no relaxedness, no return to the thing they once loved, no lingering ease of quiet discourse with friends, no natural savor of living, no perception of the unfolding wonder of things. However, instead they pass from excitation to a hollow release, from release to tension, from tension to new excitation. Nothing is itself anymore. And no more at the end of the day do they sink peacefully into the marvelous process of slowly gathering sleep. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

Once they were so eager to make life feel real; now they shun its reality and are driven to pursue phantoms, the will-o’-the-wisp of sense-spurred distraction, the unseeing ghost of once clear-eyed joys, the phantom Aphrodite. However, it is not only the more cultivated, the more sophisticated, and the well-to-do with their more ample opportunities, who feel the great emptiness. In other ways it besets large numbers who, finding little satisfaction in their daily work, seek compensation in the leisure they now possess. There are many besides, people who win early pensions or otherwise can get along without toil through legacies or rents or other sources of unearned income, women who have no family cares—the new, unopulent leisure class. They have no training for leisure. They have, most of them, no strong interests of devotions. The habits of their work time convey no meaning to the time of liberation. Most of them live in cities, in drab and narrow confines within which they revolve in casual little circles. They see nothing ahead but the coming of mature age. They want to regain the feel of life. Time is theirs, but they cannot redeem it. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

So they too betake themselves, in their various ways, to some form of excitation. Men and women live in large groups, very unlike the other primates, they built shelters for themselves, and they paint their bodies with various colors, the women often live separate from the men, and they believe in something invisible. Now what is that? Is it the souls of the ancestors, the dearly departed who are still locked in the air of Earth, disembodied and confused? Yes, it is the souls of ancestors, but the human worship other entities as well. They image a God who has made the Wild Beasts and to him they make blood sacrifice on Altars, thinking this aspect of Almighty God to be a personality of very distinct limits and rather easy to please or displease. Now I can say all this was a big surprise to me. I had seen the early sign of it. After all, I telescoped millions of years for you in my Revelations. However, when I drew near to these altars, when I heard the specific prayer to the God of the Wild Animals; when I began to see the care and deliberation of the sacrifice—the slaying of the ram or a deer—I was much struck by the fact that not only had these humans come to look like Angels, but they had guessed at the truth. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

They had come upon it instinctively! There is a God. They know. They do not know what God is like but they know. And this instinctive knowledge seems to spring from the same essence as does their surviving spiritual souls. Let me be even clearer. Self-consciousness, and the awareness of one’s own death—this has created a sense of distinct individuality in humans, and this individuality fears death; fears annihilation! They see it, know what is happening, see it happening. And pray to a God that he will not let such a thing have no meaning in the World. And it is this very same tenacity—the tenacity of this individuating the shape of the body, holding itself together, so to speak, clinging to life, as it were, perpetuating itself, by shaping itself according to the only World it knows. Having no recourse in themselves, they must get out of themselves. They take the easy ways out because they see no alternative. They have never learned to climb the paths leading to the pleasures that wait in the realm of ideas, in the growing revelation of the nature of things, in the treasuries of the arts, and in the rich lore of the libraries. They must seek instead the quick transport, the dream, the adventure, in the tavern or where the gamblers meet. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

They would cover the emptiness they cannot fill. They make a goal of what is a diversion. The healthy being craves an occasional wildness, a jolt from normality, a sharpening of the edge or appetite, one’s own little festival of the Saturnalia, a brief excursion from one’s way of life. However, for these other the diversion becomes the way of life and diverts no more. For them the filled glass is not the cheerful accompaniment of pleasant reunions but a deceitful medicine for the ennui of living. For them the gambling venture is no mere holiday flutter but a never-satisfied urge that forever defeats itself. In 1946, in straitened England, the then equivalent of $6,567,769,230.7 (about $6.6 billion) was placed in bets on the horses and the dogs. (Nacho is from a breed of Boxer dogs that was considered one of the fastest in the races, which is why he has so many problems with his legs now and likes to sleep.) Besides which, vast sums changed hands on the results of football games. For hundreds of thousands of people the major news in the daily papers, day after day and month after month, was the lists of the winners and the betting odds. England was not, is not, alone in this respect. It is only that the figures happen to be more accessible. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

