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A Great Soul Contains the Diary of the Human Race and Changes Lives for the Better!

December 11, 2019 3:18 am

It must have been midnight when I awoke. I do not recall the face of the clock; only the feeling of deep night, and that it was spring and that I wanted walk outside and talk to the Moon and Stars for a while. Were it possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, perhaps we would endure our sadness with greater confidence than our joys, for they are the moments when something new has entered us, something unknown. People learn to listen to silence. We can hear the infinite number of sounds we never hear at all—the unending crystalline sounds of the cockatiels, a breeze blowing lightly through the golden hay, a thrush singing in the low bushes beyond the meadow. And we suddenly realize that this is something—the World of silence is populated by a myriad of creatures and a myriad of sounds. European existentialists, finally, succinctly characterize presence as dasein, which means, literally, to “be there.” Hell is other people. From the beginning humans have served the appetites of one another in the most varying ways, but these were always reducible to a single theme: the need for fuel for one’s own aggrandizement and immunity. Human use one another to assure their personal victory over death. The death fear of the ego is lessened by the killing, the sacrifice, of the other; through the death of the other, one buys oneself free from the penalty of dying, of being killed. No wonder people are addicted to war. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

When it comes to enemies and strangers, the ego can consign them to the limbo of death without even a second thought. Because they deny that they want control over their environment, others beings, and also deny their wish for immortality, modern beings live in illusion; and it is precisely because of this illusion that humankind cannot get control over social evils like war. This is what makes war irrational: each person has the same hidden problem, and as antagonists obsessively work their cross purposes, the result is truly demonic; the film Queen of the Damned summed this up beautifully. Not only enemies but even friends and loved ones are fair fuel for our own perpetuation. In our unconscious we daily and hourly deport all who stand in our way, all who have offended or injured us, if pressured, would be unwilling to sacrifice someone else in our place. The exception to this is of course the hero. We admire him or her precisely because he or she is willing to give one’s life for others instead of taking theirs for his or hers. Heroism is an unusual reversal of routine values, and it is another thing that makes war so uplifting, as humankind has long known: war is a ritual for the emergence of heroes, and so for the transmutation of common, selfish values. In war beings live their own ennoblement. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

However, what we are reluctant to admit is that the admiration of the hero is a vicarious catharsis of our own fears, fears that are deeply hidden; and this is what plunges us into uncritical hero worship: what the hero does seem so superlative to us. Thus from another point of view we see that it is true that beings are enslaved by their own illusions based on their repressions. The logic of scapegoating, then, is based on terrestrial narcissism and hidden fear. If luck is when the arrow hits the fellow next to you, then scapegoating is pushing the fellow into its path—with special alacrity if one is a stranger to you. A particularly pungent phrasing of the logic of scapegoating one’s own death is as though the sacrifice were to say to God after appraising how nature feeds voraciously of life, “If this is what you want, here, take it!—but leave me alone. If anyone still think that this is merely cleaver phrasing in the minds of alienated intellectuals trying to make private sense out of the evil of their World, let one consult the daily papers. Almost every year there is a recorded sacrifice of human life in remote areas of Chile to appease the Earthquake gods. There have been fifteen recent officially reported cases of human sacrifice in India—one being that of a four-year-old boy sacrificed to appease a Hindu goddess, and another involving a west Indian immigrant couple in England who sacrificed their 16-year-old son, following prayer and meditation, to ward off the death of the mother. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

In the narcissism of Earthly bodies, where each is imprisoned fatally in one’s own finite integument, everyone is alien to oneself and subject to the status of scapegoat for one’s own life. The logic of ending the lives of others in order to affirm our own life unlocks much that puzzles us in history, much that with out modern minds we seem unable to comprehend, such as the Roman arena games. If the terminating of a captive affirms the power of your life, how much does the actual massive staging of life-and-death struggles affirm a whole society? The continual grinding sacrifice of animal and human life in the arenas was all of a piece with the repressions of a society that was dedicated to war and that lived in the teeth of death. It was a perfect pastime to work off anxieties and show the ultimate personal control of death: the thumbs up or thumbs down on the gladiators. The more death you saw unfold before your eyes and the more you thrust your thumbs downward, the more you bought off your own life. And why was the crucifixion such a favorite form of execution? Because, I think, it was actually a controlled display of dying; the small seat on the cross held the body up so that dying would be prolonged. The longer people looked at the death of someone else, the more pleasure they could have in sensing the security and good fortune of their own survival. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

The whole meaning of a victory celebration is that we experience the power of our lives and the visible decrease of the enemy: it is a sort of staging of the whole meaning of war, the demonstration of the essence of it—which is why the public display, humiliation, and execution of prisoners is so important. They are weak and die: we are strong and live. The Roman arena games were, in this sense, a continued staging of victory even in the absence of war; each civilian experienced the same power that one otherwise had to earn in war. If we are repulsed by the bloodthirstiness of those games, it is because we choose to banish from our consciousness what true excitement is. For beings, maximum excitement is the confrontation of death and the skillful defiance of it by watching others fed to it as one survives transfixed with rapture. Today only those such as racing-car drivers and sports parachutists can stage these kinds of dramas in civilian life. It seems that the Nazis really began to dedicated themselves to their large-scale sacrifices of life after 1941 when they were beginning to lose and suspected at some dim level of awareness that they might. They hastened the infamous final solution of the Jewish people toward the closing days of their power, and executed their own political prisoners—like Dietrich Bonhoeffer—literally moments before the end. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

Retreating Germans in Russian and Italy were especially apt to kill with no apparent motive, just to leave a heap of bodies. It is obvious they were offering last-minute hostages to death, stubbornly affirming in a blind, organismic way, “I will not die, you will—see?” It seems that they wanted some kind of victory over evil, and when it could not be the Russians, then it would be the Jews and even other Germans; any substitute scapegoat would have to do. In the recent Bengali revolt, the Western Pakistanis often killed anyone they saw, and when they did not see anyone, they would throw grenades into houses; they piled up a toll of over 3 million despised Bengalis. It is obvious that beings kill to cleanse the Earth of one’s the perceive as tainted ones, and that is what victory means and how it commemorates one’s life and power: humans are bloodthirsty to ward off the flow of their own blood. And it seems further, out of the war experiences of recent times, when humans see that they are trapped and excluded from longer Earthly duration, one says, “If I cannot have it, then neither can you.” Other things that we have found to understand have been hatreds and feuds between tribes and families, and continual butchery practiced for what seemed petty, prideful motives of personal honor and revenge. However, the idea of sacrifice as self-preservation explains these very directly. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

The characteristic of primitives and of family groups was that they represented a sort of soul pool of immortality-substance. If you depleted this pool by one member, you yourself became more mortal. It is my opinion that this ideology offers a basis for understanding both the bitter hatreds and feuds between North American Indian tribes, and the feuds or vendettas currently practiced in many European countries. Whether it was the theft of women under exogamy, of the murder of male members of the tribe, it was always a matter of avenging serious offenses upon the spiritual economy of the community which, being robbed of one of its symbols of spiritual revenue, sought to cancel or at least avenge the shortages created in the immortality account. This kind of action is natural to primitives especially, who believe in the balance of nature and are careful not to overly deplete the store of life-stuff. Revenge of equals the freeing of life-stuff into the common reservoir from which it can then be reassigned. The primitive notion of life-stuff right up to modern society is a motive for genocidal war and even the everyday secular process of justice: the guilty one is punished in order to return one’s life-stuff to the community. I do not know how much of a burden of explanation we would want to put on the pool of life-stuff in modern, secular society. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

For one thing, most people no longer believe in the balance of nature, they think that just curbing greenhouse gases, and electric cars are the solution to everything, but watering the trees in the forest, building more reservoirs, and desalinating water would be more effective. Yet, they are not a balancing economical force. Meaning politicians are pushing electric cars to get people off fossil fuels and make other car producers the big manufactures. Curbing greenhouses gases would help, but by planting trees, and grass is another way to do this. Furthermore, some electricity comes from coal, and many cities are already having problems providing electricity to communities and it is hard to find charging stations. Another issue is, we do not often grant to others the same life quality that we have. However, whether or not we believe in a steady pool of life-stuff, numbers are important to humans: if we buy off our own death with that of others, we want to buy it off at a good price. In wartime, we mourn our dead without undue depression because we are able to celebrate an equal if not greater number of deaths in the ranks of the enemy. This explains the obsessive nature of body counting of the enemy as well as the universal tendency to exaggerate one’s losses and minimize those of one’s own side. When their own lives are at stake is only when people can lie so blatantly and eagerly. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

The exaggerations expressed by people whose lives are in danger always seem silly to outsiders to the conflict precisely because their lives are not involved. We now have to believe that all warfare and revolutionary struggle are simply a development of feuding and vendettas, where the basic thing at stake is a dramatization of development of nationalism in our time—the fantastic bitterness between nations, the unquestioned loyalty to one’s own, the consuming wars fought in the nae of the fatherland or the motherland—unless we saw it in this light. Our nation and its allies represent those who qualify for eternal survival; we are the chose people. From the time when the Athenians exterminated the Melians because they would not ally with them in war to the modern extermination of the Africans, they dynamic has been the same: all those who join together under one banner are alike and so qualify for the privilege of immortality; all those who are different and outside that banner are excluded from the blessings of eternity. The vicious sadism of war is not only a testing of God’s favor to our side, it is also a proof that the enemy is mortal: “Look how we kill him.” Cruelty can arise from the aesthetic outrage we sometimes feel in the presence of strange individuals who seem to be making out all right. Have they found some secret passage to eternal life? It cannot be. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

If those unusual individuals with the unique fashion and behavior are acceptable, then what about my claim to superiority? Can someone like that be my equal in God’s eyes? Does he, that one, dare hope to live forever too—and perhaps crowd me out? I do not like it. All I know is, if he is right, I am wrong. So different and funny-looking. I think he is trying to fool the gods with his sly ways. Let us show him up. He is not very strong. For start, see what he will do when I out shine him. Sadism naturally absorbs the fear of death because by actively manipulating and hating people keep their organism absorbed in the outside World; this keeps self-reflection and the fear of death in a state of low tension. When people hold the fate of others in their hands, they feel they are masters over life and death. As long as they continue shooting, they think more of killing than of being killed. Or, as a wise gangster one put it in a movie, “When killers stop killing, they get killed.” This is already the essence of a theory of sadism. However, more than that it is the clinical proof of the natural wisdom of tyrannical leaders from the time of the divine kingship up to the present day. In times of peace, without an external enemy, the fear that feeds war tends to find its outlet within the society, in the hatred between classes and races, in the everyday violence of crime, of automobile accidents, and even the self-violence of suicide. War sucks much of this up into one fulcrum and shoots it outward to make an unknown enemy pay for our internal sins. How rotational this irrationality. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

To teach is to transform by informing, to develop a zest for lifelong learning, to help pupil become students—mature independent learners, architects of an exciting, challenging future. Teaching at its best is a kind of communion, a meeting and a merging of the minds. The library is not only there as a socially owned and governed institution, a true people’s information service; it is staffed by men and women who maintain high respect for intellectual values. Because they are also the traditional keeps of the books, the librarians have a healthy sense of the hierarchical relationship between data and ideas, facts and knowledge. The enlightened individual is no propagandist, never aggressively intrudes one’s views in conversation nor forces one’s conclusions on others in an argumentative manner. One accepts people as they mentally are. One enters the inner stillness as a learner, as one who is sensitive to the Interior. Word and capable of responding to it. Such response is as far beyond the guidance of the good religious being by a moral conscience as that in turn is beyond the primitive being’s instincts, appetites, and desires. If in some ways one is as human as everyone else, in other ways one is unlike other beings. This is inevitable because one has gone ahead and surpassed one’s fellows. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

Insofar as one is aware of other beings and of the objects which surround one, one expresses the Mind which is the Real. And insofar as one may be either lifted at times out of one’s little ego, or endowed with insight which sees beyond that ego, does one express it further still. The intellectual argues where the enlightened beings announces. It is the difference between arguing from theory and announcing from experience. To live in lonely contemplation of the secrets deep down in the heart, to place all ambitions and restless desires on a funeral pyre and burn them up in a heap—these things demand the highest courage possible to a being. Those who would denominate one who has achieved them as a coward, because one does not run with the crowd who fight for pelf and self, make a ghastly mistake. One will bear witness in thought and speech to the joy of this awakened consciousness. If a being deserts blood relation, it is only to take on spiritual ones. If one leaves one’s Earthly house, it is only to enter the monastery, a spiritual one. If one forsakes the society of wife and children, it is only to enjoy that of teacher and students. Thus absolute escape is a mirage and cannot be found. The kind of quality of one’s bounds can be changed and transformed but not really served. The only attainable freedom lies deep within. It is invisible and mental. This is what the enlightened being enjoys. One may be weighted with business responsibilities and surrounded by a family, but in one’s heart nothing holds. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

Is there then no real need of a master? The answer is “No!” for some people, but “Yes!” for most people. One is needed to wake up the sleeper by telling one the highest truth from the very first time, and then descend by degrees to the stages while still holding on to the truth. The master serves only by showing a seeking person one’s real self, one’s soul: or holding a mirror up to one. This can be called, also, giving one a glimpse, or, more truthfully, being used by God as a vehicle to do so. One who is working under the guidance of a master is not exempt from making mistakes, but one will make fewer and expose them sooner and correct them quicker than one who is not. I write all this in no sneering nor disparaging manner, but rather as one who understands sympathetically the need of most beginners and many intermediates to find guidance outside themselves for the all-sufficient reason that they cannot find it inside. Indeed it is because I have been a disciple that I myself know why others become one, and can approve of their actions. However, that experience is also why I know the limitations and disservices of a discipleship. To say that no teacher is necessary is to set oneself up as a teacher by that very statement. Self-instruction cannot be as correct and efficacious as instruction by an expert, a specialist, or a fully experienced person who can also communicate adequately as a teacher. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

It is an absolute necessity that whoever seeks to realize the spiritual Truth must seek out a guru. This injunction has hypnotized readers and hearers. We thank our teachers for exemplifying the best of the education profession. Teachers give the students hope and the means to fulfill their aspirations as they guide, nourish, encourage, discipline and love their students. The young and mature minds that teacher mold are our leaders of today and tomorrow. They are making a difference in preparing them for the challenges to come by encouraging them to make a lifelong commitment to learning. The master teacher that lurks within each of us is likelier to burst forth within the intellectual atmosphere that collegiality can create. We need to build up an intimate inner relationship with a being whose compassion is wide enough to understand us and whose power is developed enough to help us. It does not matter that one is in the afterlife. Those who know only a single mode of living, that of the extrovert, or a single mode of thinking, that which is sense-based, need to expose themselves for sufficient time to the influence of a spiritual master before they can begin to become even dimly aware that they have a soul. However, since a fully evolved master is hard to find, something else must act as one’s next best substitute. This must necessarily be an inspired writing produced by such a being. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

The truth is that nearly all aspirants need the help of expert human guides and printed books when they are actively seeking the Spirit, and of printed books at least when they are merely beginning to seek. It has long been clear to me that teaching is at once the most difficult and the most honorable of professions. We have all been touched by example, guidance, and motivation of a teacher whose often-reluctant pupil we were. We can recall a moment of insight or truth when caught in the act of learning. None of us may owe larger debts for whatever we may have become, for whatever we may have become, for whatever we may have been able to accomplish, than we owe to teachers in our past lives whose total devotion to young people and their discipline has been their chief reward and the reason we honor teachers. It is not essential to find a teacher in the flesh—one may be in print. A book may become a quite effective teacher and guide. The closest we will ever come to an orderly Universe is a good library. Information is a basic human right and the fundamental foundation for the formation of a republic institution. My childhood library was small enough not to be intimidating. And yet I felt the whole World was contained in those two rooms. I could walk any aisle and smell wisdom. However, the death of a library, any library, suggests that the community has lost its soul. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

In the absence of an enlightened individual’s personal society, one may have recourse to the best substitute—a enlightened being’s printed writings. Inspired texts, portions of scriptures, great being’s writings and sayings offer guidance on the course of action to be followed, the ethical considerations to be heeded, the decisions to be made under certain pressures, crises, or confrontations—decisions whose consequences are often quite grave. Who can price the value of such readings at such times? Spiritual formation is, in practice, the way of rest for the weary and overloaded, of the easy yoke and the light burden of cleaning the inside of the cup of the dish, of the good tree that cannot bear bad fruit. And it is the path along which God’s commandments are found to be not heavy, not burdensome. It is the way of those learning as disciples or apprentices of Jesus to do all things that I have commanded you, within the context of this I have been given say over everything in Heaven and Earth and look, I am with you every minute. However—I emphasize, because it is so important—the primary learning here is not about how to act, just as the primary wrongness or problem in human life is not what we do. Often what human beings do is so horrible that we can be excused, perhaps, for thinking that all that matters is stopping it. However, this is an evasion of the real horror: the heart from which the terrible actions come. In both cases, it is who we are in our thoughts, feelings, dispositions, and choices—in the inner life—that counts. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

Profound transformations there is the only thing that can definitely conquer outward evil. It is very hard to keep this straight. Failure to do so is a primary cause of failure to grow spiritually. Love, we hear, is patient and kind. Then we mistakenly try to be loving by acting patiently and kindly—and quickly fail. We should always do the best we can in action, of course; but little progress is to be made in that arena until we advance in love itself—the genuine inner readiness and longing to secure the good of others. Until we make significant progress there, our patience and kindness will be shallow and short-lived at best. It is love itself—not loving behavior, or even the wish for intent to love—that has the power to always protect, always true, always hope, put up with anything, and never quit. Merely trying to act lovingly will lead to despair and to the defeat of love. It will make us angry and hopeless. However, taking love itself—God’s kind of love—into the depths of our being though spiritual formation will, by contrast, enable us to act lovingly to an extent that will be surprising even to ourselves, at first. And this love will then become a constant source of joy and refreshment to ourselves and others. Indeed it will be, according to promise, a well of water springing up to eternal life—not an additional burden to carry through life, as acting lovingly surely would be. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

The invitation to become healed—psychotherapy begins when a person cannot live one’s life further in the ways one has, and consults with somebody who intends to help one. The fact that a person would arrive at such an impasse should provoke wonder, since all of us are gifted with intelligence that could guide us out of existential cul-de-sac. However, people arrive at this point, and there are those who would be of help. How does the sufferer reach one’s stalemate? I believe one chooses it. I agree with the existentialist thinkers that every person chooses one’s ways of being in the World. However, I would go further and assert that people choose their ways of being for somebody. A being chooses one’s way of being for oneself, or for somebody else. One’s choices, naturally, yield consequences. The way a person has chosen to exist was selected from possible alternative ways. It was selected because it seemed to be a way to fulfill or preserve values. These values include, for example, survival, identity, status, the love of another person, money and so forth. If we look now at some particular being’s present condition, whether one be sick or well, we can ask, “Of what way of being is this condition an outcome? At whose invitation did the fellow choose this way of being and not some other? One’s own? One’s mother’s One’s teacher’s? And we can ask further, “What values were fulfilled, and which sacrificed, when the fellow chose and followed this way?” #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

Some people are skeptical of a natural spirit and some writers deny its being. However, Christopher Columbus has established it by argument, and believed that it was produced in the liver and feed the nourishing soule, which is seated in every part of the body. The spirit is supplied by the blood. The spirit whilest is shines in brightness and spreads itself though all the Theatre of the body, as the Sun over the Earth, it blesses all parties with joy and loyalty and dyes them with a rosy color; but the contrary when it is retracted, intercepted or extinguished, all things become horrid, wane, and pale, and finally do utterly perish. So wonderful are the powers of the soul. “Suffer not yourself to be led away by any vain or foolish thing; suffer not the devil to lead away your heart again after those wicked harlots. Behold, O my son, how great iniquity ye brought upon the Zoramites; for when they saw your conduct they would not believe my words. And now the Spirit of the Lord doth say unto me: Command thy children to do good, least they lead away the hearts of many people to destruction; therefore I command you, my son, in the fear of God, that ye refrain from your iniquities. That ye turn to the Lord with all your mind, might, and strength; that ye lead away the hearts of no more to do wickedly; but rather return unto them, and acknowledge your faults and that wrong which ye have done,” Alma 39.11-13. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

The enlightened does not wish to be regarded as other than one is; not for one the canonization of a saint or the adoration of a god. Insight, and its application to human living, is the final fulfilment for all of us, shall be our natural condition. Grant, we beseech Thee, Almighty God, that the new Birth of Thine Only-begotten Son in the flesh may set free those whom the old bondage detains under the yoke of sin; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord this compensating principle acts as a control and balance. He is not ruled by the reaction, as others are, nor blinded by it to an egoistic judgement. Christ looks out dispassionately upon the course of human life—which includes one’s own life—as if one were not personally involved in it, yet he does whatever ought to be done as if he were. Grant, we beseech Thee, O our God, that Thy family, which has been saved by the Nativity of Thy Son our Lord Jesus Christ, may also quietly repose on Him as a perpetual Redeemer, Who with we shall cling steadyfastly throughout our lives to the writings of our illumined master, returning to him again and again in prayer. His works are the truest of all, pure gold and not alloys. There are also wise beings whose thought goes deep and they understand clearly that our spiritual life is our way to salvation. Their record exists, their sayings and writings also. Their study is worthwhile, their precepts can be put to the test in practical everyday living. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

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It is a Lifting-Up into One’s Mind When You Have Reached the Very Edge of Your Own Mind!

