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No One Knows the Worth of Innocence Till One Knows it is Gone Forever, and that Money Cannot Buy it Back!

November 30, 2019 3:01 am

If past history was all there was to life, the richest people would be those who did not progress. Your past is important, but as important as that is, it is not nearly as important to your present as the way you see the future. The function of a great soul is to store obscure ideas, and make sense of the World of information. We are the dwelling place of incredible opportunities. They live within us. With consciousness about who we are and what we are, with the awareness of the problems we are faced with, with a commitment not only to ourselves but to each other, we can make it work We will make it work Is this all too good to be true, too beautiful to be factual? Is it only a theory without grounds, a personal belief without evidence? No!—it is quite demonstrable to anyone who will undertake the work upon oneself.. When God made you, He threw away the mold. There never has been or ever will be another person just like you. So you are an original, a meticulously designed instrument. That is great! However, you will never perform, live, or achieve above the value you attribute to yourself. It is the supreme job of the soul to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge. The rewards of this quest are not primarily material ones, although these may come. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22

The only reward that can be guaranteed to the successful aspirant is that one will emerge out of the unregenerate state and come closer to God’s consciousness, that is to say, to the kingdom of Heaven. Whoever looks for more may be disappointed. However, to the being who through reflection or suffering, intuition or instruction, has got one’s values right, this will be enough. From the first momentary glimpse f the soul till the final rest in it, one is being led to accept the truth that the love which one wants and hopes to find outside of oneself must be found within oneself. The true beloved is not a person but a present. When genuine love in its most intense form utterly overwhelms one, one will find that its physical form is a mere caricature of it and that its human form is a pale reflection from it. Instead of having to bed some woman or some man for crumbs of affection from their table, one will find a veritable fountain of everflowing love deep within one’s heart, and therefore ever available to one in the fullest measure. This is that one beloved who can never desert one, the unique soul-mate who will forever remain with one, the only twin soul one can seek with the absolute certainty that it is truly one’s own. At the least there will be more outer harmony and less outer friction in day-to-day living, more inner peace and less inner anxiety. It leads to amity in human relationships and dissolves enmity. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22

When their lives have reached an impasse, people seek or should seek the help of a psychotherapist. The symptoms of the impasse are diverse, including physical suffering, inability to concentrate, anxiety, depression, boredom or guilt, inability to love another or participate in adult relationships, loneliness, obsession, antisocial behavior—the entire gamut of psychopathology as we know it. Diverse though the symptoms of misery might be, they share one feature. They are the inexorable outcome of adjusting to a way of life, a way of existing and behaving in the World, which an informed common sense would tell us must lead to neurosis or psychosis, to a checking out or a refusal to carry on further in that way. We know now that elaborate schemes for classifying symptoms of mental illness into neat categories is unprofitable for would-be helpers of others. When we label someone as a schizophrenic or a neurotic, we lull ourselves into thinking that we understand one before we actually do. The impasses in existence are only superficially described as illness, a term which at best is a metaphor, not an explanation. We spent centuries regarding people who do not fit, whose behavior we could neither understand nor accept as evil, as possessed by demons. It was indeed an advance toward greater compassion among beings when the illness-metaphor was applied to the people who would not play the game of social existence as it was supposed to be played. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22

However, not all who, though physically intact, cannot play the game are sick. Perhaps none are. Mental illness is a myth one that has an historical purpose, but which no longer helps beings regard and treat deviants as their kith and kin. Now, the persistent belief that people who check out are mentally ill and need to be cured of their disease symptoms beclouds understanding. Indeed, the belief that one’s patient or client or counselee is an exemplar of some category of disapproved humanity: schizophrenic, delinquent, neurotic, and so forth—leads the would-be helper to treat one as less than a full human being, less than a fellow traveler through this life. Anyone who has been treated by another, not as they very one he or she is, but as the embodiment of some category—disabled, same sex oriented, a professor, a psychotic—knows that one is not being addressed by the person who so regards him or her. If I am regarded as a patient by the doctor, and neither he or she nor I ever become acquainted with one another, we are doubtless both cheated; and it is questionable whether any enduring help can come out of so impersonal a transaction. It is more apt to regard the one in deed of help as a fellow seeker. One seeks relief from one’s suffering, to be sure, and more fundamentally (whether or not one can verbalize the ultimate goal of one’s quest), one is seeking a way to be in the World, a way to live with others, and a way of being oneself that is meaningful and rewarding. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22

One is seeking a way that produces satisfactions, hope, and meaning in expanding experience rather than pain, misery, stultification, and impotence. These latter outcomes are cries for help. They are, as well, proof that the seeker’s way of life up to the point of breakdown was not compatible with wellness. It seems futile for a physician, psychotherapist, or growth counselor to treat symptoms by anesthetizing the person with assorted drugs, or by reducing one in some way, and then to send one back to the very way of life that was inimical to truly human being. What is called for in addition to cure is to help the seeker find some way that will permit one to function more fully, more authentically, with a more liberating focus to one’s existence. The counthentically, with a more liberating focus to one’s existence. The counselor must aim to seek with one’s client and persist in the search until they jointly discover what changes in the client’s self and World will permit one to live a life compatible with wellness. The helper, if one is to me more than a first-aid technician, must grope with one’s client, to find healthy personality for one: that is, a healthy way of being a person in the World (the literal meaning of personality). Therefore, not everyone with a mental illness is broke or dangerous, but sometimes those who are not seeking help can be. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22

In real life a person knows that one’s behavior will have consequences. When people lack a complete feeling of reality, it may cause reactions that represent unconscious tendencies. No one knows the worth of innocence till one know it is gone forever, and that money cannot buy it back. Some people have a predisposing factor in the brain which is partly responsible for their mental illness. Often times, a paranoiac fall ill long before anyone suspects one’s illness and their pathological idea overwhelmed them at a psychological moment. This usually happens when one’s congenitally hypersensitive emotional life becomes warped, and the spiritual form which one’s emotions need in order to live finally break down. It did not break by itself, it was broken by the individual. It is usually because one’s feelings, which are woven out of moonshine are immature, and need prolonged incubation in order to grow strong and to withstand he unavoidable clash with reality. In themselves there is nothing reprehensible about them, but to the simple, straightforward mind they arouse suspicion. However, in the individual’s mind, when someone rejects them it has a devastating effect, because they believe there are no grounds for this harsh interpretation. One’s dream is destroyed, but this in itself would not have been harmful had it not also killed the individual’s feelings. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22

A less passionate person can put up with sternness, and not hold before one the ideal of cold-blooded heartlessness, but the highly-strung, sensitive nature in need of affection will be broke. Gradually it will seem to the individual that one attained one’s ideal, when suddenly one discovered that the person they think they “fixed” was not on the same wavelength. This realization is usually followed by an arise of paranoia, and also a form of paranoid schizophrenia characterized by delusions and hallucinations, and indeed all other forms of schizophrenia. There will also usually be microscopic lesions of the brain. Milder cases do not usually lead to hospitalization, they can be cured by psychotherapeutic means. However, with regard to the possibility of a cure, one should not be too optimistic. Such cases are rare. They very nature of the disease, involving as it does the disintegration of the personality, rules out the possibility of psychic influences, which is the essential agent in therapy. Schizophrenia shares this peculiarity with obsessional neurosis, its nearest relative in the realm of the neuroses. Many cases of schizophrenics never are seen in psychiatric hospitals because these cases are partially camouflaged as obsessional neuroses, compulsions, phobias, and hysterias, and they are very careful never to go near an asylum. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22

Concomitantly, the individual needs to excel, to achieve success, prestige, or recognition in any form, they need to feel “accepted.” Strivings in this direction are partly oriented toward power, inasmuch as success and prestige lend power in a competitive society. However, they also make for a subjective feeling of strength through outside affirmation, outside acclaim, and the fact of supremacy. Here the center of gravity is possessed outside the person oneself; only the kind of affirmation wanted from others differs. Factually the one is as futile as the other. When people wonder why success has failed to make the individual feel any less insecure, they only show their psychological ignorance, but the fact that they do so indicates the extent to which success and prestige are commonly regarded as yardsticks. A strong need to exploit others, to outsmart them, to play them, to make them of use to oneself, is part of the picture. Any situation or relationship is looked at from the standpoint of “What can I get out of it?”—whether it has to do with money, prestige, contact, or ideas. The person is consciously or semiconsciously convinced that everyone acts this way, and so what counts is to do it more efficiently than the rest. One becomes hard and tough, or gives that appearance. One regards all feelings, one’s own as well as others’, as sloppy sentimentality. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22

