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I Know the He Exists Somewhere in Silence—He Has Hid His Rare Life from Our Gross Eyes
I flashed on Deacon last night in my clutches, my questions to him coming angrily as accusations. He knew nothing about any Totality of Salvation, did he? Why, I had already figured that out, had I not? That when I drifted to Earth, in my fantasy, as Saint William Randolph, I had to leave behind a certain Heavenly Knowledge. One can remember an event, an action, a person, a place, a feeling, a procedure, a line of verse, a melody, or a person’s name. One can remember doing such and such, seeing such and such, or thinking such and such. And one can remember where something is, when a certain event happened, why something happened, who did a certain thing, how to do something, and how something looks, sounds, or feels. Although memory is commonly said to be of the past, one can remember facts about the future (I just remembered that there will be a meeting tomorrow), facts about the present (I just remembered that the debate is going on right now), scientific laws and generalizations, and timeless truths of logic and mathematics. What in the name of Heaven is going on? A stinging hurt spread through me, over my face, my skin. I had never felt anything quite like it. #RandolphHarris 1 of 12
Deacon was back there, in the shadows, laughing cruelly, collecting just a seam of the light along the edge of his face and form. I felt his strength recede, and his eyes misted. A glowing fire was quelled, and I had not done it, and an ever-present grief enfolded it. A protective surge rose in me and the wild fantasies reigned again inside of me as if no one else was present. Behind me the ghost whispered contemptuously, “You are not a gentleman, you never were!” I muttered all the obscenities I knew in French and English in a tight whisper. Some people seem to view eternity as a continual existence through time, but others believe it is a timeless present. Despite the variety of uses, philosophers writing on memory have tended, until recently, to concentrate on those uses of “remember” in which it takes its object an expression referring to a particular past event or action. While they have paid some attention to memory of facts (memory that such and such), they have generally restricted this attention to memory of facts about remembering events. Thus they have tended to ignore, or rule out of consideration, cases in which the fact remembered is about the remote past (for example, the fact that Brutus stabbed Caesar), or about the future. #RandolphHarris 2 of 12
For to say that a person remembers an event (and hence to say that he or she remembers a fact about an event, or otherwise came to know of it, at the time of its occurrence, and this implication limits the possible objects of event-memory to past events and actions occurring within the lifetime of the rememberer. And of course it is only such events and actions that one can remember having witnessed or done. I went up high in the air. I traveled fast—faster than a ghost, or so I figured. I drifted about the city of Rocklin, lulled by its lights and its voiced. I wondered how Ava would handle this power, if she would be weeping again. I let myself believe there were no ghosts who could touch me up here or anywhere if I used all my considerable powers, no ghosts who could make me afraid. I said No to hunger. I said to thirst Be still. I slipped down silently into the realm of my fellow creatures. I caught sight of Deacon in the driveway, pulling behind him a pile of suitcases, all dependent upon one huge rectangular bag equipped with excellent little wheels. He was whistling a melody by Chopin and walking very briskly, and I fell into stride beside him. #RandolphHarris 3 of 12
“You are the most dashing man on the street, Little Brother,” I said. “What is with all the suitcases?” “Are you going to let us stay at the house, Beloved Boss?” he asked. His eyes were fired with love. In our short acquaintance, I had never seen him so happy. In fact, I had never seen him happy before at all. “What do you think?” he asked. “Do we crowd you? Do you want us out?” “Not at all, I want you there,” I replied. “I should have told you.” We walked along together, me trying to keep up with his long legs. Ava was in the bedroom, working on the computer we bought at Sunset, first thing she had to have. She was recording every experience, every sensation, every subtle distinction, ever revelation. The notion of the past enters into the notion of memory in another way, for it is true in general that remembering involves having previously learned or acquired knowledge of what one remembers. However, it should not be supposed that when a person is said to remember a fact about an event in the remote past or the future—that is, about an event to which one cannot have been a witness—what one really remembers is learning (for example, reading or being told) that fact; it commonly happens that one remembers a fact without having any recollection of the occasion on which one learned it. #RandolphHarris 4 of 12
Memory of acts (what has been called factual memory) cannot be reduced to memory of events experienced or witnessed by the rememberer (what has been called personal memory), and not all cases of factual memory are cases in which the remembered fact is a fact about a remembered event or action. However, the concealing memory may be connected with the impression it conceals, not only through its contents, but also through contiguity of time; this is the contemporaneous or contiguous concealing memory. How large a portion of the sum total of our memory belongs to the category of concealing memories, and what part it plays in various neurotic hidden processed, these are problems into the value of which I have neither inquired, nor shall I enter here. I am concerned only with the emphasizing the sameness between the forgetting of proper names with faulty recollection and the formation of concealing memories. At first sight, it would seem that the diversities of both phenomena are far more striking than their exact analogies. There we deal with proper names, here with complete impressions experienced either in reality or in thought; there we deal with a manifest failure of the memory function, here with a momentary disturbance—for the name just forgotten could have been reproduced correctly a hundred times before, and will be so again from tomorrow on. #RandolphHarris 5 of 12
Here we deal with lasting possession without a failure, for the indifferent childhood memories seem to be able to accompany us through a great part of life. In both these cases, the riddle seems to be solved in an entirely different way. There is the forgetting, while here it is the remembering which excites our scientific curiosity. It was fun walking along the street again. Feet on the Summer pavements with the heat of the Sun still rising from them. Reese was talking about how she wished she could get rid of some female. I pondered the matter, perhaps for the first time. A body could not survive being dumped in the Honey Island Swamp in the Pearl River Wildlife area. Too many gators. It made me smile bitterly to remember that once others had tried to dispose of me in just the same way. But this poor dead female had lacked my resources when she tumbled down into darkness. Her soul had fled to the Totality of Salvation, of course. We walked on together through a crush of valiant tourists. The town was drippingly hot. Local legend has it that Honey Island Swamp in Louisiana scares people who dare to venture down the road after nightfall and park along the road, reports claim ghost, believed to be slaves from nearby plantations, may jostle vehicles and leave their handprints on windows. #RandolphHarris 6 of 12
The temperatures in the area are said to drop, an indication of a paranormal presence. This swamp is also the home of the legendary Honey Island Swamp monster, which has from time to time been known as the Tainted Keitre. The creature is described as bipedal, seven feet (over two meters tall), with gray hair and yellow eyes. The story goes that a four-story mansion of antebellum fashion once stood on the land in the 1870s, the owner was notorious for beating the enslaved people, both African Americans and European Americans. There was speculation that he was from a race of slave masters from another planet. One day, Charles Deslondes, on the 1882-acre plantation, tried to convince the master to stop beating them leaving deep scars in their backs, and if he would be their friend they would tell him something that might change his life. The slaves warned that he should watch his wife at night because they found a wild boar with its throat gashed out. The evening after the owner received the message, the couple went to bed as usual and the wife, near midnight, slipped outside into the rain to sneak below to the home’s prison to visit the slaves. As the slave she was fond of moved to embrace her, you could hear the chains restricting him rattle in the night air. The next morning, he was hanged high on one of the property’s 500-year-old oak tree and buried below it. #RandolphHarris 7 of 12
Years later, the house sank with the owner, Manuel Andry in it. Legend has it that he was eaten alive by gators and the property turned into a swamp. No records survive to tell us what Charles said the final minutes before the mansion sank, but some suspect he used a powerful voodoo curse and that Manel Andry some how became the swamp monster we hear about these days. Here we seal with lasting possession without a failure, for the indifferent childhood memories seem to be able to accompany us through a great part of life. The riddle seems to be solved in an entirely different way. There it is the forgetting, while here it is the remembering which excites out scientific curiosity. After deeper reflection, one realized that, although there is a diversity in the psychic material and in the duration of time of the two phenomena, yet these are by far outweighed by the conformities between the two. We deal with the failure of remembering; what should be correctly reproduced by memory fails to appear, and instead something else comes as a substitute. We are justified in saying that the diversities in material, in duration of time, and in the centering of both phenomena serve to enhance our expectation, that we have discovered something that is important and of general value. #RandolphHarris 8 of 12
This generality purports that the stopping and straying of the reproductioning function indicates more often than we suppose that there is an intervention of a prejudicial factor, a tendency which favors one memory and, at the same time, works against another. The subject of childhood memories appears to me so important and interesting. What vibe did you get in your secret soul? Good ghost? Bad ghost? Hmm, well, good, obviously. Trying to tell us we have Andry genes. Trying to save us, trying to keep us from breeding some awful mutations, which occurs now and then in the family. A benign ghost. I have told you the whole story. A benign ghost and an awful mutation. Has Reese mentioned the mutation? The lost child? Then I stretched out on my bed. Satin tufted tester above me. Satin counterpane below. Fairly shadowy. I turned my face into the down pillows, of which I always had a sizeable heap, and with all my muscles sort of scrunched up against the modern World. I believe we accept too indifferently the fact of infantile amnesia—that is, the failure of memory for the first years of our lives—and fail to find it in a strange riddle. We forget of what great intellectual accomplishments and of what complicated emotions a child of four years is capable. #RandolphHarris 9 of 12
We really ought to wonder why the memory of later years has, as a rule, retained so little of these psychic processes, especially as we have every reason for assuming that these same forgotten childhood activities have not glided off without leaving a trace in the development of the person, but that they have left a definite influence for all future time. Yet, in spite of this unparalleled effectiveness they were forgotten! This would suggest that there are particularly formed conditions of memory (in the sense of conscious reproduction) which have thus far eluded our knowledge. It is quite possible that the forgetting of childhood may give us the key to understanding of those amnesias which, according to our newer studies, are possessed at the basis of the formation of all neurotic symptoms. Suddenly, there was an agitation in me so greater that only lying alone, scrunched up on the bed, could comfort me. Sleep. Sleep, but I could not. And I had to see if the ghost would come. A clock ticked somewhere. A clock with a painted face and curlicue hands. Not a huge clock. A clock that with its whole soul knew only how to tick and might tick for centuries, maybe had ticked for centuries, a clock to which people would look, and which people would dust, and which people wound with a key, and which people might come to love. #RandolphHarris 10 of 12
There was a clock somewhere in this house, perhaps in the back parlor, the only piece of all this furniture that could talk. I heard it. I knew what it was saying. Its code was lovely to me. Of these retained childhood reminiscences, some appear to us readily comprehensible, while others seem strange or unintelligible. It is not difficult to correct certain in regard to both kinds. If the retained reminiscences of a person are subject to an analytic test, it can be readily ascertained that a guarantee for their correctness does not exist. Some of the memory pictures are surely falsified and incomplete, or displaced in point of times and place. The assertions of persons examined, that their first memories reach back perhaps to their second year, are evidently unreliable. Motives can soon be discovered which explain the disfigurement and the displacement of these experiences, but they also demonstrate that these memory lapses are not the result of a mere unreliable memory. Powerful forces from a later period have moulded the memory capacity of our infantile experiences, and it is probably due to these same forces that the understanding of our childhood is generally so very strange to us. The recollection of adults, as is known, proceeds through different psychic material. #RandolphHarris 11 of 12
Some recall by means of visual pictures—their memories are of a visual pictures—their memories are of a visual character; other individuals can scarcely reproduce in memory the partly sketch of an experience; we call such persons auditifs and moteurs in contrast to the visuels. These differences vanish in dreams; all our dreams are preponderatingly visual. However, this development is also found in the childhood memories; the latter are plastic and visual, even in those people whose later memory lacks the visual element. The visual memory, therefore, preserves the type of the infantile recollections. Only my earliest childhood memories are of a visual character; they represent plastically depicted scenes, comparable only to stage settings. “And it was by faith that these three disciples obtained a promised that they should not taste of death; and they obtained not the promise until after their faith. And neither at any time hath any wrought miracles until after their faith; wherefore they first believed in the Son of God. And there were many whose faith was so exceedingly strong, even before Christ came, who could not be kept from within the veil, but truly saw with their eyes the things which they had beheld with an eye of faith, and they were glad,” reports Ether 12.17-19. #RandolphHarris 12 of 12
