Cyclamens were my wife’s favourite flowers and I reproached myself for so rarely remembering to being her flowers, which was what she liked. Forgetting is very often determined by an unconscious purpose and it always enables one to deduce the secret intentions of the person who forgets. A young woman was accustomed to receiving a bouquet of flowers from her husband on her birthday. One year his token of his affection failed to appear, and she burst into tears. Her husband came in and had no idea why she was crying till she told him that today was her birthday. He clasped his hand to his head and exclaimed: “I am sorry, but I had quite forgotten. I will go out at once and fetch your flowers.” However, she was not to be consoled; for she recognized that her husband’s forgetfulness was proof that she no longer had the same place in his thoughts as she had formerly. This lady, Bianca, had met my wife two days before, and told her that she was feeling quite well and enquired after me. Some year ago she had come to me for treatment. A flower is a symbol of love, Eros, friendship and joy. Although we may not be perfect, God wants us to feel God about ourselves. He knows we are going to make mistakes, but he is not focusing on our mistakes and weaknesses, but what we did right. God is pleased with His creation. As long as we preserver, making a point to do as well as we can, we can be confident, having faith that God is leading us to success. However, there are times in our lives when we may be a bit sad, tired, and overcome by problems. Maybe some of us are experiencing some bad habits we need to let go of, but do not become overwhelmed by guilt and condemnation. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

Sometimes things in life may wreak havoc with our affections. What is true today is false tomorrow—that sort of thing. Will you or nill you, that is the rhythm of life, so long as you shall live. You are happy one moment; the next thing you know, you are sad. At peace, then in an uproar. Fervent, then tepid. Studious, then stupid. Serious, then supercilious. However, the wise person who is well instructed in the ways of the spirit is not swayed by the huffs and puffs of the Mutables. One pays little attention to the flips and flops of affections within. Nor does one care from which corner of the chart the wind of instability blows. All one does is bend one’s mind to the task at hand; that is to say, to make progress toward the vowed and desired destination. How can one remain firm of purpose through the topsy-turvy of a lifetime? Simply by placing one eye on the intention and the other eye on the Lord. Repent and make an hones effort to change and know that God is in the process of helping you achieve your goals. The purer the eye of intention, the longer the glass through which it peers. However, even the long glass, pure as its intention is, will dawdle at the middle distance when something delightful presents itself. A dipping caravel, for example, laden with cloth and silk, sugar and diamonds, heading for Antwerp. Self-seeking leaves strawberry makes on the soul, and rare is the person without them. Self-seeking always damages the sight of the soul, and rare is the person who has the vision one was born with. Always aim the lens in the right direction and focus it at the farthest point. That is where you will find God. If not, try cleansing the lens. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

Because if you are constantly at strife within yourself, feeling you are not good enough, your spiritual progress will be thwarted. You may not be the best at the things you set out to do, but what matters is that you are trying. Living with a heavy heart, feeling down about yourself will keep you from becoming the success that God want you to be. You have to learn to love yourself as you are. For no one on this planet is perfect. We all have things in our lives we need to improve upon. Do not go wasting your time and affection on wordlings whose only thought is to stack high and deep the things of the World. Instead, praise God with great reverence and great warmth. When I feel God next to me, everything seems to go swimmingly. However, when I think God is out and about, I plummet like a rock. God brings the heart to tranquillity and certain festival joyfulness. Pleasure with God near, how sweet it is! Please with God nowhere to be found, how brief it is! Pleasure for us Devouts can be had, only if the Lord has something to do with it. Either that, or God’s grace has to be an ingredient somewhere in the mix, perhaps a soupcon of sapience. When one of us has a moment of happiness with God, it has an unexpected effect. The res of creation seems to have this pleasant patina on it. Who is there in the World to whom God has not already been a cause of delight? Alas, there are quite a few. They are the Worldly wise and the fleshly wise, but when it comes to God’s wisdom, they are noways wise. Paul advised the Romans on this very point (8.6). However, wherever they are, Vanity runs riot, and Death hands in the air. And where are Your followers, O Lord? If anywhere, they are off the beaten path making their way through bog and fen; that is to say, up to their hips in Contempt of the World and Mortification of the Flesh. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

