No human being in the World has ever risen to greatness without a correspondingly great soul. When this is no longer true, then will our civilization have to come to an end. Even the most misfitting child who’s changed upon the soul’s worth, sits with the genius of the Earth and turns they key to the whole World. In one applies it around themselves like scaffolding, theory can obscure and individual. When working in difficult places, scaffolding does provide the builder a secure place to stand and gives architects the opportunity to view an emerging building from new angles. However, a builder’s rough scaffolding can easily camouflage and be mistake for the intricate architecture is surrounds. Similarly, people can erect theory around other individual’s quickly—often automatically—when they are uncertain and hoping for a surer vantage point, as in the opening vignette. One of the most formidable challenges of being human, then, is to draw structure from a particular orientation without letting theory obscure the complex, unique individual in front of you. We have preserved this life, and the soul has preserved us. Exploring deeply can mean thinking not about the way one came to be the way one is, but that one is. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

The Greeks, who were apparently strong visual learners, originated the term stigma to refer to bodily signs designs to expose something unusual and bad about the moral status of the signifier. The signs were cut or burnt into the body and advertised that the bearer was a slave, a criminal, or a traitor—a blemished person, ritually polluted, to be avoided, especially in public places. Later, in Christian times, two players of metaphor were added to the term: the first referred to bodily signs of holy grace that took the form of eruptive blossoms on the skin; the second, a medical allusion to this religious allusion, referred to bodily signs of physical disorder. Today the term is widely used in something like the original literal sense, but is applied more to the disgrace itself than to the bodily evidence of it. Furthermore, shifts have occurred in the kinds of disgrace that arouse concern. Society establishes the means of categorizing persons and the complement of attributes felt to be ordinary and natural for members of each of these categories. Social setting established the categories of person likely to be encountered there. The routines of social intercourse in established settings allow us to deal with anticipated others without special attention or thought. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

When a stranger comes into our presence, then, first appearances are likely to enable us to anticipate one’s category and attributes, one’s “social identity”—to use a term that is better than “social status” because person attributes such as “honesty” are involved, as well as structural ones, like “occupation.” We lean on these anticipations that we have, transforming them into normative expectations, into righteously presented demands. Typically, we do not become aware that we have made these demands or aware of what they are until an active question arises as to whether or not they will be fulfilled. It is then that we are likely to realize that all along we had been making certain assumptions as to what the individual before us ought to be. Thus, the demands we make might better be called demands made “in effect,” and the character we impute to the individual might better be seen as an imputation made in potential retrospect—a characterization “in effect,” a virtual social identity. The category and attribute one could in fact be proved to possess will be called one’s actual social identity. While the stranger is present before us, evidence can arise of ones possessing an attribute that makes one different from others in the category of persons available for one to be, and of a less desirable kind—in the extreme, a person who is quite thoroughly bad, or dangerous, or weak. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

One is thus reduced in our minds from a whole and unusual person to a tainted, discounted one. Such an attribute is a stigma, especially when its discrediting effect is very extensive; sometimes it is also called a failing, a shortcoming, a limitation. It constitutes a special discrepancy between virtual and actual social identity. Note that there are others types of discrepancy between virtual and actual social identity, for example the kind that causes us to reclassify an individual from one socially anticipated category to a different but equally well-anticipated one, and the kind that causes us to alter our estimation of the individual upward. Not, too, that not all undesirable attributes are at issues, but only those which are incongruous with our stereotype of what a given type of individual should be. The term stigma is used to refer to an attribute that is deeply discrediting, but should be seen as a language of relationships, not attributes, is really needed. An attribute that stigmatizes one type of possessor can confirm the usualness of another, and therefore is neither creditable nor discreditable as a thing in itself. For example, some jobs in American cause holders without the expected college education to conceal this fact; others job, however, can lead the few of their holders who have a higher education to keep this a secret, lest they be marked as failures and outsiders. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