I Meant to Have but Modest Needs Such as Content and Heaven
The sky was a faint lilac color now, overcast and reflecting the city glow. The motionless grandeur came about the Earth; the fiery vigor burst from Heaven. For centuries, people have been fascinated by the essential and powerful fall of man. Earthly states are merely coercive institutions which would not exist had man not fallen, and serve simply to issue punishments and remedies for the corruption of human nature. Civil subordination is natural to humans and would exist even if the Fall had not taken place, and cannot be written off as an extraneous penal imposition. Perfection and fulfillment of human nature is in the intellect rather than the will. Law is essentially a rule of right reason, rather than a species of will-based commands. Moral evaluation consists of rational assessments based upon the intrinsic nature of the cases in question and is also susceptible of being interpreted as constituting a restriction on divine omnipotence. It is my ultimate goal to transmute this experience into a level of life participation which is worthy of the immense powers that God has bequeathed to us, a level of life experience which knows no moral shrinking from the most obvious yet painful theological questions which in our transfigured state has made utterly inescapable, the first of which is, obviously, how does God view our essential beings? Perhaps damnation is not a literal Hell with flames, but a state which is defined by the absence of God. #RandolphHarris 1 of 8
Humans have a real measure of responsibility for their spiritual condition. The free will of human beings, therefore, can cooperate with God’s grace, and does so. The human will, of course, is never the primary cause of human’s regeneration—the Spirit of God and the preaching of the Word always maintain the initiative—but human’s will is specifically granted a place, and unless there is consent on the human’s part there can be no effective regeneration. The mind is darkened by what it learns when regeneration is absent and cannot understand; the lips are folded, and cannot speak. Regeneration is the impartation of life, spiritual life, to those who are dead, spiritually dead, through their trespasses and sins. It is the Holy Spirit who impart this life. It is truth that the written Word is the instrument which the Holy Spirit uses in regeneration. “Being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the Word of God, which lives and abides forever,” reports 1 Perter 1.23. Regeneration is the spiritual change wrought in the heart of human beings by the Holy Spirit in which one’s inherently sinful nature is changed so that one can respond to God in Faith, and live in accordance with the Will of God. It extends to the whole nature of a being, altering one’s governing disposition, illuminating one’s mind, freeing one’s will, and renewing one’s nature. #RandolphHarris 2 of 8
Regeneration, or new birth, is an inner re-creating of fallen human nature by the gracious sovereign action of the Holy Spirit. And the work intended by their regeneration, or in being born again, which is the spiritual conversation and quickening of the souls of humanity, is everywhere ascribed unto them that shall be saved. And this regeneration is the head, fountain, or beginning of our sanctification, virtually comprising the whole in itself, as will afterward appear. Regeneration renews our minds. Being renewed in the spirit of our minds means that our minds now have a new, saving supernatural light, to enable them to think and act spiritually. In the same, the Holy Spirit, implants in our heart a new prevailing love for God, causing the soul to cling to him, and his ways with delight and satisfaction. Our Heavenly Father is all-powerful and all-knowing. He knows our physical struggles. God is also aware of our physical pains due to infirmary, aging, accidents, or birth disorders. God is aware of our emotional struggles, and everything else. God knows each person who has suffered injustice or who has been abused. He knows our weaknesses and the propensities and temptations we struggle with. #RandolphHarris 3 of 8
During mortality we are tested to see if we will choose good over evil. For those who keep God’s commandments, they will live with him in a state of never-ending happiness. Of all the paradoxes that help us detach from the ordinary plane of existence and connect with the spiritual plane, suffering that breeds a greater engagement in life is perhaps the most intriguing. Our mortal life is designed by God to be a test and source of growth for each of us. Since the beginning, the tests have not been easy. We face trials that come from having mortal bodies. Sometimes the World and our lives can seem to be in increasing disharmony. However, the loving God who allowed these tests for us also designed a way to make sure we pass through them. God is our father and we are created in his image, entitled through our worthiness to receive revelation to help with our righteous endeavors. We are promised that we may have God’s Spirit with us always. The trunk of the tree does not become superfluous because of a new branch; it makes the branch possible. It takes a prayer of faith, a fervent prayer of faith to our Heavenly Father to be raised unto life eternal. We must encourage ourselves from a central, deep, integrated sense of what we are; what we feel, value, believe, and cherish. #RandolphHarris 4 of 8
As personal integrity becomes a more permanent frame of reference from which we operate, we are far less likely to violate one set of needs by satisfying another set. Just as the riverbed guides the river, our best self will guide the way we live our lives. We must pray unto the Father in Heaven with all the energy of our hearts that we may be filled with his love, and that we may be purified. The Savior, Jesus Christ, is putting his name in our hearts. For many of us, our faith in God and Christ is increasing. We are feeling more hope and optimism. And we are feeling the pure love of Christ for others and ourselves. However, sometimes it seems that our hope and faith are being overcome by our troubles. And we may yearn to feel love. Therefore, we have to keep in mind that the human mind is too smart to accept being lied to. The Lord has opportunities near us to feel and share in his love. We can pray with confidence for the Lord to lead us to love someone for him. Because we are principled, we are honest. Because we are loving, we are lovable. Because we are interested in the welfare of others, we are respected. Because our ideas work, we are worth listening to. Because we are determined, we are able to get things done. As we help children of God in their troubles, our own troubles will seem lighter. Our faith and hope will be strengthened. Part of God is inside of us and that voice has the answers. #RandolphHarris 5 of 8
God’s voice will give us so much peace. We will find it easier to go from role to role. And will have very little inner conflict over how to act or how to spend our times. It is like we have a kind of cosmic glue holding us together now. In the past, we may have been all fragments, pieces of us darting about in different orbits. To persevere firm and steadfast in faith of Christ, it requires that the gospel of Jesus Christ penetrate one’s heart and soul. That way we will be on one planet in one great orbit, sure of our destiny and our goals. God will give us a new heart, and a new spirit. And God will put his spirit within us and cause us to talk in his statutes. It is challenging but vital to remain firm and steadfast when we find ourselves being refined in the furnace of affliction, something that comes sooner or later to all of us in mortality. Without God, these dark experiences tend to despondency, despair, and even bitterness. With God, comfort replaces pain, peace replaced turmoil, and hope replaces sorrow. Remaining firm in the faith of Christ will bring his sustaining grace and support. He will convert trial into blessings. #RandolphHarris 6 of 8
Once we receive God, it may feel that every part of us is blossoming. Suddenly we will be able to stand up to our enemies, feel compassion for them, even. We will not be riddled by worry nor doubt. We will come through these experiences more internally focused, autonomous, and self-directed as we build our integrated sense of self-identity. Instead of basing our identities in career or family roles, our hardier, more self-sufficient, and more inner-directed survivor soul will base our identity on who we truly are. When we learn to trust enough in the wisdom of our own soul to accept how all the various aspects of our personality come together, we will discover the miraculous truth that the whole that is us transcends our individual personality traits. Viewed as a composite, our life has an almost magical coherence and continuity. If we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that the Spirit has touched us more than once and the testimony of the Spirit is real. The temptations and tribulations we experience, with any testing the Lord sees fit to impose, can lead to our full conversion and healing. However, this happens if, and only if, we do not harden our hearts or stiffen our minds against God. The promised healing is the cleansing and sanctification of our sin-wounded souls, making us holy. #RandolphHarris 7 of 8
Always remember the good things to come, both now and hereafter, for those who are firm and steadfast in the faith of God. Whenever we can, we must look for opportunities to display our best self. In the Lord’s due time, the additional answers, comfort, and understand about the spirit will come to us through marvelous visions. Our best self is the aspect of us that brings out the best in others and the World, that graces ordinary experience with extraordinary clarity, and that, is the believers are correct, goes with us into the next World. When we face a personal challenge, we also have to understand that each day gives us the opportunity to make life richer, more rewarding. When we have ready (if not constant) access to our best self, amazing things can happen. We are eligible for a kind of genius and will become open to new ideas, more able to weigh touch options, more creative in the way we approach the problems in our lives. We may also begin to get a dose of the cosmic truths whose promise makes every moment an adventure. When we are operating at full throttle, challenged simultaneously at work, at home, and in civic life, as we do everything we can to operate out of our best self—by letting go, staying integrated, listening to our inner voice—we will find that, as a reward, we will rise to every one of the many strenuous occasions of the day. Every day is another day to be happy. #RandolphHarris 8 of 8
Eclipse was All We Could See at the Window And Awe was All We Could Feel
The sins of my past rose up to taught me. All my own excesses mocked me. I thought it was nothing short of magnificent. When we got to my house I gave two hundred dollars to my two mortal guards who were happily astonished. When we reached the courtyard garden, and just when I was about to exclaim about the ancient cherub fountain and all the tropical wonders blooming against my cherished stucco walls, I stopped to ponder what loyalty is. Loyalty is not just an act, it is also an attitude. To be loyal to someone, we have to embrace affection or sentiment towards such persons. Loyalty requires the complete subordination of one’s own private interest in favor of giving what is due, and perhaps also the exclusions of other legitimate interests. In this sense, loyalty may often be one-sided, although it need not be. If we could not count on the loyalty of others or give them our loyalty, social life would be not only bleak but also impossible. The back parlor of my house had been cleaned and dusted earlier this very day and I could smell the cleaning lady’s distant perfume. Of course I had never laid eyes on the woman. She came by the light of the Sun, but she did her job well enough for me to leave her big bills. I loved giving away money. I carried it for no other purpose. I slapped a hundred on the desk for her. #RandolphHarris 1 of 7
We have desks everywhere in this house, I thought. Too many desks. Did not every bedroom have a little desk? Why so many? I made my usual beeline for the front parlor, peeking into each and every bedroom on the way, as though I really needed to, in order to know that no one was home. The place had too much furniture. Not enough paintings. Too many books. What the hallway needed was Emile Nolde. How could I get my hands on the German Expressionists? The Prophet, 1912 is one of the finest examples of woodcut. There is a great contrast between light and dark, and as a result, dramatic emotional effects. We do not merely sense the pain and anguish of the prophet’s life, the burden that prophecy entails, but we feel the portrait emerging out of the very gouges of Emily Nolde’s knife made in the block. Ava, with her own genius, recently made a copy of the Prophet, using her own face and gold and black, which represents prosperity and nobility. I thought it was very sophisticated. That young lady really has a lot of talent. I value such human qualities as sincerity, courage, cheerfulness, and kindness. Human nature has all sort of lessons driven into it by the pressure of events and reasoning afterwards redefines them and adds new inventions, quickly or slowly. #RandolphHarris 2 of 7
Front parlor. Piano. Here was no piano now. I should tell them to get a piano. Had we not passed an antique piano in a window? I had a sudden urge to play the piano—to use my gift to rip at the keys. It was that Bela Bartok concerto still assaulting my mind, and the picture of those two macabre dancers accentuating the music. An essential step in the development of society is the growth of natural justice, which is a bargain for mutual profit not to hurt or be hurt. Natural justice is followed by the characteristic comment that not everybody keeps this bargain, but unless a substantial number do, the human race would have been wiped out. Thus the fact that humankind has survived at all is adduced as a proof that there must have been such a compact. However, it also serves to explain the occurrence of such a compact along Darwinian lines, as an example of survival of the fittest; communities that failed to achieve it must have perished like those ill-equipped forms of life, trapped in the toils of their own destiny, which nature had debarred from increase. #RandolphHarris 3 of 7
The social contract is the basis of social cooperation, not in calculated self-interest, but in a natural instinct that impales the strong to have empathy for the less able. The Universe is great; yet it has its limitation, but what is more perfect than a Universe that is rational? Rationality in the Universe is so evident that it is never concealed. The greatness of the Universe is based on the foundation of the existence of rationality which is an order publicly followed and without partiality. We should partake worthily of the sacrament each week and fill our lives with virtuous activities that will bring us spiritual power. As we do this, we will grow stronger in our ability to resist temptation, keep the commandments and be more Godlike. The justice of God is identical with his grace: it is not conditional upon human merit, but is received by faith alone (faith itself being a work of God in humans). God offers humans his justice and creates the response of faith. The security of humans before God rests solely in the Gospel, with its word of forgiveness. From a religious, psychological, and practical standpoint, it stands to reason that we have a vested interest in changing our attitudes, even if evil seems too powerful to oppose. #RandolphHarris 4 of 7