However, why are these last, at least by some, generally recognized as the truly wise persons in this World? Because they have made the pilgrimage from Vanity to Verity, Flesh to Spirit. God has found them, and under the guise of good they find God in creation and praise Him so for all the good in creation. How different, how wildly different, are the pleasures of Creator from the pleasures of the creature! They are as different as Timelessness from time, Uncreated Light from created light. Sadly, many people do not really like themselves They have a war raging within. They are constantly thinking or speaking negatively about themselves. They feel guilty, inferior, they cannot get along with other people. We must learn to accept ourselves, faults and all, if we want to go to a higher level. We have come to grips with the fact that we are going to have some weakness. We will always have some imperfections throughout our lives. When we do not live up to our own unrealistic expectations, we need to give ourselves a break, and not to be so hard and critical on ourselves. Keep in mind that God love you because He made you and He knows everything about you. When an individual learns to overcome being so hard on themselves and others is when God will take one to a new level of success, as He is constantly changing you for the best. When people do not accept themselves and the imperfections they cannot change, they go through life feeling wrong on the inside. That affects how a person’s self-image and how they see the World. This will have an impact on your relationships with others and God. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

Now, we do not have to accept our mistakes, we can keep trying to change for the better. The most important thing is to have a good heart and be what is righteous. Know that God is still refining people as long as they are on this Earth. Understand God loves you and is pleased with you. My prose begins to turn to prayer. O Perpetual Light, transcending all source of created light! Let the ragged lightning bolt from the sky, search the nooks and crannies of my soul. Purify, glorify, clarify, vivify—with all Your powers—my spirit that it may cling to You with joyful hugs. Oh, when will this blessed and desirable moment come, when we will see each other face to face?! That is the sort of moment Paul wrote about to the Colossians, where everyone—Greek and Jew, slave and slaver, circumcised and uncircumcised, civilized and not so civilized—all are one in Christ (3.11). Why hast it not happened already? How much longer do I have to wait? Up to this point in my sad life, there lives, in a shack out back, the Old Man Paul’ Letters speak of; that is to say, the unregrenerate human who is climbing all over the Cross, but has yet to learn which side is up; one says one’s dying to oneself and to the World but, if one is, it is the longest death scene since Prometheus on the rock! Paul wrote something similar to the Romans (6.6). Up to this point the itch outlasts the scratch; concupiscence attacks the defenses within—Paul to the Galatians (5.17); the quiet kingdom of my heart is aflame with war and the fumes of war. If I may use the words of Psalmist. But You, O Lord, who “dominate the power of the sea, and mitigate the roll of the wave,” (89.9), rise up and help me (44.26). “Scatter the peoples who want war” (68.30). #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

Pulverize them with the engine of Your virtue. Dazzle them with You wonders, I beg You, and Your powerful right hand will be glorified, as Jesus son of Sirach would say (36.6). Why do I want You to do all this? Because there is no other hope our refuge for a boke like me, except in You, my Lord God. Father, sometimes I have a hard time seeing myself the way You see me, so please remind me occasionally through Your Word, or through messages in everyday life. Thank You for making me special, for this royal blood flowing through my veins, and for no giving up on me when I make mistakes or wrong choices. Please keep changing me, making me better, more like You. “O LORD you have searched me [thoroughly] and have known me. You know my downsitting and my uprising; You understand my thought afar off. You sift and search out my path and my lying down, an You are acquainted with all my ways. For there is not a word in my tongue [still unuttered], but, behold, O Lord, You know it altogether. You have beset me and shut me in—behind and before, and You have laid Your hand upon me. Your [infinite] knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high above me, I cannot reach it. Where could I flee from Your presence? If I ascend up into Heaven, You are there; if I make my bed in Sheol (the place of the dead), behold, You are there. If I take the winds of the morning or dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there shall Your hand lead me, and Your right hand shall hold me. If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me and the night shall be [the only] light about me. Even the darkness hides nothing from You, but the night shines as the day; the darkness and the light are both alike to You. For You did form my inward parts; You did knit me together in my mother’s womb. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

“I will confess and praise You for You are fearful and wonderful and for the awful wonder of my birth! Wonderful are Your works, and that my inner self knows right well. My frame was not hidden from You when I was being formed in secret [and] intricately and curiously wrought [as if embroidered with various colours] in the depths of the Earth [a region of darkness and mystery]. Your eyes saw my unformed substance, and in Your book all the days [of my life] were written before ever they took shape, when as yet here was none of them. How precious and weighty also are Your thoughts o me, O God! How vast is the sum of them! If I could count them, they would be more in number than the sand. When I awoke, [could I count to the end] I would still be with You. If You would [only] slay the wicked, O God, and the men of blood depart from me—who speak against You wickedly, Your enemies who take Your name in vain! Do I not hate them, O Lord, who hate You? And am I not grieved and do I not loathe those who rise up against You? I hate them with perfect hatred; they have become my enemies. Search me [thoroughly], O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there is any wicked or hurtful way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting,” reports Psalm 139.1-24. Every religion can point to those who exemplify its aspirations. Christianity can point to its Martin Luther Kings and Sarah Winchesters, and Mother Teresas, its Albert Schweitzers, and William Randolph Hearsts, and Desmond Tutus, its contribution to the spread of hospitals and universities and to the abolition of slavery. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