Similarly, a middle class boy may feel no compunction in being seen going to the library; a professional criminal, however, writes this: “I can remember before now on more than one occasion, for instance, going into a public library near where I was living, and looking over my shoulder a couple of times before I actually went in just to make sure no one who knew me was standing about and seeing me do it.” So, too, an individual who desires to fight for one’s country may conceal a physical defect, lest one’s claimed physical status be discredited; later, the same individual, embittered and trying to get out of the army,  may success in gaining admission to the army hospital, where one would be discredited if discovered in not really having an acute sickness. A stigma, then, is really a special kind of relationship between attribute and stereotype, although I do not propose to continue to say so, in part because there are important attributes that almost everywhere in our society are discrediting. The term stigma and its synonyms conceal a double perspective: does this stigmatized individual assume one’s differentness is known about already or is evident on the spot, or does one assume it is neither known about by those present nor immediately perceivable by them? In the first case one deals with the plight of the discredited, in the second with that of the discreditable. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

This is an important difference, even though a particular stigmatized individual is likely to have experience with both being discredited, and discreditable, the two cannot always be separated. However, remaining committed to understanding and describing one’s World as he or she experiences it—even when formulating—helps individuals be sure they are focusing on the architecture, not the scaffolding. “No confraternity or sodality has ever been made sacred expect by the faith of those who formed it, as there is no known power beyond this World or in in that can make anything sacred except the power we claim for ourselves. We are children of the Universe no matter who thinks otherwise, we live and breathe and think and dream as do all sentient beings, and no one has a right to condemn us or deny us the right to love and live,” (Page 425 of Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis by Anne Rice). Three different types of stigma may be mentioned. First there are abomination of the body—the various physical deformities. Next there are blemishes of individual character perceived as weak will, domineering or unnatural passions, treacherous and rigid beliefs, and dishonesty, these being inferred from a known record of, for example, mental disorder, imprisonment, addiction, alcoholism, sexuality, unemployment, suicidal attempts, and radical political behavior. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

Finally, there are tribal stigma of race, nation, and religion, these being stigma that can be transmitted though lineages and equally contaminate all members of a family. In all of these various instances of stigma, however, including those the Greeks had in mind, the same sociological features are found: an individual who might have been received easily in ordinary social intercourse posses a trait that can obtrude itself upon attention and turn those of us whom one meets away from one, breaking that claim that one’s other attributes have on us. One possesses a stigma, an undesired differentness from what we had anticipated. We and those who do not depart negatively from the particular expectations at issue I shall call the normal. Some have “rebelled in their own way against the inevitable isolation that closes around us all; they have survived because the beauty of life would not let them leave it; and a thirst for knowledge has been born in them—a thirst for new ages and new forms and new expression of art and love—even as they see everything that have cherished crumbling and fading away. This is our Universe. We too are made of stardust as are all things on this planet; we too belong,” (Page 426 of Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis by Anne Rice). #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

The attitudes we normal have toward a person with a stigma, and the actions we take in regard to one, are well known, since these responses are what benevolent social action is designed to soften and ameliorate. By definition, of course, we believe the person with a stigma is not quite human. On this assumption we exercise varieties of discrimination, through which we effectively, if often unthinkingly, reduce one’s life chances. We construct a stigma-theory, an ideology to explain one’s inferiority and account for the danger one represents, sometimes rationalizing an animosity based on other differences, such as those of social class. We use specific stigma terms such as cripple, bastard, moron in daily discourse as a source of metaphor and imagery, typically without giving a thought to the original meaning. We tend to impute a wide range of imperfections on the basis of the original one, and at the same time to impute some desirable but undesired attributes, often of a supernatural cast, such as “six sense,” or “understanding”: For some, there may be a hesitancy about touching or steering the blind, while for others, the perceived failure to see may be generalized into a gestalt of disability, so that the individual shouts at the blind as if they were deaf or attempts to lift them as if they were crippled. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

Those confronting the blind may have a whole range of belief that is anchored in the stereotype. For instance, they may think they are subject to unique judgment, assuming the blinded individual draws on special channels of information unavailable to others. Further, we may perceive one’s defensive response to one’s situation as a direct expression of one’s defect, and then see both defect and response as just retribution for something one or one’s parents or one’s tribe did, and hence a justification of the way we treat one. Now turn from the normal to the person one is normal against. It seems generally true that members of a social category may strongly support a standard of judgment that they and others agree does not directly apply to them. Thus it is that a business person may demand womanly behavior from females or ascetic behavior from monks, and not construe oneself as someone who ought to realize either of these styles of conduct. The distinction is between realizing a norm and merely supporting it. The issue of stigma does not arise here, but only where there is some expectation on all sides that those in a given category should not only support a particular nor but also realize it. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