A former addict explained in the London Spectator why men and women do it. The gambler, he said, “gambles because it provides an emotional tension which his mind demands. He is suffering from a deficiency disease, and the only antidote he knows is gambling.” He is trying to escape the great emptiness. An English worker of the semi-skilled category once said to me: “A fellow has to do something, and what is there? Maybe I have a shilling or two in my pocket. Maybe I could buy an extra shirt. It is no go. So I put them on the dogs.” By these resorts people do not escape the great emptiness. What they get is a sequence of brief delusions of escape. In time the only thing they can escape to is what they themselves know for a delusion. The resort is only a drug to make them forget the disease. As with all such drugs, the dose must be continually renewed, and it becomes harder and harder to return to the pre-addict stage. They come to look on the great emptiness as something inherent in the very nature of things. That is all life is. Now they know the drug is a delusion, but they do not know that it has bred a deeper delusion. There are other avenues of escape that, while they may still be delusive, have the merit of not being recognized as such. Which means that the escape is actually made. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

In every large city, and notably in those areas where people go to spend their retirement, like Cresleigh Homes Rocklin Trails, where the climate is mild and sunny, all kinds of special cults flourish and new ones are frequently born. To these places report the hucksters of the supernatural and find a ready market for their wares. There are to be found the prophets of mystical union, robed and turned preachers of the Light of Asia, interpreters of the Rosy Cross, exponents of the Heavenly trance, new healers of the soul, tuners-in of the Infinite, operators in spiritual magics. Considerable numbers flock to them, some to seek a new sensation and then pass on, but some to stay and create a peaceful community. These last ones have found their peace. A stable reality, and nebula for their mystical dream. Back in the days when unremitting toil was the lot of all but the very few and leisure still a hopeless yearning, hard and painful as life was, it still felt real. People were in rapport with the small bit of reality allotted to them, the sense of the Earth, the tang of the changing season, the consciousness of the eternal on-going of birth and death. Now, when so many have leisure, they become detached from themselves, not mere from the Earth. From all the widened horizons of our greater World a thousand voices call us to come near, to understand, and to enjoy, but our ears are not trained to hear them. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

The leisure is ours but not the skill to use it. So leisure becomes a void, and from the ensuing restlessness beings take refuge in delusive excitations or fictitious visions, returning to their own Earth no more. The crisis in the European sciences has been the growing effort to impose natural scientific attitudes on the study of human (or psychological) phenomena. The basic problem with this trend is that it reduces, or debases, the human experience. It seeks to understand human behavior in terms of only itself surface (that is, observable, measurable) features; it equates psychological investigation with the investigation of physical or physiological phenomena, seeking to find invariant, universal laws of psychological functioning. In order to show that a phenomenon such as the smile is more than the contraction of the circumoral muscles or that fear or anger or attraction transcend the conditioned reflect, we have to investigate the person to whom these events occurred. The aim of phenomenology is to return to the things themselves, or to provide a method whereby human experience can be studied in its immediacy (as opposed to under controlled or laboratory conditions); the researcher suspends one’s preconceptions (for example, preselected questions) about the phenomenon under study; the researcher immerses oneself in as many aspects (for instance, cognitive, intuitive, affective) of the given phenomenon as possible. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

And the researcher collects and integrates these descriptions to provide a saturated (subjective or intersubjective) interpretation of the given phenomenon. That this method has its parallels in the artist’s mode of perceiving and apprehending phenomena was not lost. For it is precisely art, or the artists mode, that best illuminated psychology for these thinkers; it is precisely the artistic mode that could counterbalance reductionism. If phenomenology was a movement before becoming a doctrine, this was attributable neither to accident, or to fraudulent intent. It is as painstaking and has thorough attentiveness and wonder, and the same demand for awareness, and the same will to seize the meaning of the World, as that meaning comes into being. Phenomenology, on the other hand, is not merely an artistic procedure; it is a systematic method of understanding and sharing data—an artistic-science blend, if you will. This leads us to the intensity of the encounter in the creative act. Absorption, being caught up in, wholly involved, and so on, are used commonly to describe the that artist, or scientist when creating or even the child at play. By whatever name one calls it, genuine creativity is characterized by an intensity of awareness, a heightened consciousness. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

Artists, as well as you and I in moments of intensive encounter, experience quite clear neurological changes. These include quickened heart beat; higher blood pressure; increased intensity and constriction of vision, with eyelids narrowed so that we can see more vividly the scene we are painting; we become oblivious to things around us (as well as to the passage of time). We experience a lessening of appetite—persons engaged in a creative act lose interest in eating at the moment, and may work right through mealtime without noticing it. Now all of these correspond to an inhibiting of the functioning of the parasympathetic division of the autonomic nervous system (which has to do with ease, comfort, nourishment) and an activation of the sympathetic nervous division. And, lo and behold, we have the flight-fight mechanism, the energizing of the organism for fighting or fleeing. This is the neurological correlate of what we find, in broad terms, in anxiety and fear. However, what the artist or creative scientist feels is not anxiety or fear; it is joy. I use the word in contrast to happiness or pleasure. The artist, at the moment of creating, does not experience gratification or satisfaction, though this maybe the case later, after he or she has a highball or a pipe in the evening. Rather, it is joy, joy defined as the emotion that goes with heightened consciousness, the mood that accompanies the experience of actualizing one’s own potentialities. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