Before we can hope to conquer the evil that is out there, we must face the part of us that gives in to these vices, that allows us to lose hope in the face of negativity, that is still the conscienceless, selfish being some have evolved into since birth. Typically, those of us afraid of the evil within project those traits onto others in the World. Projection is the easiest way to avoid dealing with our own darker traits, impulses, and actions. Projection is purely a person blaming others for the wrongdoings, mistakes, or faults they are actually responsible for. Spiritual growth requires the acknowledgement of one’s own imperfection. The destructive power of evil is the inability to admit personal sinfulness, and the corresponding tendency to see others as bad. Fortunately, inner exploration means more than facing personal weakness. Looking closely at oneself also allows for rediscovery of spiritual strengths. Each action we take and each thought we think is a choice between good and evil. Keep in mind that illusions do hurt us twice. They hurt us when they cause us to take action whose logic is based in false ideals; we then suffer the consequences of our bad decisions. Arguably, they hurt us more the second time around, when we have to face the pain of losing the (ineffective and untrue) principles that have guided us. #RandolphHarris 5 of 7
Fortunately, through redemptive suffering, we can survive the loss of these illusions, discover important truths, even spiritual growth. Even one episode of deep suffering can destroy our damaging illusions. The deeper the pain, the greater the potential for growth. We can make good use of our heartache, allowing it to dispel a debilitating belief system. Changing the ways we view suffering and learning to put its lessons to good use are two of the best ways to get the most out of our adventure in life. I grew up believing in God, Heaven, and Hell, and the power of the Devil. I was sure that is I followed the Ten Commandments, I would go to Heaven. After all, good boys get Christmas presents, do they not? By the time I was a teenager, my life grew more complicated and confusing. I had these wild dreams about running away and eloping with Paris Hilton. I even convinced myself that if I got a job and a luxury German car and a big house that my dreams would come true. By reminding oneself of the truths we are suffering and what it has revealed, we can empty ourselves of the disillusionment that weighs us down and fill ourselves instead with the wonderful experiences and insights life has to offer. #RandolphHarris 6 of 7
Sometimes our dreams and illusions are the catalysts that push us to reaching high goals. Paris Hilton is out of the league of most men, but there are other beautiful people we can enjoy. Maybe, if you are like me, and dreamed of someone like Paris Hilton, when you meet your true love you will cherish that person as much as you would a mega star. As natural as it may seem to turn away from or distract oneself from our pain, we might want to consider practicing facing it, daily. When pain arises, it is a good idea to acknowledge this as soon as possible, and then direct our undivided attention toward it, taking care not to turn it into suffering (meaning the over-dramatization of pain). As we become a student of emotions, casting both a finely focused and panoramic eye on them, and get to know them intimately. The more deeply and skillfully we can relate to our emotions, the more we will be able to do so in actual relationship. Human beings resist change, even in a beneficial direction, when we cannot be sure what is a head of us. Until we bid farewell to these former parts of ourselves, we will not be fully prepared to step into the void and grasp the new sense of identity that awaits us on our journey. We have to allow ourselves to feel the depth of our sadness, anger, pain or any losses that hurt us. “And it came to pass that there was no contention among all the people, in all the land; but there were mighty miracles wrought among the disciples of the Savior,” reports 4 Nephi 1.13. #RandolphHarris 7 of 7
High from the Earth I Heard a Bird Like a Neighbor from Another World!
With glazed eyes she looked up at me. The sweet taste of life was on her lips, just a touch, and all her pain was gone, and the moment had come, the moment of peace from pain, peace from struggle, peace from fear. She simply could not believe it. Thought is one aspect of the soul. Thought is aware only of ideas about reality; it does not know reality, for knowledge and reality can never be identical. Identity with reality or object can be achieved as experience, never as thought, for thought is purely representative. Truth is attained in ways different from thought. Thought must fuse with the total feeling experience, since it is in feeling that we have direct awareness of good and evil, beauty and unattractiveness, worth and unworthy, contradiction and harmony; these rest in the soul’s original capacity to experience pain and pleasure. Feeling is the ultimate arbiter of consistency and intellectual harmony, the ultimate creator of imagination and its works. Moreover, feeling is the nisus that drives an individual to seek whatever total unity of comprehension and action is possible for one. An echo of our own mental voice sometimes comes back at us. It might strike one, sharp and hard, that we have been given so many chances to save our souls and our entire lives are constructed around these chances! #RandolphHarris 1 of 9
That is our nature—going from temptation after temptation, not to sin, but to be redeemed. One’s love of knowledge, goodness, and beauty arises from, and finds its fulfillment in, feeling. Thus, the essential nature of feeling is love, which constantly drives an individual toward a greater over-all comprehension of one’s life and the cosmos. If love was not possessed at the foundation of the World, this World would be left without truth and law. Many of us want to see into the soul of others. We can sense secrets in them, a trove of them, and sometimes can feel an electric connection. Whiskey voice, they call it. It is so seductive. Feeling convinces most of us that the World is physical and thus consists of souls as well as a personal deity. A soul is not simply a stream of impressions united by memory; it is a substantival entity, causally related to the body and interacting with it. Nevertheless, the soul is a greater influence and governs the body in ways close to it. Both soul and body act according to law, but the laws of the bodies as such are purely physical. The laws of the soul are on a higher level; they are teleological and unite the physical and mental. They do not contradict the laws of the physical World, but they do control and reorder them. #RandolphHarris 2 of 9
A personal deity, God, follows from the existence of souls and ends. How else can they be explained? The World and everything in it is the personal creation of God and the means by which he attains his ends and the ends of his creatures. God attains his ends through the mechanisms or causa nexuses that science discovers, and these mechanisms are characteristic of both the living and nonliving. These mechanisms should not be identified with materialism. Mechanism does not imply the nonexistence of ends or of psychic beings; it implies only the existence of uniform modes by which things come into being. The World can just as easily be psychic as material, but the psychic interpretation is rationally to be preferred because it does not make a mystery or a paradox of the presence of feeling and values in the World. This is why some find themselves besieged by prayerful petitions. The voices from indigenous persons on Earth as well as the descendants of colonists will bring them in contact with the suffering and the misery of the planet they have escaped. #RandolphHarris 3 of 9
Many people are hard at working, trying to get God to dip down through the astral layers into our human souls, as we listen earnestly to the faithful and relay our petitions to the All Knowing One. Mechanism is simply a method of research; it is not a fundamental explanation of life and mind. Only the most exhaustive survey of the life of humans can provide such an explanation and relate to one’s life to the cosmos and God. Furthermore, mechanism does not repudiate free will; it is simply the necessary condition for the will to express its autonomy. There are three realms of observations: the realm of fact, the realm of universal law, and the realm of values, which serve as standards of meaning for the World. These realms are only logically separable; they cannot be separated in reality. Fact and law are the mean, the mechanisms, by which values are attained in this World; they are also the means by which people can discover that certain values are foolish, contradictory, unrealizable, or in other words, false. Since fact and universal law are not existentially separable from value, God must also be the creator of everything and the quintessence of whatever deserves to exist for its own sake. Moreover, since feeling is fundamental, a sort of pluralistic idealism in which the only realities are living spirits and God in interaction is justified. All other realities are so only secondarily, as manifestations of these spiritual activities. #RandolphHarris 4 of 9
There is an immense sweep of modern knowledge, but there is no single unity or oneness to existence. Direct experience reveals an irreducible multiplicity of things. Reality is always in flux, the doing, and the suffering occur within a fixed order, a pre-established harmony between God and the multitude of spirits. To limit ourselves to what science understands is to exclude unjustifiably the realms of feeling and values, and to exclude the latter is to render our experience unintelligible. Natural life and the social life are the two fundamental sources for religious ideas. From nature we derive the concept of God; from our social life, the concepts of ethical living. Paganism has tended to emphasize the cosmological; Christianity, the ethical. Christianity has sought to fuse both into one complete theological scheme. The ethical element in religion is far more significant than the cosmological (which can properly be left to science), even though the emphasis upon cosmology leads to recognition of God. The true mark of the religious person is not one’s cosmology but one’s feeling for, and search after, what ought to be, one’s passion for, and loyalty to, the highest possible ideals. This passion and loyalty, however, are not so much activistic as contemplative. #RandolphHarris 5 of 9
Piety is found in the inner life, in a feeling for the holy that attains so high a state of intuitive comprehension that logic, reason, becomes futile and inessential. Piety rests beyond any sectarian interest, Christian or not, for it drives people to seek a totality of feeling in which truth is completely fused with goodness and beauty. In consequence, the holy is not merely what people think it is; it is rather the unattained, the beyond in our lives that is without contradiction, defect, or dissonance. It is manifested in the endless striving for that immortal sea that is the infinite parent of all things. In this contemplative striving, in this endless search for total harmony and for the ought-to-be rests the possibility of progressively uniting science, religion, and art. However, the overwhelming realization of this unity occurs only at particular moments when one is moved by the experience of total beauty. In such moments, one knows absolutely that the fusion has, as far as possible, been accomplished. #RandolphHarris 6 of 9
Love as a concept enters philosophy at one point through religion, particularly when the origin of the World is expressed as an act of procreation or the Creator is conceived of as loving his creation either as a whole or in part (i.e., the human race). However, the concept of love is also a subject for philosophic mediation in regard to ethical problems. Love, as one of the most powerful of human impulses, is seen to be much in need of control, especially if people as rational beings are to be able to use their rational capacities. Pleasures and other values of loving may be preserved without entailing the supposed evils of intemperate sexuality. Love has a unique metaphysical status, for it exists in both the material and the ideal Worlds. Love can take on many forms, from gross sexual passion to a devotion to learning, but, it is argued, the ultimate object of love is the beautiful. The goodness that God sees in his creation is its beauty and to feel the beauty of the World is to love it and its Creator. One of the great blessings of the plan is that we are organized into families. We have parents whose greater wisdom and experience will help us reach our divine potential. Trust them. They want what is best for us. #RandolphHarris 7 of 9
Four thirty A.M, I am awake again. Singing to the dark through open eyes while dreaming I see only you and me stuck between desire and compromise. If I said I want you back I’d be a liar. There is nothing left of us to long for anymore, but inside the ashes burns an endless fire and every night I can’t help reaching out for more.
And I cannot sleep… You are so far away from me. You are leaving me scars scattered in my heart, a road map of all the places you have been. And I cannot escape, cannot wash this away. Love has burned your mark so deep within. If I said I want you back I would be a liar. There is nothing left of us to long for anymore, but inside the ashes burns an endless fire. And every night I cannot help reaching out for more. Sometimes I feel so happy, sometimes I feel so sad. Sometimes I feel so happy, but mostly you just make me mad. Baby, you just make me mad. Linger on, your pale blue eyes. Linger on, your pale blue eyes. Thought of you as my mountain top, thought of you as my peak. #RandolpHarris 8 of 9
Thought of you as everything, I have had but could not keep. Linger on, your pale blue eyes. If I could make the World as pure and strange as what I see, I would put you in the mirror, I put in front of me. Skip a life completely. Stuff it in a cup. She said, “Money is like us in time, it lies, but cannot stand up. Down for you is up.” It was good what we did yesterday. And I would do it once again. The fact that you are married, only proves, you are my best friend. But it is truly, truly a sin. Linger on, your pale blue eyes. God’s love for the World is redemption brought to humanity. God loves his creatures as they love him. Both love of God and religious faith are thought to be subject to volition. Great emphasis are put on ceremonious expressions of devotion and upon the refusal to carry our certain rites. Loyalty is the relationship between persons–for instance between Lord and one’s vassal, between parent and children, or between friends. #RandolphHarris 9 of 9
One Day is there of the Series Termed Thanksgiving Day and Celebrated Part at Table and Part in Memory!