In love relationships the neurotic’s tendencies to defeat, subdue, and humiliate the partner play an enormous role. They usually want a mate who is eminently desirable, one through whose attractiveness, social prestige, or wealth can enhance one’s own position. One sees no reason to be considerate of other. The neurotic usually attaches him or herself to others so they can subdue and degrade and humiliate that individual, and this attitude is usually traceable to feelings the individual has about his or her parent, by whom one felt humiliated and whom one wished to humiliate in returned, but out of fear hid this impulse being an exaggerated devotion—a situation which is often described as a fixation. These individuals are usually bad losers and undeniably want victory. One is always ready to accuse others, and the consideration of guilt does not play a role in the thought process. One does not assume the other person is wrong; just one assumes one is right because one needs this ground for subjective certainty in as much the same way as an army needs a safe ground to launch an attack. If not an arrant foolishness, to admit an error when it is not absolutely necessary sees to one as an unforgivable display of weakness. It is consistent with one’s attitude of having to fight against a malevolent World that one should develop a keen sense of realism—of its kind. A need for reassuring affection is often the reason for clinging to a partner of the same sex. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22

Admiration or love may serve as a compensation for the defeating drives as follows: by keeping the destructive impulses from awareness; by eliminating competitiveness altogether by creating an unsurpassable distance between self and competitor; by providing a vicarious enjoyment of success or participation in it; by propitiating the competitor and thus warding off one’s vindictiveness. One will never be so naïve as to overlook in others any manifestation of ambition, greed, ignorance, or anything else that might obstruct one’s own goals. Since in a competitive civilization attributes like these are much more common than real decency, one feels justified in regarding oneself as only realistic. Another facet of one’s realism is one’s emphasis on planning and foresight. Like any good strategist, in every situation one is careful to appraise one’s own chances, the forces of one’s adversaries, and the possible pitfalls. Because one is driven always to assert oneself as the strongest, shrewdest, or most sought after, one tries to develop the efficiency and resourcefulness necessary to being so. The zest and intelligence one puts into one’s work may make one a highly esteemed employee or a success in a business of one’s own. However, the impression one gives of having an absorbing interest in one’s work is only a means to an end. One has no love for what one is doing and take no real pleasure in it—a fact consistent with one’s attempt to exclude feelings from one’s life altogether. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22

This chocking off of all feelings has a two-edged effect. On the one hand it is undoubtedly expedient from the standpoint of success in that it enables one to function like a well-oiled machine, untiringly producing the goods that will bring one ever more power and prestige. Here feelings might interfere. They could conceivably lead one into a line of work with fewer opportunistic advantages; they might cause one to shy away from the techniques so often employed on the road to success; they might tempt one away from one’s work to the enjoyment of nature or art, or to the companionship of friends instead of persons merely useful to one’s purpose. On the other than the emotional barrenness that results from a throttling of feeling will do something to the quality of one’s work; certainly it is bound to detract from one’s creativity. The moment of the outbreak of neurosis is not just a matter of chance; as a rule it is most critical. It is usually the moment when a new psychological adjustment, that is, a new adaptation, is demanded. Such moments facilitate the outbreak of a neurosis, as every experienced neurologist knows. You may ask why the neurotic has a special tendency not to accomplish one’s necessary tasks. Here let me point out that no living creatures adjusts itself easily and smoothly to new conditions. The law of inertia is valid everywhere. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22

A sensitive and somewhat unbalanced person, as a neurotic always is, will meet with special difficulties and perhaps with more unusual tasks in life than a normal individual, who as a rule has only to follow the well-worn path of an ordinary existence. For the neurotic there is no established way of life, because one’s aims and tasks are apt to be of a highly individual character. One tries to go the more or less uncontrolled and half-conscious way of normal people, not realizing that one’s own critical and very different nature demands of one more effort than the normal person is required to exert. There are neurotics who have shown their heightened sensitiveness and their resistance to adaptation in the very first weeks of life, in the difficulty they have in taking the mother’s breast and in their exaggerated nervous reactions, and so forth. For this peculiarity in the neurotic predisposition it will always be impossible to find a psychological aetiology, because it is anterior to all psychology. This predisposition—you can call it congenital sensitiveness or what you like—is the cause of the first resistances to adaptation. As the way to adaptation is blocked, the biological energy we call libido does not find its appropriate outlet or activity, with the result that a suitable form of adaptation is replaces by an abnormal or primitive one. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22

Neurosis is not primary a phenomenon based on a perverted sexual disposition, but merely secondary and a consequence of failure to apply the stored-up psyche in a suitable way. The psychological trouble in neurosis, and the neurosis itself, can be formulated as an act of adaption that has failed. A neurosis is, in a sense, an attempt at a self-cure—a view which can be and has been applied to many other illnesses. The aggressive type looks like an exquisitely uninhibited person. One can assert one’s wishes, one can orders, express anger, defend oneself. One’s feelings about oneself is that one is strong, honest, and realistic, all of which is true if you look at things from one’s way. According to one’s premises one estimate of oneself is strictly logical, since to one ruthlessness is strength, lack of consideration for others, honesty, and a callous pursuit of one’s own ends, realism. One’s attitude on the score of one’s honesty comes partly from a shrewd debunking of current hypocrisies. Enthusiasm for a cause, philanthropic sentiments, and the like one sees as sheer pretense, and it is not hard for one to expose gestures of social consciousness or Christian virtue for what they so often are. One’s set of values is built around the philosophy of the jungle. Might makes right. Away with humanness and mercy. Homo himini lupi. Here we have values not very different from those with which the nazis have made us so familiar. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22

This behavior could be labeled as Pseudoneurotic schizophrenic. Schizophrenia literally means “split personality,” referring to portions of the psyche that are contradictory; it does not mean multiple personality disorder, which is the presence of distinct, autonomous alternate personalities. Pseudoneurotic schizophrenia is a form characterized by all-pervasive anxiety and a wide variety of neurotic symptoms that initially mask underlying psychotic tendencies, which may be manifest as occasional, brief psychotic episodes. By adapting the terminology to that of early Middle Ages, it is all devils and witchcraft. Healthy personality is growing personality. It is a way for a person to function in one’s World, a way that yields growth without placing other important values in jeopardy. People commit themselves to a repertoire of values; they live for them One who is a healthy personality seeks to fulfill them, and one defends them when they are under threat. A healthy personality is to oneself as a dedicated farmer is to one’s farm—one does everything in its time. The abundance of the crops, that state of one’s livestock, and the condition of one’s outbuildings are testimony to the farmer’s alert and responsive care. The healthy personality likewise shows evidence, in one’s very being and presence, of one’s alert and responsive care of oneself. One finds one’s life meaningful, with satisfactions and some accepted suffering; one loves and is loved; one is can fulfill reasonable social demands upon one. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22

And one is in no doubt as to who one is, what one’s feeling and convictions are. One does not apologize for being the very person one is. One can look out on the World and see it from the standpoint of how it presently is (according o social consensus); but one can also see oneself, the World, and the people in it from the standpoint of possibility. One can regard the World as a place in which one can bring into being some possibilities that exist only in one’s imagination. The World, the other person, and oneself—none of these are seen by a healthy personality as sclerosed, frozen, finished, or defined once for all. Such a person has free access to a dimension of human being much neglected by the square, the hyper-conformist, the modal personality. I am referring here to something that has been called the unconscious, experiencing. Transcendental experiences, spiritual experience. This hidden dimension of the self, sought for centuries by beings who have longed for personal fulfillment beyond rationalism, is usually dreaded by the average person. It could be called experiencing possibility. It sometimes peeps out when one permits oneself to be unfocused and aimless, unintegrated, not going anywhere or doing anything; but is tamped back in anxious haste, for it is experiences like the contents of Pandora’s box. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22