December 10, 2019 2:59 am

It is not the human thoughts which the teacher sends out, so much as the spiritual power within the disciple which is aroused by those thoughts, that matters. Our ideals are important to us as is the love of books and the love of knowledge and the love of truth and free information and letting people discover things for themselves. We can say in a preliminary manner, that spiritual formation for the Christian basically refers to the Spirit-driven process of forming the inner World of the human self in such a way that it becomes like the inner being of Christ himself. In the degree to which spiritual formation in Christ is successful, the outer life of the individual becomes a natural expression or outflow of the character and teachings of Jesus. Christian spiritual formation is focuses entirely on Jesus. Its goal is an obedience or conformity to Christ that arises out of an inner transformation accomplished through purposive interaction with the grace of God in Christ. Obedience is an essential outcome of Christian spiritual formation. When humans forget it, they are reminded of their divine linkage by prophets, teachers, and enlightened individuals. One of the advantages of having a personal teacher is that, to some extent, you can watch his or her mind work. The master can see the disciple’s character and motives, hidden complexes and unrevealed weaknesses better than one can oneself. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14

Teachers affect eternity; they can never tell where their influence stops. So long as one’s experience and results have not established sufficient confidence in one’s intuitive guidance and sufficient trust in one’s philosophic knowledge, one needs to continue travelling with a teacher. What the earnest mind is struggling to formulate to itself vaguely and uncertainly and unclearly, the teacher states decisively, assuredly, and definitely. That Christ be formed within you is the eternal watchword of Christian spiritual formation. This ideal is fortified by the deep moral and spiritual insight and in part of the process of proving that the spirit gives life. There are various wrong behaviors: acting out of anger, looking to lust, heartless divorce, verbal manipulation, returning evil for evil, and so forth. However, as abundant experience teaches, to strive merely to act in conformity with his expressions of what living in the kingdom of God from the heart is like is to attempt the impossible. And it will also lead to doing things that are obviously wrong and even ridiculous—such as self-castration as presumed act of devotion to Christ, which unfortunately has repeatedly occurred in Christian history. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14

The outward interpretation of spiritual formation, emphasizing specific acts as it does, will merely increase the righteousness of beings. However, we must go beyond it to achieve genuine transformation of who we are through Christ, so we can live richly in his kingdom. If we were studying the process of growth in plants, we would assume certain constant conditions of temperature, moisture and Sunlight, in forming our conceptualization of the process. Likewise in conceptualizing the process of personality change in psychotherapy, there are elements which will denote or characterize the change itself. When beings in the past have asked themselves the purpose o life, some have answered, in the words of the catechism, that the chief end of beings is to glorify God. Others have thought of life’s purpose as being the preparation of oneself for immortality. Some has settled on a much more Earthy goal—to enjoy and release and satisfy every sensual desire. Still many—and this applies to much of humanity—regard the purpose of life as being to achieve—to gain material possessions, status, knowledge and power. Some have made it their goal to give themselves completely and devotedly to a cause outside of themselves such as Christianity, or capitalism. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14

Adolph Hitler has seen his goal as that of becoming the leader of a master race which would exercise power over all. In sharp contact, many in the East have striven to eliminate personal desires, to exercise the utmost of control over themselves. I mention these widely ranging choices to indicate some of the very different aims beings have lived for, to suggest that there are indeed many goals possible. Nonetheless, our first value dimension involves a preference for a responsible, moral, self-restrained participation in life, appreciating and conserving what beings have attained. The second-place stress upon delight in vigorous action for overcoming of obstacles. In involves a confident initiation of change, either in resolving personal and social problems, or in overcoming obstacles in the natural World. The third dimension stresses the value of a self-sufficient inner life with a rich and heightened self-awareness. Control over persons and things is rejected in favor of a deep and sympathetic insight into self and others. The fourth underlying dimension values a receptivity to persons and to nature. Inspiration is seen as coming from a source outside the self, and the person lives and develops in devoted responsiveness to this source. The fifth and final dimension stresses sensuous enjoyment, self-enjoyment. The simple pleasures of life, an abandonment to the moment, a relaxed openness to life, are values. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14

This is a significant study, one of the first to measure objectively the answers given in different cultures to the question, what is the purpose of my life? It has added to our knowledge of the answers given. It has also helped to define some of the basic dimension in terms of which the choice is made. When we look at these dimensions, it is as if persons in various cultures have in common five major tones in the musical scales on which they compose different melodies. It is clear that the very expression of the fear is part of what we are becoming. Instead of simply being a façade, as if it were one is coming closer to being oneself, namely a frightened person hiding behind a façade because one regards oneself as too awful to be seen. However, the main overall effect of higher education upon student values is to bring about general acceptance of a body of standards and attitudes characteristic of collegebred men and women in the World community. The impact of the college experience is to socialize the individual, to refine, polish, or shape up one’s values so that one can fit comfortably into the rank of global college alumni. Nonetheless, I find that many individuals have formed themselves by trying to please others, but again, when they are free, they move away from being this person. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14

One professional man, looking back at some of the process he has been through, writes, toward the end of therapy: “I finally felt that I simply had to begin doing what I wanted to do, not what I thought I should do, and regardless of what other people feel I should do. This is a complete reversal of my whole life. I have always felt I had to do things because they were expected of me, or more important, to make people like me. The hell with it! I think from now on I am going to just be me—rich or poor, good or bad, rational or irrational, logical or illogical, famous or infamous. So thanks for your part in helping me to rediscover Shakespeare’s—‘To thine own self be true.’” People seem to move toward more openly being a process, a fluidity, a changing. They are not disturbed to find that they are not the same day to day, that they do not always hold the same feelings toward s given experience or person, that they are not always consistent. They are in flux, and seem more content to continue in this flowing current. The striving for conclusions and ends states seems to diminish. An existing individual is constantly in process of becoming, and translates all one’s thinking into terms of process. It is with one as it is with a writer and one’s style; for one only has a style who never has anything finished, but moves waters of the language every time one begins, so that the most common expression comes into being for one with the freshness of a new birth. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14

I find that people move toward being a process of potentialities, being born, rather than being or becoming some fixed goal. It also involves being a complexity of process. I find that this desires to be all of oneself in each moment—all the richness and complexity, with noting hidden from oneself, and nothing feared in oneself—this is a common desire in those who have seemed to show much movement in therapy. To be that self which one truly is involves still other components. One which ha perhaps been implied already is that the individual moves toward living in an open, friendly, close relationship to one’s own experience. This does not occur easily. Often as a person sense some new facet of oneself, one initially rejects it. Only as one experiences such a hitherto denied aspect of oneself in acceptant climate can one tentatively accept it as a part of oneself. Many cannot tolerate the experience of one’s childish feelings, but gradually as one comes to accept and embrace them as a part of oneself, to live close to them and in them when they occur. One type of wise person is one whose wiseness comes from working in an establishment which caters either to the wants of those with a particular stigma or to actions that society takes in regard to these persons. For example, nurse and physical therapist can be wise; they can come to know more about a given type of prosthetic equipment than the patient who must learn to use it so as to minimize one’s mobility impairment. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14

Other types of wise persons are the individuals who are related through the social structure to a stigmatized individual—a relationship that leads the wider society to treat both individuals in some respects as one. Thus the loyal spouse of the mental patient, the daughter of a wealthy CEO, the parent of a physically disabled child, the friend of someone visually impaired, the family of the hangman, are all obliged to share some of the discredit of the stigmatized person to whom they are related. One response to this fate is to embrace it, and to live within the World of one’s stigmatized connection. It should be added that persons who acquire a degree of stigma in this way can themselves have connections who acquire a degree of stigma in this infirmary twice-removed. The problems faced by stigmatized persons spread out in waves, but of diminishing intensity. For instance, there was a 12-year-old girl who was left out of all social activities because her father was a successful CEO. She tired to be nice and friendly to everyone but it was no use. The girls at school told her that their mother’s did not want them to associate with her because it will be bad for their reputations. Her father had some bad publicity in the papers and even through he is running a successful business people are envious of him. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14

The girl wanted to know if there was anything someone could do because she was very lonesome; it was no fun being alone all the time. Her mother tried to take her places, but the girl wanted to be with people her own age. In general, the tendency for a stigma to spread from the stigmatized individual to one’s close connections provides a reason why such relations tend either to be avoided or to be terminated, where existing. Persons with a courtesy stigma provide a model of “normalization,” showing how far normal could go in treating the stigmatized person as if one did not have a stigma. (Normalization is to be distinguished from “normification,” namely, the effort on the part of a stigmatized individual to present oneself as an ordinary person, although not necessarily making a secret of one’s failing.) Further, a cult of the stigmatized can occur, the stigmaphobic response of the normal being countered by the stigmatized response to the wide. The person with a courtesy stigma can in fact make both the stigmatized and the normal uncomfortable: by always being ready to carry a burden that is not really theirs, they can confront everyone else with too much morality; by treating the stigma as a neutral matter to be looked at in a direct, off-hand way, they open themselves and the stigmatized to misunderstanding by normal who may read offensiveness into this behavior. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14

The relation between the stigmatized and one’s stand-in can be an uneasy one. The person with a failing may feel that reversion to type may occur at any moment, and at a time when defenses are down and dependency is up. One person showed a tendency to move away, hesitantly and fearfully, from a self that he is not. In other words even though there may be no recognition of what one might be moving toward, he is moving away from something. And of course, in doing so one is beginning to define, however negatively, what he is. At first this may be expressed simply as a fear of exposing what he is. Thus one eighteen-year-old boy says, in an early interview: “I know I am not so hot, and I am afraid they will find it out. That is why I do these things…They are going to find out some day that I am not so hot. I am just trying to put that day off as long as possible. If you know me as I know myself—I am not going to tell you the person I really think I am. There is only one place I will not cooperate and that is it. It would not help your opinion of me to know what I think of myself.” A phrase or two, coming from an inspired being, may set a subconscious process working in the mind of another and lead oneself in the end to acquire a new truth. Those who come forward as gurus driven by the ego, the ambitions, and ulterior motives are not gurus at all. They are trespassers on a fine vocation. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14

We must remember that those who work to earn a livelihood and come home tired have not the time or strength to think for themselves. For them the ready-made support of established religion is indeed helpful, while the guidance of sincere, competent, and available teachers is even more sought. Modern cynics and skeptics see no harm in paying those to whom we entrust the minds of their children a smaller wage than is paid to those to whom they entrust the care of their plumbing. Teachers are the important link to the future and the World of knowledge and self-esteem for children. We need to strengthen the chain that brings us together in a worthwhile and noble cause—teaching! Let us continue to strengthen the chain that brings us together. We are a team but we are only as strong as our weakest link. To follow one’s path, rejecting the idea of seeking the expert help, tested knowledge, and accumulated experience of a Master is to follow a haphazard course of trial and error. The determination to maintain such independence and to make one’s own way by one’s own effort is not of much use. One will be far better off working under guidance than without it. If one as an aspirant has been led safely upwards past the delusory sidetrack and bypaths which detain so many other seekers, one is most fortunate. Only in this way can one’s consciousness arrive at what really constitutes the Highest Truth. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14

As the strata of the Earth preserves in succession the living creatures of past epochs, so the shelves of libraries preserve in succession the errors of the past and their expectations, which like the former were very lively and made a great commotion in their own age but now stand petrified and stiff in place where only the literary paleontologist regards them. One is wise who knows the sources of knowledge—where it is written and where it is to be found. The library is not only there as a socially owned and governed institution, a true people’s information service; it is staffed by men and women who maintain high respect for intellectual values. Because they are also the traditional keepers of the books, the libraries have a healthy sense of the hierarchical relationship between data and ideas, facts and knowledge. Teaching is necessary. How can those who do not know the true cause of their afflictions know the way out of them? Someone must warn them, someone must awaken them. In a completely rational society, the best of us would aspire to be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for something less, because passing civilization along from one generation to the next ought to be the highest honor and the highest responsibility anyone could have. The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14

A being who approached God with deep longing for Him, and earnest prayer, will find god if one has no guru. However, a teacher is necessary because very few people have his deep yearning and therefore the guru is necessary for them. When the going gets tough, the teacher inspires and encourages seekers of God not to give up, but to stick to the Quest, regardless of the many long years it takes. It is always pleasant to learn that a seeker has found a good teacher. It may be puzzling then to hear that the teacher can no longer continue with one’s pupil. However, in such a case, the individual should not be unnecessarily distressed, because one can most certainly continue to make progress on the Quest irrespective of whether or not one has an outward teacher. All one needs to do is to pray humbly to God, whose love and forgiveness will accompany one always where a human teacher cannot. The instruments of Christian spiritual formation therefore involve much more than human effort and actions under our control. Well-informed human effort certainly is indispensable, for spiritual formation is no passive process. However, Christlikeness of the inner being is not a human attainment. It is, finally, a gift of grace. Though we must act, the resources for spiritual formation extend far beyond the human. They come from the interactive presence of the Holy Spirit in the lives of those who place their confidence in Christ. They also come from the spiritual treasures—people, events, traditions, teachings—stored in the body of Christ’s people on Earth, past and present. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14

Therefore we must understand that spiritual formation is not only formation of the spirit or inner being of the individual, though that is both the process and the outcome. It is also formation by the Spirit of god and by the spiritual riches of Christ’s continuing incarnation in his people—including, most prominently, the treasures of his written and spoken word and the amazing personalities of those in whom one has most fully lived. Grant unto us, we pray Thee, O Lord our God, that we who rejoice to keep the feast of the Nativity of Jesus Christ our Lord, may by walking worthily of Him attain to fellowship with Him, through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Grant, O Lord, we beseech Thee, to Thy people an inviolable firmness of faith; that as they confess Thine Only-begotten Son, the everlasting partaker of Thy glory, to have been born in our very flesh, of the Virgin Mother, they may be delivered from present adversities, and admitted into joys that shall abide; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Grant, O Lord, we beseech Thee, O Lord our God, that Thy Church may alike apprehend both parts of the one Mastery, and adore One Christ, very God and very Man, neither divided from our nature nor separate from Thine essence; though the same Jesus Christ our Lord. “And it came to pass that Alma ate bread and was filed; and he blessed Amulek and his house, and he gave thanks unto God,” reports Alma 8.22. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14

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The Soul Gives People Contact with the Great Minds of the Past, a Contact that is at the Heart of All Learning!

December 9, 2019 6:40 am

To furnish the means of acquiring knowledge is the greatest benefit that can be conferred upon humankind. It prolongs life itself and enlarges the sphere of existence. God is fun, educational, and the biggest brain on the face of the Earth. And as children of God, it is our daily mood that creates the weather. We possess a tremendous power to make our loves miserable or joyous. We can be tools of torture or instruments of inspiration. It should be our goal to inspire dreams, shape lives, and give hope for the future. Although everyone can learn to success, it may not be on the same day and in the same way. Therefore, make it a point to understand those not very good at explaining and enlighten those not very good at comprehending. No calling in society is more demanding than teaching; no calling in our society is more selfless than teaching; and no calling is more central to the vitality of a democracy than teaching. The library, much like the soul, give people and faculties a contact with the great minds of the past, a contact that is at the heart of all learning. There are great results to be had from associating with resources and others who are more spiritually advanced than we are. These sources allow us to excel, strengthen ourselves in the resolve to pursue the quest, and they also fan the spark of longing for the Divine. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

The company of enlightened beings tends to arouse those who dwell in darkness to seek light, as it tends to hasten the development of those who are already engaged in this search. It is when one reaches the end of a particular phase and has first to find, then to begin a new one that help from the outside is useful. When one reaches a difficult place on the Quest, the same is true. This help may be found in a book, a lecture, and educator, a chance meeting, or in some other way. The help of a master shows itself principally, and is chiefly important in, the course taken by the mind during prayer. One of the chief benefits of meeting with an illumined book or an inspired being, is that such an encounter opens up the possibility of moving more swiftly from a lower to a higher standpoint. It opens up truths which would ordinarily be too far ahead to be noticed, thus acting like a spiritual telescope. It also brings us face to face with our own errors in thought and conduct. Such a movement might otherwise take several years or sometimes a whole lifetime. However, it remains only a possibility. It is for us to recognize the true character of the opportunity and for us to grasp and take the fullest advantage of it. It may be that one keeps the spiritual quest in the background of one’s mind only. If so one needs a quickening impulse. One imparts the necessary impetus which helps the student towards the realization of his finest aspirations. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

Whoever seeks to raise one’s own consciousness of God, will get most help from seeking out an individual who has already accomplished the task. In the presence of someone whose own consciousness is of God’s Grace, one will receive the inward inspiration which can energize and lead one’s personal effort in the same direction. The entrance of a book of truth, or of a being bearing truth, into the aspirant’s life will, at certain periods when one is ready and prepared for further development, be like turning on the light in a room to shut out the darkness. The earnest seeker will get more from a single meeting with a truly inspired being than from attendance at a hundred sessions in an organized spiritual school and a center of worship. For the first will awaken one’s intuition whereas the second will only give the illusion of doing so. However, such is the widespread ignorance and inexperience of these things, as well as the suggestive power of pomp and prestige, that the organized institution will always attract fifty followers where the lone illuminate will attract five. A human channel is needed for the superhuman inspiration, grace, teaching, or revelation because the recipient minds are not sufficiently sensitive, pure, or prepared to receive it directly for themselves. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

If we understand sacrifice in both its dimensions—as guilt and as the unblocking of power—we can see how logically an unmysteriously warfare had to increase in viciousness: beings staged whatever size death potlach they were technically capable of, from Genghis Khan to Auschwitz. The general opinion is that at the most primitive level of religious organization—that of shamanism—sacrifice of war captives was a rarity; captives could be taken in small number for a variety of reasons, but usually simple sadistic ones like gloating over torture or personal ones like avenging the loss of members of one’s own family. And this is in accord with what we see in simpler societies expiation for guilt was easier to achieve and required no massive expenditure of life. However, as societies increased in scale and complexity, incorporating high gods, a priesthood, and a king, the motive for sacrifice became frankly one of pleasing the gods and building power, and then mountains of war captives began to be sacrificed. When much booty and many slaves were brought back from riding expeditions, it may have seemed that the purpose was secular and economic, but it was basically religious: it was a matter of affirming one’s power over life and death; and the lure of economic gain was always outweighed by the magical power of war, no matter how this was disguised. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

The kings of Dahomey undertook their war expeditions to bring back slaves to sell to Europeans. They held an annual custom at which hundreds of prisoners’ heads were lopped off and placed in heaps—a celebration of victory which the king offered to the people. To the amazement of the European slave traders, the king would not sell these victims even when there was a dearth of slaves for sale; in spite of his avarice the sacrificial slaughter had to take place. The reason, of course, was that the ceremony was much more important than mere possession: power is the ability to dispense life and death for the whole tribe and in relation to all of nature. Allied to this dynamic is another one which we have trouble understanding today: the one who makes the sacrifice dispenses not only power but fate; if you kill your enemy, your life is affirmed because it proves that the gods favor you. The whole philosophy is summed up in the lines from a typical western movie, when the Indians come upon a cavalry officer and the leader says, “Let us see if his gods protect him—shoot!” The point we moderns miss is that this is not said out of cocky pride or cynicism, as if the Indian knew in advance that the enemy would fall: ancient beings really wanted to see. War was a test of the will of the gods, to see if they favored you; it forced a revelation of destiny and so it was a holy cause and a sacred duty, a kind of divination. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

Whatever the outcome was, it was a decision of holy validity—the highest kind of judgment humans can get—and it was in one’s hands to be able to force it: all one had to do was to stage a way. It was thus natural for the divine kings, who had total power over their people, to want to test their own fate before the highest court. It is as though they said to the gods, “Now show me if I am really as special as I believe; prove to me that I am your favored son.” With the massive slave armies spread across the plain, the flotilla of ships chocking the shore, the arms glistening in the Sun, and the din rising to the Heavens, the divine king must have felt that a sacrifice hunt of such magnitude could not fail, that one could almost defiantly force the favor of the gods in view of the blood that would flow for them. This was the gift complex of the primitive potlatch magnified to its highest intensity: the dialogue with the gods was there, and the sacrificial gift was prominent; the accent was on massive visible power; the ambition was to mount the biggest production possible. And so it made no difference how many were killed, or from what side they came. War was a sacred duty and a holy cause, but it was the king’s cause: its primary meaning was to prove one’s power to survive. And so the more dead, the better. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

Fortunate and favored, the survivor stands in the midst of the fallen. For him there is one tremendous fact; while countless others have died, many of them one’s comrades, one is still alive. The dead lie helpless; one stands upright amongst them, and it is as though the battle had been fought in order for one to survive it. It is a feeling of being chosen amongst the many who manifestly shared the same fate. The being who achieves this often is a hero. One is stronger. There is more life in one. One is the favored of the Gods. Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result. As Hitler concluded—after miraculously surviving the bomb blast that was mean to take his life but instead took several others, “Providence has kept me alive to complete my great work.” It seems that the larger and more frequent the heaps of dead which attest to one’s special favor, the more one needs this confirmation. It becomes a kind of addiction to proving an ever-growing sense of invulnerability, to tasting the continually repeated pleasure of survival. If the king is victorious, then all the dead on the battlefield belong to him because they prove one’s specialness. No wonder the divine kings repeatedly staged their compulsive campaigns and inscribed the mountainous toll of their butchery for all time. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

We now understand that their pride was holy; they had offered the gods an immense sacrifice and a direct challenge, and the gods had confirmed that their destiny was indeed divinely favored, since the victories went to them. In recent times President Trump threw out the same challenge to God from the White House—to show His favor by giving victory and blessing the economy. It is very clear to us that pride is the driving power motive behind most people. And how could it be otherwise? Humans are a terrestrial organism who must naturally aggress on their World in order to incorporate the energy-power they need from it. On the most elemental level this power resides in food, which is why primitives have always acknowledged food power as the basic one in the sacrificial meal. From the beginning, humans, as meat-eating hunter, incorporated the power of animals. However, humans were particularly weak beings, and so they had to develop a special sensitivity to sources of power, and a wide latitude of sources of power for one’s own incorporation. This is one way to understand the greater aggressiveness of humans compared to animals: humans were the only beings we know of that are conscious of death and decay, and so they engaged in a heightened search for powers of self-perpetuation. Any study of the early evolution of warfare and the natural viciousness of it has to take this into account. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

Very early in human evolution humans aggressed in order to incorporate two kinds of power, physical and symbolic. This meant that trophy taking in itself was a principal motive for war raiding; the trophy was a personal power acquisition. Beings took parts of the animals they killed in the hunt as a testimonial to their bravery and skill—buffalo horns, grizzly bear claws, jaguar teeth. In war they took back proof that they had killed an enemy, in the form of one’s scalp or even one’s whole head or whole-body skin. These could be worn as badges of bravery which gave prestige and social honor and inspired fear and respect. But more than that, the piece of the terrible and brave animal and the scalp of the feared enemy often contained power in themselves: they were magical amulets, powerful medicine, which contained the spiritual powers of the object they belonged to. And so trophies were a major source of protective power: they shielded one from harm, and one could also use them to conjure up evil spirits and exorcise them. In addition to this trophy was the visible proof of survivorship in the contest and thus a demonstration of the favor of the gods. What greater badge of distinction than that? No wonder trophy hunting was a driving obsession among primitives: it gave to humans what they needed most—extra power over life and death. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

We see this most directly, of course, in the actual incorporation of parts of the enemy; in cannibalism after victory the symbolic animal makes closure on both ends of this problematic dualism—one gets physical and spiritual energy. An Associated Press dispatch from the Cambodian Front Lines quotes a Sargent Danh Hun on what he did to his North Vietnamese foes: “I try to cut them open while they are still dying or soon after they are dead. That way the livers give me the strength of my enemy…[One day] when they attacked we got about 80 of them and everyone ate liver.” Spirits are things by themselves. No abstract entity is entailed here, but a natural body, and natural bodies are no less differing one from the other than the dense or tangible parts which embrace them. Sometimes spirits are taken for vacuum, but they are really the most active bodies. Sometimes they are taken for garded as virtues and qualities of tangible parts, but they are actually things by themselves. Sometimes they have been called souls of plant and living creatures, but they are not such. Spirits are minute parts and a special study of their effects and manifestations are needed in order that we may learn about their motions. The spirit of humans (being of an equal and uniform substance) pre-supposes and feigns in nature a greater equality and uniformity than really is. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