It seems so simple, so innocent, so entirely praiseworthy, to put down indecent literature by laws against obscenity. We are none of us in favour of what seems to us indecent. It is impossible we should be, for the word means, if we search into it, simply what is unfit. Yet the simpler and more fundamental the conception of decency is seen to be, the more it eludes any prescription of positive law. It is determined by the nature of the individual oneself, by the feelings of one’s social group, and very notably by fashion. Most of us are old enough to know that less than twenty years ago the whole young womanhood of today would have been held guilty or banned from television for indecency in dress and liable to be conducted to the nearest police station. In literature fashion is even more uncertain and elusive than in life, for the good reason that it is not produced by mass action. Endless examples have been brought forward of such fluctuations of opinion regarding books condemned by law, as well as examples of books legally condemned as obscene in England and free in America, or legally condemned in America and free in England. The obscenity of today will be the propriety of tomorrow. However, by the spread of education, the extension of religion, the people will themselves learn to reject all forms of unpleasant conduct, literature, art. #RandolphHarris 1 of 8
If the people learn not merely to disregard but to detest all these forms of indecency in thought, word, and deed, the day will come when no form of censorship will be needed, when there will be no prosecutions for breaches of the law, and when acts of Congress will be a dead letter on the Statute Book. Indeed, there will be a time when the whole population will live up to God’s ideal, and this is a desire of many. There is only one way to prevent the circulation of bad literature, and that is to promote the circulation of good literature. That would do more than any revival of a moral censorship of the Press. When archbishops preach these sound doctrines of common sense I begin to believe that it is time for me to be silent. For the truth is when one is speaking from a place of authority, that he or she should have the floor alone to teach genuinely healthy minds, when not surrounded by secrecy and prohibition. For some reason, I do not feel worthy to teach the work of God to others. I think it is a sacred responsibility that should be left to someone with more maturity, power, and authority. However, at the same time, I want to share with others the doctrines and covenants that have helped get me through some of my darkest days. And although, I am still waiting on my testimony, I do the best I can. #RandolphHarris 2 of 8
I supposed that deliverance from darkness is a gradual process. It is not like it just eclipsed us over night. “There is something cold and blank behind her smile. She is standing on an overpass in her miracle mile. Because you were from a perfect World, a World that threw me away today, to run away. A pill to make you numb. A pill to make you dumb. A pill to make you anybody else, but all of the drugs in this World will not save her from herself,” (Coma White by Marilyn Manson). I supposed that we cannot blame anyone for the things that have happened to us, but we should count our blessings. It is also clear that it is important for us to stay sober so we can learn what is going on around us and figure out how best to resolve these situations and move forward in the name of God. We cannot have integrity without clarifying our convictions or values or goals. We can change them, but we must always have some. And so we clarify our ideals and determine to act according to them. The biggest tragedy of life is not to live—not to function with our full soul, with our whole life, with enthusiasm, with spirit, with faith, with love. #RandolphHarris 3 of 8
We must humbly pray that none of us will be so burdened by mistakes, by failures, and by sin that we will not have the courage and wisdom to turn to the ideals of the gospel, to the wonder God, and to each other to find the strength to live life as it is meant to be lived. It is a beautiful existence we have, and it is not too late for any of us to enjoy it to the fullest. If we truly love God, we would never consider disobeying him. If we truly love our neighbor, we would never dream of lying to or about one, nor stealing from one, nor doing anything that might cause one pain or harm. If we are focused on loving and serving God, and on loving our neighbor, obedience will become part of our nature. We will not need anyone to spell out what we can and cannot (or should and should not) do, because our natural impulse will be to act as Christ would act. If we are truly living the gospel, then it should not matter where the line is, because our natural impulses lead us well away from the edge. Sometimes, however, things are complex and beyond our spiritual understanding. For instance, one of the strangest art clichés that still circulates endlessly is the one about the eyes in the portrait following you around the room. This non-illusion arises from somewhat muddled expectations about how a two-dimensional image might behave when seen from different angles in three-dimensional space. #RandolphHarris 4 of 8
Provided the image is not a hologram, we can hardly expect it to take account of our position in the room. If the eyes engage us when we stand directly in front of the picture, they will also engage us from any other viewpoint, despite the distorting effects of foreshortening. I doubt if the eyes following us around the room have anything at all to do with Gothic fiction or those old movies in which real eyes spy through peepholes cut into the face of a portrait. Of course, they actually do follow you around. I suspect by its slightly supernatural, spiritualist note that we can safely blame the concept of eyes that seem mobile and, worse, intently watching us, on our conscious reminding us that we are in the house of God, which is Earth, and regardless of if we want to realize it or not, God is watching our every move. Therefore, the complex situational is actually not beyond our spiritual understand once we analyze the metaphor. Nevertheless, it is the disposition of the eyes in a portrait, as between living people, that tells us that the smile of the subject is a direct avenue of meaningful communication, vividly reserved for you and me, and it is also a reminder that people have faces and eyes and this is where we should direct our attention when communicating with them. There is no doubt that this sensation, this knowledge, has a profound impact on the viewer. #RandolphHarris 5 of 8
It may be a blinding glimpse of the obvious, but it is worth noting in conclusion that the exchange of a smile—be it sincere or forced or spontaneous—makes us feel good. “I know that God loveth his children; nevertheless, I do not know the meaning of things,” reports 1 Nephi 11.17. God loves all his children—his sons and his daughters alike. And the truth of his love is absolute. It is the truth upon which everything else is founded. The eyes are the windows of the soul, and in the soul is where truth is possessed. The truth holds the Universe together. When you see our Father, you will see a being with whom you have long been acquainted, and he will receive you into his arms, and you will be ready to all into his embrace. You will be so glad and joyful. When you are qualified and purified, you can endure the glory of eternity. We are blessed to know of God. How many people over the space of thousands of years have not even known that there is a Father in Heaven? How many individuals’ lives might have been different if they could only have known about our loving, merciful, and caring Heavenly Father? #RandolphHarris 6 of 8
Indeed, how blessed we are to have such teachings that center on the nature of our Father in Heaven. We know that there is something taking place, even though we know at the same time that the source of stimulation is coming from inside of us. However, God and humans are of the same divine, eternal species, and if we do not comprehend the nature of God, we cannot appreciate our divine parentage nor the very real potential we possess to become like our Heavenly parents. Coming to know God is done through revelation. And powerful personal revelation is predicated upon righteous living and spiritual discipline. Certainly a knowledge of these laws and powers enables people to learn truths which are faith promoting and which help one to understand more about God. May God help each of us to so live now in order to merit that marvelous moment when we are clasped in the arms of God. We have the plan of salvation, which makes this possible. Moral agency, the ability to choose, is an essential part of this plan. We have already made some good choices, and we can keep learning and growing. To gain a testimony, we must nourish it step by step. Our testimony will increase as we make decisions to keep the commandments. As we live and strengthen others, we will see our testimony continue to develop. #RandolphHarris 7 of 8
Reinforcement is the process of strengthening a habit, pattern, or attitude so that the individual tends to repeat it. Most of our learning happens because it is reinforced or rewarded in some way. As we establish personal habits of prayer, scripture study, obedience to the commandments, and service to others, we will be blessed with moments of inspiration that will strengthen out testimony. It is important to value experience and project no matter how small or large they are, as being thankful for these moments is constant nourishment and will keep us safely on the path to reaching our goals. God loves us, he knows us, he hears us and answers our prayers. “Search diligently, pray always, and be believing, and all things shall work together for your good, if ye walk uprightly and remember the covenant wherewith ye have covenanted one another,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 90.24. Whatever strengthens our tendency to hold onto some learned idea or action, and to repeat it, is called a reinforcing event. If it rewards us, meets a need, brings some kind of pleasure, then we tend to hang onto it. And, because of pleasure, we do again and again whatever feels good. We each need the help of the Savior to follow the plan and return to our Father in Heaven. We must fill our lives with virtuous activities that will bring spiritual power. #RandolphHarris 8 of 8
Enlightened to a Larger Pain by Contrast with Love the Reason Deeper in Sight of Native Air
Innumerable molecular aggregates were produced at random in the probiotic soup and, by prolonged trial and error, evolved to form the basis for life. People have at all times set the greatest value on ethics, as though they expected that it in particular would produce especially important results. And it does in fact deal with a subject which can easily be recognized as the sorest spot in every civilization. If I cannot accept the suggestion and find it in conflict with my inner self, the experience is one of negative empathy or pain. It is a feeling of constraint or compulsion. The reason we have to repent is to be able to forgive ourselves and to be able to get in harmony again with the principles and laws of good living. When we surrender ourselves to harmony and find it in accord with our natural inclinations and needs, we experience a feeling of freedom. Where this freedom is possible, the object is beautiful. Where we are incapable of encountering ourselves in the object, the form is experienced as ugly and the contemplation of it involves an inward sense of compulsion or hindrance. The laws that indicate the conditions under which a definite echo in the mind of the perceiver will occur are objective. The subject must be aesthetically educated to the necessary surrender to aesthetic experience, however. We do not have to repent to earn God’s love, even though some scriptures portray God as being very angry with the sinner. Others portray God as angry with sin, not the sinner. #RandolphHarris 1 of 11
Sins do not trouble themselves enough about the fact of the mental constitution of human beings. Sins issue a command and do not ask whether it is possible to obey it. On the contrary, sin assumes that every person’s id is psychologically capable of anything that is required of it, and that the pleasure gained from sinning has unlimited mastery over the human will. To overcome sins of the past and restore free will is to make amends. People know when they have done wrong, but sometimes they are afraid to go to those whom they have wronged. They are too proud to admit their failures. However, when an individual has the courage to show remorse, one will find that a great reconciliation takes place. It is the offended person’s responsibility to react to one’s efforts to be reconciled. And when one cannot compensate a person for a wrong, when it is too late or impossible, then one can bless other people. We are brothers and sisters with the same Eternal Father; we belong to the same human community. Though one cannot repair the damage one may have done to some of God’s children, one has natural faculties or capacities to thin and to reason. We all have a desire for happiness and an aversion to misery, but these inclinations give one no knowledge or truth. However, there are eternal principles of morality, which people may come to know through the use of reason about experience. The past is only significant in terms of what it has made one become. #RandolphHarris 2 of 11
We should be aggressive in our desire and effort to do what is right. Many people do wrong because they are fueled by their desires and demands and do not think about the laws of God, nor respect the rights of other human beings. They think they have a right to force themselves, their ways, and their views on to other people, regardless of what the law states or what the person wants. Some people are unprepared to live a righteous life because they do not define themselves, they are not honest about who they are, what they believe, or what values they hold. Particular people do not tell themselves why they believe in their values nor do they understand why they have become a part of them. Perceiving the operations of one’s own minds when one reflects, one is furnished with ideas of perception, thinking, doubting, believing, reasoning, knowing and willing. All knowledge about what pain is to one who never felt it, all knowledge about the physics of light and color or sound refers back to what one perceives when one sees and hears it. It is in this sense, then, that people get all their ideas from sensation and reflection. Once the mind is furnished with ideas, it may perform various operations with them. #RandolphHarris 3 of 11
Principles are not innate, unless ideas be innate. If the ideas which make up the truth that people live by are not based on the doctrines and covenants of God, then it is likely these people do not have righteousness based in their soul. Therefore, they are corrupt and cannot know what it means to be good. “God comes in awesome majesty. The Almighty is beyond our reach and exalted in power; in his justice and great righteousness, he does not oppress,” reports Job 37.23. We must fall back upon the omnipotence and wisdom of God and the fact that our knowledge is suited to our purpose. Power is a necessary idea of reason, grounded in certain other experiences. Power is both passive and active. Whether or not matter has any active power, we have our idea of active power from the operation of the mind itself. We find it by direct observation that we have the power to begin, continue, or stop certain actions of our minds and motions of our bodies. This power we call will, and the actual exercise of this power, volition, or willing. Action is voluntary or involuntary insofar as it is or is not consequent upon the order or command of the mind. The idea of liberty is the idea of a power in any agent to do or forbear any particular action, according to the determination or thought of the mind, whereby either of them is preferred to the other. Where this power is absent, a person is under necessity. #RandolphHarris 4 of 11