Now this intensity of awareness is not necessarily connected with conscious purpose or willing. It may occur in reverie or in dreams, or from so-called unconscious levels. An eminent New York professor related an illustrative story. He had been searching for a particular chemical formula for some time, but without success. One night, while he was sleeping, he had a dream in which the formula was worked out and displayed before him. He woke up, and in the darkness he excitedly wrote it down on a piece of tissue, the only thing he could find. However, the next morning he could not read his own scribbling. Every night thereafter, upon going to bed, he would concentrate his hopes on dreaming the dream again. Fortunately, after some nights he did, and he then wrote the formula down for good. It was the formula he had sought and for which he received the Nobel prize. Though not rewarded so dramatically, we have all had similar experiences. Processes of forming, making, building go on even if we are not consciously aware of them at the time. William James once said that we learn to swim in the Winter and to skate in the Summer. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

 Whether you wish to interpret these phenomena in terms of some formulation of the unconscious, or prefer to follow William James in connecting them with some neurological processes that continue even when we are not working on them, or prefer some other approach, as I do, it is still clear that creativity goes on in varying degrees of intensity on levels not directly under the control of conscious willing. Hence the heightened awareness we are speaking of does not at all mean increased self-consciousness. It is rather correlated with abandon and absorption, and it involves a heightening of awareness in the whole personality. However, let it be said immediately that unconscious insight or answers to problems that come in reverie do not come hot or miss. They may indeed occur at times of relaxation, or in fantasy, or at other times when we alternate play with work. However, what is entirely clear is that they pertain to those areas in which the person consciously has worked laboriously and with dedication. Purpose in the human being is a much more complex phenomenon than what used to be called will power. Purpose involves all levels of experience. We cannot will to have insight. We cannot will creativity. However, we can will to give ourselves to encounter with intensity of dedication and commitment. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

The deeper aspects of awareness are activated to the extent that the person is committed to the encounter. However, the pressure to make all people members of organizations, to herd them together and affix labels, is a kind of mania. Why should there not be room for untrammeled, independent minds, who prefer to remain free and uninfluenced, untied to any one group? It is a common but fallacious belief that by joining a group we get at the truth more quickly, or progress to spiritual reality more easily. When people act together in religious or political organization, they often act worse than they would as individuals. Why is it that the eagerness with which so many disciples flock to join an ashram ends so often in a deterioration of character after they have lived in it for a while? The answer is that there is a fundamental fallacy behind the thinking which draws them into it. It is the fallacy that they have any business with the other disciples. Their true business is with their master alone. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

The disadvantage of adhering to a single system of belief or joining a single organization teaching religious, mystical, or hygienic principles is that the sound truths given out are usually one-sided; they ignore others equally sound and valuable but outside the purview of the system’s founder or the organization’s leader. This neglect prevents attainment of the full truth about the subject. For example, one political party speaks of wanting to save the environment, but only focuses on emissions. However, we also need to prevent deforestation, which is why Ethiopia planted 350 million trees in one day.  Trees help to clean the air and release moisture into the air. It would be a good idea to take advantage of the rain by building more reservoirs so that we can have more drinking water and avoid droughts. And we need to reduce the amount of waste we send to the landfills. Landfills just inject garbage into the Earth and make it sick by poisoning. We have to do our best to save the Earth. “Or otherwise, can ye imagine yourselves brought before the tribunal of God with your souls filled with guilt and remorse, having a remembrance of all your guilt, yea, a perfect remembrance of all your wickedness, yea, a remembrance that yet have set at defiance the commandments of God?” (Alma 5.18). #RandolphHarris 15 of 15

For More Detailed Coverage on Landfills, Please Follow the Link Below (and here is a preview): Our Intern, Easton, recently took a trip to our local landfill so we could learn more about how items are disposed of in our community and we also asked 9 eye-opening questions! Check out what we learned, here: (link: https://www.jillianharris.com/my-eye-opening-trip-to-the-landfill-9-questions-answered/) jillianharris.com/my-eye-opening…