If the church has shown more understanding of this part of the message, the regrettable split between religion and medicine might never have happened. In both, the power of saving is at work. If we look at the miracles of medical and mental healing today, we must say that there is a wall between eternal and perishable life is pierced at one point; that liberation from the evil one has happened in one dimension of our life; that a physician or mental helper becomes a savior for someone. One functions, as every savior does, as an instrument of the healing power given to nature as well as to beings by the divine presence in time and space. However, there are also limits to this kind of healing and liberating. The people healed by Jesus became sick again and died. Those who were liberated from demonic compulsion might, as Jesus himself warned, relapse into more serious states of mental disease. It was a break-through of eternal life in one moment of time, as all our medical healing is. Also, there is a second limit to the healing body and mind: The attitude of one who is to be healed may prevent healing. Without the desire for delivery from the evil one there is no liberation; without longing for the healing power, no healing! The wall which separates us from eternal life is broken through only when we desire it, and even then only when we trust in the bearers of healing power. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

Trust in saviors does not mean what is called today faith-healing, which is at best psychic sanctification of oneself or someone else. However, it means openness to liberation from evil, whenever we encounter the possibility of such liberation. This openness is not always present. We may prefer infirmary to health, enslavement to liberty. There are many reasons for the desire not to be healed, not to be liberated. One who is weak can exercise a power over one’s environment, over one’s family and friends, which can destroy trust and love but which gives satisfaction to one who exercises this power through weakness. Many amongst us should ask ourselves whether it is not this that we unconsciously do toward husband or wife; toward children or parents; toward friends or groups. There are others who do not want liberation because it forces them to encounter reality as it is and to take upon themselves human’s heaviest burden: that of making responsible decisions. This is especially true of those who are in bondage to mental disturbances. Certainly they suffer, as do those with bodily infirmary, but the compensation of gaining power or escaping responsibility appears more important to them than the suffering. They cut themselves off from the saving power in reality. For them, this saving power would first of all mean opening themselves up to the desire for salvation of body or mind. However, even Jesus could not do it with many—perhaps most—of His listeners. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

One could perhaps say that the first work of every healer and liberator is to break through the love of infirmary and enslavement in those who Jesus wants to save. One alone can afford to be as boundlessly patient as Nature is. One alone can rightly be lavish with time. The one on the spiritual path lead beings into a life that is noble, beautiful, and intelligent, and to save them from their sins of self-exhaustion through febrile and foolish conflicts. The enlightened individual has lifted one’s thinking above the level of both free will and fate, matters which concern the ego. One lives in the Witness Self. The practical result is that one does not feel the caress of pleasure or the sting of pain so keenly as others. One exemplifies the truth of Nature’s dictate, “To one who asks nothing everything is given.” Whatever greatness the World looks up to one for possessing, vanishes utterly from one’s mind in the presence of this infinite greatness. God periodically moves upon one’s people and in their surrounding culture to achieve Hos everlasting purpose for that tiny stretch of cosmic time we call “human history.” This usually happens in ways that no one but God could have planned or foreseen and in ways that are possessed far beyond our control or comprehension. We discover, usually after the fact, that a pervasive and powerful shift has occurred. It may happen to the individual, to the group, or to an entire culture. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

Old ways of doing things cease to be effective, though they may have been very powerful in the past. There arises a very real danger that we will set ourselves in opposition to what God truly is doing now and aims to do in the future. Often we miss the opportunity to act with God in the now. We fail to find, quickly enough new wineskins for the new wine. Such a new move of God was what happened in the emergence of the Hebrew people from Egypt when the time was right and again in their entry into and emergence from Babylonian exile. Again, we see it in the emergence of a Christian people within Jewish culture, and then the emergence of a nonethnic body of Christ from the Jewish church. Since then, the pervasive and powerful movement of God has happened again and again during the sojourn of Christ in his people on the Earth: the overwhelming of classical paganism, the emergence of the monastic form of Christian devotion, the Cistercian, Franciscan, and Devotio Moderna transformations within monasticism, the Protestant Reformation, Pietism, Wesleyan and American revivalism, and many other such movements of less historical effect, such as the twentieth-century charismatic countercultural upsurges (“Jesus People,” and so on). The rise and out workings of such movements are clearly the result of God’s hand in our midst. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

And God is still moving. The quest for spiritual formation (really, as indicated, spiritual transformation) is in fact an age-old and Worldwide one. It is rooted in the deep personal and even biological need for goodness that haunts humanity. It has taken many forms and has now resurfaced at the beginning of the twenty-first century to meet our present situation. This is, I am sure, part of an incoming tide of God’s life that would lift our lives today for our voyage into eternity. Our hearts cry out, “Lord, I want to be a Christian in my heart.” So this quest, currently so deeply felt, is at once new and very old, both very promising and full of danger, illuminative of our lacks and failures and bursting with grace, an expression of the eternal quest of Go for humans and of human’s ineradicable need for God. This contemporary quest for spiritual formation is essential to the life of God in his people as they presently move toward the fulfillment of his purposes for today and beyond. Viewed sociologically and historically, as well as spiritually, the new impulse is an aspect of the dissolution of Protestant denominationalism as we have known it and of the emergence of a new—but also an old—identity for Christians: crossing all denominational lines and national and natural boundaries. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

It is not generally recognized that the question, “Am I a Christian?” can no longer be answered in any significant manner by citing denominational, ethnic, or national names or symbols. There are now 33,800 different Christian denominations on Earth. Clearly, an adequate answer must go deeper than our religious associations. It must refer to what we are in our heart—before God, in the depths of our being, always the focal point of Christian spiritual formation. Such an answer has always been required “before God.” Who can deny it? However, that has not always been recognized and given adequate emphasis among us—especially not in the recent past—although we are increasingly doing so today. This change is an extremely good thing and a highly promising departure from the recent past of Christians Worldwide. “Behold, my heart cries: Wo unto this people. Come out in judgement, O God, and hide their sins, and wickedness, and abominations from before thy face!” reports Moroni 9.15. O God, Who makest us glad with the yearly expectation of our redemption, grant that as we joyfully receive Thine Only-begotten Son as our Redeemer, we may also see Him without fear when He cometh as our Judge. Our Lord’s realization of the truth does not weigh down on him. He finds it natural and does not feel it to be exceptional, although do others. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

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There is One Place Where I Can Find Out Who I am and What I am Going to Become—And that is the Soul!

December 8, 2019 5:09 am

The cockatiels were singing a celestial melody in the early afternoon. Their rhythmic ditty mingled with the soft sweetness of the just-blooming Winter Jasmine, Snowdrops, and the air so crisp and cool you could snap it with your fingers. The lush shade of the evergreen trees was offset by the autumnal flashed of red, orange and yellow. Meghan breathed in the air that was full of the promise of the coming Winter. In the single matter of learning prayer alone one will encounter all sorts of obstacles within oneself and difficulties without. If one places oneself under the training of an expert preceptor, whose long experience in this matter and natural gift for guiding others makes one’s advice mentally enlightening and practically useful, the hardships will be much more easily and quickly overcome. The beginner cannot take one’s lessons from the skies. Even if only to impart the right atmosphere and inculcate the right ideas, one has to find a teacher. When they need to speak, you listen; when they need to listen, you speak; when they need to question, you answer; and when they need to answer, you question. Knowing when is just a part of what makes one a great teacher. Teachers inspire dreams, shape lives, and give us hope for the future. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

The use of a teacher is, firstly, suggestive. One’s influence is a definite assistance to incline us to travel along the proper path. It is, secondly, protective, for under one’s constant guidance we learn to be weary of pitfalls. More people need to spend as much time looking into their soul, as they spend on social media. When the lights go out in our brains, the Dark Ages are coming again! The illuminate stands on the very apex of the pyramid of knowledge. That is why one can understand the position of all others and sympathize with them, too. The being of the instinctivists lives the past of the species, as the being of the behaviorists lives the present of one’s social system. The former is a machine that can only produce social patterns of the present. Instinctivism and behaviorism have one basic premise in common: that beings have no psyche with its own structure and its own laws. For instinctivism, the same sense holds true. Some psychologist may criticize others dealing with humans (Humanpsychologen) who claim that anything psychic can only be explained psychologically, for instance, on the basis of psychological premises. (The “only” is a slight distortion of their position of the sake of a better argument). #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

On the contrary, if there is an area where we certainly cannot find the explanation for psychic events and experiences, it is the area of the psyche itself; this is so for the same reason that we cannot find an explanation for digestion in the digestive processes, but in those special ecological exposed a number of organisms to selective pressures which made them assimilate not only inorganic foodstuffs, but also those of an organic nature. In the same way psychical processes are also achievements which have come about as a result of selective pressures of life—and species—preserving value. Their explanation is in every sense pre-psychological. Put in simpler language, it is maintained that one can explain psychological data by the evolutionary process alone. The crucial point here is what is meant by “explain.” If, for instance, one wants to know how the effect of fear is possible as the result of the evolution of the brain from the lowest to the highest animals, then this is a task for those scientists who investigate the evolution of the brain. However, if one wants to explain why a person is frightened, the data on evolution will not contribute much to the answer: the explanation must be essentially a psychological one. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

Perhaps the person is threatened by a stronger enemy, or is coping with one’s own repressed aggression, or suffers from a sense of powerlessness, or a paranoid element in one makes one feel persecuted, or—many other factors that alone or in combination may explain one’s fright. To want to explain the fright of a particular person by evolutionary process is plainly futile. There is a premise that the only approach to the study of human phenomena is the evolutionary one, means that we understand the psychical process in a being exclusively by knowing how, in the process of evolution, one became what one is. Similarly, it is suggested that digestive processes are to be explained in terms of conditions as they existed hundreds of millions of years ago. If the physician was concerned with the evolution of digestion, rather than with the causes of the particular symptom in this particular patient, could a physician dealing with disturbances of the digestive tract help one’s patient? For some, evolution becomes the only science, and absorbs all other sciences dealing with humans. It seems that if humans understand the evolutionary process which made them become what they are now, humans understand themselves only and sufficiently. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

In spite of the great differences between instinctivistic and behavioristic theory, they have a common basic orientation. They both exclude the person, the behaving being, from their field of vision. Whether beings are the product of conditioning, or the product of terrestrial evolution, one is exclusively determined by conditions outside oneself; of has no part in one’s own life, no responsibility, and not even a trace of freedom. Humans are puppets, controlled by strings—instinct or conditioning. However, this theory holds some weight with corrupt politicians, the TV News media, the evil wealthy, and corrupt fractions of law enforcement influences individuals to spy on their neighbors, act out, and set people they do not like up, in lieu of dropping criminal charges against the aggressor, and/or illegally giving the aggressor government benefits and cash payments to target certain innocent individuals. Essentially, these aggressors are no longer operating through their own will, they are now puppets and slaves controlled by a tyrannical faction of beings or an organization. At this level, sacrifice is an admission of the pitiful finitude and powerlessness of humans in the face of mysterium tremendum (a mystery before which humanity both trembles and is fascinated, is both repelled and attracted. Thus, God can appear both as wrathful or awe-inspiring, on the one hand, and as gracious and loveable, on the other) of the Universe, the immensity of what transcends one and negates one’s significance. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

At this level sacrifice affirms reality, bows to it, and attempts to conciliate it. Sacrifice, then, is not an irrational aberration, but a basic human reflex of truth, a correct expiation of natural guilt. One basic motive of society is the symbolic expiation of guilt, which we see as a very complex phenomenon grounded in the truth of the human condition. Guilt is one of the serious motives of humans, not to be tossed off lightly. If we are to understand the happenings of history, these happenings have to be seen as resulting from the composite of human motives, not simply from the aberrations of power of the elusiveness of a dream. The new technology and the promise of abundance are the dream that keeps humankind mesmerized; oppressiveness of tyranny would not have been tolerated but for the beneficial goods that flowed out of the megamachines. However, people bear tyranny because of its rewards not only to their stomachs but also their souls. They support tyranny by willingly marching off to war not only because that reduces the frustration they feel at home toward authority, not only because it enables them to project their hatreds on the enemy, but also because it expiates their guilt. How else explain the parents that we read about during each war who, when told about the tragic death of their son or daughter, have expressed regret that they had not more to give? #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

This age-old essence of primitive gift giving; it chills us only by the nature of the sacrifice that they make so willingly and by the secondhand god to whom it is offered—the nation-state. However, it is not cynical or callous: in guilt one gives with a melting heart and with choking tears because one is guilty, one is transcended by the unspeakable majesty and superlativeness of the natural and cultural World, against which one feels realistically humbled; by giving one draws oneself into that power and merges one’s existence with it. Furthermore—and this takes us deeper into the problem—sacrifice and scapegoating are not technical tricks to overcome anxiety. The spilling of blood, because it is a life substance, may be a magical effort to grow crops. Of course. In one of its forms scapegoating is also magical in origin: a ritual is performed over a goat, by which all the tribe’s uncleanliness (sin) is transferred to the animal; it is then driven off or killed, leaving the village clean. It is the same way that Jesus was done and Queen Akasha in Anne Rice’s Queen of the Damned. This act not only represented an arrangement of life but a real spiritual purge that qualifies one to triumph over death. I doubt that enslaved people were sacrificed at an upper-class feast of the Maya merely to give it a properly genteel elegance. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

It is true that primitives have often spilled blood in order simply to gloat and strut over an enemy; but I think the motive is more elemental than merely to give to feasts a pleasant veneer. Humans spill blood because it makes their hearts glad and fills out their organisms with a sense of vital power; ceremoniously killing captives is a way of affirming power over life, and therefore over death. The sacrificer may seem nonchalant about it, but this is because beings like to experience their power effortlessly and smoothly, as though they were accustomed by nature to dispose of the strongest force she had to offer. (Detroit car makers who sell power and speed—with their business person’s realism about the truths of life—have long known this.) Also, consider gift giving, it relates not only to guilty but fundamentally to power. The sacrifice is a gift, a gift to the gods which is directed to the flow of power, to keeping the life force moving there where it has been blocked by sin. With the sacrifice humans feeds the gods to give them more power so that one may have more. The sacred food has the strength of life. The sacrifice of living things adds visible life power to the stream of life; the more living things sacrificed, the more extravagant release of power, and so forth. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

When a king died, the ancient custom of sacrificing wives, enslaved people, and cavaliers was not only that they should continue to serve the master in the in the invisible World—that was a matter of course. What they achieved by suffering and dying together as living sacrifices was to bring extravagant new life into being. The sacrifice was a means for establishing a communion with the invisible World, making a circle on the flow of power, a bridge over which it could pass. So, for example, in the simple building sacrifice when one took possession of a piece of ground: the sacrifice expulsed the demonic spirits in the soil and released powers that literally purged the place and made building upon it safe. Now this idea of flux and flow of power may not be so hard for us to understand today—as we saw Aaliyah was killed in a plane crash on 25 August 2001, and the 9 September 2001, the twin towers were taken down and nearly 4,000 lives were immediately lost. Some believe it is evidence of a primitive culture in American practicing rituals. The Nazi experience is also a grim refresher course on the metaphysics of mass slaughter. Nazis were animated by a spiritual concept: they had a whole philosophy of blood and soil which contained the belief that death nourishes life. We recognize the familiar archaic idea that the sacrifice of life makes life flow more plentifully. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

Because of this idea that death mystically replenishes life and the birth of insurance companies for people and other assets, it has required insurance companies to go a step further to prevent the loss of life by offering Kidnap and Ransom Insurance that also covers extortion. This is an effort to keep people from sacrificing innocent lives to collect a cash payout. These insurance companies offer for $2,000, for instance, $5 million in coverage to pay to have a person who is illegally detained released, pay their ransom or pay extortion demands. Furthermore, a death potlatch is what we discussed before when stated that people think death mystically replenishes life. Well, Dr. Karl Brandt, plenipotentiary in charge of all medical activities in the Reich, when asked about his attitude toward the killing of human beings in the course of medical experiments, replied, “Do you think that one can obtain any worthwhile fundamental results without a definite toll of lives? The same goes for technologic development. You cannot build a great bridge, a gigantic building—you cannot establish a speed record without deaths!” In similar vein, many SS men took a curious pride in the fact that even in peacetime they had many fatalities during “realistic” military training. Human bodies were encased in the concrete fortifications and bunkers, as though such bodies could give strength to inanimate matter. And a man was encased in the concrete of the original Bay Bride in Oakland, California USA, which was recently demolished. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

The psychological question is for most disputants the only question. When your ordinary doctor of divinity has proved to one’s own satisfaction that an altogether unique faculty called “conscious” must be postulated to tell us what is right and what is wrong; or when your popular-science enthusiast has proclaimed that “apriorism” (the doctrine that knowledge rests upon principles that are self-evident to reason or are presupposed by experience in general) is an exploded superstition, and that our moral judgments have gradually resulted from the teaching of the environment, each of these persons thinks that ethics is settled and nothing more is to be said. The familiar pair of names, Intuitionist and Evolutionist, so commonly used now to connote all possible differences in ethical opinion, really refer to the psychological questions alone. The discussion of this question hinges so much upon particular details that it is impossible to enter upon it all within the limits of this paper. So many of our human ideals must have arisen from the association with acts of simple bodily pleasures and reliefs from pain. Association with many remote pleasures will unquestionably make a thing significant of good ness in our minds; and the more vaguely the goodness is conceived of, the more mysterious will its source appear to be. However, it is surely impossible to explain all our sentiments and preferences in this simple way. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

The more minutely psychological studies human nature, the more clearly it finds there traces of secondary affections, relating the impressions of the environment with one another and with our impulses in quite different ways from those mere associations of coexistence and succession which are practically all that pure empiricism can admit. Take the love of stimulants; take bashfulness, acrophobia (the terror of high places), motion sickness syndrome, haemophobia (to faint at the sight of blood), the susceptibility to musical sounds; take the emotion of the comical, the passion for poetry, for mathematics, or for metaphysics—no one of these things can be wholly explained by either association or utility. They go with other things that can be so explained, no doubt; and some of them are prophetic of future utilities, since there is nothing in us for which some use may not be found. However, their origin is in incidental complications to our cerebral structure, a structure whose original features arose with no reference to the perception of such discords and harmonies as these. Well, a vast number of our moral perceptions also are certainly of this secondary and brain-born kind. They deal with directly felt fitness between things, and often fly in the teeth of all the prepossessions of habit and presumptions of utility. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

The moment you get beyond the coarser and more commonplace moral maxims, The Decalogues (The Ten Commandments) and Poor Richard’s Almanacs (a collection of periodicals, which contain humor, information, and proverbial wisdom), you fall into schemes and positions which to the eye of common-sense are fantastic and overstrained. The sense for abstract justice which some person have is as eccentric a variation, from the natural-history point of view, as is the passion for music or for the higher philosophical consistencies which consumes the soul of others. The feeling of the inward dignity of certain spiritual attitudes, peace, serenity, simplicity, veracity; and of the essential vulgarity of others, as querulousness, anxiety, egoistic fussiness, and so forth, are quite inexplicable except by an innate preference of the more ideal attitude for its own pure sake. The nobler thing tastes better, and what is all that we can say. Experience of consequences may truly teach us what things are wicked, but what have consequences to do with what is mean and vulgar? If a being has shot his wife’s paramour, by reason of what subtile repugnancy in things is that we are so disgusted when we hear that the wife and the husband have made it up and are living comfortably together again? Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a World in which Messrs (plural of MR. for example, Mr. Hollingsworth, Mr. Toth, Mr. Wallace). #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

Francois Marie Charles Fourier, Edward Bellamy, and William Morris’s utopias should all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torture, what except a specifical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain? To what, once more, but subtile brain-born feelings of discord can be due all these recent protests against the entire race-tradition of retributive justice? –I refer to Tolstoi with his ideas of non-resistance, to Mr. Bellamy with his substitution of the punitive ideal. All these subtileties of the moral sensibility go as much beyond what can be ciphered out from the laws of association as the delicacies of sentiment possible between a pair of young lovers go beyond such precepts of the etiquette to be observed during engagement as are printed in manuals of social form. No! Purely inward forces are certainly at work here. All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

Our ideals have certainly many sources. They are not all explicable as signifying corporeal pleasures to be gained, and pains to be escaped. And for having s constantly perceived this psychological fact, we must applaud the intuitionist school. Whether or not such applause must be extended to that school’s other characteristics will appear as we take up more questions. The vital spirit has a special affinity for the body; indeed, it abhors leaving the flesh, because it has no connaturals neat at hand. It may, perhaps, rush to the extremities of the body, to meet something that it loves, but it is loth to go forth. Novital spirits have two appetites. They desire to multiply. Unhappily finding nothing like: One drop of water moves towards another, and flame to flame; but much more does this appear in the escape of the spirit into the external air, because it is not carried to a particle like itself, but to a very World of connaturals…the going forth and escape of the spirit into the air is a double action arising partly from the appetite of the spirit, and partly from the appetite of the air; for the common air is a needy thing, and seizes everything with avidity, as spirits, odours, rays, sounds and the like. The vital spirit is held to exercise two functions that nonvital spirits do not reveal. First, it seems to play a controlling role in the governing the growth and decay of body parts and tissues. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

The lifeless spirit maintains itself by feeding on adjacent parts. The amount and rate of its feeding determine the time span of its host’s existence. Since inanimate things exist far longer than animate beings, the vital spirit, present only in things living, is in part responsible for the body’s growth, sustenance, and corruption. It disturbs and restrains and intensifies and increases the processes involved in the consumption or depredation of the human body and the repair or refreshment thereof. In the most direct of ways, then, the vital spirit is vital. The vital spirit, in the second place, seems to be the efficient cause of all actions and functions undertaken by the body’s principal organs and members. Digestion is the function of the stomach, seeing that of the eye, and so on. The action in each case is properly that of the organ and member involved. They can be regarded as the material cause of the action. However, no action, no matter how specific to a member, would come if the vital spirit were not present: The actions or functions of the individual members follow the nature of the members themselves; as attraction, retention, digestion, assimilation, separation, excretion, perspiration, and even the sense itself, depend upon the properties of the several organs, as the stomach, liver, heart, spleen, gall, brain, eye, ear, and the rest. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

However, yet none of these actions would ever be set in motion without the vigour, presence, and heat of the vital spirit. Thus, the vital spirit is some sort of force-carrying, or force-bearing, substance without which no animal or human activity is possible. Perhaps the notion of “vehicle” fits here. If so, we are reminded of the efficient cause and that it is nothing else than the vehicle of form. So spiritual transformation, the renovation of the human heart, is an inescapable human problem with no human solution. It is something that can be learned from a survey of World history, World cultures, and past and present efforts to deal with human life by religion, education, law, and medicine. And when we take into consideration the many techniques that are taught in the various psychologies and competing spiritualities of our own day, this observation unfortunately stands firm. Genuine transformation of the whole person into the goodness and power seen in Jesus and his Father, God—the only transformation adequate to the human self-remains the necessary goal of human life. However, it is possessed beyond the reach of programs of inner transformation that draw merely on the human spirit—even when the human spirit is itself treated and ultimately divine. And spiritual formation has now presented itself as a hopeful possibility for responding to the crying, unmet need of the human soul. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

The hope springs once again for a response to the need that is both deeply rooted in Christian traditions and powerfully relevant to circumstances of contemporary life. “And then shall ye know that I am an honest person, and that I am sent unto you from God,” reports Helaman 9.36. O, God, Who makest us glad with the yearly expectation of our redemption, grant that as we joyfully receive Thine Only-begotten Son as our Redeemer, we may also see Him without fears when He cometh as our Judge. Only through our Lord, who with Thee four things from which the Master is entirely free, we come to understand that God has no foregone conclusions, no arbitrary pre-determinations, no obstinacy, and no egoism. Grant, O merciful God, that for the reception of the transcendent mystery of Thy Son’s Nativity, the minds of believers may be prepared, and also the hearts of unbelievers subdued. Through the same Jesus Christ our Lord who is working for an infinite duration of time, peace will come. Therefore, we must be infinitely patient. O God, Who art pleased to save, by the Nativity of Thy Christ, the race of beings, which was mortally wounded in its chief, grant us this healing blessing. God we beseech Thee, that we may not cleave to the author of our perdition, but be transferred to the fellowship of our Redeemer, Who with Thee the plane of negative thoughts, emotions, and behaviour does not exist. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

CRESLEIGH MEADOWS AT PLUMAS RANCH

Plumas Lake, CA | from the mid $300’s

Coming Soon!