Also, it seems possible for an individual to fail to live up to what we effectively demand of one, and yet be relatively untouched by this failure; insulated by one’s alienation, protected by identity beliefs of one’s own, one feels that one is a full-fledged normal human being, and that we are the ones who are not quite human. One bears a stigma but does not seem to be impressed or repentant about doing so. Sometimes it may be difficult to know, at times, whether we have been hurt more by friends or our enemies. Human’s awesome scientific advances into the infinitude of pace as well as the infinitude of sub-atomic particles seems mostly likely to lead to the total destruction of the World unless we can make great advances in understanding and deal with interpersonal and inter-group tensions. I believe that when we accept ourselves as we are, then we change. I believe that we have learned this from others in society as well as within our own experiences—that we cannot change, we cannot move away from what we are, until we thoroughly accept what we are. Then change seems to come about almost unnoticed. Another result that comes out of being myself is that relationships then become real. Real relationships have an exciting way of being vital and meaningful, and real relationships tend to change instead of reaming static. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

Very rarely do we permit ourselves to understand precisely what others are saying. Our first reaction to most of the statements which we hear from other person is an immediate evaluation, or judgment, rather than an understanding of it. I believe this is because understanding is risky. If I let myself really understand another person, I might be changed by that understanding. And we all fear change. So as I say, it is not an easy thing to permit oneself to understand an individual, to enter thoroughly and completely and empathically into one’s frame of reference. It is also a rare thing. To understand is enriching in a double way. I learned from other’s experiences in ways that change me, that make me a different and, I think, a more responsive person. Even more important perhaps, is the fact that my understanding of these individuals permits them to change. It permits them to accept their own fears and bizarre thoughts and tragic feelings and discouragements, as well as their moment of courage and kindness and love and sensitivity. And it is their experience as well as mine that when someone fully understands those feelings, this enables them to accept those feelings in themselves. Then they find both the feelings and themselves changing. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

Whether it is understanding a woman who feels that very literally she has a hook in her head by which other lead her about, or understanding a man who feels that no one is as lonely, no one is as separated from others as he, I find these understandings to be of value to me. However also, and even more importantly, to be understood a very beneficial value to these individuals. Here is another learning which has had importance for me. I have found it enriching to open channels whereby others can communicate their feelings, their private perceptual Worlds, to me. Because understanding is rewarding, I would like to reduce the barriers between others and me, so that they can, if they wish, reveal themselves more fully. On a national scale, we cannot permit another individual to think differently than we do. Yet it has come to seem to me that this separateness of individuals, the right of each individual to utilize one’s experience in one’s own way and to discover one’s own meanings in it,–this is one of the most priceless potentialities of life. Not surprisingly, one good way to start designing an essential being is to plan to allow one’s soul to flourish and let its heart shape the rest. The soul gets you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no soul. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

 Each person is an island unto oneself, in a very real sense; and one can only build bridges to other islands if one is first of all willing to be oneself and permitted to be oneself. So I find that when I can accept another person, which means specifically accepting the feelings and attitudes and beliefs that one has as a real and vital part of one, then I am assisting one to become a person: and there seems to me great value in this. The next learning I want to state may be difficult to communicate. It is this. The more I am open to the realities in me and in the other person, the less do I find myself wishing to “fix things.” As I try to listen to myself and the experiencing going on in me, and the more I try to extend that same listening attitude to another person, the more respect I feel for the complex process of life. So I become less and less inclined to hurry to fix things, to set goals, to mold people, to manipulate and push them in the way that I would like them to go. I am much more content simply to be myself and to let another person be oneself. I know this must seem strange. If we are not going to do things to people, what is life for? If we are not going to mold them to our purposes, what is life for? If we are not going to teach the thing things that we think they should learn, what is life for? If we are not going to make them think and feel as we do, what is life for? #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