When one’s unconscious threatens to speak, when direct experience of self or World invades one’s consciousness, one becomes overwhelmed with anxiety and may temporarily feel one is losing one’s mind and sanity. Indeed, one is on the point of going out of one’s ego. One’s present self-concept and concept of things and people are shattered by implosions and explosions of raw experience from within and without. One experiences one’s being in dimensions presently unfamiliar to one, hence frightening. However, a healthier personality recognizes that one’s unconscious, this persistent but usually drowned out dream, this source of new truth, is the voice of one’s true, real self—a statement of how one has mistreated oneself (if the message is dysphoric) or an invitation to new possibilities of being for which one has become sufficiently grown and secretly, unconsciously prepared. We look upon these possibilities from this delicious mess of insanities and realities, strivings, and deadnesses, hopes and fears, agonies and exultations, which forms our present state, and realize that the more a being becomes acquainted with the true sources of one’s inner life—both good and bad sides—the better it will be for one’s outer life. One will expand the meaning of one’s own habitual life-experience as one expands the awareness of the divine in oneself. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22

The idea that one can learn without effort, without frustration, may be good as an advertising slogan, but is certainly not true in the acquisition of major skills. Without the capacity to accept frustration humans would hardly have developed at all. And does not everyday observation show that many times people suffer frustrations without having an aggressive response? People waiting in line in order to obtain a theater ticket, religious people who fast, people in war who have to do without adequate food—in these and hundreds of other cases frustration does not produce aggression in healthy people. What can, and often does, produce aggression is what the frustration means to the person, and the psychological meaning of frustration differs according to the total constellation in which the frustration occurs. If a child, for instance, is forbidden to eat candy, this frustration, provided the parent’s attitude is genuinely loving and free from pleasure in controlling, will not mobilize aggression; but if this prohibition is only one of many manifestations of the parent’s desire for control, or if, for instance, a sibling is permitted to eat it, considerable anger is likely to be the result. What produces the aggression is not the frustration as such, but the injustice of rejection involved in the situation. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22

The most important factor in determining the occurrence and intensity of frustration is the character of a person. A very greedy person, for instance, will react angrily when one does not get all the food one wants, and a miserly person, when one’s wish to buy something inexpensive is frustrated; the narcissistic person feels frustrated when one does not get the praise and recognition one expects. The character of the person determines in the first place what frustrates one, and in the second place the intensity of one’s reaction to frustration. Practical wisdom in overcoming the most difficult situations and perfect skill in managing the most delicate ones, are qualities which should emerge from the balanced training given by this quest for truth. It becomes the background, unknown to other persons, of all one’s activities. This is a considerable achievement, a consequence of applying to them what one perceived in prayer, learnt in study, and understood in reflection. It is a teaching whose conceptions give the mind a reasonable understanding of life and whose practice gives the heart repose. It is a gross mistake to believe that this is a path to Worldly misery and material destitution. Whoever turns oneself into a jewel-case of philosophic wisdom, perfect devotion, and faultless conduct, to one comes success in all one’s enterprises. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22

When the healthy love of life is on one, and all its forms and its appetites seems so unutterably real; when the most brutal and the most spiritual things are lit by the same Sun, and each is an integral part of the total richness—why, then it seems a grudging and sickly way of meeting so robust a Universe to shrink from any of its facts and wish them not to be. Rather take the strictly dramatic point of view, and treat the whole thing as a great unending romance which the spirit of the Universe, striving to realize its own content, is eternally thinking out and representing to itself. After the pure and classic truths, the exciting and rancid ones must be experienced because our minds have become clogged with the dullness and heaviness of our native pursuits. Still, the facts of human sensibility are the most worthy of attention. However, what is the essence of this philosophy of objective conduct, so old-fashioned and finite, but so chaste and sane and strong, when compared with its rival? It is the recognition of limits, foreign and opaque to our understanding. It is the willingness after bringing about some external good, to feel at peace; for our responsibility ends with the performance of that duty, and the burden of the rest we may lay on higher powers. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22

And what sense can there be in condemning ourselves for taking the wrong way, unless we need have done nothing of the sort, unless the right way was open to us as well? I cannot understand the willingness to act, no matter how we feel, without the belief that acts are really good and bad. I cannot understand the belief that an act is bad, without regret at it happening. I cannot understand regret without the admission of real, genuine possibility in the World. Only then is it other than a mockery to feel, after we have failed to do out best, that an irreparable opportunity is gone from the Universe, the loss of which it must forever after mourn. The World is vulnerable, and liable to be injured by certain of its parts if they act wrong. And it represents their acting wrong as a matter of possibility or accident, neither inevitable nor yet to be infallibly warded off. In all this, it is a theory devoid either of transparency or of stability. It gives us a pluralistic, restless Universe, in which no single point of view can ever take in the whole scene; and to a mind possessed of the love of unity at any cost, it will, no doubt, remain forever inacceptable. One who is sufficiently ready to recognize the Higher Purpose of Life, and who has the courage to change and improve one’s way of thinking, thereby replacing the negative thoughts by optimistic ones, will certainly be rewarded by improved circumstances and greater happiness than one may already enjoy. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22

And if I still wish to think of the World as a totality, it lets me feel that a World with a chance in it of being altogether good, even if the chance never comes to pass, is better than a World with no such chance at all. A little of this knowledge saves from much danger. Even a few years’ study of philosophy will bring definite benefit into the life of a student. It will help one in all sorts of ways, unconsciously, here on Earth and it will help one very definitely after death during one’s life in the next World of being. Although its promises and experience may not appear glamorous in a Worldly sense, the Quest reveals itself to be the best pf all possible ways of living. If it exacts the highest possible price in human satisfactions it gives in return the highest possible spiritual satisfactions. “For the Lord God hath said that: Inasmuch as ye shall keep my commandments ye shall prosper in the land; and inasmuch as ye will not keep my commandments ye shall be cut off from my presence,” reports 2 Nephi 4.4. Blessed art Thou, Almighty Master, Who hast reach the beginning of the night. Hear our prayers, and those of all Thy people; and forgive us our sins voluntary and involuntary, and accept our evening supplications, and send down on Thine inheritance the fulness of Thy mercy Thy compassion. Compass us about with Thy holy Angels, arm us with the armour of Thy righteousness, fence us round with Thy truth, guard us with Thy power. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22

Deliver us from every assault and every device of the adversary; and grant us to pass this evening and the ensuing night, and all the days of our life, in fullness of peace and holiness, without sin and stumbling. For it is Thine to pity and to save, O Christ our God. “Behold, my soul delighteth in the things of the Lord; and my heart pondereth continually upon the things which I have seen and heard,” reports 2 Nephi 4.16. Grant us, Lord, to rejoice in beholding the bliss of Thy Jerusalem, and to be carried in her bosom with perpetual gladness; that as she is the home of the multitude of the Saints, we also may be counted worthy to have our portion within her; and that Thine Only-begotten Son, the Prince and Saviour of all, may in this World graciously relieve His afflicted, and hereafter in His Kingdom be the everlasting Comfort of His redeemed. Stir up, O Lord, Thy power, and come; and mercifully fulfill that which Thou hast promised to Thy Church unto the end of the World. Stir up, we beseech Thee, O Lord, our hearts to prepare the ways of Thine Only-begotten Son; that by Hid Advent we may be enabled to serve Thee with purified minds; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. We beseech Thee, O Lord, to purify our consciences by The daily visitation; that when Thy Son our Lord cometh, He may find in us a mansion prepared for Himself; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22

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The Heart is Like a Frosty Glass of Milk for the Soul—Tasty, Wholesome, Mother-Approved and More Importantly, a Necessary Part of a Healthy Intellectual Life

November 29, 2019 3:22 am

The best of my education has come from my soul…my tuition fee is a meditative prayer and once in a while, fasting. You do not need to know very much to start with, if you know the way to your heart. What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals. It is sufficient for one to know that one needs God; and that behind this Universe God simply is and will be forever, and will in some way hear one’s call. In the practical assurance of these empirical facts, in the blessedness of their mere acknowledgement as given, is possessed all the peace and power one craves. The floodgates of the religious life are opened, and the full currents can pour through. Get that peace of God which passes understanding, and the questions of the understanding will cease from puzzling and pedantic scruples be at rest. Surely, if the Universe is reasonable (and we must believe that it is so), it must be susceptible, potentially at least, of being reasoned out to the last drop without residuum. The aim is to shadow forth a sort of process by which spirit, emerging from its beginnings and exhausting the whole circle of finite experience in its sweep, shall at last return and possess itself as its own object at the climax of its career. This climax is the religious consciousness. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23