Cresleigh Meadows is coming soon! Found just north of Feather River Boulevard, Cresleigh Meadows is home of the largest neighborhood in Plumas Ranch as well as the popular Bear River Park. With four floor plans available, ranging from approximately 2,000 – 3,500 square feet offering, three to five bedrooms, we are certain you will find the home that fits your needs and lifestyle. The kaleidoscope of home designs parallel changes in American society. These are family-oriented households turned outward to involvement in social movements and to work outside the home. Homes designed by Cresleigh are clean and elegant, representing the most important aspects of American life.

These popular design feature clean lines of classical and early American architecture. The design elements include reflect the highest in moral and artistic merit. There are great technological advances for a nation of nesters with open floor plans, large kitchen islands, and flex spaces are staples in Cresleigh homes. Multi-generational living options also available in select homes. Cresleigh homes creates havens from the strain and bustle of the outside World. A number of these homes exist around the World and are seen as cozy retreats from the harsh clamor of daily life. Take a pictorial stroll through some of the glorious Cresleigh homes to learn about the architecture, furniture, and design that fascinates us all. Many of these houses are reminiscent of the Queen Anne era with, Eastlake, Stick and Shingle styles and the Arts and Crafts Movement. https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-meadows-at-plumas-ranch/

It is the Work of the Enlightened to Show People What they Cannot See for themselves—their Own Higher Possibilities!

December 7, 2019 2:11 am

That perfect tranquility of life, which is nowhere to be found but in retreat, a faithful friend, and a good soul. When I look into my soul, I cannot understand why I ever step out of it. Our neighborhoods represent the best and last frontier in our collaborative efforts to advocate for and improve the lives of our community members. It is within the structure of neighborhoods that our family develops, incorporates values, and even learn the skills necessary for responsible citizenship. If you thoroughly know anything of value, teach it to others. Healthier personalities have the ability to find and maintain relationships of love and friendships in the World. This ability insures that a healthier person will have access to relief from the existential loneliness in which we all live. It will be noted that I used the term “relief.” Loneliness is not a disease of which one can be cured; it is instead an inescapable fact of human existence. Less healthy personalities, cut off as they are from the fount of their real selves, find themselves terrible company. They cannot long tolerate solitude, and they run willy-nilly into busy-work, or superficial companionship with others. They do not, however, truly encounter another person and enter into dialogue with one. Hence, the feeling of loneliness, of not being known and understood, chronically nags at them like a stone in their shoe or a headache. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

The healthier personality, because one is less self-concealing and has readier access to one’s own fantasy, feelings, and memories, is less afraid of solitude when this is one’s lot; and when one is with others, one can feel secure enough in one’s own worth that one can let encounter and dialogue happen. During the process of such dialogue, the shell which encapsulates one as a separate, isolated being ruptures; and one’s inner World expands to include the received World of experience of the other. When the dialogue ends, one has experienced oneself in the new dimensions evoked by the other person, and one has learned of the personal World of another—thus one has enlarged and changed. The less healthy personality defends oneself against being so affected and changed in one’s contact with others. One “rubs shells,” or clinks one’s character armor against that of the other person, but does not meet the other. There is no encounter. Just as a healthy personality dares to let oneself be the one he or she is, so does he respect, even cherish and defend, the “suchness,” the idiosyncrasy, of the other person in one’s World. One eschews sneaky efforts to manipulate the feelings, thoughts, and actions of the other; hence one truly experiences the other person as an other, as a source of being, different in some respect from oneself and similar to one in other ways. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

The less healthy person dares neither to let oneself be, nor to trust the being when one is not trying to control the being. In one’s transactions, one seeks always to influence the other, if in no other modality than in the way in which one will be seen and experienced by the other. In the extreme instances of unhealthy personality, the individual actually (this can only be stated metaphorically) detaches one’s ego from one’s body and functions as a spectator and manipulator of one’s own depersonalized body as it transacts with the other person. This depersonalized body is then manipulated before the other, in the hope that the other’s experience of and responses toward this counterfeit person can thus be controlled: robots performing before others who are perceived as robots. However, when people make a profession of their stigma, the majority group leaders are obliged to have dealings with representatives of other categories, and so find themselves breaking out of the closed circle of their own kind. Instead of leaning on their crutch, they get to play golf with it, ceasing, in terms of social participation, to be representative of the people they represent. Also, those who professionally present the viewpoint of their category may introduce some systematic bias in the presentation simply because they are sufficiently involved in the problem to write about it. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

Although any particular stigma category is likely to have professionals who take different lines, and may even support publications which advocate different programs, there is uniform tacit agreement that the situation of the individual with this particular stigma is worth attention. Whether a writer takes a stigma very seriously or makes light of it, one must define it as something worth writing about. This minimal agreement, even when there are no others, helps to consolidate belief in the stigma as a basis for self-conception. Here again representatives are not representative, for representation can hardly come from those who give no attention to their stigma, or who are relatively unlettered. I do not mean to suggest here that professionals provide the stigmatized with the sole public source of reminder as to their situation in life; there are other reminders. Each time someone with a particular stigma makes a spectacle of oneself by breaking a law, winning a prize, or becoming a first of one’s kind, a local community make take gossipy note of this; these events can even make news in the mass media of the wider society. In any case, they who share the noted person’s stigma suddenly become accessible to the normal immediately around and become subject to a slight transfer of credit or discredit to themselves. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

By being now embraced by the masses, the situation of the stigmatized individual’s situation thus leads them easily into living in a World of publicized heroes and villains of their own stripe, their relation to this World being underlined by immediate associated, both normal and otherwise, who bring them news about how one of their kind has fared. When one considers one set of individuals, from whom the stigmatized person can expect some support, those who share one’s stigma and by virtue of this are defined and define themselves as one’s own kind. The second set are—to borrow a term once used by homosexuals—the “wise,” namely, persons who are not perceived as part of the dominate group but whose special situation some times has made them intimately privy to the secret life of the stigmatized individual and sympathetic with it, and who find themselves accorded a measure of acceptance, a measure of courtesy membership in the clan. Wise persons are the marginal beings before whom the individual with a fault need feel no shame nor exert self-control, knowing that in spite of one’s failing one will be seen as an ordinary other. An example may be cited from the World of a woman of the evening. Although she sneers at respectability, the lady, particularly, the woman of the evening, is supersensitive in polite society, taking refuge in her off hours with Bohemian artists, writers, actors and would-be intellectuals. There she may be accepted as an off-beat personality, without being a curiosity. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

Before taking the standpoint of those with a particular stigma, the person perceived as normal who is becoming wise may first have to pass through a heart-changing personal experience, of which there are many literary records. And after the sympathetic normal makes oneself available to the stigmatized, one often must wait their validation of one as a courtesy member. The self must not only be offered, it must be accepted. Sometimes, of course, the final step does seem to be initiated by the normal; the following is an example of this. “I do not know whether I can or not, but let me tell of an incident. I was once admitted to a group of African American boys of about my own age with whom I used to fish. When I first began to join them, they would carefully use a term of endearment in my presence. Gradually, as we went fishing more and more often, they began to joke with each other in front of me and call each other the more derogatory term of endearment. The change was in their utilization of the word when joking after the precious inability to use the word at all. One day when we were swimming, a boy shoved me with mock violence and I said to him, ‘Do not give me that (expletive) talk.’ He replied, ‘You bastard,’ with a big grin. From that time on, we could all use the term of endearment but the old categories had totally changed. Never, as long as I live, will I forget the way my stomach felt after I used the term of endearment without any reservation.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

Heaven lies within and without us, it is true. But in most cases, only by the intervention of some authentic spiritual genius do we seem able to translate this into actuality for ourselves. Life is teaching us all the time but its voice needs a human being as a more direct medium, its lessons need human speech or writing to gain clearer utterance. If we never tried to seem a little better than we are, how could we improve or train ourselves from the outside inward? And the same impulse to show the World a better or idealized aspect of ourselves finds an organized expression in the various professions and classes, each of which has to some extent a cant or pose, which its members assume unconsciously, for the most part, but which has the effect of a conspiracy to work upon the credulity of the rest of the World. There is a cant not only of theology and of philanthropy, but also of law, medicine, teaching, even of science—perhaps especially of science, just now, since the more a particular kind of merit is recognized and admired, the more it is likely to be assumed to be worthy. Thus, when the individual presents oneself before others, one’s performance will tend to incorporate and exemplify the officially accredited values of the society, more so, in fact, than does one’s behavior as a whole. To the degree that a performance highlights the common official values of the society in which it occurs, we may look upon it, in the matter of Durkheim and Radcliffe-Brown, as a ceremony—as an expressive rejuvenation and reaffirmation of the moral values of the community. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

Furthermore, in so far as the expressive bias of performances comes to be accepted as reality, then that which is accepted at the moment as reality will have some of the characteristics of a celebration. To stay in one’s room away from the place where the party is given, or away from where the practitioner attends one’s client, is to stay away from where reality is being performed. The World, in truth, is a wedding. One of the richest sources of data on the presentation of idealized performances is the literature on social mobility. In most societies there seems to be a major or general system of stratification, and in most stratified societies there is an idealization of the higher strata and some aspiration on the part of those in low places to move to higher ones. (One must be careful to appreciate that this involves not merely a desire for a prestigeful place but also a desire for a place close to the sacred center of the common values of the society.) Commonly we find that upward mobility involves the presentation of proper performances and that efforts to move upward and effort to keep from moving downward are expressed in terms of sacrifices made for the maintenance of front. Once the proper sign-equipment has been obtained and familiarity gained in the management of it, then this equipment can be used to embellish and illumine one’s daily performances with a favorable social style. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

Perhaps the most important piece of sign-equipment associated with social class consist of the status symbols through which material wealth is expressed. American society is similar to others in this regard but seems to have been singled out as an extreme example of wealth-oriented class structure—perhaps because in America the license to employ symbols of wealth and financial capacity to do so are so widely distributed. Indian society, on the other hand, has sometimes been cited not only as one in which mobility occurs in terms of caste groups, not individuals, but also as one in which performances tend to establish favorable claims regarding non-material values. The caste system, for example, is far from a rigid system in which the position of each component is fixed for all time. Movement has always been possible, and especially so in the middle regions of the hierarchy. A low caste was able, in a generation or two, to rise to a higher position in the hierarchy by adopting vegetarianism and teetotalism, by Sanskritizing its ritual and pantheon. In short, it took over, as far as possible, the customs, rites, and beliefs of the Brahmins, and the adoption of the Brahminic way of life by a low caste seems to have been frequent, though theoretically forbidden. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

The tendency of the lower castes to imitate the higher has been a powerful factor in the spread of Sanskritic ritual and customs, and in the achievement of a certain amount of cultural uniformity, not only throughout the caste scale but over the entire length and breadth of India. Nature herself is forever silently voicing these majestic truths and if we are unable to receive them from her lips, as we usually are, then we must receive them from a teacher’s lecture. We know that the mere reading of books and journals is not enough, and our essential conviction (as also the acknowledgment of the Old World since time immemorial) is that a personal guide who can instruct and inspire one to travel through the twilit jungle land which lies between ignorance and truth is indispensable. This missing element in many quests is the spiritual guide. One of the greatest helps to convert our timid thoughts and our trembling wishes into deeps is the inspiration received from a superior mind. Most beings find they need a concrete symbol to receiver their devotion and concentrate their aspiration. In short, they find they need a Spiritual Leader, be one historical and of the past, or contemporary and of the present. It is said that wisdom comes with experience. However, the enlightened who offer to impart it, whether in person or in writing, may save us some of the effort and suffering which accompany experience. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

In fact, of course, there are many Hindu circles whose members are much concerned with injecting an expression of wealth, luxury, and class status into the performance of their daily round and who think too little of ascetic purity to bother affecting it. Correspondingly, there have always been influential groups in America whose members has felt that some aspect of every performance ought to play down the expression of sheer wealth in order to foster the impression that standards regarding birth, culture, or moral earnestness are the ones that prevail. Every generation has to find its own way through these mysteries and to these truths anew, despite the heavy freight of recorded teachings and revelations which it receives from all the previous ones. This is why new prophets have always been needed to provide the very antiquated clues. Something or someone is needed to draw us from the ego to God. When one finds out that all one’s efforts at self-improvement are movements around a circle, that the ego does not really intend to give itself up in surrender to the soul and therefore only pretends to do so, one realizes that left to oneself one cannot succeed in really changing one’s inner centre of gravity. If one is to free oneself from such a hopeless position, help is needed from some outside source. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

It is not that teachers make a difference—they make the difference for the future. Students need to know that you care before they care what you know. The home environment is a most powerful factor in determining the level of growth achievement of individuals, people’s interest in learning, and the number of years of education the individual will receiver. It accounts for more of the person’s motivation in learning than does the educational curriculum or the quality of instruction in our education. The soul is the most enduring of memorials, the trustiest monument for the presentation of an event or a name or an affection; for it, and it only, is respected by wars and revolutions, and survives them. The purposes of human evolution require the presence at all times through human history of some spiritually fulfilled individuals to act as guides or teachers. At no period has the race been left entirely without them, no matter how bleak, how savage, or how materialistic the period has been. While the dream is still continuing, one cannot help taking its scenes and figures as being quite real. However, if someone rings a bell until one awakens from the dreaming state, one will then see that both scenes and figures were mere figments of one’s own imagination. In a sense, the teacher of philosophy acts as this awakener did, except that one directs one’s efforts to the sense-deceived consciousness of everyday life. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

It is not enough to set up a spiritual ideal for one to attain. One needs also the psychological help, the emotional and mental re-education which can remove large obstructions to that attainment. No seeker is so wise, so informed, so perfect, or so balanced as not to need the constructive criticism and expert counsel of a true spiritual guide. Such is the World today, with its tensions and greeds, its confusions and wrongs, its ignorance and evil-doing, that if anyone has a store of virtue and an awareness of divinity, people have need of them and hence of one. There is too little of the one and hardly any of the other among us. A being needs comfort and support in these times more than in ordinary times. Where can one best find them? By sitting humbly in intellectual discipleship under those who have been blessed by the higher power with the revelation of its own existence. One can absorb from them a certitude that the World is still ruled by higher laws and its history by higher purposes. “And because of your diligence and your faith and your patience with the word in nourishing it, that it may take root in you, behold, by and by ye shall pluck the fruit thereof, which is most precious, which is sweet, and which is above all that is sweet, and which is white above all that is white, yea, and pure above all that is pure; and ye shall feast upon this fruit even until ye are filled, that ye hunger not, neither shall ye thirst,” reports Alma 32.42. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

Certainly we do not intend to deride any good thing, and we are thankful for whatever truly helps human beings in their desperate life upon the Earth. Nothing else would be compatible with the spirit of Jesus. The constant love of God is extended to every human being who ever lives, sometimes in places and postures that God himself would not prefer, but still with some good effect. However, whether or not a spirituality adequate to human need and producing genuine renovation of the heart can be a matter of mere human abilities is a question of fact. To be mistaken about it will have consequences of the most serious nature. In any case, we may be sure of this: the formation and, later, transformation of the inner life of humans, from which our outer existence flows, is an inescapable human problem. Spiritual formation, without regard to any specifically religious context or tradition, is the process by which the human spirit or will is given a definite form or character. It is a process that happens to everyone. The most despicable as well as the most admirable of persons have had a spiritual formation. Gangsters as well as saints ae the outcome of spiritual formation. Their spirits or hearts have been formed. We each can become a certain kind of person in the depts of our being, gaining a specific type of character. And that is the outcome of a process of spiritual formation as understood in general human terms that apply to everyone, whether they want it or not. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

Fortunate of blessed are those who are able to find or are given a path of life that will form their spirit and inner World in a way that is truly strong and good and directed Godward. The shaping and reshaping of the inner life is, accordingly, a problem that has been around as long as humanity itself; and the earliest records of human thought bear eloquent witness to the human struggle to solve it—but with very limited success, one would have to say. True, some points in human history have shown more success in the elevation of the human spirit than others. However, the low points far exceed the high points, and the average is discouragingly low. Societies the World around are currently in desperate straits trying to produce people who are merely capable of coping with their life on Earth in a nondestructive manner. This is as true as of North American and Europe as it is of the rest of the World, though the struggle takes superficially different forms in various areas. In spiritual matters there really is no “Third World.” It is all Third World. When a child of God undertakes a public task or mission one will neither over nor under do one’s work. One will do exactly what is required. The enlightened being expressed self without selfishness, individuality without individualism. One possesses a sense of infinite leisure, a manner devoid of all haste, a willingness to achieve one’s ends little by little. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

Although fully deserving it, one is too humble to demand and always too embarrassed when offered nay special reverence. One’s personality is one with one’s teaching: one’s life incarnates, practices, and actualizes it. One is content to let then attribute to others the help they are getting from one. One’s ego needs no gratitude and no recognition and would not know what to do with them if they came. One rejoices in their progress as the chief thing. What one gives one gives freely and asks for no requital. Since one’s life itself is not fixed but moves incessantly, one cannot congeal one’s thought into fixed doctrines that are strict and rigid or one’s character into fixed attitudes. One will put forth whatever wisdom indicates in any situation and to any question, not solely what the past indicates—which is what accumulated knowledge or a lined-up character really does. One’s mind is free, one’s policies always fresh. One is neither orthodox nor unorthodox. Naturally such a fluid standpoint will not find approval from the many who have to wear a partisan or fanatic label. The self-renounced illuminate sits beside the gleaming river of life and dips one’s pitcher like others into those troubled waters of passion or pain. Yet one wears an inscrutable smile which perhaps says: “I see all and know all. If I drink with you, it is to be you. If I remain with you, it is to help you. For paradoxically, I sit also at this river’s source.” #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

If someone knows what I do not yet know, if one has trodden father on this path, then it is well to learn from one if one will teach me. The instruction and criticism of a qualified living guide are worth having. However, owing to the rarity of such guides, many seekers are unable to find one. One should appreciate the value of finding a master worthy of being followed. The inner demand of the one will attract in time the outer meeting with the other. No maniac can sure oneself. We dare not leave the treatment of humanity’s mania entirely to humanity themselves. The help of sane outsiders is needed. However, it should be given indirectly and unobtrusively. If the more mature, older, and more experience nightingales find it necessary to give lessons in singing to the younger ones, why not the same situation among human beings? It is the greatest irony of human’s existence that in the end one will be saved from one’s meanness and misery not by those who shout the loudest but by the quietest, the most silent of one’s fellows. For the power and knowledge which one will gain from discipleship with them will be what one needs above all else—power over the baseness in oneself and knowledge f the divine World-Idea. “Then my brethren, ye shall reap the reward of your faith, and your diligence, and patience, and long-suffering, waiting for the tree to bring forth fruit unto you,” reports Alma 32.43. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

I must say I find the news very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to my library and read a book. The love of learning, the sequestered nooks, and all the sweet serenity of the soul is found when we open our hearts to God. O God, Who hast made this most sacred night to shine with the illumination of the True Light; grant, we beseech Thee, that as we have known the mystery of that Light upon Earth, we may also perfectly enjoy it in heaven; through the same as Jesus Christ our Lord. Grant, O Merciful God, that He Who was born to be the Saviour of the World, as He is the Author of our divine birth, so may be Himself the Bestower of our immortality; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Almighty and everlasting God, Who hast willed that on the Nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, should depend the beginning and the completion of all religion; grant us, we beseech Thee, to be reckoned as a portion of Him, on Whom is built the whole salvation of humankind; Who with Thee. We beseech Thee, O Lord, bestow on Thy servants the increase of faith, hope, and charity; that as they glory in the Nativity of Thy Son our Lord, they may, by Thy governance, not feel the adversities of the World; and also that what they desire to celebrate in time, they may enjoy to all eternity; through the same as Jesus Christ our Lord. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

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For those Without Money, the Road to the Treasure House of the Imagination Begins in the Soul

December 6, 2019 1:59 am

To my thinking, great souls must have a clear head, a strong hand, and above all, a great heart; and I am inclined to think that many of us can achieve this. However, we often fear our greatness as well as our lowliness, and this is precisely the core dilemma, from the existential-integrative standpoint. The fears of both constriction and expansion (or their clinically useful synonyms, smallness and greatness) haunt the entire spectrum of existential freedoms. They are the keys, moreover, to a full existential restoration. The human psyche (consciousness) is characterized by a constrictive-expansive continuum, only degrees of which are conscious. For the purpose of our existential-integrative framework, we consider six positions along this continuum: the physiological, the environment, the cognitive, the psychosexual, the interpersonal, and the experiential (being). Whereas physiological, environmental, and cognitive positions along the continuum are dominated by conscious processing, psychosexual, interpersonal, and experiential modalities are accented by pre- and sub-conscious mediation. It is not necessary to be living always near a spiritual leader in a monastery as so many seem to think. Death is silent; education is noisy. Every person, regardless of the disguise, knows what he or she it not. One must learn what one can be. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13

What is really necessary to meet one on this physical plane is to connection with your soul, even if just for five minutes a day. After that one’s help can be received inwardly and mentally. This is because the real knowledge is not in the body, but part of one’s inner being, the Mind behind the body, and it is that inner being with which the seeker must try to come into relation. Such a relation one builds up oneself by one’s own mental attitude, by one’s faith and devotion and obedience to the way that is show. Dread of the constrictive or expansive polarities promotes dysfunction, extremism, or polarization, the degree and frequency of which is generally proportional to the degree and frequency of one’s dread. Put another way, one will do everything one can, including becoming extreme and destructive oneself, to avoid he constrictive or expansive polarity that one dreads. The dread of physiological expansion (arousal), for example, can promote extreme or dysfunctional measures to constrict (tranquilize) oneself. The conditioned fear of enclosures (constriction) can foster excessive efforts to enlarge or expand one’s surroundings. The dread of catastrophic (expansive) cognitions can associate with narrow, regimented cognitions. The revulsion for a constricted puritanical upbringing can correlate with an indulgent, expansive adulthood. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13