Freedom is one power of an agent and will is another; one power cannot be the power of another. As far as this power reaches, of acting or not acting, by the determination of one’s own thought preferring either, so far is a person free. Freedom is the absence of constraint. If we distinguish will from desire, we cannot make the mistake of thinking the will is free. What then determines the will with respect to action is some uneasiness in a person that may be called the uneasiness of desire. Good and evil work on the mind but do not determine the will to particular actions. The only thing that can overcome the uneasiness of one desire is the greater uneasiness of another. The removal of uneasiness is the first and necessary step to happiness. Since it is present desire that moves the will to action, good and evil contemplated and known in the mind can move us to action only when that knowledge is accompanied by a greater uneasiness than any other. Since we have many desires and can have knowledge of desired good in the future as well as feared evil, we can suspend the pursuit of any desire until we have judged it. Thus, government of our passions is possible whenever there is greater uneasiness in not doing so. This power is the ground on which we hold people responsible for their actions. Good and bad are nothing but pleasure or pain, present or future. #RandolphHarris 5 of 11
Error in choice is usually due to the greater strength of present pleasure or pain in comparison with future pleasure and pain. A true knowledge of what contributes to our happiness can influence a choice only when to deviate from that choice would give greater uneasiness than would any other action. Thus it is possible to change the pleasantness and unpleasantness of various actions by considerations, practice, application, and custom. It would seem that the will is not actually free and thus a person’s actions are determined, but at the same time we can suspend the execution of any desire by our judgment. “Be careful that no one entices you by riches; do not let a large bribe turn you aside. Would your wealth or even all your mighty efforts sustain you so you would not be in distress? Do not long for the night, to drag people away from their homes. Beware of turning to evil, which you seem to prefer to affliction. God is exalted in his power. Who is a teacher like him? Who has prescribed his ways for him, or said to him, ‘You have done wrong?’ Remember to extol his work, which people have praised in song. All humankind has seen it; people gaze on it from afar. How great is God—beyond our understanding! The number of his years is past finding out,” reports Job 36.18-26. #RandolphHarris 6 of 11
The mind is furnished with many simple ideas by the senses, and it observes by reflection that certain of them are constantly together. It then presumes that these belong to one thing and for convenience gives them one name. In this way the mind arrives at the complex idea of particular substances, such as gold, which we observe to be yellow and malleable, to dissolve in aqua regia, to melt, and not to be used up in fire. A substance so defined gives us only a nominal definition. Not imagining how these simple ideas can subsist by themselves, we accustom ourselves to suppose some substratum wherein they do subsist, and from which they do result; which therefore we call substance. This idea of a substratum is extremely vague, and it is a something we know not what. Our ideas do not reach, and we cannot have, a knowledge of the real essences of substances. Nonetheless, the real essences do exist, although our knowledge comes short of them. Our knowledge of corporeal substances consists of ideas of the primary and secondary qualities perceived by the senses and of the powers we observe in them to affect or be affected by other things. We have as clear an idea of spirit as of body, but we are not capable of knowing the real essence of either. We know little of how the parts of the body cohere as of how our spirits perceive ideas or move our bodies, since we know noting of either except our simple ideas of them. #RandolphHarris 7 of 11
If God wished, as far as we know, he could add to matter the power to think, just as easily as he could add to matter a separate substance with the power to think. Even our idea of God is based on simple ideas that are enlarged with the idea of infinity. God’s infinite essence is unknown to us. We can only know that he exists. “Now, behold, I say unto you, if I had not been born of God I should not have known these things; but God has, by mouth of his holy Angel, made these things known unto me, not of any worthiness of myself,” reports Alma 36.6. Sometimes when a person asks whether life has any meaning, what he or she wants to know is whether there is a superhuman intelligence that fashioned human beings along with other objects in the World to serve some end—whether their role is perhaps analogous to the part of an instrument (or player) in a symphony. People who ask whether history has a meaning often use the word in the same sense. When Macbeth exclaimed that, “Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” he was answering this cosmic question in the negative. His point evidently was not that human life is part of a scheme designed by a superhuman idiot, but that it is not part of any design. #RandolphHarris 8 of 11
We find ourselves in a dreadful situation in which there is scarcely a clue as to whether our existence has any real significance, in a cosmic sense. On the other hand, when we ask whether a particular person’s life has or had any meaning, we are usually considered not with cosmic issues but with the question whether certain purposes are to be fond in one’s life. Thus, most of us would say that without hesitation that a person’s life had meaning if we knew that one devoted oneself to a cause (such as the spread of Christianity or capitalism, or the reform of mental institutions), or we would at least be ready to say that it acquired meaning once one became sufficiently attached to one’s cause. Whether we approve of what they did or not, most of us would be ready to admit—to take some random examples—that Aaliyah, Dorothea Dix, Pasteur, Lenin, Margaret Sanger, Th Empress Dowager, Nathan Bedford Forrest, Moctezuma Ilhyicamina, Prince Shotoku, Tupac Shakur, William Wirt Winchester, William Randolph Hearst, and Boy Hilton led meaningful lives. We seem to mean two things in characterizing such lives as meaningful: we asset, first, that the life in question has some dominant, over-all goal or goals which gave direction to a great many of the individual’s actions and, second, that these actions and possibly others not immediately related to overriding goals or that would have not been present if there had been no goal in their lives. #RandolphHarris 9 of 11
Let us assume that meetings between God and certain human beings do take place; let us also grant that activities commanded by God in these meetings acquire meaning by being or becoming means to the end of pleasing or obeying God. Granting all this, it does not follow that obedience of God is the only possible unifying goal. There have been devout people who were also attached to the advance of science, to the practice of medicine, or to social reform and who regarded these ends as worthy pursuing independently of any divine commandments. Occasionally it was suggested that humans were derived from special seeds or spores of life which always existed. It is well-known that the intense cold, ultraviolet radiation, and cosmic rays in outer space constitute a threat to all life. However, people still believe these germs of life came to Earth from outer space. These hypothetical germs (biospores, cosmozoa, astroplankton, panspermia) are assumed to have been carried either by meteorites or by bits of cosmic dust propelled by radiation pressure, light quanta, or other media. And we are virtually certain that the Earth has been able to support life for not more than the past three billion years. The Earth’s early atmosphere contained almost no oxygen, and there as no upper ozone layer to act as a shield against ultraviolet radiation. Hence, intense radiation reached the surface of the Earth, on which seas or pools of probiotic soup, rich in chemical elements, existed. #RandolphHaris 10 of 11
Inorganic photochemical and other reactions were set up, as a result of which organic compounds, including amino acids, were formed. Once they appeared on a sufficient scale, chemical selection would set in, because of differential utilization of available energy. Over a prolonged period, biochemical complexity and efficiency would build up in a small number of surviving systems, the immediate precursors (so-called eobionts) of living things. When there were systems that exhibited metabolism and the capacity of self-reproduction, living things themselves appeared. At this stage morphological evolution began to supersede chemical evolution. The altered physical conditions on the planet, including the presence of an oxygenic atmosphere, no longer allowed organic compounds to be formed by purely inorganic synthesis. Some scientists have contended that the origin of life can only be explained by postulating the action of a supernatural creator, or God. A living thing possess a series of attributes which sever it from the inorganic by a chasm across which there is no bridge. Hence, to account for life we are compelled to admit that at some definite point in past time it was placed upon the planet by the operation of an extramundane cause. That cause must have been living, intelligent, personal. However, this can only have been God. Life may well exist at many stations in the cosmos and not just on Earth. #RandolphHarris 11 or 11
My Friend Must be a Bird Because it Flies! Ah, Curious Friend, Thou Puzzlest Me!
Every experience and every science is possible only by means of certain nonempirical premises, such as the principles of real identity, of the continuity of existence, of constant causality or legality, and of the temporal continuity of becoming, or, in general, by means of fundamental a priori forms or principles, which constitute the organization of human cognitive powers but from whose transcendental validity by no means necessarily follows its transcendental reality. Is human life every worthwhile? Does (or can) human life have any meaning? What did freedom mean to a people who had endured and survived 250 years of enslavement in America? What did the future hold for nearly four million African Americans in 1865? True human life is part of a divinely ordained cosmic scheme and after death some human beings will be rewarded with eternal bliss, no matter what culture, race, gender they are. If we are asked to believe that all our striving is without final consequence, then life is meaningless and it scarcely matters how we live if we all end in the dust of death. According to Christianity, on the other hand, each action has vital significance. God’s grand design is life eternal for those who walk in the steps of Christ. Here is the one grand incentive to good living. As life is seen to have purpose and meaning, people find release from despair and the fear of death. #RandolphHarris 1 of 9
Whatever meaning life acquires is derived from the encounter between God and human beings. Freedom meant many things to many people. However, to most people who had been enslaved, it meant that families would stay together. Freedom meant that women and men would no longer be sexually exploited. Freedom meant that moving around without having to obtain permission. Freedom meant that labor would produce income for the laborer and not the master. Freedom meant working without the sting of the whip, thrashing against your skin and drawing blood as an incentive to work harder, faster, better, stronger, longer. Freedom meant one could own land, cultivate it, and build their dream home. Freedom meant, if charged with a crime, a trial before jury. Freedom meant voting. Freedom meant citizenship and having the same rights as White people. Years after slavery ended, a Texas woman, who had once been enslaved, called Mrs. Margrett Nillin was asked if she preferred slavery or freedom. “Well, it is this way, in slavery I owned nothing and never owed anything. In freedom I own my home and raise my family. All that causes me worriment and in slavery I had no worriment, but I prefer freedom,” reports Mrs. Margrett Nillin. #RandolphHarris 2 of 9
The meaning thus conferred upon human life cannot be understood in terms of some finite human purpose, supposedly more ultimate than the meeting itself. For what could be more ultimate than the Presence of God? It is true that God is not always near, but in times of Divine farness are by no means devoid of meaning. Times of Divine nearness do not light up themselves alone. Their meaning extends over all of life. There is a dialectic between Divine nearness and Divine farness and it points to an eschatological future in which it is overcome. Some people believed in the perishableness of all good things and the ultimate extinction of all their hopes and achievements in death. As slavery ended, the most urgent need for many freed people was finding family members who had been sold away from them. Slavery had not destroyed the African American family. Husbands, wives, and children went to great lengths to reassemble their families after the Civil War. For years and even decades after the end of slavery, advertisements appeared in the African American newspapers appealing for information about missing kinfolk. #RandolphHarris 3 of 9
The following notice was published in the Colored Tennessean on 5 August 1865: Saml. Dove wished to know of the whereabouts of his mother, Areno, his sisters Maria, Neziah and Peggy, and his brother Edmond, who were owned by Geo. Dove of Rockingham County, Shenandoah Valley, Virginia. Sold in Richmond, after which Saml and Edmond were taken to Nashville, Tennessee, by Joe Mick; Areno was left at the Eagle Tavern, Richmond. Respectfully yours, Saml Dove, Utica, New York. To be a moral individual is to be part of the human community and to be actively concerned in the life of other human beings. It is indeed undeniable that people frequently fail to bring about the ends of morally inspired acts or wishes, but phenomenological analysis discloses that the real moral value and meaning of an act does not depend on the attainment of the external goal. The good will is the moral intent or attitude. It is here that we find the existential meaning of life: Since that which is morally good contains its meaning and value within itself, it follows that it is intrinsically worth while. The existence of what is morally good is therefore better than its nonexistence. However, the existence of what is morally good is essentially connected with the existence of free moral individuals, and hence it follows that the existence of human beings as moral agents is better than their nonexistence. #RandolphHarris 4 of 9