Yet for many people the most troubling thing about Christianity is some deep philosophical problem. For reasons many of you may recalled, we can live peaceably with impenetrable philosophical puzzles. What troubles us is something more concrete: the behaviour of many people who count themselves as disciples of the one who taught, “You shall love your neighbour as yourself,” and even “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” Every religion is plagued by those who exploit it or their own purposes or embarrass and defame it by their behaviour. Thus every skeptic, and indeed every believer, can point to those whose lives suggest that religion is a sham—those who profess the love of Christ and practice hate, who preach honesty and fail to reports all their income, who proclaim the unity of the church and attack people whose doctrines or values differ from their own, who promote selflessness and are vain to the core, who pretend concern and could not care less. Can the irreligious not be moral? Thus responded skeptics after Senator Joseph Lieberman recalled George Washington’s warning “never to indulge the supposition that ‘morality can be maintained without religion.’” Is America more civil and moral than secular Scandinavia? the skeptics asked. The Swedes may skip church, but they take better care of their poor and their elderly and provide a higher percentage of the national budge to humanitarian efforts than we do. Creation of the new White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives rejoiced the God-and-goodness debate. The canard that Godliness and goodliness are linked in any way but typographically must be taken on faith, for no evidence supports it. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

Some Christians have given Christianity a bad name. And then came September 11, 2001. The “insane courage” that enabled this horror supposedly came from religion. If a martyr’s death is equivalent to pressing the hyperspace button and zooming through a wormhole to another Universe, it can make the World a very dangerous place. To fill a World with religion, or religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns. There was perhaps a warped religious idea of martyrdom and the afterlife was at work on those ill-fated flights. And it may be true, that religion at its worst can be toxic and superstitious—which is something healthy religion must ever be vigilant about (much as science is vigilant about pseudoscience). However, anecdotes aside—“I can counter the believer-terrorist with believer-humanitarians,” responds the believer—what does the evidence show? Medicine, twisted, can kill people. However, we would want to further evidence before deciding whether medicine is bad. The vivid examples—the worst and the best—capture our attention but do not decide the issue: Do self-professed Christians more than others tend to display the fruit of the Spirit, or their opposites? Is the Christian religion a source more of compassion or intolerance? The extremes—the churchgoing civil rights activists and the churchgoing extremist groups—cancel each other out. So it remains for dispassionate research with ordinary people to help us decide the issue. The evidence shows, first, that faith-rooted values give many people a reason to behave morally when no one is looking. Religions encourage people to seek meaning beyond everyday existence. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

Religion people exhort people to purse causes greater than their personal desires. The opposed orientation, self-indulgent materialism, seeks happiness in the pursuit and consumption of material goods. In one U.S. national survey, frequent worship attendance predicted lower scores on a dishonesty scale that assessed, for example, self-serving lies, tax cheating, and failing to report damaging a parked car. Moreover, in cities where more than nine in ten people are church members, you can more readily leave your car unlocked than in Seattle, where fewer than a third are. Even the eighteenth-century French writer Voltaire, to whom Christianity was an “infamy” that deserved crushing, found the influence of faith useful among the masses. “I want my attorney, my tailor, my servants, even my wife to believe in God,” he wrote, because “then I shall be robbed and cuckolded less often.” He once silenced a discussion about atheism until he had dismissed the servants, lest in losing their faith they might lose their morality. The University of Pennsylvania criminologist Byron Johnson examined forty religion-delinquency studies, including hi own. His conclusion: “Most delinquent acts were committed by juveniles who had low levels of religious commitment. Those juveniles whose religiosity levels were in the middle to high levels committed very few delinquent acts.” Even when controlling for other factors such as socioeconomic level, neighbourhood, and peer influences, kids who went to church were seldom delinquent. Self-described Christians in the Western World also engage in much less promiscuity of pleasures of the flesh, much less drug and alcohol abuse, and much less violent crime and delinquent behaviour. Because religion-morality links are correlational, the direction of cause and effect is sometimes ambiguous. Nevertheless, such findings hint that when the church is clear and forceful in its ethical prescriptions, it may be influential.  #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