The horror of a directionless, rootless upbringing, on the other hand, can generate absolutist and fundamentalist tendencies later in life. The terror of being ontologically and cosmically dismissed (obliterated), finally, can lead to desperate psychophysiological efforts to manifest ontologically, to be all-important (which too often, tragically, leads back again to the impoverished position because aspirations of the former magnitude cannot be borne for long. Let us look at some psychiatric disorders and their associated dreads. When we consider hyperconstrictive dysfunctions and the dread of ultimate expansion (greatness, chaos), there are some things that stand out. With depression people usually dread assertion, stimulation, ambition, standing out, possibility. With dependency dreaded is autonomy, venturing out on one’s own, unmanageable responsibility. Anxiety produces certain dreads such as in dealing with potency and its associated risks, responsibilities, and strains. Also foolishness, spontaneity, and unpredictability. In cases of agoraphobia (fear of places and situations that might cause panic, helplessness, or embarrassment, which is an anxiety disorder that often develops after one or more panic attacks), what these people suffering with this condition tend to dread is open places, conflict and confusion. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13

With obsessive-compulsiveness people dread experimentations, surprise, confusion and complexity, disarray, and recklessness. In cases of paranoia individuals usually dread trusting, reaching out, the confusion, complexity, and brutality of relationships. However, in cases dealing with people who suffer from depressant substance abuse, these individuals usually dread all of the symptoms associated with hyperconstrictive dysfunctions. When looking at hyperexpansive dysfunctions and the dread of ultimate constriction (smallness, and obliteration), those who are dealing with mania (extremely elevated and excitable mood usually associated with bipolar disorder), these individuals dread confinement, limitation, delay of impulses, devitalization. In case of anti-social personality disorder, people usually dread vulnerability, weakness, and victimization. When individual suffer from hysteria, and they have a dread of rejection and insignificance. Those dealing with narcissism typically dread inadequacy, unworthiness, and impotence. In people experiencing impulsiveness, many tend to dread regimentation, routine, and emptiness. Seen in some suffering from claustrophobia, many dread entrapment, tight or closed places. Yet, in people dealing with stimulant abuse, they are frequently noted to dread all of the conditions associated with each hyperexpansive dysfunction. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13

Increasing our understanding of mental illness helps us reach out with love and compassion to those who are suffering. Some hyerconstrictive/expansion blends of dysfunctions and the dead experienced are important to consider. People who are passive-aggressive usually dread belittlement, on the one hand, and, on the other, the rage of fury that results from that dread. (The combination produces such blunted aggression as sarcasm and dawdling.) In those experiencing borderline personality disorder (a mental disorder characterized by emotional instability, feelings of worthlessness, insecurity, impulsivity, and impaired social relationships), these people usually dread extreme belittlement, insignificance combined with extreme rage, fury (which leads to both fusion, tyranny and isolation, and withdrawal). In cases of manic depression, we often see dread associated with confinement, limitation, and delay on the one hand, and assertion, stimulation, and ambition on the other. In people who suffer from schizophrenia, which is a long-term mental disorder of a type involving a breakdown in the relation between thought, emotion, and behavior, leading to faulty perception, inappropriate actions and feelings, withdrawal from reality and personal relationships into fantasy and delusion, and a sense of mental fragmentation, these people usually dread vaporizing (which may lead to disorganized, omnipotence-striving states) and exploding (which may foster obsessive, catatonic-like qualities). Schizophrenia associates with constrictive and expansive dreads in their most radical forms. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13

Although dread of (and compensation for) constrictive/expansive polarities can be seen at every existential level and is integral to the respective liberation of every level, its genesis is far from uniform. Constrictive or expansive dread can arise in a wide variety of spatial, temporal, and dispositional contexts. Acute trauma is the perception of an event as immediately contrary and shocking. It is an existential jolt that produces extreme fear. When a child falls ill, for example, a profound alteration in mobility may be experiences. If this alteration is powerful enough, it can alarm the child, not merely at the level of physiology (pleasure-pain) but at the higher levels of one’s groundedness in the World. It may be associated with mortal fears of diminishment, minimization, imperceptibility, and perhaps even dissolution. The intensity of the child’s fear is a function of many factors, including (but not limited to) one’s original psychophysiological disposition (for instance, one’s hardiness level), the severity of one’s illness, the cultural and familial context in which one contracts the illness, and so on. Discrepancy is the key here. The greater one experiences a discrepancy between one’s original disposition and subsequent events, the greater is the likelihood that one will deny those subsequent events and hence become experientially debilitated. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13

Such debilitation is likely to manifest itself initially in the form of excessive efforts to expand (for example, cry out, refuse, defy) one’s condition of growing immobilization. If these protestations prove comparatively viable, one will be able to maintain one’s denial of smallness and live out one’s life in a variety of compensatory fashions. Depending on the severity and subsequent handling of one’s trauma, accordingly, one is likely to exhibit a range of expansionist traits, from exuberance and feistiness to outright belligerence and imperiousness. If, on the other hand, the child’s attempts to deny one’s illness are repeatedly and unabatingly rebuffed, then another traumatic cycle may develop—the cycle of chronic trauma. Whereas acute trauma focuses on the original dread of constructing (for example, of becoming immobilized), chronic trauma centers on the counteraction of that dread (fruitless and repeated efforts to become mobilized, expand). The result of this shift is a complete reversal of the original situation. Instead of denying and overcompensating for psychophysiological smallness, the client now does everything one can to render oneself small and to avoid psychophysiological greatness. There is yet a third scenario for developing constrictive or expansive trauma. This is the subtler cycle of intergenerational, or implicit trauma. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13

Implicit trauma is the indirect, vicariously transmitted trauma of family and caretakers. Unlike acute and chronic trauma, implicit trauma is never directly experienced by the affected individuals but is learned, accepted, and stored in their memories. While the basis for implicit trauma is relatively obscure, both initial dispositions and modeling appear to play instrumental roles. The implicit-trauma sequence goes something like this: A family member, say our hypothetical client, experiences acute or chronic trauma. One’s trauma (for instance, one’s fear of immobility) leads, in turn, to compensatory behavior (such as overachieving) designed to thwart the precipitating injury. As this cycle solidifies in our client’s personal life, it also begins to filter into one’s relationship with one’s children. It is at this point, predictably, that one’s children develop a risk for implicit trauma. For this to occur, however, two basic conditions must be met: the children must idealize, and thereby strive to emulate, their mother’s excesses, and they must display inherent dispositions (for instance, ambitiousness) that comfortably conform to these excesses. Given these prime conditions, accordingly, immobility and smallness can prove far-ranging intergenerational enemies, unwittingly internalized and unknowingly transmitted. Only the broken-hearted causalities, such as those who are not superachievers, can begin to unravel the contagion. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13

The operation of the above traumas, it may be evident by now, is confined neither to period nor place, type of polarization (for instance, constrictive/expansive), nor existential level (for instance, physiological). Although childhood, because of its comparative vulnerability, is more susceptible to traumatic impacts, such impacts are not restricted to childhood. Trauma originates, not in relation to parents, peers, any other stimulus per se, but in relation to being, to the groundlessness that is our condition. Hence it is not so much the specific content of the abuse or pain that unnerves us so, but the implications of that content for our being in the World, for our relationship to the Universe. It is in this sense that physical and emotional shock, parents, family myths, and so on symbolize wider networks of alarm—our smallness or greatness before creation itself. The third principle that has emerged from our existential-integrative formulation is that the confrontation with or integration of constrictive/expansive polarities promotes healing, vitality, and health. This principle also operates at various levels of freedom and can best be understood in terms of these levels. For example, constricting lethargy can be dealt with by nutritional regimens designed to release and expand energy. Expansive criminality can be environmentally modified to constrict via aversive and alternative reinforcements. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13

Constrictive timidity, conversely, can be environmentally conditioned to expand (for instance, by confronting the object of dread). Rigid belief systems can be rationally restricted into expansive, adaptive belief systems. Sexually expansive adult behavior can be explained on the basis of sexually constrictive (or expansive) childhood behavior and thus rechanneled. Compulsive isolation (and constricting) can be explained and transcended through emotionally corrective bonding (and expanding). By facing and experiencing one’s frailty, finally, one can learn to understand and transform one’s pomposity. Through these means, then, choice and the capacity for genuine self-encounter broaden while denial and overcompensation shrink. Far from associating with injuries, moreover, smallness and greatness begin associating with growth opportunities. For example, humility can replace docility, discipline can replace obsessiveness, and zest can replace inflation. Though medical science has made marvelous progress in the past century in solving some of the mysteries of the brain, the truth is that knowledge in this complex area is still in its infancy. We still do not know exactly how the brain works nor exactly how and why parts of it malfunction. One thing is certain, however: no individual, family, nor group is immune from the effects of mental illness. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13

Wherever you go, you will get instruction from the experiences of life. Any book or person seen or art production which reminds a being of one’s diviner self, is to that extent one’s teacher. Any happening or event or experience which alienates one from such remembrance, whether it be regarded by the World as good or as evil, likewise is one’s teacher. Even one’s own unworthy actions will, because of the consequences to which they must infallibly lead, also be one’s teachers. Those whose inner development or outer circumstances or personal destiny have prepared them for the truth will come to it anyway: they may need a little prodding or a lot of reflection, but in the end they will recognize it for what it is. However, they confound this recognition with the relation of discipleship to some guru. If they are to be correctly understood, the two things need to be separated. Teaching is always available in some way or some form, for Life, through varied situations, takes care of its own; but a Teacher in one’s physical form may not be available just at the necessary point in time. In that case, one may be met through one’s writings. If this does not happen, one may come into the mental life during a great anguish or an enforced inactivity or an unusual relaxation or, finally, though or during prayer. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13

The secret teaching is to appear to have known all your life what you learned this afternoon. On the way to the truth, many find two guides: the spiritual preceptors and God. To the preceptors one may take a bow, but know that God keeps your heart. Happiness depends on our understanding of life, understanding depends upon the penetration of insight, insight depends upon right instructions received from a competent teacher. The inspirational and moral, the intellectual and prayer helps which a competent guide can give to a worthy disciple are valuable. If such a worthy, honourable, selfless, experienced, and expert guide can be found—and this may be counted exceptionally good fortune—the disciple should certainly submit to one’s tutelage and surrender to one’s influence. We absorb our lessons, and then time and experience help kinit them together. Thought is a process, not an event. The need of a saviour arises from the fact that the ego cannot lift itself by its own bootstraps, cannot rise out of its own dimensions into a higher one, and will not willingly encompass its own destruction. Yet its spiritual career arrives eventually at a point where is finds and sees that it has done what it could, that further efforts are futile, and that only some power outside itself can bring about the next forward move. However, it may not without self-deception declare this point to be reached when in fact it ought to continue with its strivings; it may not cease prematurely from its struggles. If it does so, then it would be equally futile to seek a master’s grace. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13

Moments of movements is an important concept and when it appears, is when change actually occurs. Spiritual formation is often understood today as entirely a human matter. The beyond that is within is thought to be a human dimension or power that, if we only manage it rightly, will transform our life into divine life. Or at least it will deliver us from the chaos and brokenness of human existence—at a minimum, perhaps, from life-destroying addictions, such as to alcohol, work, pleasures of the flesh, or violence. We are engulfed by books, programs, and seminars that rest upon this assumption. Thus, for example, one now hears spirituality described as our relationship to whatever is most important in our life. Or perhaps as the process of becoming a beneficial and creative person. These are words taken from contemporary writings, and they represent deep currents of human thought and culture. “They were once a delightsome people, and they had Christ for their shepherd; yea, they were led even by God the Father,” reports Mormon 5.17. O God, Who makest us glad with the yearly expectation of our redemption, grant that as joyfully receive Thine Only-begotten Son as our Redeemer, we may also see Him without fear when He cometh as our Judge; even our Lord, who with Thee. Grant, O merciful God, that for the reception of the transcendent mystery of Thy Son’s Nativity, the minds of believers may be prepared, and also the hearts of unbelievers subdued; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13

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The People are Reasonable or Even Humble and Pure and Express Coherence—It is a Miraculous Exception!

December 5, 2019 3:07 am

A well-chosen soul has innumerable dishes, all of admirable flavour. Readiness is achieved in different ways, depending upon what there is to be learned. It takes faith in your abilities, and in your future even when you do not believe. Life requires a person to have an essence of humanity to create the spark that glows warmly inside of them. The influence you have on others will be etched in their souls forever. Readiness may require painful and protracted effort—thinking, reading, watching, writing, talking, and doing. Other times it may be attained effortlessly, almost inadvertently. Either way, timing is critical. Knowing how to learn or how to teach is essentially knowing when to press and when to wait. Styles of learning and teaching are characterized by their mix of pressure and patience. If we did not have souls, many people thirsty for knowledge would dehydrate. Wise people have always known that when the unconscious speaks, to pay attention. The breakdowns or check-outs that we have referred to are final outcomes of not listening. The symptoms and suffering are but the voice of the real self, the voice of human being protesting in a voice so loud it can no longer be neglected. Before the breakdown, the voice murmured softly from time to time; but its murmurings were in a code, a forgotten language that could not be understood. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

And so the person persisted in the ways of behaving, the ways of construing oneself and other people, that had become increasingly good neither for one’s growth nor for one’s well-being. The healthier personality listens to one’s boredom, one’s anxiety, one’s dreams and fantasies and gropes for change in ways of meeting the World that will permit great realization of potential self. For stigmatized people, typically when one member of the category happens to come into contact with another, both may be disposed to modify their treatment of each other by virtue of believing that they each belong to the same group. Further, in being a member of the category, an individual may have an increased probability of coming into contact with any other member, and even forming a relationship with the individual as a result. A category, then, can function to dispose its members to group-formation and relationships, but its total membership does not thereby constitute a group. Whether or not those with a particular stigma provide the recruitment base for a community that is ecologically consolidated in some way, they are likely to support agents and agencies who respect them. (Interestingly, we have no word to designate accurately the constituents, following, fans, subjects, or supporters of such representatives.) #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

Members may, for example, have an office or lobby to push their case with the Press or Government, differing here in terms of whether they can have a being of their own kind, a “native” who really knows, as do those with a hearing impairment, visual impairment, those addicted to a substance, someone of a particular culture or ethnic background, or someone who is not as affluent as other, as do those seeking a second chance. (Action groups which serve the same category of stigmatized person may sometimes be in slight opposition to each other, and this opposition will often reflect a difference between management by natives and management by the dominate group.) Another of their usual tasks is to appear as speakers before various audiences of mass appeal and of the stigmatized; they present the case for the stigmatized and, when they themselves are natives of the group, provide a living model of fully-normal achievement, being heroes of adjustment who are subject to public awards for proving that an individual of this kind can be a good person. Indeed, the healthier personality transcends the contradiction between the conscious and unconscious, between being fully focused and grandly unfocused—one can oscillate between the extremes and push them further than the less healthy individual. When one focuses, one is fully focused and when one lets go, one really lets go. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

Healthy personality is manifested by a mode of being that we can call authenticity, or more simply, honest. Less healthy personalities, people who function less than fully, who suffer recurrent breakdowns or chronic impasses, may usually be found to be liars. They say things they do not mean. Their disclosures have been chosen more for cosmetic value than truth. The consequence of a lifetime of lying about oneself to others, of saying and doing things for their sound and appearance, is that ultimately the person loses contact with one’s real self. Because of its destructive character competitiveness in neurotic persons gives rise to a huge amount of anxiety, and consequently leads to a recoiling from competition. The question now is, Whence comes this anxiety? It is understandable without any difficulty that one source is a fear of retaliation for the ruthless pursuit of ambition. One who steps on all others, humiliates and crushes them as soon as they have or want to have success, must have the fear that they will want just as intensely to defeat one. However, such a retaliation fear, although it will be active in everyone who achieves success at the expense of others, is scarcely the whole reason for the neurotic’s increased anxiety and one’s consequent inhibition toward competition. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

Experience shows that retaliation fear alone does not necessarily lead to inhibitions. On the contrary, it may result merely in a cold-blooded reckoning with the imaginary or real envy, rivalry or malice of others, or in an attempt to expand one’s power in order to be protected from any defeat. A certain type of successful person has only one goal, the acquisition of power and wealth. However, if the structure of such personalities is compared with that of definitely neurotic persons there is one striking difference. The ruthless success-hunter does not care for the affection of others. One neither wants nor expects anything from others, neither help nor any kind of generosity. One knows that one can reach what one wants by one’s own strength and efforts alone. One will, of course, make use of other people, but one cares for their good opinion only in so far as it is useful in attaining one’s own goal. Affection for its own sake means nothing to one. One’s desires and one’s defenses go along one straight line: power, prestige, possession. If there is nothing within one to interfere with one’s strivings, even one who is driven to this kind of behavior by internal conflicts will not develop the usual neurotic characteristics. Fear will only push one into enhanced efforts to be more successful and more invincible. The neurotic person, however, pursues two ways that are incompatible: an aggressive striving for a “no one but I” dominance; and at the same time an excessive desire to be loved by everyone. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

For the neurotic, this situation of being caught between ambition and affection is one the central conflicts in neuroses. The main reason why the neurotic becomes afraid of one’s own ambition and demands, why one does not even want to recognize them, and why one checks them or recoils from them altogether, is that one is afraid of losing affection. In other words, the reasons why the neurotic checks one’s competitiveness is not that one has particularly stringent “super-ego demands” which prevent too great an aggressiveness, but that one finds oneself caught in a dilemma between two equally imperative needs: one’s ambition and one’s need for affection. The dilemma is practically unsolvable one. One cannot step on the people and be loved by them at the same time. Yet in the neurotic the pressures is so great that one does try to solve it. In general one attempts a solution to two ways: by justifying one’s drive for dominance and the grievances resulting from its nonfulfillment; and by checking one’s ambition. The justification is important as a strategy: it is attempted to make the demands incontestable so they will not block the way toward being loved. If one disparages others in order to humiliate them or crush them in a competitive fight, one will be deeply convinced that one is being wholly objective. If one wants to exploit others one will believe and try to make them believe that one is in great need of their help. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

Often those with a particular stigma sponsor a publication of some kind which gives voice to shared feelings, consolidating and stabilizing for the reader one’s sense of the realness of one’s group and attachment to it. Here the ideology of the members if formulated—their complaints, their aspirations, their politics. The names of well-known friends and enemies of the group are cited, along with information to confirm the goodness or the badness of these people. Success stories are printed, tales of heroes of assimilation who have penetrated new areas of normal acceptance. Atrocity tales are recorded, recent and historic, of extreme mistreatment by the dominate group, or those perceived as normals. Exemplary moral tales are provided in biographical and autobiographical form illustrating a desirable code of conduct for the stigmatized. The publication also serves as a forum for presenting some division of opinion as to how the situation of the stigmatized person ought best to be handled. Should the individual’s failing require special equipment, it is here advertised and reviewed. The readership of these publications provides a market for books and pamphlets which present a similar line. Those who come to serve as representatives of a stigmatized category are usually a little more vocal, a little better know, or a possibly better connected than one’s fellow-sufferers. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

Therefore, one’s effort to gain attention for a movement may actually absorb one’s whole day, and one maybe become a professional at it. Once those who are actually making a difference in the community and helping others who are villainized attains a high occupational, political, or financial position—how high depending on the stigmatized group in question—a new career is likely to be thrust upon one, that of representing one’s category. One finds oneself too eminent to avoid being presented by one’s own as an instance of them. (The weakness of a stigma can thus be measured by how eminent a member of the category may be and yet manage to avoid these pressures). The authentic being manifested by healthier personalities takes the form of unself-conscious disclosure of self in words, decisions, and actions. It is a risky way of being, especially in a social setting that punishes all forms of action and disclosure that depart from some current stereotype of the ideal or acceptable being. The healthier person will doubtless experience many a bruise for being and disclosing who one is, but one prefers to accept these blows rather than lose oneself or sell oneself (one’s authentic being) for short-run acceptability. Indeed, there is much reason to suspect that authenticity before others is the same mode of being that permits a being to have access to the underground realm of experiencing, the unconscious. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

Defensiveness and concealment of self before others unfortunately are the same modes of being that screen off a being’s unconscious, one’s preverbal experiencing from oneself. The currents of feeling, fantasy, memory, and wish that would get a being criticism from others also produce anxiety in oneself; so one blocks these from the view of self and others in the service of self-defense. In time, one succeeds in fooling oneself as much as other into believing one is the person one is so expertly seeming to be. In truth one is an invisible person. Whatever is authentic of one, whatever is most spontaneous and alive (one’s experience of one’s possibilities), is buried so deep not even one can cognize it. One of the reasons less healthy personalities are so self-conscious, so deliberate in their choice of word and action before others, is that they dread letting something slip out that truly expresses their being, something which will get them into trouble. They are, as it were, idolaters of the state of artificial grace known as “staying out of trouble.” In fact, they have sold their souls and possibilities for a good, but false name. All this is not to say that healthier personalities are always fully visible, fully transparent, before the gaze of self an others. Such chronic self-revelation may be itself idolatrous, and is suicidal in certain circumstances. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

Good intent or sincere motive cannot by itself be enough to protect the unwise individual against one’s own gullibility, the uncritical against one’s own folly, and the uninformed against one’s own miseducation. All this is as true of the quest itself as of that part of its practice called deep prayer. Certainly we would expect a healthier personality to have enough common sense, judgment, even cunning, to preserve oneself in a hostile environment, dropping one’s guard only when one is among trusted and loving friends. And, in fact, a healthy personality will have been able to enter into and maintain relationships of trust and love with one or more people, people whom one has let know one and whom one knows and responds to. Seductive activities, phenomena, ideas, or guides may try to lure one from this straight course into time-wasting sideshows or dangerous directions. Reform, psychism, politics, perverted teachings or counterfeit ones may call but must not be heeded. One has a long way to go yet and must take care to keep on the right road. Another dimension of healthy personality concerns the realm of values itself. Healthier personalities seek and find meaningful values and challenges in life, such that there is an element of direction, of focus, to their existence. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

Less healthy personalities, estranged as they are from their real selves, usually pursue only cliched goals and values current in their present social milieu. These latter goals frequently do not challenge or inspire the average person to the fullest integration and expression of one’s unique being; they do not “turn one on” or keep one going. The upshot is that one will often feel trapped or, worse, feel that one is “losing one’s mind.” The latter fear is mostly likely to occur when a person looking at the externals of one’s present situation finds that one has accomplished or has been given “everything to make a being happy”—but that one, in honesty, is miserable, bored, and does not know what to do next. One has loved ones, a family, material success, a nice house, car, and so on; but one finds one’s work increasingly boring, more like a treadmill, and one’s relationships with others empty, formal, and all too predictable; and one entertains fantasies of leaving one’s loved ones, chucking it all, and going to Las Vegas, only to repress these ideas with the anxious thought, “I must be insane to harbor such notions.” One might scurry into further “busy-work,” commence drinking to excess, create excitement by treading along primrose paths at great risk, or do others searching in the outer World for some new meanings. One looks in the wrong place, the right place being within one’s own experience. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

The healthier personality, less estranged and less afraid of one’s real self, can look within and without and create or find new sources of value, new directions of commitment, even when these elicit some criticism from others in one’s World. One is freer to invest value in more aspects of the World than one’s less healthy counterpart. The few who have a broad experience of life, whose reason is sufficiently alive to judge both fruits and roots correctly and whose intuition is sufficiently active to recognize nobility when meeting it, want the whole truth and nothing less, will find a friend (for one will not wish to be anything more) who will decline to permit others to hold a fanciful vision of an Earthly perfection which is non-existent; who will be humble, sane, and balanced above all things, and yet prove with time—if they themselves prove loyal—to be also a sure and benevolent guide in this dark forest where so many wander bewildered, deceived, or self-deceived. Excessive unreflective saint-worship raises exaggerated and false hopes. It has unreflective saint-worship raises exaggerated and even false hopes. It has historically often ended with exploitation of the worshipper. However, even where it does not, it is still incompatible with healthy self-development; an affectionate respect is wiser and safer. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