It is essential to make a clear that none should take to this Quest in order to follow or depend on some particular being, or to gain certain mystic experiences, for if one is disappointed in the being or frustrated in reaching the experiences, one will be inclined to abandon the Quest. No!—one should take to it for its own sake, because it is immeasurably worthwhile and because its rewards in improved character and developed understanding are sufficient in themselves to pay for one’s effort. If the Quest helps one to become aware of, and to eradicate, bad faults in oneself, in one’s outlook on life and in one’s approach to others, it has justified itself. Even if the spiritual consciousness fails to show itself, or to show itself often enough to please one, one has still had one’s money’s worth. The time will come when values will change, when ambitions, powers, possessions, and acquisitions will be put back into their proper places, when their tyranny over the will and the feelings will be put to an end. The is the character of the cognitive element in all the mental life we know, and we have no reason to suppose that the character will ever change. On the contrary, it is more than probable that to the end of time our power of moral and volitional response to the nature of things will be the deepest organ of communication therewith we shall ever possess. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23

In every being that is real there is something external to, and sacred from, the grasp of every other. God’s being is sacred from ours. To co-operate with one’s creation by the best and rightest response seems all he wants of us. In such co-operation with his purposes, not in any chimerical speculative conquest of him, not in any theoretic drinking of him up, must possess the real meaning of our destiny. This is nothing new. All beings know it at those rare moments when the soul sobers herself, and leaves off her chattering and protesting and insisting about this formula or that. In the silence of our theories we then seem to listen, and to hear something like the pulse of Being beat; and it is borne in upon us that the mere turning of the character, the dumb willingness to suffer and to serve this Universe, is more than all theories about it put together. When this inner work is sufficiently advanced, certain traits of character will either advance in strength or appear for the first time. Among them are patience, goodwill, stability, self-control, peacefulness, and equableness. Those who are willing to practise the philosophic discipline may realize their spiritual nature for themselves and not have to depend upon hearsay for the knowledge of its existence. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23

It can be shown that the disciplines of philosophy offer much in return, that to the person who seriously feels one’s life needs not mere amendment but raising to a finer level there are encouraging experiences and beautiful intuitions awaiting one. It is a new and different, a superior and fuller, a self-fulfilling kind of experience. A life so full of exalted purpose, so inspired by a tremendous ideal, cannot be a dull or unhappy one. The toil of the quest is hard and long. If it deters anyone from starting on it, let one remember that the rewards along the way, even apart from the grand one at the end, are sufficiently worthwhile to repay one for all one is likely to do. Shoot for the Moon. Even if you miss, you will land among the stars. The reward of all the years of long arduous striving will be their happy justification; the rich blessing of an infinite strength within one will pay off the failures and weaknesses of a past self which had to be fought and conquered. Your job gives your authority. Your behavior earns you respect. During times of war and suffering, the spiritual Quest demonstrates its value by the inner support which it gives and the unquenchable faith it bestows. The forces of evil will be checked; the good will triumph in the end, as always. God’s love for all remains what it ever shall be—the best thing in life. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23

Nonetheless, the ways of obtaining power, prestige and possessions differ in different cultures. They may come by right of inheritance or they may come from the individual’s possession of certain qualities appreciated by one’s cultural group, such as courage, cunning, capacity to cure the unwell or communicate with supernatural powers, mental instability, and the like. They may be acquired also by extraordinary or successful activities, achieved on the basis of given qualities or through the favor of fortuitous circumstances. In our culture inheritance of position and wealth certainly plays a role. If, however, power, prestige and possession have to be acquired by the individual’s own efforts one is compelled to enter into competitive struggles with others. From its economic center competition radiates into all other activities and permeates love, social relations and play. Therefore competition is a problem for everyone in our culture, and it is not at all surprising to find it an unfailing center of neurotic conflicts. In our culture neurotic competitiveness differs from the normal in three respects. First, the neurotic constantly measures oneself against others, even in situations which do not call for it. Although striving to surpass others is essential in all competitive situations, the neurotic measures oneself against person who are in no way potential competitors and who have no goal in common with one. The question as to who is the more intelligent, attractive, popular, is indiscriminately applied to everyone. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23

One’s feelings toward life can be compared to that of a jockey in a race, for whom only one thing matters—whether one is ahead of the others. This attitude leads necessarily to a loss or impairment of real interest in any cause. It is not the content of what one is doing that matters so much as the question of how much success, impression, prestige will be gained by it. The neurotic may be aware of this attitude of measuring oneself against others, or one may do it automatically without being aware of doing it. One is scarcely ever fully aware of the role it plays for one. The second difference from normal competitiveness is that neurotic’s ambition is not only to accomplish more than others, or to have greater success than they, but to be unique and exceptional. While one may think in the comparative one’s aim is always in the superlative. One may be perfectly aware of being driven by relentless ambition. More frequently, however, one either represses one’s ambition entirely or partly covers it. In the latter cases one may believe, for example, that one cares not for success, but only for the cause one is working for; or one may believe that one does not want to be in the limelight, but only wants to pull the strings behind the scene. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23

Or one may admit that one was once ambitions, as some period in one’s life—that as a boy one had fantasies of being Christ or a second Napoleon, or saving the World from war, that as a girl she wanted to marry the Duke of Sussex—but will declare that since then one’s ambition has subsided altogether. One may even complain that it has receded too much, and that it would be desirable to recapture some of one’s old ambition. If one has repressed one’s ambition entirely one is likely to be convinced that ambition has always been quite alien to one. Only when a few protective layers have been loosened by the analyst will one recall having had fantasies of a grandiose nature, or thoughts that flashed through one’s mind of being the very best in one’s field or of being exceptionally clever or handsome, or having caught oneself feeling amazed that any woman could fall in love with another man when he was around, and, even retrospectively, resenting it. In most cases, however, ignorant of the powerful role ambition plays in one’s reactions, one does not ascribe any particular significant to such thoughts. Such an ambition will sometimes be focused upon one particular goal: intelligence, or attractiveness, or achievements of some kind, or morals. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23

Sometimes, however, the ambition is not centered on a definite goal, but spreads over all the person’s activities. One has to be the best in every field one comes in touch with. One may want to be at the same time a great inventor and an outstanding physician and an unequaled musician. A woman may want to be not only the first in her particular field of work, but also a perfect housewife and a best-dressed woman. Adolescents of this type may find it hard to choose or pursue any one career, because choosing one means renouncing another, or at least renouncing part of their favorite interest and activities. For most persons it would be difficult indeed to master architecture, surgery and the violin. Also such adolescents may begin their work with expectations that are excessive and fantastic: to paint like Rembrandt, to build a mansion like Sarah Winchester, to write plays like Shakespeare, to be about to make an accurate blood count as soon as starting to work in the laboratory. Since their excessive ambition leads them to expect too much they fall short in their achievements, and are thus easily discouraged and disappointed and are soon induced to give up their endeavors and start something else. Many gifted persons scatter their energies this way during their entire lives. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23

Some gifted people have indeed great potentialities for achieving something in various fields, but by being interested and eventually ambitions in all of them they are incapable of consistent pursuit of any goal; in the end they achieve nothing and let their fine faculties go to waste. Whether or not there is awareness of the ambition there is always great sensitivity to any frustration of it. Even a success may be felt as a disappointment, because it does not quite measure up to high-flown expectations. For example, a success with a scientific paper or book may nevertheless be a disappointment because it does not set the Thames on fire, but arouses only a limited interest. A person of this type after having passed a difficult examination will discount one’s success by pointing out that others, too, have passed. This persistent tendency toward disappointment is one of the reasons why persons of this type cannot enjoy success. Other reasons I shall discuss later. Naturally they are also extremely sensitive to any criticism. Many persons have never produced more than their first book or their first picture, because they felt too deeply discouraged by even mild criticism. Many latent neuroses first became manifest at the criticism of a superior or the incurrence of a failure, although the criticism or the failure may in itself have been trivial, or at any rate quite out of proportion to the resulting mental trouble. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23