The statement in St. Mark that He sat down at the right hand of God we must take as a metaphour: it was indeed, even for the writer, a poetical quotation, from Psalm CX. However, the statement that the holy Shape went up and vanished does not permit the same treatment. What troubles us here is not simply the statement itself but what (we feel sure) the author meant by it. Granted that there are different Natures, different levels of being, distinct but not always discontinuous—granted that Christ withdrew from one of those to another, that His withdrawal from one was indeed the first step in His creation of the other—what precisely should we expect the onlookers to see? Perhaps mere instantaneous vanishing would make us most comfortable. A sudden break between the perceptible and the imperceptible would worry us less than any kind of joint. However, if the spectators say they saw first a short vertical movement and then a vague luminosity (that is what “cloud” presumably means here as it certainly does in the account of the Transfiguration) and then nothing—have we any reason to object? We are well aware that increased distance from the centre of this planet could not in itself be equated with increase of power or beatitude. However, this is only saying that if the movement had no connection with such spiritual events, why then it had no connection with them. Movement (in any direction but one) away from the position momentarily occupied by our moving Earth will certain be to us movement “upwards.” To say that Christ’s passage to a new “Nature” could involve no such movement, or no movement at all, within the “Nature” he was leaving, is arbitrary. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

Where there is passage, there is departure; and departure is an event in the region from which the traveller is departing. All this, even on the assumption that the Ascending Christ is in a three-dimensional space. If it is not that kind of body, and space is not that kind of space, then we are even less qualified to say what the spectators of this entirely new event might or might not see or feel as if they had seen. There is, of course, no question of a human body as we know it existing in interstellar space as we know it. The Ascension belongs to a New Nature. We are discussing only what the “joint” between the Old Nature and the new, the precise moment of transition, would look like. However, what really worries us is the conviction that, whatever we say, the New Testament writers meant something quite different. We feel sure that they thought they had seen their Masters setting off on a journey for a local “Heaven” where God sat in a throne and where there was another throne waiting for Him. And I believe that in a sense that is just what they did think. And I believe that, for this reason, whatever they had actually seen (sense perception, almost by hypothesis, would be confused at such a moment) they would almost certainly have remembered it as a vertical movement. What we must not say is that they “mistook” local “Heavens” and celestial throne-rooms and the like for “spiritual” Heaven of union with God and supreme power and beatitude. You and I have been gradually disentangling different senses of the word Heaven throughout this essay. I may be convenient here to make a list. Heaven can me the unconditional Divine Life beyond all Worlds. Blessed participation in that Life by created spirit. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

The whole Nature or system of conditions in which redeemed human spirit, still remaining human, can enjoy such participation fully and forever. This is the Heaven Christ goes to “prepare” for us. The physical Heaven, the sky, the space in which Earth moves. What enables us to distinguish these senses and hold them clearly apar is not any special spiritual purity but the fact that we are the heirs to centuries of logical analysis: not that we are sons to Abraham but that we are sons to Aristotle. We are not to supposed that writers of the New Testament mistook Heaven in sense four of three for Heaven in sense two or one. You cannot mistake a half sovereign for a sixpence until you know the difference between them. In their idea of Heaven all these meanings were latent, ready to be brought out by later analysis. They never thought merely of the blue sky or merely of a “spiritual” Heaven. When they looked up at the blue sky they never doubted that there, whence light and heat and the precious rain descended, was the home of God: but the other hand, when they thought of one ascending to Heaven they never doubted He was “ascending” in what we should call a “spiritual” sense. The real and pernicious period of literalism comes far later, in the Middle Ages and the seventeenth century, when the distinctions have been made and heavy-handed people try to force the separated concepts together again in wrong ways. The fact that Galilaean shepherds could not distinguish what they say at the Ascension from that kind of ascent which, by its very nature, could never been seen at all, does not prove on the one hand that they were unspiritual, nor on the other that they saw nothing. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