Let us not ask a teacher to be a god, because thereby we are liable to deceive and endanger ourselves, but let us ask one to be competent and illumined, truthful and helpful and compassionate. Today society asks more of educators than ever before. You are required to be social workers, computer experts, juvenile officers, mediators, researchers, business partners, interdisciplinary team members, and chemical dependency counselors. You must provide for children who do not speak the native language of the country; who are gifted learners, visual learners, kinesthetic learners, voracious leaners, and reluctant learners; who are emotionally disturbed, hungry, and without a home. We ask you to teach children how to drive, get along with others, how to maintain proper social hygiene, balance a checkbook, make healthy choices, use new technologies—and yes, how to read, write, and do arithmetic. Sokrates did not have an overhead projector. He asked questions that bothered people and 3,500 years later people are still talking about him. The soul is the wardrobe of humanity; whence beings properly informed may bring something for ornament, much for curiosity, and more for use. A healthy personality lives in and with one’s body, one is an embodied self. One is able freely to move one’s body, which has a look of grace, coordination, and relaxation. One dances through life, to state this idea in its most extreme but essentially accurate form. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

By contrast, the less healthy personality is afraid to live in one’s body. One represses one’s bodily experiencing and feels one’s body alternately numb and dead or as a dangerous and stinking cesspool charged with explosive nitroglycerine. One must take care lest an urge, a feeling, an impulse, or a movement break through the tight control. For one, this would be disastrous. One of the most common evidences of disembodiment is muscular tension that reveals itself as stiffness in body posture, awkwardness in gait, the mouth a thin red line, the jaws clenched, and the face an immobile mask, frozen in false smile or anxious frown or counterfeit dignity; the voice emits sounds that are jerky, pressured, constricted. Touch such an average person on the arm or place one’s arm around his or her shoulders, and one will instantly stiffen, experience panic, jump as if stabbed, and perhaps experience a mixture of sexual arousal and guilt or anxiety. The healthier person has a more fully lived and experienced body. One’s face is mobile and expressive; one speaks in a voice that is free, but one which is fighting off an impulse to say something else at the same moment that the present speech is being emitted. It is no accident that the average people receive psychotherapeutic benefit from instruction in vocalization or freely expressive dance and from massage and other forms of direct experience with their bodies. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

Indeed, the therapists of the future will without doubt be obliged to learn to live gracefully with their own bodies and learn ways of inviting their clients to get back into theirs. Not by our own exertions alone, and not by gift or grace of an external being alone, can we be brought to final realization, but by both. Those who can let themselves be uplifted by some inspired or enlightened person should understand that one is capable of lifting them to the point of touching their best self, the divinity within them. Some may even gain a glimpse of it, a memorable unforgettable experience. However, will they let it happen? We are not left to find out for ourselves that the truth is. Now and then messengers appear among us, each bearing one’s own personal communication about the existence of a higher power and the need of a higher life. We may help our souls in drawing to us the goal by surrendering to the guidance of a competent spiritual adviser or we may obstruct it by clinging to the ego’s. However, an incompetent adviser will also obstruct it, and in fact become a channel for the ego’s truth-obscuring tactics. The difficulty of the task of self-improvement is not to be underrated and it is because of this as well as for other reasons that seekers since ancient times have been advised to obtain the help of a teacher. From one they can get inspiration, guidance, and a certain telepathically transferred strengthening power which is called Grace. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

In nature the physical is a totally different type of reality from the spiritual side of the human being, which remains hidden in a way the physical World never can be. This is by now an old story, but often repressed or forgotten. Science misses the heart. Paradoxically, the spiritual side of us—though it is not perceivable by the senses and though we can never fully grasp it in any way—is never entirely out of our mind. It always stands in the margin of our consciousness, if not the center. It is really the only thing that is celebrated (or degraded) in the arts, in biography and history, and in most of our popular writings in magazines and the like. Their emphasis is continually upon what people think and feel, on what they might or should do and why, and on what kind of character they have. Human beings gossip about nothing else, and now much of what is called news is really just gossip. However, that only emphasizes how we are constantly aware of the spiritual side of life. We know immediately that it is what really matters. We pay more attention to it—in ourselves and others—than to anything else. And there is a deep, if often perverted, wisdom in this. For the spiritual simply is our life, no matter what grand theories we may hold or what we may say when trying to be intellectual, well informed, and up-to-date. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

The swelling protest from the human depths has recently been shouting at us that the physical and public side of the human Universe cannot sustain our existence. “Humans shall not live by bread alone.” We would do well to listen, no matter who is talking. Those are, of course, words from Jesus. And his way is truly the way of the heart, or spirit. If we would walk with him, we must walk with him at that interior level. There are very few who really do not understand this about him. He saves us by realistic restoration of our heart to God and then by dwelling there with his Father though the distinctively divine Spirit. The heart thus renovated and inhabited is the only real hope of humanity on Earth. The statement that “Humans shall not live by bread alone” was adapted by Jesus from the history of the Jewish experience with God. Jesus was, among other things, the most profound and powerful expression of that experience. However, it was also given new and profound meaning by one’s death and resurrection. Through them he established a radically new order of life on Earth within the kingdom of God. It was free of any specific ethnic or cultural form. All human beings can now live the life of the renovated heart by nourishing ourselves constantly on one’s persona presence—now here in our World, beyond his death and ours. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

We are much interested in the causes of bodily corruption and of prolongation of life. Perhaps decay is due chiefly to the parasitic action of the lifeless spirits and if this action could be controlled life could be extended. Living spirits, on the other hand, seem to be self-subsisting. They need a friendly body if they are to exist; yet they are essential to life itself and thus seem more to give to living processes than to take away. The living spirit seems to require three things for its subsistence. First, the spirit must have room to move according to its nature, particularly requiring space for its motion in the ventricles of the brain and the nerves perpetually. Blows to the head and some parts of the body constrict its movement and sometimes kill it. Its own motion is constantly reinforced by the pulsation of the heart and the rhythms of breathing. Second, through its own nature is flammeous, its condition must be more cold than hot, and respiration provides the proper refrigeration. Third, the body, as the home of the spirit, must be properly fed and maintain a state of good health. Feeling, or alimentation, involves the organs and parts of the body directly, and concerns the spirit, if at all, only indirectly. As for the requirement of aliment, it seems to belong more to the parts than to the living spirit. Consequently, a human may easily believe that the living spirit subsists in identity, and bot by succession or renovation. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

Contrary to what many say today, our deliverance (salvation) does not arise out of the murky human depths from which our natural life springs—whether that includes an oversoul or collective unconsciousness or not. However, Jesus moves into and through those very depths, whatever they contain, to bring us home to God. There, too, he is Master. The spiritual renovation and the spirituality that comes from Jesus is nothing less than an invasion of natural human reality by supernatural life from above. The vital spirit has a long, continuous period of existence, probably from the birth of the body to its death. Its vital force does not flare up and down, like a flame, being perpetually generated and extinguished, and of no sensible duration. This spirit must not be confused with the rational soul in being, which is certainly not propagated, nor subject either to repair or death. The vital spirit has a special affinity for the body; indeed, it abhors leaving the flesh, because it has no connaturals near at hand. It may, perhaps, rush to the extremities of the body, to meet something that it loves, but it is loth to go forth. One may not be affluent outwardly but one will be rich inwardly. One may have to endure troubles but one will endure them without worry. One will show this high degree of advancement by the assured direction of one’s efforts, the unflinching strength of one’s purpose, and the effective results of one’s work. “Because of meekness and lowliness of the heart cometh the visitation of the Holy Ghost, which Comforter with hope and perfect love, which endureth,” reports Moroni 8.26. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

O God, Who didst look on beings when one had fallen down into death, and resolved to redeem one by the Advent of Thine Only-begotten Son; grant, we beseech Thee, that they confess His glorious Incarnation may also be admitted to the fellowship of Him, their Redeemer; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. O Wisdom, that camest out of the mouth of the Most High, reaching from one end to another, mightily and sweetly ordering all things; come to teach us the way of understanding. O Adonai, and Leader of the house of Israel, Who didst appear to Moses in the flame of the burning bush, and gavest the Law on Sinai; come to deliver us with an outstretched arm. O Root of Jesse, Who standest for an ensign to the people; before Whom kings shall shut their mouths, Whom nations shall entreat; come to deliver us now, tarry not. O Key of David, and Sceptre of the house of Israel, Who openest and no being shutteth, and shuttetest and no being openeth, come and bring forth the prisoner out of the prison-house, where one sitteth in darkness and the shadow of death. O Day-spring, Splendour of the eternal Light, and Sun of Righteousness; come an enlighten those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death. O King of Gentiles, Thou Whom they long for, and Corner-stone that makest both one; come and save humans, Whom Thou formedst out of the clay. O Emmanuel, our King and Law-giver, the Expected One of the Gentiles, and their Saviour; come to save us, O Lord our God! #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

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I Remember the Truth Coming Down Like an Archangel Choir!

December 4, 2019 3:39 am

Believers and doers are what we need—faithful children of God who are humble in the eyes of the Lord. To be a child of God is one of the purest of all experiences. This awareness of a soul’s unique, even sacred nature, is what should be instilled in all beings. In our daily lives, offstage as it were, we also develop feeling for the parts we play; and along with the workaday props of the kitchen table or office restroom mirror we also use deep acting, emotion memory, and the sense of “as if this were true” in the course of trying to feel what we sense we ought to feel or want to feel. Usually we give this little thought, and we do not name the momentary acts involved. Only when our feeling does not fit the situation, and when we sense this as a problem, do we turn our attention to the inward, imagined mirror, and ask whether we are or should be acting. Consider, for example, the reaction of this young man to the unexpected news that a close friend has suffered from neurosis: I was shocked, yet for some reason I did not think my emotions accurately reflected the bad news. My roommate appeared much more shaken than I did. I thought that I should be more upset by the news than I was. Thinking about this conflict I realized that one reason for my emotions sate might have been the spatial distance separating me from my friend, who was in the hospital hundreds of miles away. I then tried to focus on his sate, and began to picture my friend as I thought he then existed. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

Sensing himself to be himself to be less affected than he should be, he tried to visualize his friend—perhaps in gray pajamas, being led by impassive attendants to the electric-shock room. After bringing such a vivid picture to mind, he might have gone on to recall smaller private breakdowns in his own life and thereby evoked feelings of sorrow and empathy. Without at all thinking of this as acting, in complete privacy, without audience or stage, the young man can pay, in the currency of deep acting, his emotional respects to a friend. Sometimes we try to stir up a feeling we wish we has, and at other times we try to block or weaken a feeling we wish we did not have. Consider this young woman’s report of her attempt to keep feelings of love in check. Last Summer I was going with a guy often, and I began to feel very strongly about him. I knew, though, that he had broken up with a girl a year ago because she had gotten too serious about him, so I was afraid to show any emotion. I also was afraid of being hurt, so I attempted to change my feelings. I talked myself into not caring about him…but I must admit it did no work for long. To sustain this feeling I had to invent bad things about him and concentrate on them or continue to tell myself he did not care. It was a hardening of emotions, I would say. It took a lot of work and was unpleasant because I had to concentrate on anything I could find that was irritating about him. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

In this struggle she hit upon some techniques of deep acting. “To invent bad things about him and concentrate on them” is to make up a World she could honestly respond to. She could tell herself, “If he is self-absorbed, then he is unlovable, and if he is unlovable, which at the moment I believe, then I do not love him.” She wavers between belief and doubt, but she nevertheless reaches for the inner token of feeling that it is her part to offer. She wavers between belief and doubt in her beloved’s “flaws.” However, her temporary effort to prevent herself from falling in love may serve the grander purpose of waiting for him to reciprocate. So in a way, her act of momentary restraint, as she might see it, was an offering to the future of their love. We also set a personal stage with personal props, not so much for its effect on our audience as for the help it gives us in believing in what we imagine. Serving almost as stage props, often, are fellow members of the cast—friends or acquaintances who prod our feelings in a desired direction. Thus, a young woman who was trying not to love a man used her supporting cast of friends like a Greek chorus: “I could only say horrible things about him. My friends thought he was horrible because of this and reinforced my feelings of dislike for him.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

Sometimes the stage setting can be a dismayingly powerful determinant of feeling. Consider this young woman’s description of her ambivalent feelings about a priest forty years her senior: “I started trying to make myself like him and fit the whole situation. When I was with him I did not like him, but then I would go home and write in my journal how much I could not stand him. I kept changing my feelings.” What she felt while facing the priest amid the props of a living room and two cups of afternoon tea collapsed when she left that setting. At home with her diary, she felt free of her obligation to please her suitor by trying to be like him. There, she felt another obligation—to be honest to her diary. What changed between the tea party and the diary session was her sense of which feeling was real. Her sense of realness seemed to shift disconcertingly with the stage setting, as if her feeling of liking the priest gained or lost its status as “real” depending on its context. Sometimes the realness of a feeling wavers more through time. Once a love story is subject to doubt, the story is rewritten; falling in love comes to seem like the work of convincing each other that this has been true love. A nineteen-year-old Catholic college student recalled: “Since we both were somewhat in need of a close man-woman relationship and since we were thrown together so often (we lived next door to each other and it was Summertime), I think that we convinced ourselves that we loved each other. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

“I had to try to convince myself that I loved him in order to justify or somehow make “right” sleeping with him which I never really wanted to do. We ended up living together supposedly because we “loved” each other. However, I would say instead that we did if for other reasons which neither of us wanted to admit. What pretending that I loved him meant to me was having a secret episode of neurosis.” This double pretending—pretending to him and pretending to herself that she loved him—created two barriers to reflection and spontaneous feeling. First, she tried to feel herself in love—intimate, deeply enhanced, and exquisitely vulnerable—in the face of contrary evidence. Second, she tried not to feel irritation, boredom, and a desire to leave. By this effort to orchestrate feeling—to keep some feelings above consciousness and some below, and to counter inner resistances on a daily basis—she tried to suppress reality testing. She both nurtured an illusion about her lover and doubted the truth of it. It was the strain of this effort that led to her “secret episode of neurosis.” In the theater, the illusion that the actor creates is recognized beforehand as an illusion by actor and audience alike. However, in in real life we more often participate in the illusion. We take it into ourselves, where is struggles against the sense we ordinarily make of this. In life, illusions are subtle, changeable, and often hard to define with certainty, and they matter for more to our sanity. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

The other side of the matter is to live with a dropped illusion and yet want to sustain it. Once an illusion is clearly defined as an illusion, it becomes a lie. The work of sustaining it then becomes redefined as lying to oneself so that one becomes self-stigmatized as a liar. This dilemma was described by a desperate wife and mother of two: “I am desperately trying to change my feelings of being trapped [in marriage] into feelings of wanting to remain with my husband voluntarily. Sometimes I think I am succeeding—sometimes I know I have not. It means I have to lie to myself and know I am lying. It means I do not like myself very much. It also makes me wonder whether or not I am a bit of a masochist. I feel responsible for the children’s future and for my husband’s, and there is the old self-sacrificer syndrome. I know what I am doing. I just do not know how long I can hold out.” One stage, the actress doing Method acting tries to delude herself; the more voluntary, the more richly detailed the lie, the better. No one thinks she actually is Queen Akasha or even pretending to be. She is borrowing Queen Akasha’s reality or something from her own personal life that resembles it. She is trying to delude herself and create an illusion for the audience, who accept it as a gift. In everyday life there is also illusion, but how to define it is chronically unclear; the matter needs constant attention, continual questioning and testing. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

In acting, the illusion starts out as an illusion. In everyday life, that definition is always a possibility and never quite a certainty. On stage, the illusion leaves as it came, with the curtain. Off stage, the curtains close, too, but not at our bidding, not when we expect, and often to our dismay. On stage, illusion is a virtue. However, in real life, the lie to oneself is a sign of human weakness, of bad faith. It is far more unsettling to discover that we have fooled ourselves than to discover that we have been fooling others. This is because for the professional actor the illusion takes on meaning only in relation to a professional role whereas in real life the illusion takes on meaning with reference to living person. When in private life we recognize an illusion we have held, we form a different relation to what we have thought of as our self. We come to distrust our sense of what is true, as we know it though feeling. And if our feelings have lied to us, they cannot be part of our good, trustworthy, “true” self. To put it another way, we may recognize that we distort reality, that we deny or suppress truths, but we rely on an observing ego to comment on these unconscious processes in us and to try to find out what is going on despite them. At the same time, everyday life clearly requires us to do deep acting. We must dwell on what it is that we want to feel and on what we must do to induce the feeling. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

When we think about deep acting, consider, for example, this young man’s efforts to counter an apathy he dreaded: “I was a star halfback in high school. [But in my senior year] before games I did not feel the surge of adrenalin—in a word, I was not “psyched-up.” This was due to emotional difficulties I was experiencing at the time, and still experience. Also, I ad been an A student but my grades were dropping. Because in the past I had been fanatical, emotional, intense player—a “hitter,” recognized by coaches as a hard worker and a player with “desire”—this was very upsetting. I did everything I could to get myself “up.” I tried to be outwardly rah-rah, I tried to get myself scared of my opponents—anything to get the adrenalin flowing. I tried to look nervous and intense before games, so at least the coached would not catch on…when actually was mostly bored, or in any event, not “up.” Before one game I remember wishing I was in the sands watching my cousin play of his school.” This young man felt a slipping sense of realness; he was clear that he felt “basically” bored, not “really” up. What also seemed real to him was the sense that he should feel driven to win and that he wanted to feel that way. What also felt real to him in hindsight was his effort to seem to the coaches like a “hitter” (surface acting) and his effort to make himself fearful of his opponents (deep acting). #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

As we look back at the past, we may alternate between two understandings of “what really happened.” According to one, our feeling was genuine and spontaneous. According to other, it seemed genuine and spontaneous, but in fact it was covertly managed. In doubt about which understanding will ultimately make sense, we are led to ask about our present feelings: “Am I acting now? How do I know?” One basic appeal of the theater is that the stage decides that questions for us: we know for sure who is acting. What distinguished theater from life is not illusion, which both have, need, and use. What distinguishes them is the honor accorded to illusion, the ease in knowing when an illusion is an illusion, and the consequences of its use in making feeling. In the theater, the illusion ends when the curtain falls, as the audience knew it would. In private life, its consequences are unpredictable and possibly fateful: a love is terminated, a suitor rejected, another hospital bed filled. It may be noted that in the case of some statuses dramatization presents no problem, since some of the acts which are instrumentally essential for the completion of the core task of the status are at the same time wonderfully adapted, from the point of view of communication, as means of vividly conveying the qualities and attributes claimed by the performer. The roles of prizefighters, surgeons, violinists, and law enforcement are cases in point. These activities allow for so much dramatic self-expression that exemplary practitioners—whether real or fictional—become famous and are given a special place in the commercially organized fantasies of the nation. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

In many cases, however, dramatization of one’s work does constitute a problem. An illustration of this may be cited from a hospital study where the medical nursing staff is shown to have a problem that the surgical nursing staff does not have: The things which a nurse does for post-operative patients on the surgical floor are frequently of recognizable importance, even to patients who are strangers to hospital activities. For example, the patient sees one’s nurse changing bandages, swinging orthopedic frames into place, and can realize that these are purposeful activities. Even if she cannot be at his side, he can respect her purposeful activities. Medical nursing is also highly skilled work. The physician’s diagnosis must rest upon careful observation of symptoms over time where the surgeon’s are in larger part dependent on visible things. The lack of visibility creates problems on the medical. A patient will see one’s nurse stop at the next bed and chat for a moment or two with the patient there. One does not know that she is observing the shallowness of the breathing and color and tone of the skin. He thinks she is just visiting. So, alas, does his family who may thereupon decide that these nurses are not very impressive. If the nurse spends more time at the next bed than at his own, the patient may feel slighted. The nurses are “wasting time” unless they are darting about doing some visible thing such as administering hypodermics. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

Similarly, the proprietor of a service establishment may find it difficult to dramatize what is actually being done for clients because the clients cannot “see” the overhead costs of the service rendered them. Undertakers must therefore charge a great deal for their highly visible product—a coffin that has been transformed into a casket—because many of the other costs of conducting a funeral are ones that cannot be readily dramatized. Merchants, too, find that they must charge high prices for things that look intrinsically expensive in order to compensate the establishment for expensive things like insurance, slack periods, and so forth, that never appear before the customers’ eyes. The problem of dramatizing one’s work involves more than merely making invisible cost visible. The work that must be done by those who fill certain statuses is often so poorly designed as an expression of a desired meaning, that if the incumbent would dramatize the character of one’s role, one must divert an appreciable amount of energy to do so. And this activity diverted to communication will often require different attributes from the ones which are being dramatized. Thus to furnish a house so that it will express simple, quiet, dignity, the householder may have to race to the auction sales, haggle with antique dealers, and strategically canvass all the local shops for proper wallpaper and curtain materials. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

To give a radio talk that will sound genuinely informal, spontaneous, and relaxed, the speaker may have to design one’s script with painstaking care, testing one phrase after another, in order to follow the content, language, rhythm, and pace of everyday talk. Similarly, a Vogue model, by her clothing, stance, and facial expression, is able expressively to portray a cultivated understanding of the book she poses in her hand; but those who trouble to express themselves so appropriately will have very little time life over for reading. The attentive pupil who wishes to be attentive, one’s eyes riveted on the teacher, one’s ears open wide, so exhausting oneself in playing the attentive role that one ends up by no longer hearing anything. And so individuals often find themselves with the dilemma of expression versus action. Those who have the time and talent to perform a task well may not, because of this, have the time or talent to make it apparent that they are performing well. It maybe said that some organizations resolve this dilemma by officially delegating the dramatic function to a specialist who will spend time expressing the meaning of the task and spend no time actually doing it. If we alter our frame of reference for a moment and turn from a particular performance to the individuals who present it, we can consider an interesting fact about the round of different routines which any group or class of individuals helps to perform. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

When a group or class is examined, one finds that the members of it tend to invest their egos primarily in certain routines, giving less stress to the other ones which they perform. Thus a professional being may be willing to take a very modest role in the street, in a shop, or in one’s home, but in the social sphere which encompasses one’s display of professional competency, one will be much concerned to make an effective showing. In mobilizing one’s behavior to make a showing, one will be concerned not so much with the full round of the different routines one performs but only with the one from which one’s occupational reputation derives. It is upon this issue that some writers have chosen to distinguish groups with aristocratic habits (whatever their social status) from those of middle-class character. The aristocratic habit, it has been said, is one that mobilizes all the minor activities of life which fall outside the serious specialties of other classes and injects into these activities an expression of character, power, and high rank. By what important accomplishments in the young nobleman instructed to support the dignity of one’s rank, and to render himself worthy of that superiority over one’s fellow citizens, to which the virtue of his ancestors has raised them: Is it by knowledge, by industry, by patience, by self-denial, or by virtue of any kind? #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