The third difference from normal competition is the implicit hostility in the neurotic’s ambitions, one’s attitude that “no one but I shall be beautiful, capable, successful.” Hostility is inherent in every intense competition, since the victory of one of the competitors implies the defeat of the other. There is, in fact, so much destructive competition in an individualistic culture that as an isolated feature one hesitates to call it a neurotic characteristic. It is almost a cultural pattern. In the neurotic person, however, the destructive aspect is stronger than the constructive: it is more important for one to see others defeated than to succeed oneself. More precisely, the neurotic-ambitious person acts as if it were more important for one to defeat others than succeed. In reality one’s own success is of the utmost important to one; but since one has strong inhibitions toward success—as we shall see later—the only way that remains open to one is to be, or at least to feel, superior: to tear down the others, to bring them down to one’s own level, or rather beneath it. In the competitive struggles of our culture it is often expedient to try to damage a competitor in order to enhance one’s own position or glory or to keep down a potential rival. The neurotic, however, is driven by a blind, indiscriminate and compulsive urge to disparage others. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23

One may unknowingly disparage others even though one realizes that the others would do one no actual harm, or even when their defeat is distinctly counter to one’s own interest. One’s feeling may be described as an articulate conviction that “only one can succeed,” which is only another way of expressing the idea that “no one but I shall succeed.” There may be an enormous amount of emotional intensity be hind one’s destructive impulses. For example, a man who was writing a play was thrown into a blind fury when he heard that a friend of his was also working on a play. This impulse to defeat or frustrate the efforts of others may be seen in many relationships. A child with excessive ambition may become impelled by a wish to defeat all one’s parents’ efforts on his or her behalf. If the parents press one in matters of deportment and social success one will develop a kind of behavior which is socially scandalous. If they concentrate their efforts one one’s intellectual development one may develop such strong inhibitions toward learning that one appears to be feebleminded. I recall two young patients brought to me who were suspected of being feebleminded, although later they proved to be very capable and intelligent. The fact that they were motivated by a wish to defeat their parents became apparent in their attempts to act in the same way toward the psychoanalyst. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23

One of them pretended for some time not to understand me, so that I became insecure in my judgment of her intelligence, until I recognized that she had been playing the same game with me that she had used against her parents and teachers. Both youngsters had vigorous ambitions, but at the beginning of their treatment the ambition was completely submerged in destructive impulses. The same attitude may appear toward lessons or toward any kind of treatment. When taking lessons or undergoing treatments it is to the person’s interest to profit from them. For a neurotic person of this type, however, or more accurately speaking, for the competitive part in one, it becomes more important to defeat the efforts or thwart the possible success of the teacher or physician. And if one can achieve this goal by merely demonstrating in one’s own person that nothing has been achieved, one is willing to pay even the price of remaining ill or ignorant, thereby demonstrating to others that they are no good. It is needless to add that this process works unconsciously. In one’s conscious mind such a person will be convinced that the teacher or the physician is factually incapable, or is not the right person for one. Thus a patient of this type will be inordinately afraid that the analyst will succeed with one. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23

One will go to any length to defeat the analyst’s efforts, even though in doing so one obviously defeats one’s own ends. Not only will one mislead the analyst or withhold important information, but one may even stay in the same condition or dramatically become worse, as long as one possibly can. One will not tell the analysts of any improvements, or if one does it will be only reluctantly, or in a complaining fashion, or one will credit an improvement or any gain in insight to some outside factor, such as a change in temperature, the fact that one has taken aspirin, something be has read. One will not follow any lead of the analyst, thus attempting to prove that the latter is definitely wrong. Or one will bring up as a finding of one’s own a suggestion of the analyst which one had originally rejected with violence. This latter behavior can often be observed in ordinary daily affairs; it constitutes the dynamics of unconscious plagiarism, and many battles for priority have such a psychological basis. Such a person cannot stand the idea that anyone but he or she should have a new thought. One will decidedly disparage any suggestion that is not one’s own. For instance, if it is recommended by a person whom one is competing with at the same time, one will dislike or refuse a movie or a book for that reason alone. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23

When all these reactions are brought closer to awareness in the process of analysis the neurotic may have open outbreaks of rage after a good interpretation: impulses to smash something in the office or to thrash someone’s BMW, or physically assault someone while the are not looking, or to shout insulting remarks at the analyst are common. Or after some problems have been clarified one will point out immediately that there are still many problems unsolved. Even if one has improved considerably and recognizes this fact intellectually, one fights against feeling any gratitude. There are other factors involved in the phenomenon of ingratitude, such as the fear of incurring obligations, but one important element in it is frequently this humiliation which the neurotic feels for having to give someone credit for something. There is much anxiety connected with the defeating impulses because of the fact that the neurotic person automatically assumes that others will feel just as much hurt and vindictive after a defeat as one does oneself. Therefore one is anxious about hurting others and keeps the extent of one’s defeating tendencies from awareness by believing and insisting that they are factually justified. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23

One can see from these examples how the unconscious personality build itself up. This is called the sensitizing effect of a preserving emotion. In dealing with criminal cases we can make use of the sensitizing effect, and then we arrange the critical stimulus words in such a way that they occur more or less within the presumable range of preservation. This can be done in order to increase the effect of the critical stimulus words. With a suspected culprit as a test person, the critical stimulus words are words which have a direct bearing upon the crimes. The test person was a man about 25 years of age, a decent individual, one of my normal test persons. I had of course to experiment with a great number of normal people before I could draw conclusions from pathological material. If you want to know what it was that disturbed this man, you simply have to read the words that caused the turbulences and fit them together. Then you get a nice story. Everyone knows nowadays most people have complexes. What is not so well known, though far more important theoretically, is that complexes have us. The existence of complexes throws serious doubt on the naïve assumption of the unity of consciousness, which is equated with “psyche,” and on the supremacy of the will. Every constellation of a complex postulates a disrupted and the intentions of the will are impeded or made impossible. Even memory is often noticeable affected, as we have seen. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23

The complex must therefore be a psychic factor which, in terms of energy, possesses a value that sometimes exceeds that of our conscious intentions, otherwise such disruptions of the conscious order would not be possible at all. And in fact, an active complex puts us momentarily under a state of duress, of compulsive thinking and acting, for which under certain conditions the only appropriate term would be the judicial concept of diminished responsibility. The subject can only control one’s mind to a limited extent, and therefore behaves like an animated foreign body in the sphere of consciousness. The complex can usually be suppressed with an effort of will, but not argued out of existence, and at first suitable opportunity it reappears in all its original strength. Personality fragments undoubtedly have their own consciousness, but whether such small psychic fragments as complexes are also capable of a consciousness of their own is a still unanswered question. I must confess that this question has often occupied my thoughts, for complexes behave like devils and seem to delight in playing impish ticks. They slip just the wrong word into one’s mouth, they make one forget the name of the person one is about to introduce, they cause a tickle in the throat when the softest passage is being played on the piano at a concert, they make the tiptoeing latecomer trip over a chair with a resounding crash. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23

They bid us congratulate the mourners at a burial instead of condoling with them, they are instigators of all those maddening things attributed to mischievousness of the of an object. They are the actors in our dreams, whom we confront so powerlessly; they are the elfin beings so aptly characterized in Danish folklore by the story of the clergyman who tried to teach the Lord’s prayers to two elves. They took the greatest pains to repeat the words after him correctly, but at the very first sentence they could not avoid saying, “Our Father, who are not in Heaven.” As one might expect on theoretical grounds, these impish complexes are unteachable. To these types of people, life is a struggle of all against all, and the devil take the hindmost. One’s attitude is sometimes quite apparent, but more often it is covered with a veneer of suave politeness, fairmindedness and good fellowship. This front can represent a Machiavellian concession to expediency. As a rule, however, it is a composite of pretenses, genuine feelings, and neurotic needs. A desire to make others believe he or she is a good fellow may be combined with a certain amount of actual benevolence as long as there is no question in anybody’s mind that one is in command. There may be elements of a neurotic need for affection and approval, put to the service of aggressive goals. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23

We must realize that this behavior is much prompted by basic anxiety. The component of fear is so evident. One’s needs stem fundamentally from one’s feeling that the World is an arena where, in the Darwinian sense, only the fittest survive and the strong annihilate the weak. What contribute most to survival depends largely on the civilization in which the person lives; but in any case, a callous pursuit of self-interest is the paramount law. Hence, one’s primary need becomes one of control over others. Variations in the means of control are infinite. There may be an outright exercise of power, there may be indirect manipulation through oversolicitousness or putting people under obligation. One may even prefer to be the power behind the throne. The approach may be by way of the intellect, implying a belief that by reasoning or foresight everything can be managed. One’s particular form of control depends partly on one’s natural endowments. Partly, it represents a fusion of conflicting trends. If, for instance, the person inclines at the same time toward detachment one will shun any direct domination because it brings one into too close contact with others. Indirect methods will also be preferred if there is much hidden need for affection. If this wish is to be the power behind the throne, the presence of sadistic trends is indicated, since it implies using others of attainment of one’s goals. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23