A human who really believes that “Heaven” is in the sky may well, in one’s heart, have a far truer and more spiritual conception of it than many modern logicians who could expose that fallacy with a few strokes of one’s pen. For one who does the will of the Father shall know the doctrine. Irrelevant material splendours in such a man’s idea of the vision of God will do harm, for they are not there for their own sakes. Purity from such images in a merely theoretical Christian’s idea will do no good if they have been banished only by logical criticism. The experience is neither an abstract supposition nor an intellectual series of thoughts. It is felt in quite intimate and very personal way. It is immeasurably more convincing than any thought-series could be, however plausible and logical they were. One knows of what divine stuff one is inwardly made, in what starry direction one is daily going, and on what self-transforming task one is constantly working. It can only reveal to one or two facets of its nature at each glimpse. The power can touch one’s will, and the grace can move one’s heart, but that is all. Humans are so wrapt in themselves that even when the glimpse happens, they look at the experience as their own, in origin occurrence and result. They seldom look at it from the other side. For it also an attempt by the Overself first to reveal Itself, second to communicate with them. One’s outlook becomes more spacious, one’s understanding more lucid, one’s intuition more immediate. In those revelatory moments the “I,” the essence of personality, is found to be only the thought of itself. It is the difference between trying to know and actually knowing. To see this truth for the first time is to experience something which will be long remembered. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

To find some higher meaning in one’s personal existence is to fortify one’s will and to buttress one’s ideals; to ascertain the fact that there is a link between this Universe of time and space with a Mind which is above both, is to experience an indefinable satisfaction. While the glimpse these comes a curious feeling of absolute certitude, happy certitude, utter doubtlessness. The truth is there plainly before one and deeply sensed with one. This experience of the ultimate oneness of all things of one’s own part in that oneness is, of course, well known in mystical experience—especially in nature mysticism but also in some kinds of religious mysticism, and certainly in philosophic mysticism. The first effect is to make one feel that one is not alone, that the Universe is behind one and that one does not need to be crushed by anxieties, worries, and fears—all pertaining to the little self. Such an experience is indeed an excellent counter to them. The fact is that all actual enlightenment is self-enlightenment; it is given to a human by oneself, that is, by one’s own best self. It is generally brief, but enough to provide a glimpse of that self and a touch of its revelatory energy. They are “glimpses of the eternal” and “peeps into timelessness,” a development which we could not get as animals but only as humans. It is then only that human, interwoven with the World-Mind, deep in holy happy adoration, is sure. A glimmering of what it means to see with the intelligence that there is a Higher Power and that is plays a role in human affairs not less than in the Universe’s, come to one. We read in the Bhagavad Gita of Arjuna’s cosmic vision. He was given a glimpse of a part of the universal order, the World-Design, the World-Idea. Other who have had this glimpse saw other parts of it, such as he evolution of the center of consciousness through the animal into the human kingdom, an evolution which is recapitulated in a very brief form by an embryo in the womb. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

Consciousness may expand into infinity or contract into a point. Some have had this experience through mystical meditation and others through physical chemical drugs, but the point is that they are temporary experiences of the fact that we live in a humanmade World, that the time orders and space dimensions are mental constructs and are alterable, that consciousness is the basic reality, that it can assume many different forms, and that ordinary, average human consciousness is merely one of those forms. This tells us why the insights of the seers like Jesus differed so greatly from those of ordinary human beings. With a glimpse comes revelation. One feels that one belongs to an immortal race, that there is an inner Reality behind all things, and that the ultimate source is a beneficent one. By means of this light in one’s mind, one will begin to understand scriptures, all the World’s scriptures, with a new ease. What would the World be, once bereft of wet and of wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet; long live the weeds and the wilderness yet. For one above one’s brethren set to shine:–yet we but a fourth of Judah’s line—whereof it is said “His buckets flowed with water”—so save not, Lord, for our sake, but for Thine, save now, our Father. For one more meek than all humans and more true, whose merit brought down manna on the dew, chosen redeemer, drawn from out of the water—save her that ever looketh forth anew, save her, our Father. For one who was as angels are above, who, meetly clad, did in Thy precincts move in holiness, all purified with water—save her, O Lord, her that is sick with love, save her, our Father. For that glad prophetess who danced before the camp, to them whose heart was sad and sore, for whom there rose and sank a well of water—Save them that dwelt in goodly tents of yore save them, our Father. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

Cresleigh Homes

Don’t let the outside fool you…this home may be a single story, but it boasts nearly 2600 square feet! That is larger than many traditional two-story homes. Riverside Residence 2 is one of our favorite models.

Best of all, your new home comes with a smart home package including video doorbell and digital deadbolt for the front door. You’ll have to see it!

Three bedrooms, three bathrooms, and a three car garage all come included in this home. The layout if an entertainer’s dream with large kitchen and working island, dining room connected through the butler’s pantry, and a large great room overlooking the ample rear yard. https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-riverside-at-plumas-ranch/residence-2/

And if the house has too much space for you, one could always convert one of the bedrooms into a wardrobe.

#CresleighHomes
#PlumasRanch