All one’s words, as all one’s motions are attended to, one learns a habitual regard to every circumstance of ordinary behavior, and studies to perform all those small duties with the most exact propriety. As one is conscious of ow much one is observed, and how much humankind are disposed to favor all one’s inclinations, one acts, upon the most indifferent occasions, with that freedom and elevation which the thought of this naturally inspires. One’s air, one’s manner, one’s deportment, all mark that elegant, and graceful sense of one’s own superiority, which those who are born to inferior stations can hardly arrive at. These are the arts by which one proposes to make humankind more easily submit to one’s authority, and to govern their inclinations according to one’s own pleasure: and in this one is seldom disappointed. These arts, supported by rank and preeminence, are upon ordinary occasions, sufficient to govern the World. If such virtuosi actually exist, they would provide a suitable group in which to study the techniques by which activity is transformed into a show. From several different sources a variety of suggestive influences play upon an individual’s mind and habits, influences which may be all very well for others but which may be harmful to one’s own individuality at one’s particular stage of spiritual progress. This is true not only of the trivial affairs of everyday living but also of the loftier affairs of aspirational living. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

Optimistic truths and torturous falsehoods, cleverly combined half-truths and half-falsehoods are continually being presented to one’s consciousness. Not only one’s physical life, but also one’s mental life must become a process of careful acceptance and vigilant rejection. At a certain stage of this quest the seeker must be particularly careful to be on one’s guard against the skillfully suggested truths of others who mistake their own candle-glimmer for the Sun’s glory and the prejudices born of their own narrow experience for the wisdom born of insight. This caution is especially necessary in the sphere of spiritual experience. The wary seeker should be on one’s guard against those who offer pseudo-knowledge as well as those extremists who would lead one off balance. Those who take to this quest for the sake of satisfying personal ambition, will do better in the end to leave it alone. Travelling on this quest can be only another way of inflating their egos, increasing their price, and renewing their sectarianism. It is not easy, this quest. Some stumble along it and somehow manage to advance a little way, but others give up. Good intent or sincere motive cannot by itself be enough to protect the fool against one’s own gullibility, the uncritical against one’s own stupidity, and the uninformed against one’s own ignorance. All this is as true of the quest itself as part of is practice called intense prayer. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

However, there is an evil quest too, whose disciples seek to serve their lower nature rather than to conquer it, and whose masters show themselves by action or teaching to be monsters. Warnings must be given against possible pitfalls on the quester’s way. While Worldly beings strain their heads and knit their brows, the enlightened individual sits quietly or works unhurriedly, self-absent, unutterably wise in the Infinite. In a World half given over to despair, one dwells with an intrinsic power that all feel who contact one, or one moves radiating a calm strength to every environment. One is detached, watching the passing show go by, but not so detached as if one were far away. From one’s interest in the World’s affairs is vivid; one’s intelligence is active, seeing the interplay of cyclic impetus and spiritual results. One’s wonderful calmness does not make one utterly impervious to all the happenings of this era, nor callous to all the turns of national fortune or disaster. There is such a perfect harmony of one’s faculties that although each still continues to exist autonomously, all work together like a single faculty. There is profound power, there is ample security in this presence. The enlightened individual alone may dare to be oneself, may live unrelated to the fads and fashions around one. The goal is to make one’s acts tend toward harmony but not mistake uniformity for unity. Differences there will be. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of bright minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards. Good teaching is loving and listening, sharing and supporting It is being passionately human. That is the point at which a good teacher begins. One possesses the ability to produce peace within oneself and to radiate it outside oneself. One is sufficient, oneself and not anyone else, an original and not a copy, music and not echo—in short, a true individual. It is a fact that such a being these three passions—anger, lust, and hatred—are stilled forever. There is no temptation which can now have any power over one, no fear which can overcome one, no frustrations which can depress one. There will be an air of settled conviction, of inward assurance about one’s speech and writing. The aura of peace and wisdom and power that emanates from one’s person is the best testimonial to the value of one’s ideas. This superb poise is not an act, put on for the benefit of onlookers; it is real. Now, right on the conscious surface of our World within is possessed some of our thoughts, feelings, intentions, and plans. These are the ones we are aware of. They may be fairly obvious to others as well as to ourselves. In terms of them we consciously approach our World and our actions within it. However, these surface aspects are also a good indication of the general nature of the unconscious spiritual depth within, of what sorts of things make it up. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

However, the thoughts, feelings, and intentions we are aware of are, after all, only a small part of the ones that are really there in our depths; and they often are not the ones most revealing of who we actually are and why we do what we do. What we really think, how we really feel, and what we really would do in circumstances foreseen and unforeseen may be totally unknown to ourselves or to others familiar with us. We may pass one another—even pass ourselves, if you can imagine that—like yachts in the night. We do it all the time. The hidden dimension of each human life is not visible to others, nor is it fully graspable even by ourselves. We usually know very little about the things that move in our own soul, the deepest level of our life, or what id driving it. Our within is astonishingly complex and subtle—even devious. It takes on a life of its own. Only God knows our depths, who we are, and what we would do Thus the psalmist cries out for God’s help in dealing within—oneself! Search me, O God. Let the prayers of my heart by acceptable to you. Renew in me right spirit. At a certain point my own beyond that is within (my heart) has been formed and I am then at its mercy. Only God can save me. Grant, we beseech Thee, Almighty God, that the coming solemnity of our redemption may both bestow upon us assistance for this present life, and also enrich us with the bliss of life eternal; through Jesus Christ our Lord. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

Be Thou to us, O Lord, a crown of glory in the day when Thou shalt come to judge the World by fire; that Thou mayest graciously clothe us here with the robe of righteousness, and hereafter with the perfection of a glorious liberty; though Thy mercy. Come to deliver us, O Lord God of hosts; turn us again, and shew Thy face, and we shall be saved; so that being cleansed by Thy mercy with the gift of worthy repentance, we maybe enabled to stand before Thee in the judgment; through thy mercy. O Christ our God, Who wilt come to judge the World in the Humanhood which Thou has assumed, we pray Thee to sanctify us wholly, that in the day of Thy Coming our whole spirit, soul, and body may so revive to a fresh life in Thee, that we may live and reign with Thee forever. O Lord God, Father Almighty, purify the secrets of our hearts, and mercifully wash out all the stains of sin; and grant, O Lord, that being cleansed from our crimes by the benediction of Thy tenderness, we may without any terror await the fearful and terrible Coming of Jesus Christ our Lord. “But behold, my beloved beings, I judge that ye have faith in Christ because of your meekness; for if ye have not faith in him then ye are not fit to be numbered among the people of his church,” reports Moroni 7.39. I think we need the soul in the same way we need wilderness. Both are sanctuaries of a king. Both are storehouses of diversity. Book lovers will understand me, and they know too, that part of the pleasure of a library is possessed in its very existence, much like the soul. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

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You Are Here in My Arms, but Where is Your Heart?

December 3, 2019 12:31 am

If we do not model what we teach, we are teaching something else. Reading helps us grow, head and heart. It gets people ready for school and helps them to do better once they get there. We know that libraries, without education, we cannot have an educated people who will carry on successfully our form of government. Likewise, without a soul that comes from a loving place, people think they are worthless. A caring soul can provide astonishing revelation. A good soul can give a person a chance to feel. If someone believes you think they are worth something, they may start to believe it, too. Good souls put snags in the river of humans passing by, and over the years, they redirect hundreds of lives to God. Those who are frightened away from the Quest by these notes of its dangers are better separated from it. The aspirant who lacks balance is liable to take a misstep at more than one point of one’s path. If an unbalanced dreamer is not brought to actuality and reality by experience, one had better leave the quest alone. This is not to say that one cannot get mystical experiences in plenty, but that they will have little true worth for insight. The uncertainties of the Quest may lead, especially in the neurotic temperament, to a variety of unhappy moods and unhealthy emotions as the years pass by. The student may at such times turn against oneself in morbid masochism, or against the teaching one has been following, or against the personal instructor if one has one. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

The novice too often lives under the delusion that one is following the Quest when one has yet to find the entrance to it. The importance of right direction is such that if the angel of deflection covers a long period, then area of error stretches a wide distance. A self-protective need of the quester is to find and keep both an apparent and a real sanity. The first is needed in defense against the Word, the second against oneself. Sometimes when people apply theory improperly or are over-practised, one of the harmful results will be a gradual slackening of interest in the common activities of humankind. The unfortunate being develops a blurred and vague character. One becomes increasingly unfit to fulfill social obligations or business duties, and tends to become bred with responsibilities. One treats the fate of others with indifference. One does what is inescapable, but one does it in a casual, detached, and uninterested manner. In short, one becomes unfit for everyday practical life. Keep away from psychic practices and occult explorations. They are filled with dangers and pitfalls. First devote your energies to the foundational work of learning philosophy, improving character, disciplining emotion, and cultivating calmness. Only after this work has been well advanced will it ever be safe for you to consider other taboos endeavors. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

A discrepancy may exist between an individual’s virtual and actual identity. This discrepancy, when known about or apparent, spoils one’s social identity; it has the effect of cutting one off from society and from oneself so that one stands a discredited person facing an unaccepting World. In some case, one may continue through life to find that one is the only one of one’s kind and that the World is against one. In most cases, however, one will find that there are sympathetic others who are ready to adopt one’s standpoint in the World and to share with one the feelings that one is human and essentially normal in spite of appearances and in spite of one’s own self-doubt. The first set of sympathetic others is of course those who share one’s stigma. Knowing from their own experience what it is like to have this particular stigma, some of them can provide the individual with instructions in the tricks of the trade and with a circle of lament to which one can withdraw for moral support and for the comfort of feeling at home, at ease, accepted as a person who really is like any other normal person. The existence of a different value system among these persons is evinced by the communality behavior which occurs when people who are not part of the majority group interact amongst themselves. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

Not only when people are with their peer group do they change from unexpressive and confused individuals, as they frequently may appear in larger society, to expressive and understanding persons within their own group, but moreover they express themselves in institutional terms. Among themselves they have a Universe of response. They form and recognize symbols of prestige and disgrace; evaluate relevant situations in terms of their own norms and in their own idiom: and in their interrelations with one another, the mask of accommodative adjustment drops. Among one’s own, an individual can use one’s perceived disadvantage as a basis for organizing life, but one must resign oneself to a half-World to do so. Here on may develop to its fullest one’s endearing tale accounting for one’s possession of this supposed stigma. Once again must a warning be given against the dangers of falling into mere psychism and seeking for phenomena, vision, miracles and other things which are still in the realm of a kind of subtle materialism and are always connected with the personal ego. One may find that the tales of one’s fellow suffers bore one, and that the whole matter of focusing on atrocity tales, on group superiority, on trickster stories, in short, on the problem, is one of the large penalties for having one. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

Behind this focus on the problem is, of course, a perspective not so much different from that of the normal as it is specializes in one sector: We all seem to be inclined to identity people with characteristics which are of importance to us, or which we think must be of general importance. If you asked a person who the late Franklin D. Roosevelt was, one would probably answer that Mr. Roosevelt was the 32^nd president of the Untied States of America, not that he was a man suffering from polio, and when he asked for an invitation to the Winchester mansion, he was refused. Although many persons, of course, would have mentioned his polio as supplementary information, considering it an interesting fact that a man with a physical disability managed to fight his way to the White House. When they hear his named mentioned, people who are disabled, however, would probably think of Mr. Roosevelt’s polio. The true spiritual experience is higher than that, purer than that, and will leave one absolutely calm, whereas the physical phenomena leaves one excited. Every kind of such phenomena involves thought or emotion, whereas the deepest spiritual experience goes beneath thought and emotion and especially beneath the personal ego. Only then does one come in contact with the Infinite life power which is behind everything and which is the true goal of this Quest. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

Those who imagine the Quest to be a spiritual joyride know only a limited phase of it. For along with the joys there are glooms, difficulties, struggles, conflicts, and vacillations. That a proportion of those who are attracted to these subjects are psychopaths, is unfortunately true. They would be far better employed in getting proper treatment for their disordered minds, imaginations, and feelings. Certain studies may easily exaggerate their condition and increase their imbalance. It is the serious duty of every responsible expounder to warn them off this field and to bid them engage in the quest of psychic and bodily healthy before attempting to pursue things they may not understand. We have seen that the driving force behind evil in human affairs stems from human’s paradoxical nature: in the flesh and doomed with it, out of the flesh in the World of symbols and trying to continue on a Heavenly flight. The thing that makes the human the most devastating being that ever stuck one’s neck up into the sky is that one wants a stature and a destiny that is impossible for other beings; one wants an Earth that is not an Earth but a Heaven, and the price for this kind of fantastic ambition is to make the Earth an even more eager graveyard than it naturally is. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

Our great wistfulness about the World of primitive beings is that they managed willy-nilly to blunt the terrible potential destructiveness of the drama of heroism and expiation. One did not have the size, the technological means, or the World view for running amok heroically. Heroism was small scale and more easily controlled: each person, as a contributor to the generative ritual, could be a true cosmic hero who added to the powers of creation. Allied to this cosmic heroism was a kind of warfare that always made military people chuckle. Among the Plains Indians it was a kind of athletic contest in which one scored points by touching the enemy; often it was a kind of disorganized, childish, almost hysterical game in which one went into rapture if one brought back a trophy or a single enemy for torture. Anyone was liable to be snatched out of one’s hut at daybreak, and on mountainous islands like those of Polynesia groups lived in continual fear of those just over the ridge or across the lagoon; no one was every safe from capture and sacrificial slaughter. This is hardly the ideal of altruism, and there are very few today who have a romantic image of primitive human’s peaceful nature; one look at the blunt stone sacrificial slave-killing knives of the Northwest Coast Indians is enough to set the record straight. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

Since we do not experience the terror of the occasional victims of primitive raids, we can look back nostalgically at the small numbers consumed at random, and compare them with those who died in one on 11 September 2001 in New York, Dresden, or one flash at Hiroshima. Wistfully one can observe the comparatively low toll of life that primitive warfare took. Today, the picture looks something like this: that once humankind got the means for large-scale manipulation of the World, the lust for power began to take devastating tolls. This can be seen strikingly at the rise of the great civilizations based on divine kingship. These new states were structures of domination which absorbed the tribal life around them and built up empires. Masses of beings were forged into obedient tools for really large-scale power operations directed by a powerful, exploitative class. It was at this time that people who were used as slaves were firmly compartmentalized into various special skills which the plied monotonously; they become automaton objects of the tyrannical rulers. We still see this degradation of tribal peoples today, when they hire themselves out for money to work monotonously in the mines. Primitive beings could be transformed, in one small step, from a rich creator of meaning in a society of equals to a mechanical thing. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

Something was accomplished by this new organization of labor that primitive beings never dreamed of, a tremendous increase in the size of human operations: huge walled cities, colossal monuments, pyramids, irrigation projects, unprecedented wars of booty and plunder. It was a megamachine. The amalgam of kingship with sacred power, human sacrifice, and military organization unleashed a nightmare megamachine on the World—a nightmare that began at Sumer and that still haunts us today, with our recent history of megamachines in Warsaw, Hiroshima, Pearl Harbor, Germany, and Vietnam. This is the colossus of power gone mad, a colossus based on the dehumanization of beings that began, not with the Newtonian materialism, Enlightenment rationalism, or nineteenth-century commercialism, but with the first massive exploitation of beings in the great divine kingship of the ancient World. It was then that beings were thrown out of the mutualities of tribalism into the cauldron of historic alienation. We are still stewing there today because we have not seen that the worship of the demonic megamachine has been our fate, and we have willingly perpetuated it and even aggravated it until it threatens to destroy the very World. This perspective on history attack social evil at its most obvious point. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

From the very beginning the ravages of large-scale warfare were partly a function of the new structure of domination called the state; the state was an instrument of dictatorship that had come into being artificially through the conquest, and with it began humankind’s real woes. The new class society of conquerors and slaves right away had its own internal frictions; what better way to siphon them off than by directing the energies of the masses outward toward an alien enemy? The state had its own built-in wisdom: it solved its ponderous internal problems of social justice by making justice a matter of triumph over an external enemy. This was the start of the large-scale scapegoating that has consumed such mountains of lives down through history and continues to do so today, right up to Vietnam and Bangladesh: what better way forge a nation into unity, to take everyone’s eyes off the frightening state of domestic affairs, than by focusing on a heroic foreign cause? Here is the psychology of this new scapegoating of the state: Hence the sense of joyful release that so often has accompanied the outbreak of war…popular hatred for the ruling classes was cleverly diverted into a happy occasion to mutilate or terminate foreign enemies. In short, the oppressor and the oppressed, instead of fighting it out within the [ancient] city, directed their aggression toward a common goal—and attack on the rival city. Thus, the greater the tensions and the harsher the daily repressions of civilization, the more useful war became as a safety valve. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

The new structure of the conquest state forced an increased butchery of war. The invention of the military machine made way necessary, and even desirable. With the advent of the megamachines, power simply got out of hand—or rather, got pressed into service of a few hands—and instead of isolated and random sacrifices on behalf of a fearful tribe, ever larger numbers of people were deliberately and methodically drawn into a dreadful ceremony on behalf of the few. So that the ability to wage war and to impose collective human sacrifice had remained the identifying mark of all sovereign power throughout history. Little does it matter that modern public relations and the appearance of bureaucratic neutrality and efficiency disguise better than ever both the sacrifice and the blatant central power of the state; the chief of the U.S. Selective Service (the public relations euphemism) may sit around and logically explain one’s function and the fairness of the selective process to young high school students, but the bare fact is that they are obliged by the state’s power to offer their lives for its own diversionary ceremony, just as were the ancient Egyptians who were enslaved. If there is anything new in all this, it is that the young are beginning to understand what is really happening. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

Why has humankind remained locked into such a demonism of power all through history? It is not simply because enslaved beings have not had the power to throw off their chains; or, simply because being have forgotten how it was in the beginning before the state stepped on their necks. The demonism remains because it was fed by its own irrationality. It is based on a continuation of the anxiety of primitive beings in the face of one’s overwhelming World; the megamachine tries to generate enough power to overcome basic human helplessness. However, now we see the costs of the lie: the users of the megamachine are led into a megalomaniac and paranoid distortion of reality. Once you start an arms race, you are consumed by it. This is the tragic fatality of power, that it leads to a fundamental distortion of the reality of human’s relationship to nature—and so can undermine one’s own well-being. To protect oneself with one’s megamachines, beings are willing to sacrifice almost everything. This is why the megamachine represents the major historical challenge facing western and others around the globe; to see through it and get control of it is the focal problem of human survival in our time. The wise being will not be an adherent of martyristic ideology. One will make no pretense and set up no pose of exaggerated altruism. One will do what needs to be done for one’s own self. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

However, at the same time one will also do what needs to be done for others. It is not altruistic folly but altruistic wisdom that one seeks to practise. Hence, one prefers to be a live servant of the good in humankind than a dead martyr to the evil in humankind. One will not swing from the extreme of utter selfishness to the extreme of unbalanced selfishness. One will not ignore one’s own needs or fail to work for one’s own betterment event while one is attending to the needs of others and working for their betterment. One can well serve individual ends alongside one’s service of social ones. One does not dwell in one’s own heart on one’s spiritual usefulness to other people. If ever one were to do so that would only be the ego wallowing in its vanity. And it is precisely because one’s ego has been cast down that one has such usefulness. If others do not care for one’s own road but set their feet on other roads to the soul’s finding, one will feel no disappointment and express no criticism. Rather will one rejoice that they have entered on the quest, even though it be in a different way from one’s. One is too large in mind and heart to wish that it were otherwise. One does not need to ask others for help of any kind for they usually offer it spontaneously and unasked. There is some quality in one which arouses in them the strong desire to serve one. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

One will not seek any public acknowledgement for one’s services. If it does come, one will not be unduly elated; if it does not come, one will not be particularly discontented. When such a being hears from time to time of the far-reaching results of his or her work, the individual feels afresh the need of a great humility. For if it has achieved anything at all, it has not been achieved by any other power than that of Grace—which moves so mysteriously and so silently and so effectively. One’s is a disciplined freedom, without hardness of the rigid moralist or the license of the flabby hedonist. Whatever sin is committed against one, or wrong done to one, one’s forgiveness is available to the sinner immediately and completely. This is not an attitude one has to being oneself to create but ne which is natural and easy. The master is free, totally free, from the greeds and lusts of ordinary beings. In this one is a forerunner of the beings who are to appear later. One need to assume no oracular air, no conceited manner. The simple expression of what one is suffices to impress others of its own accord. In one, perception and volition are fused and not, as in ordinary beings, separated and discordant. That which one sees ought to be done, is accepted and executed by the will. Such a being will spontaneously love the Ideal, practise virtue, and promote the spread of Truth. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

Nothing can replace that special relationship that gifted beings develop with others. Popular culture has long celebrated other heroes—the athlete, the adventurer, the statesman—spiritual healers have not been celebrated in the same way. And the soul has rarely been identified as the place where the greatest of human dramas unfold—the drama of igniting the human spirit, ennobling the human heart, and enriching the human experience. The glowing warmth of an enlightened individual’s goodwill is natural, sincere. The practise of goodness is as natural with such a being as the act of breathing. A heart filled with peace and love will be felt through a radiant countenance and poised bearing. One will always show forth a curtesy that comes from the dictates of formality. If the adepts appear to stand aloof, it is not because they feel proudly superior but because they feel humbly incapable of bettering the work being done on humanity by Nature (God) in her long-range evolutionary plan. If they had held illusions of personal grandeur, they could never have become what they are. One makes no pretense of omniscience. He simple and modest outward bearing of an illuminate frequently belies the infinite subtlety of one’s intelligence. Through the presence of his kingdom, Jesus answers the deepest needs of personality for righteousness, provision, and purpose. If we set him aside, we still face the unavoidable questions: What makes our lives go as they do? #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

What could make our lives go as they ought? Inability to find adequate answers leaves us rudderless in the flood of events around us and at the mercy of whatever ideas and forces come to bear upon us. And that, basically, is the human situation. You can see it day by day all around you. However, thoughtful people through the ages have tried to answer these questions, and they have with one accord found, as already stated, that what matters most for how life goes and out to go is what we are on the inside. Things good and bad will happen to us, of course. But what our life amounts to, at least for these who reach full age, is largely, if not entirely, a matter of what we become within. Within is the arena of spiritual formation and, later, transformation. When people pay no heed to the warnings of prophets and the counsel of elders, and are still too ungrown to pick one’s steps correctly, one inevitable loses one’s ways. He awakening of inner forces ought not be attempted without an accompanying attempt to fortify character and guard against weakness. In the case of mentally disturbed or emotionally unbalanced persons, trust in their own ego may easily be misread as trust in God—with correspondingly lamentable results. The danger is that one may get lost in the mazes of one’s own mind. Those who suffer from such psychic maladjustments cannot find trust but only its distortions. They have fallen into a mental quagmire. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

Let one not deceive oneself. Few have ever really entered that exquisite awareness and remained there. Others seem to have done so but the fact is that they merely touched its outer most fringe for a few moments and then passed into an egoistic conceited state which has trapped them. Certain psychic experiences may arise, the pattern of which is familiar, having been observed in both the writer’s own experience and numerous other cases. Between the ordinary state of undeveloped humanity and the truly spiritual state attained by highly advanced individuals, there is a psychic region conducive to mediumship and other pitfalls and dangers which have to be crossed. One is indeed fortunate to come through this safely within our thoughts, feelings, intentions—and their deeper sources, whatever those may be. The life we live out in our moments, hours, days, and years wells up from a hidden depth. The illuminate being is at peace within oneself, able to stand emotionally aside from one’s affairs but unable to surrender to transient defeats. One knows when one is defeated; one never knows such a thing as failure. One’s life is a consecrated one. It has an impressive value. There is a timeless flavour about it. That is why one can work quietly not only for the immediate moment but even for results which one knows one will not live to witness. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

What is in our heart matters more than anything else for who we become and what becomes of us. “You are here in my arms,” the old song says, “but where is your heart?” That is what really matters, not just for individual relationships, but also for life as a whole. The flamelike material of the spirits accounts in part for motion that is imperceptible to us. The spirit literally swelled and pushed out the particles of natural things into the shapes and figures we see, to form a particular person, a tree, a flower, a stone. Incline, O Lord Thy merciful ears to our voice, and illuminate the darkness of our hearts by the light of Thy visitations; Who livest and reignest with the Father and the Holy Ghost, one God, World without end. Make us, O Lord, to abhor our own evils with our whole heart; that at the Coming of Thy Son our Lord, we may be enabled to receive His good things, through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Mercifully hear, O Lord, the prayers of Thy people; that as they rejoice in the Advent of Thine only-begotten Son according to the flesh, so when He cometh a second time in His Majesty, they may receive the reward of eternal life; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. “Know ye not that ye are in the hands of God? Know ye not that he hath all power, and at his great command the Earth shall be rolled together like a scroll? Therefore, repent ye, and humble yourselves before him, lest he shall come out in justice against you,” reports Mormon 5.23-23. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

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God Does Not Leave the World at Any Place, in Any Time, Without Saviours—Without Healing Power!