The simplest form of schizophrenia, of the splitting of the personality, is paranoia, the classic persecution-mania of the “persecuteur persecute.” It consists in a simple doubling of the personality, which in milder cases is still held together by the identity of the two ego. The person strikes us at first as completely normal; one may hold office, be a TV news anchor, be in a lucrative position, we suspect nothing. We converse normally with one, and at some point, something triggers a piercing look full of abysmal mistrust and inhuman fanaticism meets from one’s eyes. One has become a hunted, dangerous animal, surrounded by invisible enemies: the other ego has risen to the surface. What has happened? Obviously at some time or other the idea of being a persecuted victim gained the upper hand, became autonomous, and formed a second subject which at times completely replaces the healthy ego. It is characteristic that neither of the two subjects can fully experience the other, although the two personalities are not separated by a belt of unconsciousness as they are in an hysterical dissociation of the personality. They know each other intimately, but they have no valid arguments against one another. The healthy ego cannot counter the affectivity of the other, for at least half its affectivity has gone over into its opposite number. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23

The healthy ego is, so to speak, paralysed. This is the beginning of that schizophrenic apathy which can be observed in paranoid dementia. The person can assure you with the greatest indifference: “I am the triple owner of the World, the finest Turkey, the Lorelei, Germania and Helvetia of exclusively sweet butter and Naples and I must supply the whole World with macaroni.” All this without a blush, and with no flicker of a smile. Here there are countless subject and no central ego to experience anything and react emotionally. If the neurotic has a strongly disparaging attitude one has difficulties in forming any optimistic opinion that is authentic, taking any beneficial stand, or making any constructive decision. A good opinion on some person or matter may be shattered by the slightest negative remark that anyone makes, because it takes only a trifle to stir up one’s disparaging impulses. All these destructive impulses involved in the neurotic striving for power, prestige and possession enter into the competitive struggle. In the general competitive struggle that takes place in our culture even the normal person is likely to show these tendencies, but in the neurotic person such impulses become important in themselves, regardless of any disadvantage or suffering they may bring one. The ability to humiliate or exploit or cheat other people becomes for one a triumph of superiority, if one fails defeat. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23

Much of the rage shown by the neurotic if one is incapable of taking advantage of others is due to such a feeling of defeat. If an individualistic competitive spirit prevails in any society it is bound to impair the relations between the genders, unless the spheres of life pertaining to man and woman are strictly separated. Neurotic competitiveness, however, produces even greater havoc than the average, because of its destructive character. While no one may free oneself from every form of outward suffering, all beings have the power to free themselves from mental suffering, but it takes a strong and healthy mind. How weak, how helpless is the being who oneself is alone. How strong, how supported is the being who is both oneself and more than oneself. In the one, there is only the petty little ego as the motor of force; in the other there is also the infinite Universal being (God). Any being may detect the presence of divinity within oneself, if one will patiently work through the course prescribed by authoritative books or a competent guide. It is not the prerogative of spiritual genius alone to detect it. It is only in the rational balanced growth of the mind and the sympathetic heart, the disciplined body and the tranquilized nerves, the philosophic reflectiveness, spiritual peace, and ultra-spiritual insight, that a being arrives at last at maturity and normality and thus becomes really sane. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23

Be present, O Lord, to our prayers, and protect us by day and night; that in all successive changes of times we may ever be strengthened by Thine unchangeableness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Almighty and everlasting God, at evening, and morning, and noonday, we humbly beseech Thy Majesty, that Thou wouldst drive from our hearts the darkness of sins, and makes us to come to the true Light, which is Christ; through Jesus Christ our Lord. “Now, behold, I say unto you, if I had not been born of God I should not have known these things; but God has, by mouth of his holy Angels, made these things known unto me, not of any worthiness of myself,” reports Alma 36.5. O Lord, God, the Life of mortals, the Light of the faithful, the Strength of those who labour, and the Repose of the dead; grant us a tranquil night free from all disturbance; that after an interval of quiet sleep, we may, by Thy bounty, at the return of light, be endued with activity from the Holy Spirit, and enabled in security to render thanks to Thee. We render Thee thanksgiving upon thanksgiving, Lord our God, Father of our Lord God and Saviour Jesus Christ, by all means, at all times, in all places. For Thou hast sheltered, assisted, supported, and led us on through the time past of our life, and brought us to this hour. And we pray and beseech Thee, Or Good and Loving, grant us to pass this holy day, and all the time of our life, without sin; with all joy, healthy, salvation, sanctification, and fear of Thee. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23

However, all envy, all fear, all temptation, all the working of Satan, all conspiracy of wicked beings, do Thou drive away, O God, from us, and from Thy Holy Church. Supply us with things food and profitable. Whereinsoever we have sinned against Thee, in word, or deed, or thought, be Thou pleased in Thy love and goodness to pass it over; and forsake us not, O God, who hope in Thee, neither lead us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one, and from his works, by the grace, and compassion, and benignity of Thine Only-begotten son. The day of Resurrection has dawned upon us, the day of true light and life, wherein Christ, the Life of believers, arose from the dead. Let us give abundant thanks and praise to God, that while we solemnly celebrate the day of our Lord’s Resurrection, He may be pleased to bestow on us quite peace and special gladness; so that being protected from morning to night by His favouring mercy, we may rejoice in the gift of our Redeemer. In this hour of this day fill us, O Lord, with Thy mercy, that rejoicing throughout the whole day we may take delight in thy praise; through Jesus Christ our Lord. If the quest does nothing more than save one in one’s darkest hours from total submergence in the all-prevalent Worldliness, it has done enough. The quest can give stability to the feelings, support to the mind, defense against the pettiness and the evil of the World. The transformations effected by this inner work seem, when stabilized, to be a natural maturity. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23

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The Strength or the Opportunity to Work May be Taken from Us, but Not the Meaning of Our Life!

November 28, 2019 2:04 am

No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than the soul. I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something; and what I can do, that I ought to do; and what I ought to do, by the grace of God I shall do. The soul implies an act of faith. The brain is cool, but the soul is magic. Where else can the spirit of generations stir your imagination? So many people talk about the soul setting them on their magical paths, it is almost a groaner, but we know it is true. Wander through the depths of your being, and you can feel the dreams, the unique Worlds bubbling within your heart. The magic enters you as if it is cosmic. The brain may make you feel clever, lucky and driven to express yourself—but rarely is it as inspired to dream and create as is your soul. Some people see things as they are and say, “Why?” I dream things that never were and say, “Why not?” In the pursuit of happiness, half the World is on the wrong scent. They think it consists in having and getting, and in being served by others. Happiness is really found in giving and in serving others. The soul is informed, illuminated, radiated by a fierce and beautiful love of God. A love so overwhelming that it engulfs community after community and makes the culture of our time distinctive, individual, creative and truly of the spirit of God. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

There is another way to flee from God—the way that promises to lead us into the abundance of life, a promise that is kept to a certain extent. It is not necessarily the way of the prodigal son in the parable of Jesus. It can be the acceptance of the fullness of life, opened to us by a searching mind and the driving power of love towards the greatness and beauty of creation. Such longing for life does not need to close our eyes to the tragedy within greatness, to the darkness within light, to the pain within pleasure, to the ugliness within beauty. More men and women should dare to experience the abundance of life. However, this also can be way of fleeing from God, like labor and work. In the ecstasy of living, the limits of the abundance of life are forgotten. I do not speak of the shallow methods of having a good time, of the desire for fun and entertainment. This is, in most cases, the other side of the flight from God under the cover of labor and work, called recreation; it is justified by everybody as a means for working more effectively. However, I speak of the ecstasy of living that includes participation in the highest and lowest of life in one and the same experience. This demands courage and passion, but it also can be a flight from God. And whoever lives in this way should not be judged morally, but should be made aware of one’s restlessness, and one’s fear of encountering God. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