How can anyone hold such an inactive point of view as the one I am expressing? I am sure that attitudes such as these must be a part of the reaction of many of you. Yet the paradoxical aspect of my experience is that the more I am simply willing to be myself, in all this complexity of life and the more I am willing to understand and accept the realities in myself and in the other person, the more change seems to be stirred up. It is a very paradoxical thing—that to the degree that each one of us is willing to be oneself, then one finds not only oneself changing; but one finds that other people to whom one relates are also changing. At least this is a very vivid part of my experience, and one of the deepest things I think I have learned in my personal and professional life. All my professional life I have been going in directions that others thought were foolish, and about which I have had many doubts myself. However, I have never regretted moving in directions which felt right, even though I have often felt lonely or foolish at the time. I have found that when I trusted some inner non-intellectual sensing, I have discovered wisdom in the move. In fact, I have found that when I have followed one of these unconventional paths because it felt right or true, then in five or ten years many of my colleagues have joined me, and I no longer need to feel alone in it. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

As I gradually come to trust my total reactions more deeply, I find that I can use them to guide my thinking. I have come to have more respect for those vague thoughts which occur in me from time to time, which feel as thought they were significant. I am inclined to think that these unclear thoughts or hunches will lead me to important areas. I think of it as trusting the totality of my experience, which I have learned to suspect is wiser than my intellect. It is fallible I am sure, but I believe it to be less fallible than my conscious mind alone. My attitude is very well expressed in saying carrying on my own humble creative effort, I depend greatly upon that which I do not yet know, and upon that which I have not yet done. Very closely related to this learning is a corollary that, evaluation by others is not a guide for me. The judgments of others, while they are to be listened to, and taken into account for what they are, can never be a guide for me. This has been a hard thing to learn. I remember how shaken I was, in the early days, when a scholarly thoughtful being who seemed to me a much more competent and knowledgeable psychologist than I, told m what a mistake I was making by getting interested in psychotherapy. It could never lead anywhere, and as a psychologist I would not even have the opportunity to practise it. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

In later years it has sometimes jolted me a bit to learn that I am, in the eyes of some others, a fraud, a person practicing medicine without a license, the author of a very superficial and damaging sort of therapy, a power seeker, a mystic, and so forth. And I have equally been disturbed by equally extreme praise. However, I have not been too much concerned because I have come to feel that only one person (at least in my lifetime, and perhaps ever) can know whether what I am doing is honest, thorough, open, and sound, or false and defensive and unsound, and I am that person. I am happy to get all sorts of evidence regarding what I am doing and criticism (both friendly and hostile) and praise (both sincere and fawning) are a part of such evidence. However, to weigh this evidence and to determine its meaning and usefulness is a task I cannot relinquish to anyone else. Experience is, for me, the highest authority. The touchstone of validity is my own experience. No other person’s ideas, and none of my own ideas, are as authoritative as my experience. It is to experience that I must return again and again, to discover a closer approximation to the truth as it is in the process of becoming me. Neither the Bible nor the prophets—neither Dr. Freud nor research—neither the revelations of God nor man or woman—can take precedence over my own direct experience. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

My experience is not authoritative because it is infallible. It is the basis of authority because it can always be checked in new primary ways. In this way its frequent error or fallibility is always open to correction. I enjoy the discovering order in my experience. It seems inevitable that I seek for the meaning or the orderliness or lawfulness in any large body of experience. In is this kind of curiosity, which I find it very satisfying to purse, which as led me to each of the major formulations I have made. It is justified because it is satisfying to perceive the World as having order, and because rewarding results often ensure when one understands the orderly relationships which appear in nature. Suppose our hypotheses were disproved! Suppose our opinions were not justified! Every bit of evidence one can acquire, in any area, leads one that much closer to what is true. And being closer to the truth can never be harmful or dangerous or unsatisfying thing. So while I still hate to readjust my thinking, still hate to give up old ways of perceiving an conceptualizing, yet at some deeper level I have, to a considerable degree, come to realize that these painful reorganizations or what is known as learning, and that though painful they always lead to a more satisfying because somewhat more accurate way of seeing life. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