December 1, 2019 5:15 am

We are looking into another World and another life. It is a divine World and a divine life. It is the kingdom of the Heavens. If knowledge is to grow and behavior is to be rational, people ought to use their brains. We live from our heart. God made the soul so that people did not have any excuse to be stupid. The soul is the door to many lives—its is where they greatest of human dramas unfold, the drama of igniting the human spirit, ennobling the human heart, and enriching the human experience. Good teaching comes from behind the heart. It begins with the physical basis of beings and proceeds to the higher mental processes; the knowledge ascends from bodily, sensory behavior to intellectual behavior. Those who search for secrets must do more than direct their understanding and reason to what humans have preserved in language, and do more than spin out new designs from the familiar fabric of a traditional mind. The part of us that drives and organizes our life is not the physical. It is a World and a life that ordinary people have entered and are entering now. It is a World that seems open to us and beckons us to enter. We feel its call. We live from depths—most of which we do not understand. “Watch over your heart with all diligence, for from it flow the springs of life,” reports Proverbs 4.23. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

Through the divine spirit of the soul we learn by revelation of things divine. From the human soul and its treasures, all other doctrines are derived. If you possess knowledge which you are not using, it may be called potential, actual only when you are using it. The savior is the conqueror of the evil one and his powers. No one has used this image more impressively than Paul in his great song of triumph in the eighth chapter of Romans, when he says that none of the demonic powers which govern this World can separate us from the love of God. Saving is healing from sickness and saving is delivering from servitude; and the two are the same. Let me give you an example of their unity. We consider the neurotic or psychotic person who cannot face life as sick. However, if we describe one’s infirmary, we find that one is under the power of compulsions from which one cannot extricate oneself. One is, as the New Testament expressed it, demonically possessed. In one, disease and servitude are the same; and we ask whether, in some degree, this is not true of all of us. In which sense, we ask, do we need healing? in which sense liberation? What should salvation mean to us? Eternal life is beyond past, present, and future: we come from it, we live in its presence, we return to it. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

Eternal life is never absent—it is the divine life in which we are rooted and in which we are destined to participate in freedom—for God alone has eternity. Humans should not boast of having an immortal soul as one’s possession for, as the letter to Timothy says: God alone has immortality. We are mortal like every creature, mortal with our whole being—body and soul—but we are also kept in the eternal life before we lived on Earth, while we are living in time and after our time has come to an end. If it is our destiny to participate in freedom in the divine life here and now, in and above time, we can say that the evil one is he from whom we pray to be delivered: It is the enslaving power which presents us from fulfilling our human destiny; it is the wall that separates us from the eternal life to which we belong; and it is the sickness of our being and that of our World caused by this separation. Salvation happens whenever the enslaving power is conquered, whenever the wall is broken through, whenever thee sickness is healed. One who can do this is called the savior. Nobody except God can do this. Those who are in chains cannot liberate themselves, and those who are sick cannot heal themselves. All liberating, all healing power comes from the other side of the wall which separates us from eternal life. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

Whenever this liberating and healing power appears, it is a manifestation of eternal, divine life in our temporal and mortal existence. All liberator, all healers are sent by God; they liberate and heal through the power of the eternal given to them. Who are those healers? Where are these saviours? Each of you has liberating and healing power over someone to whom you are a priest. Well all are called to be priests to each other; and if priests, also physicians. And if physicians, also counsellors. And if counsellors, also liberators. There are innumerable degrees and kinds of saving grace. There are many people who the evil one has enslaved so mightily that the saving power which may work through them has almost disappeared. One the other hand, there are the great saviour figures in whom large parts of humankind have experienced a lasting power of liberating and healing from generation to generation. Most of us are in between. And there is the one saviour in whom Christianity sees the one saviour in whom Christianity sees the saving grace without limits, the decisive victory over the demonic powers, the tearing down of the wall of guilt which separates us from the eternal, the healer who brings light a new reality in humans and one’s World. However, if we call him the saviour we must remember that God is the saviour through him and that there is a host of liberators and healers, including ourselves, through whom the divine salvation works in humankind. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

God does not leave the World at any place, in any time, without saviours—without healing power. In today’s World, famine, war, and epidemic are almost totally the outcome of human choices, which are expression of the human spirit. Individual disasters, too, very largely follow upon human choices, our own or those of others. And whether or not they do in a particular case, the situations in which we find ourselves are never as important as our responses to them, which come from our spiritual side. A carefully cultivated heart will, assisted by the grace of God, foresee, forestall, or transform most of the painful situations before which others stand like helpless children saying “Why?” “Seek first the kingdom and God’s righteousness, and all else shall be provided to you,” reports Matthew 6.33. And “Everyone who hears these words of mine and does them is like a wise being who built one’s house upon rock. The rain fell and the streams rose and the winds blew and beat upon the house. But it did not collapse, for it was built on rock,” reports Matthew 7.24-25. Accordingly, the greatest need you and I have—the greatest need of collective humanity—is renovation of our heart. The spiritual place within us from which outlook, choices, and actions come has been formed by a World away from God. Now it must be transformed. Indeed, the only hope of humanity is possessed in the fact that, as our spiritual dimension has been formed, so it also can be transformed. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

Thus in humans the body is the potential or material principle, and the soul the actualizing, vivifying, formal principle. The spirit is dynamic and is never at rest as long as there is life. If the soul requires an instrument or organ when it function, manifestations of its activity must reflect a dynamic state of affairs although these are not available to sense perception. Rational life, then, does not reflect static entities. Rational life involves movement, and its faculties and powers involve movement. Consequently, understanding, reason, imagination, memory, and will are names that designate types or classes of the soul’s activity. There is nothing static about human beings and their powers. Humans are a vibrant, dynamic mechanism. And these powers are innate and inherent in the soul. The object of logical behavior is to produce true knowledge and information rather than false, the object of ethical behavior to secure good actions rather evil. To accomplish such objects, logical behavior uses the understanding and reason, and the science of logic treats of these faculties. Ethical behaviour utilizes the will, appetite, and affections, and the science of ethics handles these faculties. Both provinces, the judicial and the ministerial, use the imagination and memory to make one stand out in moral grandeur. One’s voice seems to speak not merely with utter conviction but with absolute authority. One’s knowledge seems to come from a very deep level. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

There is the supreme relaxation of one who keeps certain resources—the most hidden, the most powerful—always in reserve. One is not good because of imposed rules or prescribed regulations. One is good because it is impossible for one to be anything else. One will find one’s proper place in the cosmic order, neither too low nor too high, and know one’s proper relationship to the divine intelligence behind that order, the World-Mind (God). The enlightened being can establish truth gleaned by insight, not put together by intellect through any organized institution or printed publication. A being who is in this state automatically repels negative thoughts and effortlessly wards off destructive ones. They cannot live in one’s atmosphere. The serenity is not something which has been added to one. It has been integrated as a part of one’s being. Although one is forced, like all humans, to take cognizance of the Word around one, of its horrors and squalors, its evils and vilenesses, the gate leading out of it all can be opened at will, and quickly. The way back into the ethereal World, with its beauty and peace, is always existent for one. The certitude which some to one is not merely the kind which opposes the meaning of hesitance, but also the kind which is the opposite of mere belief, which is born of complete understanding, perfect knowledge, and direct experience. To the extent that this person is open to all of one’s experience, one has access to all the available data in the situation, on which to base one’s behaviour. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

Enlightened individuals have knowledge of their own feelings and impulses, which are often complex and contradictory. One is freely able to sense the social demands, from the relatively rigid social laws to the desires of friends and family. One has access to one’s memories of similar situations. He has a relatively accurate perception of this external situation in all of its complexity. One is better able to permit one’s total organism, one’s conscious thought participating, to consider, weigh and balance each stimulus, need, and demand, and its relative weight and intensity. Out of this complex weighing and balancing one is able to discover that course of action which seems to come closest to satisfying all one’s needs in the situation, long-range as well as immediate needs. In such a weighing and balancing of all the components of a given life choice, one’s organism would not by any means be infallible. Mistaken choices might be made. However, because one tends to be open to one’s experience, there is a greater and more immediate awareness of unsatisfying consequences, a quicker correction of choices which are in error. It may help to realize that in most of the defects which interfere with this weighing and balancing are that we include things that are not a part of our experience, and exclude elements which are. Thus the individual may persist in the concept that “I can eat pie,” when openness to one’s past experience would indicate this is so. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

The person of enlightened mind knows not the conflict of contemplation and non-contemplation, good and evil. One abides, as it were, in the state of Absoluteness. Devoid of the feeling of “mine-ness” and “I-ness”, knowing for certain that nothing is, and with al one’s desires set at rest within, the being of knowledge does not act through one may be acting. The adept is marked off from one’s fellows by the aura of controlled emotion and calm sureness which one carries with one. One does not fear one’s fellow beings however evil they be, for one does not depend upon one’s own personal strength alone but upon the Higher Self and its boundless power. One feels that such an adept is in mind the oldest human one knows and yet in heart the youngest. These beings are not less practical for all one’s transcendental consciousness and spiritual experience. One understands as well as any cynic the low depths on which so many human relations functions. One sees quite clearly the greeds, the pettinesses, and the rancours that fill the air of human society. However, one also sees beyond and above them. In general then, it appears to be true that when one is open to one’s experience, one comes to find one’s organism more trustworthy. One feels less fear or the emotional reactions one has. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

Where one is alone in the privacy of one’s room or in public being watched by others, whether performing routine actions or entirely new ones, one will attain unified conduct because one has attained conscious unity of being. There is a gradual growth of trust in, and even affection for the complex, rich, varied assortment of feelings and tendencies which exist in one at the organic level. Do not be deceived by one’s modesty, one’s freedom from any of the varied forms of personal vanity, for beneath the surface there is ironclad assurance. A being of one’s status is able to scatter light in so many different types of mind because one is free from inflexible standpoints. So completely one freed oneself from the tyrannic sway of egoism that one can enter, though emotive thought, into another being’s personality, however offensive or antipathetic that being might ordinarily be to one. Consciousness, instead of being the watchman over a dangerous and unpredictable lot of impulses, of which few can be permitted to see the light of day, becomes comfortable inhabitant of a society of impulses and feelings and thoughts, which are discovered to be very satisfactorily self-governing when not fearfully guarded. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

Generally let this be a rule that all divisions of knowledge be accepted and used rather for lines to mark or distinguish, than sections to divine and separate them; in order that the continuance and entireness of knowledge be preserved. The goal is eventually to bring all of human life on Earth under the direction of wisdom, goodness, and power, as part of God’s eternal plan for the Universe. In thus sending out his Angel’s, God set afoot a perpetual World of revolution: one that is still in process and will continue until God’s will is done on Earth as it is in Heaven. As this revolution culminates, all the forces of evil known to humankind will be defeated and the goodness of God will be known, accepted, joyously confirmed to in every aspect of human life. “The whole Earth is full of God’s glory,” reports Isaiah 6.3. However, the day is yet to come when the Earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea. The revolution of Jesus is in the first place and continuously a revolution of the human heart and spirit. This is a revolution of character, which proceeds by changing people from the inside through ongoing personal relationship to God in Christ and to one another. It is one that changes their ideas, beliefs, feelings, and habits of choice, as well as their bodily tendencies and social relations. It penetrates to the deepest layers of their soul. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

External, social arrangements may be useful to this end, but they are not the end, nor are they a fundamental part of the means. On the other hand, from those divinely renovated depths of the person, social structures will naturally be transformed so that justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. Such streams cannot flow through corrupted souls. Conversely, a renovated within will not cooperate with public streams of unrighteousness. It will block them—or die trying. It is the only thing that can do. Another trend which is evident in this process of becoming a person relates to the source or locus of choices and decisions, or evaluative judgments. The beings increasingly comes to feel that this locus of evaluation is possessed within oneself. Less and less does one look to others for approval or disapproval; for the standards to live by; for decisions and choices. One recognizes that it rests within oneself to choose; that the only question which matters is, “Am I living in a way which is deeply satisfying to me, and which truly expresses me?” This I think is perhaps the most important question for the creative individual. One woman who was really confused about life had been contemplating suicide. She wanted to be dependent, and just let someone take over her life. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

Gradually, however, she realized that a sense of freedom was frightening to her. She felt something powerful within her, but was afraid to cut loose from her support. It takes strength to be a unique person, responsible for oneself, and also there is some uneasiness that accompanies this assumption of responsibility. To recognize that “I am he one who chooses” and “I am the one who determines the value of an experience for me” is both an invigorating and frightening realization. It is exciting, sometimes upsetting, but deeply encouraging to feel yourself in action, apparently knowing where you are going even though you do not always consciously know where that is. One can see here both the expression of trust in the organism, and also the realization of self as a process. The whole train of experiencing, and the meanings that one has thus far discovered in it, seem to launch one on a process which is both fascinating and at times a little frightening. It seems to mean letting one’s experiences carry one on, in direction which appears to be forward, towards goals that one can but dimly define, as one tries to understand at least the current meaning of that experience. The sensation is that of floating with a complex stream of experience, with the fascinating possibility of trying to comprehend its every-changing complexity. A soul is a temple unabridged with priceless treasure. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

Those who receive Jesus Christ as their living Lord and constant instructor will be God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, and will learn how to be blameless and harmless, children of God, faultless in the midst of a twisted and misguided generation, from which they shine as lights in the World, lifting up a word of life. This is an ongoing process. The relationship of body and mind entails an antistrophe. The humours and temperament of the body alter and work upon the mind, and the passions and apprehensions of the mind alter and work upon the body. As for the first: physicians prescribe drugs to heal mental diseases, as in the treatment of phrensy and melancholy; and pretend also to exhibit medicines to exhilarate the mind, to fortify the heart and thereby confirm the courage, to clarify the wits, to corroborate the memory, and the like. The root and life of all which prescripts consist in the sympathy of the mind with the state and disposition of the body. As for mental and emotional sates directly working upon bodily states, there is no physician of any skill who does not attend to the accidents of the mind, as a thing most material towards recoveries, and of the greatest force to further or hinder other remedies. Images have the power of working on the body of the imaginant and they also have the power of affecting the body of another. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

The apparent interplay of mental and physical conditions implicate that the mental events might be physiological in character and may be localized within the body. In some degree, the brain is a castle, and a considerable degree, both intellectual and emotional behavior depend upon bodily functions. Beings are something that live and can maintain life. Their vitality and sentience are evident in movement and in patterns of movement whose necessary and material basis is spirit. Such a complex of organized movement has the name of soul. God gave this ability, this soul, to humans. Humans uses their distinctive ability to produce knowledge and opinion and to communicate them. By it they make their philosophy and science, their history, and their poetry. One can project one’s empathic imagination into another person’s mind to such a degree that one can identify oneself with that person. The Sphinx is a perfect image of the adept in whom the being controls the terrestrial spirit. The attainment is a rare one—too many are satisfied to remain hardly more than a terrestrial spirit, with a few Godly traits. There is no patronizing condescension in one’s attitude toward those who are less evolved, no spiritual snobbery towards the masses. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

One cannot possibly suffer from the gloomy disappointment which those suffer who, believe that they have a clear mission in life, sadly find that they cannot establish their ideas or gather a following. Either they have not freed themselves sufficiently from clinging emotional desires—whether to be applauded by others or to reform them—or they have not freed themselves from identification with the personal ego. It is not only a matter of having more goodness than ordinary people that distinguishes one. It is primarily one’s contact with a higher dimension of being altogether. The enlightened individual has achieved perfect obedience to this fundamental Law of Balance in oneself, in one’s life, and in the Universe. The nature of the spirit is that it is the master-wheel which turns the other wheels in the body of beings. It is a particle that might be thought of like an atom, and spirits are essential to all kinds of change and movement in both inanimate and animate things. They are never at rest. The aspirant may have already discovered for oneself some of the inner benefits of the spirit. Once God has been experiences as a felt living presence in the heart, it loosens the grip of egoistic desires—together with their emotional changes of mood—on one’s consciousness and lifts it to a higher level, where one will soon become aware of a wonderful inner satisfaction which remains calm and unruffled despite outward circumstances to the contrary. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

Ultimately, the aspirant has to rise into that pure atmosphere whence one can survey one’s personal life as a thing apart. Still more difficult is it for one to live on that level while expressing the wisdom and goodness known to one. It is, however, almost beyond human strength to achieve the second part of such a program. Therefore, one has first to establish the connection with God so that his strength and understanding will then rule one effortlessly. The moment this connection is established, the aspirant will become aware of results from the descent of Divine Grace upon one’s personality. Such a moment is unpredictable, but, for the individual who stick to the Quest of Truth, its arrival is sure. Out of these intense struggles with one’s thoughts and emotions, these repeated meditations and altruistic actions, these constant self-analyses and ardent yearnings, one will eventually get something which words can hardly describe. It will be a new sense of sacredness, an enlightened awareness of a deeper self, a blessed loving serenity. In prayer, spiritual studies, and right conduct we have the triune path which brings satisfaction, peace, wisdom, and true prosperity. We are all children of God. It is our Father’s business to look after his children. Despite the tragedy and horror of our times, those who have eyes to see can still see the divine arms enfolding us. Despite the presence of monstrosities in the World, there is also the presence of God—beautiful, radiant, graceful, an indestructible. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

Intelligence exercised constantly in musing upon the nature of life, the movements of the Universe, the psychology of beings, and the mystery of God—if exercised in calmness, intuitive balance, and depth—leads to the opening up of the soul. If one lets this purpose penetrate one’s entire life, one will soon joyously feel that one is part of the eternal structure of the Universe, that one fits into the Idea of it at some point, and that with such a high relationship all things must work together for one’s ultimate good. Our whole soul has a great war of ideas, and we are the arms dealers distributing the sublime influence of God to the World. However, now I must repeat a question asked before. What does all this mean for our lives? When and where do we, ourselves, experience such saving power? When and where are we liberated, healed? It is one of the most memorable facts in the Biblical stories about Jesus that a large part of them are healing stories. There are three types: those in which people are sick of body are directly healed; those in which people are sick of body are forgiven and healed; and those in which people sick of mind are delivered from what was called demonic possession. It is regrettable that most preaching emphasizes the miraculous character of these stories, often using a poor, superstitious notion of miracles instead of showing the profound insight they betray into infirmary, healthy, and healing—the inseparable unity of body and mind. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

They are stories of salvation, preformed by Him who was called the Saviour. In them, it is visible that saving is healing. Make us, we beseech Thee, O Lord our God, watchful and heedful in awaiting the Coming of Thy Son Christ our Lord; that when He shall come and knock, He may find us not sleeping in sins, but awake, and rejoicing in His praises; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. We beseech Thee, Almighty God, let our souls enjoy this their desire, to be enkindled by Thy Spirit; that being filled, as lamps, by the Divine gift, we may shine like blazing lights before the presence of Thy Son Christ at His Coming; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. We beseech Thee, O Lord our God, let us all rejoice with upright hearts, being gathered together in the unity of faith; that at the Coming of Thy Son our Saviour, we may go forth undefiled to meet Him, in the company of His Saints; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. We beseech Thee, Almighty God, to behold our prayers, and to pour out upon us Thy loving tenderness; that we who are afflicted by reason of our sins may be refreshed by the Advent of our Saviour; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. “Therefore they did watch over their people, and did nourish them with things pertaining to righteousness,” reports Mosiah 23.18. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

You have joined together in good-will and love, rejoice in your children and expect to go on rejoicing in them. That is your personal affair and concerns your personal happiness. Within the course of this happy process you have given birth to new human beings. A time will come when these beings will cease to be solely the instruments of your happiness, and will step forth as independent members of society. For society, it is by no means a mater of indifference what kind of people they will become. In delegating to you a certain measure of societal authority, the Church of Jesus Christ demands from you the correct upbringing of its future citizens. Particularly it relies on you to provide conditions arising naturally out of your union; namely, your parental love. If you wish to give birth to a citizen while dispensing with parental love, then be so kind as to warn society that you intend to do such a filthy thing. Human beings who are brought up without parental love are often deformed beings. We beseech Thee, O Lord our God, to gird up the loins of our mind by Thy Divine power; that at the Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ Thy Son, we may be found worthy of the banquet of eternal life; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Grant, we beseech Thee, Almighty God, this grace unto Thy people, to wait with all vigilance for the Coming of Thine Only-begotten Son; that as He, the Author of our salvation, taught us, we may prepare our souls like blazing lamps to meet Him, through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

BRIGHTON STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH

Rancho Cordova, CA |

There is really something special about being here. It is like entering a fairytale. This might be the story book house of Cinderella. Here is the charm we hear so much about. The emotional benefits of owning a home is a truly tangible thing. Anyone who knows that they are home has a feeling of serenity and fulfillment like no other. A home has a hold on our minds and a special place in our hearts. Living in a home makes you feel happy, safe, and secure. When you buy a new home, you can provide shelter for yourself and your family and take control of your emotional well-being. There is dignity, uniqueness, and charm—essential characteristics of a Cresleigh home.

Randolph Harris II International Institute

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