The being who is under the bondage of work should not boast of being superior to others. However, neither should one boast to those who are in the bondage of work. There are many in our time who have experienced the limits both ways, for whom successful work has become as meaningless as plunging into the abundance of life. I am speaking of the skeptics and cynics, of those in anxiety and despair, of those who for a moment in their lives have been stopped in their flight from God and then continued it—though in a new form, in the form of consciously questioning or denying Him. Their attitude is intensely described and analyzed in our period by literature and the arts. And somehow they are justified. If they are serious skeptics, their seriousness, and the suffering following it, justifies them. If they are in despair, the hell of their serious despair makes them symbols through which we can better understand our own situation. However, they are also in flight from God. God has struck them; but they do not recognize Him. Their need to deny God in thought and attitude show that they have been arrested in their flight for a moment. If they were satisfied with the success of work or with the abundance of life, they would not have become “accusers of being.” They accuse being, because they flee from the power that gives being to every being. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

This cannot be said of the last group of those who are in flight from God. They do not flee away from the Cross as did the disciples. They flee toward it. They watch it and witness to it; they are edified by it. They are better than the disciples! However, as they really? If the Cross becomes a tenet of our religious heritage, of parental and denominational tradition, does it remain the Cross of Christ, the decisive point where the eternal cuts into the temporal? But perhaps it is not paternal tradition that keeps us near the Cross. Perhaps it is a sudden emotional experience, a conversion under the impact of a powerful preacher or evangelist that has brought us, for the first time, face to face with the Cross! Even then, in the height of our emotion, we should ask ourselves—is not our bow to the Cross the safest form of our flight from God? But whatever the way of our flight from God, we can be arrested. And if this happens, somethings cuts into the regular process of our life. It is a difficult but also great experience! One may be thrown out of work and think now that the meaning of life is gone. One may feel suddenly the emptiness of what seemed to be an abundant life. One may become aware that one’s cynicism is not serious despair but hidden arrogance. One may see in the midst of a devotional act that one has exchanged God for one’s religious feelings. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

All this is as painful as being wounded by a knife. However, it is also great, because it opens up in us a new dimension of life. God has arrested us and something new takes hold of us. This new reality that appears in us does not remove the old realities, but transforms them by giving them a new dimension. We still work; and work remains hard and full of anxiety and, as before, takes the largest part of our day! But it does not give us the meaning of our life. The strength or the opportunity to work may be taken from us, but not the meaning of our life. We realize that work cannot provide it and that work cannot take it from us. For the meaning of work itself has become something else. In working we help to make real that infinite possibilities that are possessed hidden in life. We cooperate with life’s self-creating powers, in the smallest or the greatest form of work. Through us, as workers, something of the inexhaustible depth of life becomes manifest. This is what one may feel, at least in some moments, if one is arrested by God. Work points beyond itself. And because it does so, it becomes blessed, and we become blessed through it. For blessedness means fulfillment in the ultimate dimension of our being. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

And if someone is arrested by experiencing the profound emptiness of the abundant life, the abundance itself is not taken from one; it may still give great moments of ecstasy and joy. However, it does not give one the meaning of one’s life. The external opportunities or the inner readiness to experience the ecstasies of life may vanish, but not the meaning of one’s life. One realizes that abundance cannot give it, and that want cannot take it away. For the abundance of life becomes something new for one who is arrested by God. It becomes a manifestation of the creative love that reunites what it separates, that gives and takes, that elevates us above ourselves and shows us that we are finite and must receive everything, that makes us love life and penetrate everything that is to its eternal ground. And if someone is arrested by God and made aware of the lack of serious of one’s doubt and one’s despair, the doubt is not taken away from one, and the despair does not cease to be a threat. However, one’s doubt does not have to lead to despair. It does not have to deprive one of meaning of one’s life. Doubt cannot give it to one, as one secretly believed in one’s cynical arrogance; and doubt cannot take it from one, as one felt in one’s despair. For doubt becomes something else for one who is arrested by God. It becomes a means of penetrating the depth of one’s being and into the depth of all being. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

Doubt ceases to be intellectual play or a method of research. It becomes a courageous undercutting of all the untested assumptions on which our lives are built. They break down one after the other, and we come deeper and nearer to the ground of our life. And then it happens that those who live in serious doubt about themselves and their World discover that dimension that leads to the ultimate by which they had been arrested. And they realize that hidden in the seriousness of their doubt was the truth. And if someone is arrested by God and made aware of the ambiguous character of one’s religion life, religion is not taken away from one. However, now one realizes that even this cannot give one the meaning of one’s life. If one loses religion, one does not have to lose the meaning of one’s life. Whoever is arrested by God stands beyond religion and non-religion. And if one holds fast to one’s religion, it becomes something else to one. It becomes a channel, not a law, another way in which the presence of the ultimate has arrested one, not the only way. Since one has reached freedom from religion, one also has reached freedom for religion. One is blessed in it and one is blessed outside of it. One has been opened to the ultimate dimension of being. Therefore, do not flee! Let yourself be arrested and be blessed. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

Now, what are these essential features? First, it is essential that God be conceived as the deepest power in the Universe; and, second, he must be conceived under the form of a mental personality. The personality need not be determined intrinsically any further than is involved in the holding of certain things dear, and in the recognition of our disposition toward those things, the things themselves being al good and righteous things. However, extrinsically considered, so to speak, God’s personality is to be regarded, like any other personality, as something possessed outside of my own and other than me, and whose existence I simply come upon and find. A power not ourselves, then, which not only makes for righteousness, but means it, and which recognizes us—such is the definition which I think nobody will be inclined to dispute. Various are the attempts to shadow forth the other lineaments of so supreme a personality to our human imagination; various the ways of conceiving it what mode the recognition, the hearkening to our cry, can come. Some are gross and idolatrous; some are the most sustained efforts of human’s intellect has ever made to keep still living on that subtile edge of things were speech and thought expire. However, with all these differences, the essence remains unchanged. In whatever other respects the divine personality may differ from ours or may resemble it, the two are consanguineous at least in this—that both have purposes for which they care, and each can heart the other’s call. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

One is not grieved when past or present history brings to one’s notice the fact that human nature is less than perfect, nor is one disillusioned when one one’s self is made to suffer personally from this imperfection. One knows beings as they are, as well as what they will one day become, and has an accepting attitude toward their frailties. Nothing that any of them may do can embitter one, or weaken one’s confidence in the higher laws, or deter one from abiding the higher principles, or blur one’s insight to the ultimate greatness of every human being. Without pretension or affection, neither seeking to draw attention nor seek to impress others, one is truly humble in one’s greatness. Anyone who has this awakened consciousness at all times will be radiant at all times. One will make the best of things and things will be for best with one. Peace is perpetually within one. It is not the humility of an inferiority-complexed person but of a being who communes with God. It is not the equanimity of stupid empty-mindedness but of one who feels deep spiritual peace. It is not the dignity of self-conceit but of profound respect for the God within one. A being finds one’s greatest fulfilment of life, one’s greatest joy and happiness, in spirit, so that in reducing lower things one misses nothing at all, for one has outgrown them. This was the belief, feeling, and practice of one being who become a veritable sage—Plotinus! #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

So much intuition, like dream, get lost in the passage to verbal expression or even mental formulation. In early years, questions pepped one’s mind. Now they have ceased to do so. Not only because one does not want to disturb the peace one now enjoys; nor because one’s intellect has decayed; but because one knows that behind it all is Mystery: that one being cannot play the role of omniscient God, that one may well leave to God the endless questions that arises. A peace pervades one, gathered from deep thought and, much more, from the stillness which transcends all thought. The peace fills one with amiability, like warm Sunshine, and makes ill will impossible. The sensitive benefit, momentarily or permanently, by the contact, although they may not feel the peace till afterwards; the insensitive, well!—they may shrug their shoulders in wonder at what others see and find in one. One’s varied experience of human being makes one familiar with the heights and depths of the human nature, it saintly possibilities and its sinful actualities. This knowledge does not make one more cynical, only more patient. One’s patience is the outcome of one’s understanding, one’s acceptance the outcome of one’s knowledge. The cosmic plan of evolution through birth and after birth illuminates many situations for one. One neither hopes for the best nor fears the worst, for one lives in perfect serenity. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