In North Carolina, a northern journalist met a middle-age African America man plodding along, staff in hand, and apparently very footsore and tired. The nearly exhausted freedman explained that he had walked almost six hundred miles looking for his wife and children who had been sold four years earlier. There were emotional reunions as family members found each other after years of separation. Ben and Betty Dodson had been apart for twenty years when Ben found her in a refugee camp after the war “Glory! Glory! Hallelujah,” he shouted as he hugged his wife. “This is my Betty, sure yes. I found you at last. I was haunted and haunted until I tracked you up here. I was bound to hunt until I found you if you were still alive.” The hunger for the love of their family and the faith of God sure was apparent. There was nothing more valuable than family to Americans at one time. Other searches had more heart-wrenching results, however. Husbands and wives sometimes learned that their spouses had remarried during the separation. Believing that his wife had died, the husband of Laura Spicer remarried—only to learn after the war that Laura was still alive. Sadly, he wrote to her, but refused to meet with her. “I would come and see you, but I know I could not bear it. I want to see you, but I do not want to see you. I love you just as well as I did the last day I saw you, and it will not do for you and I to meet.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 9
Tormented, he wrote again pledging his love. “Laura I do not think that I have changed any at all since I saw you last—I think of you and my children every day of my life. Laura, I do love you the same. My love to you never has failed. Laura, truly, I have got another wife, and I am very sorry that I am. You feel and seem to me as much like my dear loving wife, as you ever did Laura.” The conclusion is inevitable: the best or least undesirable form of existence is reached when, finally, we descend benath the threshold of consciousness; for only there so we see individual pain entirely disappear. Sometimes people reach a negative answer on the ground that unhappiness usually or necessarily outweighs happiness. If the generative act were an affair of pure rational reflection, could the human race continue to exists? Perhaps few who have directly observed the worst agonies and tortures that may be the lot of human beings or animals would subscribe to this judgment, but we have to be careful not to play down the horrors of life because we have to correct the miseries of the human scene. #RandolphHarris 6 of 9
One freedman testified to the close relations that bound many enslaved families when he replied bitterly to the claim that he had a kind master who had fed him and never used the whip. “Kind! Yes, he gives men corn enough, and he gives me pork enough, and he never gives me one lick with the whip, but where is my wife?—Where are my Children? Take away the pork, I say; take away the corn, I can work and raise these for myself, but give me back my wife of my heart, and give me back my darling children, as they were sold away without my consent. Emancipation was also a traumatic experience for many former slave masters. A Virginia freedman remembered that Miss Polly died right after the surrender, she was so heart broken that her African America were going to leave her alone and lonely. Another former slave, Robert Falls, recalled that his master assembled the enslaved people to inform them they were free. “I hate to do it, but I must. You all are not my human capital anymore. You are free. Just as free as I am. Here I have raised you all to work for me, and now you are going to leave me. I am an old man, and I cannot get along without you. I do not know what I am going to do.” In less than a year, he was dead. Robert Falls attributed his master’s death to the end of slavery. “It killed him.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 9
Family bonds are formed in many ways. And, perhaps a lot goes unsaid, but the fact is that people need other people to survive. In preindustrial societies a kin group may live and work together, share economic resources, and conduct religious and social activities in common. However, declines in household size are becoming more common in both developed and developing countries, because of lower fertility, increased migration, and much greater numbers of persons living alone than at any time in the last. Today, with the exceptions of parents, siblings, and a handful of other close kin, many White, middle-class Americas see relatives rarely—typically at family reunions or holiday celebrations. Moreover, they do not expect much of their more distant relatives, nor do they feel particularly obligated to them. For those at the top of the stratification hierarchy also, such as the Cresleigh, Harris, Hearst, Hilton, and Winchester families, kinship networks are important and often provide their members with homes, jobs, and other support. The less affluent also maintain close bounds with relatives. There is a will to live, and that will is fueled by human concern and human companionship. It makes people feel good to know someone is concerned about them, one lady expressed that concern people have for her is the source of her will to live most eloquently. #RandolphHarris 8 of 9
Some people seem to have more social support than others. Some seniors lay in their beds for weeks in the hospital, and only medical personnel visit them. However, the fact that someone cares and their faith in God keeps them alive. “The things I shall tell you are made known unto me by an Angel from God. And he said unto me: Awake; and I awoke, and behold he stood before me. And he said unto me: Awake, and hear the words which I shall tell thee; for behold, I am come to declare unto you the glad tidings of great joy. For the Lord hath heard thy prayers, and hath judged of thy righteousness, and hath sent me to declare unto thy people, that they may also be filled with joy. For behold, the time cometh, and is not far distant, that with power, the Lord Omnipotent who reigneth, who was, and is from all eternity to all eternity, shall come down from Heaven among the children of men, and shall dwell in a tabernacle of clay, and shall go forth amongst people, working mighty miracles, such a healing the sick, raising the dead, and causing the lame to walk, the blind to receive their sight, and the deaf to hear, and curing all manner of aliments. And he shall cast out the adversary, or the evil spirits which dwell in the hearts of people,” reports Mosiah 3.2-6. #RandolphHarris 9 of 9
Two Blue Jays Went Out at Noon and Waltzed Above a Stream
Doubt must be genuine, not feigned, and unless it is employed in good faith, one is likely to err in doubting real evidence, just as, without methodological doubt one is likely to err in allowing unwarranted belief. Accordingly, doubt has no privileged status over belief. Ability to attain truth as well as falsehood must underlie the quest for truth, and freedom is thus a condition of the possibility of knowing truth as well as of being mistake. “Better for one person to perish than for a nation to dwindle in unbelief,” reports 1 Nephi 4.13. Freedom is a double dilemma. Either causal necessity or freedom is a fundamental truth, and each doctrine must be asserted either necessarily or freely. If necessity is the true doctrine, my affirmation thereof is eo ipso necessary, but since neither doubt nor belief relative to evidence would function in that determination, doubt results. If necessity is true but I affirm freedom, then in addition to my inconsistency (for my affirmation is made necessarily), there is only a subjective foundation for knowledge and morality. Given the truth of determinism, erroneous as well as true judgments are necessary, and any supposed distinction between them is illusory. “Come to knowledge of true Messiah,” reports 1 Nephi 10.14. Stop listening to the tyranny of the natural life and win freedom into the spiritual life. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
According to the hypothesis of freedom, if I freely affirm global necessity I am fundamentally inconsistent. If I affirm freedom under the same hypothesis, not only is my affirmation consistent with the hypothesis but I have a foundation for knowledge and morality. Under the double dilemma, the only satisfactory alternative is freely to affirm freedom. Freedom is essentially the power to add some novel reality to the existing World. Causality must be explained through the freedom and not vice versa. The data that are present to given event of consciousness arise out of the past relative to that event; they are past actualities, but present potentialities for the internal character o that event of consciousness out of which a determining decision is made. Human consciousness is a succession of self-creative events, each of which is given its ancestor selves as well as other data, and each of which is partially causa sui, a dependent independence. Thus, the totality of causal conditions of any human experience does not make this experience necessary, but only possible, while internal decision makes it contingently actual. All choice-making contains some arbitrary. “Because people are redeemed from Fall, they have become free forever,” 2 Nephi 2.26. The Savior has set us free from sin. We must reply on this energy. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
In extending these doctrines to theology, and taking as axiomatic the concept that freedom, responsibility, and moral and religious values depends upon choice-decisions that an omniscient God need not know future contingents, since, in relation to any divine experience, they are not yet existent. To be knowable is to be determinate, and if all were known from eternity, then all would be eternally determinate, and time and choice-making would be illusions. Also since contingents are unequivocally in part causa sui, they are not wholly dependent on divine power. Far from viewing divine power as absolute total control, it is insisted that the only power worthy of God is the far greater one of creating self-creators. Real choice in the World is incompatible with all-embracing necessity, and it is neither metaphysically requisite nor religiously desirable that God be wholly immutable and eternal. God must have a temporal aspect in order to come to know contingents as they are realized; thus he remains always omniscient in knowingly all there is to know. This theology is thus that of an eternal-temporal being, his omniscience and omnipotence being relative to the irreducible contingency and self-creativity in the World. #RandolpHarris 3 of 13
The essence of the self is consciousness of action against the resistance and limitation of reality. This could be rendered: I will, or I strive, therefore I am. Thus, personality is existence as it is formed by the double cogito: hindered by obstacles, elevating itself by and towards value. People participates in absolute and transcendent value. Although value outruns one and is not wholly one’s creation, it is made determinate by one in a given, concrete situation. Reality, then, is at once the organ of self-creation and an obstacle to it. In a sense it degrades value, yet it actualizes value by making it determinate. We are, moreover, called back to awareness of the value-creating source in which we participate. This is a spiritual flow, or upsurge (essor). Some obstacle has to break the continuity of the upsurge before the self, concentrating upon it the body’s energy, begins to will. The willing self owes its being and consciousness to the obstacles it encounters. We participate in a World of absolute value and a World brute reality and create ourselves unceasingly through them. Therefore, our experiences, even the undesirable ones, make us who we are, even if it is not who we intended to be when we set foot on this journey in life. However, the important thing is to keep faith in God and follow his doctrines and covenants so we can like who we are and feel good about our lives. Because as long as we have faith, our dream will still come true. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Once we realize all that it cost God to forgive us, we will be held as a vise, constrained by the love God. The worth of a person does not consist in the truth one possesses, or thinks one possesses, but in the pains one has taken to attain that truth. For one’s powers are extended not through possession but through the search for truth. In this alone one’s ever-growing perfection consists. Possession makes one lazy, indolent, and proud. If God held all truth in his right hand and in his left the everlasting striving after truth, so that I should always and everlastingly be mistaken and said to me, “Choose,” with humility I would pick on the left hand and say, “Father grant me that; absolute truth is for thee alone.” What is required of humanity is not to assent to the propositions of a creed, but sincerity, human love, and tolerance. Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the less affluent by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed. Though there are less affluent people in our society, the average American has enough food and clothing—at least enough so that these are not one’s only concerns in life. As one moves up the scale of motivations during one’s early childhood and concentrated more and more on the second level of the hierarchy, safety and security needs. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
Children are explorers, testers, discoverers for themselves. How else can I discover me? A small boy (five years old) called Trayvon told me, “I am smarter than people thing I am!” I asked him, “In which way?” His answer was….”I do dangerous things (like walking to the store by myself) and I do not get hurt!” I did not tell him that he should not nor that he should. How else can there be freedom? How else can there be joy? Naturally, it is important to teach a child how to avoid danger. However, in teaching this lesson, the adult must be sure the child does not also learn to fear the source of potential anger, in and of itself. We have an innate propensity to get ourselves noticed, and noticed favorably, by our kind. No more fiendish punishment could be devised, were such a thing physically possible, than that one should be turned loose and remain absolutely unnoticed by all the members thereof. As one grows through childhood, the individual moves from being dominated by the need to learn and maintain one’s safety and security to the stage of testing out one’s abilities in a more social area. However, we learn if we put our trust in human beings first, then end result will be our despair and hopelessness toward everyone. We must trust what God’s grace can do. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
Life, as we live it today, is more highly socialized, more urbanized, more—so far as external relationships are concerned—standardized than it used to be. The World has become uncomfortably small; we have not yet gained a complete control of our excessive procreational activity; so that there are far too many of us, and, being so closely crowded together, we have to adopt all sorts of new precautions to avoid friction and permit of the greatest amount of mutual freedom available within our unduly narrow frontiers. So many of the old traditional social taboos having become antiquated or no longer adequate, there has been a furious activity in making new laws and regulations, without a due recognition of the fact that old taboos can only be replaced by new taboos, and that mere legal enactments, enforced, or left unenforced, by paid officials or the police, to be effective mist themselves become taboos, printed on the fleshy tablets of the individual citizen’s heart. And as a supernatural miracle of God’s grace, we stand justified, not because we are sorry for our sins, or because we have repented, but because of what God has done. Through identification with God, we can be freed from sin and have God’s very righteousness imparted as a gift to us. “The LORD your God will put all these curses on your enemies who hate and persecute you,” Deuteronomy 30.7. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