I feel I can only puzzle my way though life and I will find a much more satisfying approximation to the truth. I am sure the facts will be my friends. The very way of feeling which has seemed to me the most private, most personal, and hence the most incomprehensible by others, has turned out to be an expression for which there is a resonance in many other people. It has led me to believe that what is most personal and unique in each one of us is probably the very element which would, if it were shared or expressed, speak most deeply to others This has helped me to understand artists and poets as people who have dared to express the unique in themselves. When I can sensitively understand the feelings which people are expressing, when I am able to accept them as separate persons in their own right, then I find that they tend to move in certain directions. And what are these directions in which they tend to move? The words which I believe are most truly descriptive are words such as beneficial, constructive, moving toward self-actualization, growing toward maturity, growing toward socialization. I have come to fee that the more fully the individual is understood and accepted, the more one tends to drop the false fronts with which one has been meeting life, and the more one tends to move in a direction which is forward. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

I would not want to be misunderstood on this. I do not have a Pollyanna view of human nature. I am quite aware that out of defensiveness and inner fear individuals can and do behave in ways which are incredibly cruel, horribly destructive, immature, regressive, anti-social, hurtful. Yet none of the most refreshing and invigorating parts of my experience is to work with such individuals and to discover the strongly beneficial directional tendencies which exist in them, as in all of us, at the deepest levels. Life at its best, is a flowing, changing process in which nothing is fixed. Life is the most richest and most rewarding it is a flowing process. To experience this is both fascinating and a little frightening. I find I am at my best when I can let the flow of my experience carry me, in a direction which appears to be forward, toward goals of which I am but dimly aware. In thus floating with the complex stream of my experiencing, and in trying to understand its ever-changing complexity, it should be evident that there are no fixed points. Life is guided by a changing understanding of an interpretation of my experience. It is always in process of becoming. I can only try to live by my interpretation of the current meaning of my experience, and try to give others the permission and freedom to develop their own inward freedom and thus their own meaningful interpretation of their own experience. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

If there is such a thing as truth, this free individual process of search should I, believe, converge toward it. And in a limited way, this is also what I seem to have experienced. “But what endures is what has always matter: love—that we love one another as surely as we are alive. And if there is any hope for us to ever really be good—that hope will be realized through love. To love any one person or thing truly is the beginning of the wisdom to love all things. This has to be so. It has to be. I believe it and I do not really believe anything else,” (Page 440 of Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis by Anne Rice). Where is the being who is free of the ego? To one we must bow deep reverence, in wondering admiration, in enforced humility. Here is one who has found one’s true self, one’s personal independence, one’s own being. Here at last is a free being, someone who has found one’s real worth in a World of false values. Here at last is a truly great being and truly sincere being. Whosoever enters into this realization becomes a human Sun who sheds enlightenment, radiates strength, and emanates love to all beings. One’s serenity is alive and buoyant, not lethargic and dull. “And it came to pass that the work of the Lord did prosper unto the baptizing and uniting to the church of God, many souls, yea, even tens of thousands. Thus we may see that the Lord is merciful unto all who will, in the sincerity of their hearts, call upon his holy name,” reports Helaman 3.26-27. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

MILLS STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH

Rancho Cordova, CA |

Now Selling!

Mills Station at Cresleigh Ranch is Rancho Cordova’s newest home community! This charming neighborhood offers an array of home types with eye catching architecture styles such as Mission, Mid-Century Modern, California Modern, and Contemporary Farmhouse. Stepping onto this beautiful tile, in this home, will transport you back to Victorian England—but the modern shower and light fixtures will remind you that you are actually in your #MillsStation Residence 3. 😉

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Located off Douglas Road and Rancho Cordova Parkway, the residents of Cresleigh Ranch will enjoy, being just minutes from shopping, dining, and entertainment, and quick access to Highway 50 and Grant Line Road providing a direct route into Folsom. Residents here also benefit from no HOA fees, two community parks and the benefits of being a part of the highly-rated Elk Grove Unified School District.

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