Challenging—and being challenged by—other is essential for our growth as is nurturance, but this does not mean that relational challenge is always a good thing. If challenge is not delivered with at least some compassion, it will tend to overpower rather than empower, and it will generate either submission or rebellion. If it is too soft or indirect, it will likely lack in needed impact; if it is aggressive, it will more often than not be met with defensiveness, defiance, or a caving in that does no one any real good. One of the most difficult things about a challenge itself is that it is inherently confrontational—not in some melodramatic way, but in the literal sense of the word confront, to stand in front of. Nothing sideways or devious or passive-aggressive about it. To confront is to directly come up against, to be face-to-face with. Unfortunately, this often carries some negative connotations, suggestive of hostility or pushiness. However, compassionate confrontation does not have to a contradiction. If we engage in it with strongly embodied presence, compassion, and clarity, confrontation can be a life enhancing process. This in itself is a real challenge, asking plenty of us, but not so much that it is not doable. “Great blessing of the Lord upon the family of Lehi in wilderness,” 1 Nephi 17.2 #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
Challenging—and being challenged by—other is essential for our growth as is nurturance, but this does not mean that relational challenge is always a good thing. If challenge is not delivered with at least some compassion, it will tend to overpower rather than empower, and it will generate either submission or rebellion. If it is too soft or indirect, it will likely lack in needed impact; if it is aggressive, it will more often than not be met with defensiveness, defiance, or a caving in that does no one any real good. One of the most difficult things about a challenge itself is that it is inherently confrontational—not in some melodramatic way, but in the literal sense of the word confront, to stand in front of. Nothing sideways or devious or passive-aggressive about it. To confront is to directly come up against, to be face-to-face with. Unfortunately, this often carries some negative connotations, suggestive of hostility or pushiness. However, compassionate confrontation does not have to a contradiction. If we engage in it with strongly embodied presence, compassion, and clarity, confrontation can be a life enhancing process. This in itself is a real challenge, asking plenty of us, but not so much that it is not doable. “Great blessing of the Lord upon the family of Lehi in wilderness,” 1 Nephi 17.2 #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
Managers are typically evaluated as to how effective and efficient they are. Managing effectively and efficiently requires certain skills—leadership, technical expertise, conceptual skills, analytical skills, and human relations skills. “The Lord’s power is over all inhabitants of the Earth,” reports 3 Nephi 4.1. It is important to commit organizational resources to develop innovative goods and services and expand internationally to obtain new customers for the organization’s products. Good managers must move quickly to take corrective action to deal with unexpected problems facing the organization from the external environment, such as a crisis like an oil spill, or from the internal environment, such as producing faulty good or services. “Therefore, blessed are they who humble themselves without being compelled to be humble; or rather, in other words, bless is one that believes in the word of God,” reports Alma 32.16. For a business to stay afloat, one must allocate organizational resources among different functions and departments of the business; set budgets and salaries of middle and first-level managers. One must also work with suppliers, distributors, and labor unions to reach agreements about the quality and price of input, technical, and human resources; work with other organizations to establish agreements to pool resources to work on joint projects. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
Healthy challenge is not an attack. It asserts, sometimes forcefully so, but does not aggress or violate. Nor does it shame the other, though it sometimes may—without trying to do so—elicit a healthy shame in the other that catalyzes their conscience regarding questionable behavior on their part, while helping draw forth the kind of vulnerability that makes heartfelt remorse possible. Managers must also be able to monitor, evaluate the performance of other managers and employees in different function and take corrective action to improve their performance; watch for changes occurring in the external and internal environment that may affect the organization in the future, and inform employees about changes taking place in the external and internal environment that will affect them and the organization; one must also communicate to employees the organization’s vision and purpose. “Turn to the Lord with full purpose in heart,” reports Mosiah 7.33. One must also be a competent spokesperson. A successful business has the ability to launch a national advertising campaign to promote new goods and services; give speeches to inform the local community about the organization’s future intentions. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
A good leader has the ability to influence employees to work toward organizational goals. Strong leaders manage and pay attention to the culture of their organizations and the needs of their customers. The intention of a healthy challenge, however fiery its expression might be, is not to dominate nor diminish others, but to clearly highlight and buttress life-giving possibilities, not leaving obstruction to well-being unaddressed. People tend to be more at ease with the delivery of this than with the reception of it, so sometimes the greater challenge is not to let one’s reactivity to being challenged get in the way of opening to it (assuming that such challenge is not abusive). Interpersonal cohesiveness is an important quality because the figurehead has to outline future organizational goals to employees at company meetings; open new corporate headquarters building; state the organization’s ethical guidelines and the principle of behavior employees are to follow in their dealings with customers and suppliers. Leader should possess the ability to provide an example for employees to follow; give direct commands and orders to subordinates; make decisions concerning the use of human and technical resources, and mobilize employee support for specific organizational goals. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
Being a liaison is another quality one has to display. Coordinating the work of managers in different departments; establishing alliances between different organizations to share resources to produce new goods and services is a priority and must be done with good intentions. Of equal importance is that we do not exclude from our challenging of another—however strong that might be or might need to be—and that we remain as open as possible to however the challenge might be received. Much of our work here is not to armor ourselves with our challenge—giving—hiding behind its delivery—but rather to remain transparently present as we express it, not letting our passion or conviction obscure or dilute our sensitivity to our recipient. Our succinct, well-grounded intuition, in as fittingly assertive and skillful a form as possible. And there is often a vulnerable piece here: through such challenge, we sometimes might risk our relationship with others, even as we perhaps recognize that it is an even greater risk to not thus speak up. A healthy manager can be fierce and can be gentle. One have to be emotionally vital and emotionally muted. Great leaders can be powerful motivators because they demonstrate a great deal of trust and confidence in their employees. If we do not deliever, we drift on stagnant seas, removed from not just the reefs, but also the depths. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Great Spirit Please Give to Me a Heaven Not so Large as Yours but Large Enough for Me
To these two eyes, weak as they may be, you are more beautiful than anybody I can think of. Do you make me happy? You make me happy in every way. When it comes to making a guy happy, you wrote the book. Feelings and spiritual qualities as inspiration, creative genius, virtue, and wisdom give emotions a place beside reason. There is an inner light, which allows God to satisfy the inner light of human beings. All experiences of human beings emerge against the background of the limited individual being, participation in the Absolute Being. By their relation to participation, which is constant and eternal, individual beings establish their relation to the World, and through the notions of essence and existence they establish their spiritual identity. The Absolute Beings is pure actuality, the infinite source of existential dynamism, and an endless reservoir of all possible forms of essences, from which individual beings receive their own limited existence. In spite of this direct and continuous dependence of the individual on God as the source, human freedom is safeguarded by the self-creativity of the individual. Indeed, from the human point of view, participation is a pursuit of an ideal which constantly moves ahead of our efforts. In this pursuit we create our spiritual self, and our experiences, moving onward, progressively acquire a unique form. Our effort in life is meant to discover this form, which has its prototype in the reservoir of Being and is our spiritual essence. #RandolphHarris 1 of 10
The accomplishment of our essence at our departure from the mortal realm mean the radical passage from limited existence into the transfinite Being. Thus, participation appears as the means of a person’s ultimate redemption, toward which everything occurring in the Universe converges. The World is the interval which separates pure Act (Being) from the limited act of participation (human existence). Matter, in limiting the spirit, offers the resistance necessary for the self to transcend itself. The World comprises three modes of reality: the World of things, that of idea, and that of individual beings (consciousnesses). The material World plays the necessary role of separating beings; ideas give spiritual meaning to things. The World of individual consciousnesses is necessarily conscious because the essence of the Absolute Being from which they proceed is itself perfect inwardness; as such it is eternally fecund and intended to communicate the creative act to beings which, in turn, propagate it in self-creation. Freedom is the essence of human destiny. However, whereas the Absolute Act is synonymous with absolute freedom, human, the participating act, is limited by the natural spontaneity of the instinct. Consequently, the life of the spirit, which is the ideal of human life, is a fighting toward gradual liberation from the passivity peculiar to instinct. #RandolphHarris 2 of 10
We become fully human by subordinating natural spontaneity of instinct. We become fully human by subordinating natural spontaneity to reflection and rational discipline. Human freedom originates in this process; and this conversion of spontaneity into freedom is the real vehicle of participation. The spiritual being is endowed with potentialities for the accomplishment of its pre-established essence. Our vocation is to seek to make our actual selves coincide with the better part of ourselves, which represents these potentialities. This self-searching and self-controlling effort presupposes an act of consent to our vocation of the spirit. Everyday is a chance for us to rehabilitate our existence, as even the least significant instant is an opportunity for consent to the self-creative effort, and thereby, an opportunity for participation in the Absolute. Human communion is the ideal of wisdom as it is seen to be possessed in the union between a certain asceticism and everyday life and love. “And they arose from the Earth, and he said unto them: Blessed are ye because of your faith. And now behold, my joy is full,” reports 3 Nephi 17.20. We must remember God’s words of assurance, and be fully of courage. #RandolphHarris 3 of 10
We ought to realize that no matter what we have done in life, no matter what we do, God and Christ will still love us just much as they did before we may not have reached our goal. God and Christ do not separate themselves from people who are learning, from the people who are still trying to express their faith. Love from God is not earned. It is not merited; if it is, it is justice and reciprocity and reward. Love comes from a loving heart, and God’s love is unconditional. And he loves the worst of us and the best of us equally. We cause God to suffer when we do wrong, when he sees us live our lives in ways that destroy us, and when he sees us hurting other people—this must cause him pain. Life, however, is always a discipline, even for the lower animals as well as for people; it can be so dangerous that only by submitting to some sort of discipline can we become equipped to live in any true sense at all. This disappearance of the discipline of the old external taboos thus imposes upon us, inescapably, the creation of a new self-discipline of internal and personal taboos. If we are not responsible to an outside order which we no longer regard as valid, then we are responsible before the inner tribunal of the self, which cannot but be valid for us so long as we are alive. “The Lord has made bare his holy arm in the eyes of all the nations; and all the ends of the Earth shall see the salvation of God,” reports 3 Nephi 17.20. #RandolphHarris 4 of 10
The fully knowledge of the World made available by an encyclopedia of human knowledge, as there already exist vast stores of experience held by groups of skilled workers, or by individuals, that are not fully utilized, if we collected and systematically arranged, and their full product was obtained for understanding, such an encyclopedia would be conducive to piety by bringing out the richness and variety in the World, and thus testifying to God’s wisdom and power. Many people desire a fuller knowledge of nature of things because it will increase piety and devotion to God. And so far from it being an easy and pleasant task, as some may at first have thought when they saw the old taboos melting away, it involves difficulties which their grandparents never knew. If it means the making of new and personal taboos, it involves a slow self-development and self-responsibility, which is not in itself a continual discipline, but runs the risk of conflict with others engaged in the same task and with the same sincerity. For what we may still term morals, since it has now become an individual outcome, will not be entirely the same for all individuals. All our moralities, indeed, cannot fail to be modifications of a common pattern because we all belong to the same community; but the differences involve a greater degree of mutual understanding and forbearance than when uniform taboos were imposed from outside. #RandolphHarris 5 of 10
It would seem that for many years there can be no common emotional or intellectual background which may be take for granted; and if in the result not a little of human’s power must be spent in creating one’s own scheme of values, still there is no immediate remedy, for it is in the nature of contemporary thinking that it demands an effort as individual as it must be unsparingly honest if it is to have any meaning for our generation. Although two persons need not have qualitatively the same sense experiences, they can and do communicate, and this communication somehow depends on the nature of the space relations underlying the congruity of each person’s perceptions. So if the people of the former generation now leaving the World are often shocked to see swept away the old rigid taboos they were brought up in, they ma leave it in peace. Life, after all, may not have been so hard for them, not so hard, perhaps, as for the younger generation. None the less, that younger generation, also, may continue to carry lightly it burden, on youthful shoulders, joyfully creating a New World. No two things can be alike, but in a material thing there is always something that bears the traces of its earlier state, so that it s cause can be discovered in it. This element is the mind, since matter itself is incapable of containing such traces. #RandolphHarris 6 of 10
From this point of view, God must be conceived as surveying all; the different possible Worlds and decreeing the existence of the one containing the greatest perfection. Here it must be remembered that what exists depends on God’s will, and unless possible demanded existence, God would have no reason for admitting any of them into existence. However, once this reason is given God, he can and does impose conditions of perfection. What God allows to exist, what he chooses as best, is chosen from natural characteristics, since to give us things what is not natural to them would involve a constant miracle. The natural tendency of a body moving in a curved path is to move along the tangent to the curve; bodies cannot naturally attract one another; matter is not naturally capable of thinking; there is a natural and not a merely arbitrary connection between our perceptions of secondary qualities and the bodily movements giving rise to these perceptions. God would not do anything merely because he willed it: if there were no objective reason to determine God’s will, he would not act at all. Obscenity is a permanent element of human social life and corresponds to a deep need of the human mind, or, for all we know to the contrary, of the mind. It is not confined to any nation or any stage of culture, low or high, naïve or highly educated. If you are unwilling to hear me because you do not like or respect people of my gender, race, profession, or background, then I am spilling my message onto unreceptive ground. #RandolphHarris 7 of 10
Obscenity definitely exists and it recognized among the people of the World, it is even manifested by the greatest people of genius of all races. We forget that we are dealing with a fundamental and inevitable human impulse, and that it is our business to preserve those aspects of it which are good and to minimize those which are evil. When everything is obscene it becomes impossible to say what obscenity is. Hence the endless definitions of obscenity, and their absurdity. Some love darkness. That love of darkness is shrewd. For, if we think of it, any attempt whatever to define obscenity—once we have put aside the vague emotional terms of abuse, foul, filthy, lewd, disgusting, and so forth—in cool and precise terms cannot bring us to any crime against society. Influence through the mass communication need not be blatant—it can be very subtle indeed. Even when communicators are not making a direct attempt to sell us something, they can succeed in influencing the way we look at the World. Consciousness-raising is the process of making members of groups subject to discrimination aware of the ways in which they are being put down. It is impossible to estimate the social damage which has been done by outworn taboos of obscenity. Raising consciousness within the oppressed group is one thing, and raising consciousness among the oppressors is quite another. That is a job for God. “For the Earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea,” reports Habakkuk 2.14. #RandolphHarris 8 of 10
The human relation problems yet to be explored are immense, and the solution will come no more easily than did the others. It is important to communicate. It I want to not-communicate with you, all I have to do is to code my message in symbols or language you cannot possibly understand. If my intent is to confuse your, lose you, make you upset or angry, cause you to feel inferior or to dislike me, then I can select message symbols in such a way as to accomplish any of those exact results. Or I can simply keep my mouth shut and send non-verbal messages (tight mouth, glared looks, clenched fist, turned back), and claim innocence (“I was not sending that message!”). To me, one of the most baffling aspects of the behavior of men and women in highly-responsible positions in some segments of our society, is their comparative lack of concern for—perhaps it is lack of awareness of—the factor of communication, as such, in the problems and situations in which they all have to deal. It is communication that makes human society possible. Children use words to express how they feel; adults use words to hide how they feel. Sometimes every reality can prove a bitter disillusionment. Therefore, we must practice love towards humanity for solidarity and compassion, not just out of love of God, but out of a desire to combat the cruelty of destiny and of nature. #RandolphHarris 9 of 10
Necessity and simplicity of nature exclude the presence of arbitrary or miraculous forces, as well as the efficacy of magic and of those forces to which it appeals. For communication to take place, the receiver must also be receptive. That means more than just having clean ears. One must also want or need to get the message and be willing to decode and fit it into one existing pattern of ideas or associations. If a student receiver is asleep in class, even if the professor’s must exciting and beautiful message will not get through to him. Another important factor in communication is the context in which a communication is being attempted. Suppose you and I are at a noisy party. I want to enjoy myself and not talk shop. You want to ask me a whole group of interesting psychological questions. I may turn off and refuse to receive, in a way I probably would not do in the classroom, on the campus, or perhaps at a different kind of part. The setting, thus, will have a lot to do with the communication or non-communication that take place. Today, many people are becoming increasingly aware that if they use certain words or body language, they will be considered sexist when they are talking to others. In such a situation, these loaded words or symbols do not communicate what the person intends; they have a different meaning for the other party. #RandolphHarris 10 of 10
Dare You See a Soul with the Successful Face of Love and Joy at the White Heat?
Vision is one of our most dominant sense. Good lighting is truly everything. Light, natural or artificial, helps us to define spatial relationships, and it stands to reason that many architects must concern themselves with light. Interior spaces demand lighting, either natural, artificial, or a combination of both. Our sense can be deeply affected by the quality of its light, as it is aesthetically the most visually pleasing and complimentary to both the inside and outside of a house. Because our sense are intertwined, others aspects of our spaces, such as acoustic features, artwork, and furnishings, also feel better when lighting is good. Lighting is also appealing because it is dynamic—brightness of light during different times of the day and color fluctuates with passing clouds. The spatial relationships demonstrate how important color—and, by extension, light—is to our experience of space. Electric light technology has made great efforts to emulate the natural patterns of light, and this is an indication that we appreciate and benefit from natural lighting as a species. One of the most dramatically lit spaces in all modern architecture is Le Corbusier’s church of Notre-Dame-du-Haut at Ronchamp in eastern France. The light is admitted through narrow stained-glass windows on the exterior southern wall, but as the window boxes expand through the thick wall, the light broadens into wide shafts that possess an unmistakable spiritual quality. The effect is one of extraordinary beauty. #RandolphHarris 1 of 7
Architects understand that if they are interested in representing the World, they must learn to incorporate the effects of light in their construction. With increased attention to healthy living environment, people are looking for eye-catching homes that maximize natural light in floor plans that flow, which ass immeasurable value to their homes, as it is one of the largest investments. These homes tend to have more character and soul. They allow the buyer to take a journey and spend time exploring experiences and create the kinds of rooms, which represent places that makes one feel good. Lighting affects the ambiance and mood of a space and can help bring value to the function of architecture, as it plays a role in the way people experience and understand the atmospheric perspective of the architecture. The sense of space that light creates can allow us to see the and appreciate the beauty of the area around us when it is luminous and has intense light by giving the sense that the rooms stretch beyond the limits of vision. This can bring an emotional value to architecture—it helps create a spiritual experience as if we are surrounded by Heavenly light. Whether it is daylight or artificial lighting, light draws attention to textures, colors, and forms of a space, helping architecture achieve its purpose. #RandolphHarris 2 of 7
In Heaven there is only pure light, but the fact that we can experience color—which, according to the laws of optics, depends upon light mixing with darkness—promises us the hope of salvation. Aesthetics is where designers and architects focus on the emotional impact and the balance of lighting because they want the people who occupy them houses to be awed as they walk through the doors, and have the ability to show off their product. In many causes light symbolizes the spiritual World, and it is powerful and revealing. It also helps occupants feel safe when navigating a room or entire home. They are able to see the floor and walls around the, which create a feeling of reassurance. Along with a breathtaking layout, the open floor plans and many windows allow for an incredibly energy efficient space. Lighting improves people’s lives, makes a house more beautiful by drawing attention to areas, all while making it easier to see. Ambient luminescence is the use of background lights that illuminates an entire space. It can suggest the freedom of space and can suggest infinity. Accent lighting is a layer that can by dynamic and colorful brilliance aim to excite the optic nerves, and in turn stimulates the body and spirit, quickens the appetite, awakens curiosity, and sharpens the wit. #RandolphHarris 3 of 7
Some people like to see a beautiful chandelier welcoming them in the house, and lavish wall sconces light the hallway, and areas of the house to be accentuated with pod lights, ceiling fans, pillars, and other architectural features such as sliding glass doors. To enhance vertical a home, light should be directed towards wall surfaces. If there is a wall that is a different texture, or simply one that the occupants should notice more than others, wall washing is a great tool. It will draw attention to the wall and make it appear as its own architectural elements instead of a piece of an entire room. Window treatments can also add style and functionality to a room. When thinking about lighting design, architects always have to take into consideration energy efficiency. Architecture has evolved to design greener buildings and homes. The goal is to be more focused on energy consumption and sustainability. Some new homes, like Cresleigh Domain, even come with solar panels included with the purchase of the home. New smart light designs focus on controlling the lighting from every room of the house. Light dimmers dominate newer designs because they allow for controlling the intensity of the light in a specific area. Smart lighting allows a person to complete tasks in a certain area while only using the light necessary to do so. #RandolphHarris 4 of 7
When one spends a lot of time under fluorescent light, the brain tends to get overstimulated. This overstimulation might make people feel uneasy or nervous. This feeling affects concentration and reduces productivity. Light dimmers and warmer lights tend to help with this issue. As humans, we a have built-in biological clock. Our exposure to daylight influences the process. Too much exposure to bright light during the evening can delay our sleeping schedule. Dimming the lights before bed, however, has a calming and drowsy effect. Compliment colors in rooms can highlight the structural design. There is perhaps no better evidence of the psychological impact a change in intensity can make than to look at the newly restored frescoes of the Sistine Chapel ceiling at the Vatican in Rome, painted by Michelangelo between 1508 and 1512. Restoration was begun in 1980 and was completed in 1995. The process was relatively simple. A solvent called AB 57, mixed with a fungicide and antibacterial agent and a cellulose gel so that it would not drip from the ceiling, was painted on to a small section of the fresco with a bristle brush. The AB 57 mixture was allowed to sit for three minutes, and then it was removed with a sponge and water that also removed the grime. The process was repeated in the dirtiest areas. The entire operation was documented in great detail by the Nippon Television Network of Japan, which funded the entire restoration project. #RandolphHarris 5 of 7
Restorers have discovered that the dull, somber hue always associated with Michelangelo were not the result of his palette, that is, the range of colors he preferred to use, but of centuries of accumulated dust, smoke, grease, and varnishes made of animal glue painted over the ceiling by earlier restorers. The colors are in fact much more saturated and intense that they seem, beside the golden tones of the unrestored surface, almost garish. As a result, there has been some debate about the metrics of the cleaning. Architectural trends are always evolving to make rooms and buildings more sophisticated. By adding a certain color or a combination of colors, one can simply change one’s mood, one’s room by creating optical illusion and make it seem smaller or larger. Color also gives us a certain state of mine, can energize us, can cheer us, can make us feel safe, calm, relax, can increase the ability to concentrate or remind us of pleasant things. Texture can also bring a perfectly fine design up to enviable levels. Texture is the sensation caused by the external surface of objects received through the sense of touch. Paint can be enhanced by adding texture to the walls. It has the ability to spark a mood or drama in a space without having to change out the furnishings, flooring, and architectural details. #RandolphHarris 6 of 7
Textured wall paneling is sold in sheets that can be attached to the wall, and then painted over. Several wall panel varieties come in different colors, or many home owners prefer to leave them white. Depending on the aesthetic one is trying to create, bold textured wall panels are a nice option for one’s interior walls. Many people like to use ship lap on walls, brick, stone, crushed formica in the paint to look like crystals, or Lincrusta wallpapers, which has various styles and patterns. Some people have walls that look art work. Other texture techniques used on interior walls involve painting murals, patterns, and even trompe l’oeil. Trompe l’oeil is an artistic technique that involves painting realistic images and scenes to give the illusion of textures, and realism. This is used on walls to give a room depth, character, or to change the mood of a room dramatically. Walls that have painted to look like artwork can be done by artisans or interior wall professionals. There are also wallpapers and do it yourself murals that mimic hand painted artwork on walls. Whichever is your method of application, the results can be stunning. Let us look deeply into our own lives, setting our own goals and focusing our plans to align with God’s in a way that will ultimately lead us toward our precious privilege to return and receive blessings. “God has entrusted you with these things, which are sacred, which he will keep and preserve for a wise purpose in one, that he may show forth his power unto future generations,” Alma 37.15. #RandolphHarris 7 of 7