Meanwhile, we can already see one consequence and one point of connection with the reflect-action theory of mind. Any mind, constructed on the triadic-reflex pattern, must first get its impression from the object which it confronts; then define what that object is, and decide what active measures its presence demands; and finally react. The stage of reaction depends on the stage of definition, and these, of course, on the nature of the impressing object. When the objects are concrete, particular, and familiar, our reactions are firm and certain enough—often instinctive. I see the desk, and lean on it; I see your quiet faces, and I continue to talk. However, the objects will not stay concrete and particular: they fuse themselves into general essences, and they sum themselves into a whole—the Universe. And then the object that confronts us, that knocks on our mental door and asks to be let in, and fixed and decided upon and actively met, is just this whole Universe itself and its essence. The Universe which shall completely satisfy the mind must obey conditions of the mind’s own imposing, and must at least let the mind be the umpire to decide whether it be fit to be called a rational Universe or not. When this truth is at last seen, that Heaven is not a place in space but a condition of being, and that therefore it can to a certain extent be realized even before death, a feeling of joy and a sense of adventure are felt. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

The joy arises because we are no longer restricted by time, and the adventuresomeness arises because a vista of the quest’s possibilities opens up. A serenity which never leaves one and an integrity which always stamps one, are only two of the fruits of matured philosophic discipline. One whose resort is solely the personal ego is constantly subject to its limitations and narrowness and, consequently, is afflicted with strains and anxieties. One who lets it go and opens oneself up, whose resort is to one’s God, finds it infinite and boundless and, consequently, is filled with inward peace. The quest often begins with a great sadness but always ends with a great happiness. Its course may flow through both dark and bright moods at times, but its terminus will be unbelievably serene. The Quest for God gives one the chance to achieve inner peace and find inner happiness; it does not give peace and happiness. If this does not seem to justify its labours and disciplines, remember that ordinary beings lack even this chance. Therefore, it is that, grey with wandering from one’s ancient goal, the aspirant turns tired feet across the threshold of immortal thought and dwells for a soft white hour upon the couch of unutterable peace. It forms the middle segment of the mental curve, and not its termination. As the last theoretic pulse dies away, it does not leave the mental process complete: it is but the forerunner of the practical moment, in which alone the cycle of mentality finds its rhythmic pause. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

We easily delude ourselves about this middle stage. Sometimes we think it final, and sometimes we fail to see, amid the monstrous diversity in the length and complication of the cogitations which may fill it, that it can have but one essential function, and that the one we have pointed out—the function of defining the direction which our activity, immediate or remote, shall take. The words one has heard with one’s mortal ears have proved only of momentary worth to one, but the words one hears when one turns away from the World and listens with the inner ear will walk by one’s side until the end of Time. When one has brought the host of conflicting emotions to rest, when one has trained the thoughts to obedience, when one has fought and beaten the ego itself, one comes to a state of peace. To enter into the presence of a high inspiration, feel its ennoblement, and understand its message, beings a deeply satisfying joy. The being who fails to find joy in one’s Quest has not understood the Quest. There is no need for aspirants to engage in the cult of morbid suffering. There is no reason why they should not be happy. If the Quest is to bring them nearer to their essential self, it will also bring them nearer to its happiness. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

When a being feels the presence of a diviner self within one’s heart, when one believes that its power protects and provides for one, when one views past errors and future troubles alike with perfect equanimity, one has a better capacity to enjoy life and a truer expression happiness than those who delight only in ephemeral pleasures and sense satisfactions. For it will endure into times of adversity and last through hours of calamity, where the other will crumble and vanish. Wisdom may or may not come with the years of mature age: it is more likely to come with the labours in self-rule and the deepenings of study, concentration, and reflection, with the humbling religious veneration of the higher Power. It is, they say, its own reward but it a bringer of gifts, of which inner peace is the most prominent and a kindly smile the most permanent. One who has won wisdom as the reward of one’s quest wins virtue as its natural accompaniment too. The person who has diligently applied oneself to the primary task of self-improvement, and who has accompanied one’s efforts with honest and rigid self-analysis, will discover that many questions which formerly baffled one has been solved by the workings of one’s own intuition. Nobody can earnestly work through a course in the higher philosophy without finding oneself a better and wiser being at the end than one was at the beginning. And this result will come to one almost unconsciously, little by little, though the creative power of right thinking. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

I imagine that one of you are asking, “But what kind of person does one become? It is not enough to say that one drops the facades. What kind of person is possessed underneath?” Since one of the most obvious facts is that each individual tends to become a separate and distinct and unique person, the answer is not easy. However, I would like to point out some of the characteristic trends which I see. No one person would fully exemplify these characteristics, no one person fully achieves the description I will give, but I do see certain generalization which can be drawn, based upon living a therapeutic relationship with others. First of all, I would say that in this process the individual becomes more open to one’s experience. This is a phrase which has come to have a great deal of meaning to me. It is the opposite of defensiveness. Psychological research has shown that if the evidence of our senses runs contrary to our picture of self, then that evidence is distorted. In other words, we cannot see all that our senses report, but only the things which fit the picture we have. Now in a safe relationship of the sort I have described, this defensiveness or rigidity, tends to be replaced by an increasing openness to experience. One’s judgments turn out to be misjudgments, and one’s caution to be indecision. Often this may be so, alas! #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

However, this kind of wisdom which comes with failure of defeat; it embodies the hindsight which, too late to be of possible use except in the future, is the consequence after the event. How precious then would be the acquirement of two values to which the Quest may lead a being—calmness and intuition. Here on the quest, it is not only possible for one to meet the profoundest thoughts of the human mind but also its highest experiences. One whom finds God, loses the burdens, the miseries, and the fears of the ego. How does the quest remove one’s fears? By providing one sooner or later with firm assurance that God’s gracious power is not only illuminative but also protective. Slowly, a one strives onward with this inner work, one’s faults and frailties will fall away and this ever-shining better self hidden behind them will begin to be revealed. The individual become more openly aware of one’s own feelings and attitudes as they exist in one at an organic level, in the way I tried to describe. One also becomes more aware of reality as it exists outside of oneself, instead of perceiving it in preconceived categories. One sees that not all trees are evergreens, not all men are stern fathers, not all women are rejecting, not all failure experiences prove that one is no good, and the like. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

One is able to take in the evidence in a new situation, as it is, rather than distorting it to fit a pattern which one already holds. As you might expect, this increasing ability to be open to experience makes one far more realistic in dealing with new people, new situations, new problems. It means that one’s beliefs are not rigid, that one can accept ambiguity. One can receive much conflicting evidence without forcing closure upon the situation. This openness of awareness to what exists at this moment in oneself and in the situation is, I believe, an important element in the description of the person who emerges from therapy. Even if this quest ends in total failure (which it cannot do) the ideals and ideas it involves will have left some impress on one’s character, for they are faint reverberations of whispers from one’s higher being. The aspirant is not unreasonable in asking that some reward, if not an adequate reward, should become visible in time for al one’s struggles. If one is told to acquire the virtue of patience, one is not told to acquire the quality of hopelessness. There are signs and tokens, experiences and glimpses to hearten one on the way. One’s prayers tend to make one sensitive and one’s studies sympathetic; the two qualities combine well so that others notice how kindly one is in personal relations. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

Lord, grant that I may always desire more than I can accomplish. Our souls have the most effective search engines yet invented—the spirit of God. “Therefore let your light so shine before this people, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father who is in Heaven,” reports 3 Nephi 12.16. Be present, O Lord, to our prayers, and protect us by day and night; that in all successive changes of time we may ever be strengthened by Thine unchangeableness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Almighty and everlasting God, at evening, and morning, and nonday, we humbly beseech Thy Majesty, that Thou wouldst drive from our hearts the darkness of sins, and make us to come to the true Light, which is Christ; though Jesus Christ our Lord. Thine is the day, O Lord, and Thine is the night: grant that the Sun of righteousness may abide in our hearts, to drive away the darkness of wicked thoughts; through Jesus Christ our Lord. We give Thee thanks, Lord, Who hast preserved us through the day. We give Thee thanks, Who wilt preserve us through the night. Bring us, we beseech Thee, O Lord, in safety to the morning hours; that Thou mayest receive our praise at all times; through Jesus Christ our Lord. O God, Who by making the evening to succeed the day hast bestowed the gift of repose on human weakness; grant, we beseech Thee, that while we enjoy these timely blessings, we may acknowledge God from Whom they come. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

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My Brain is My Harp and My Lyre, My Soul is My Garden and My Orchard!

November 27, 2019 2:29 am

People easily forget that they are locked in coevolution with the life-forms that sustain their thought. In particular, they often neglect the evolution of their soul as a vital aspect of their own survival. When life seems not worth living, ten minutes in prayer proves otherwise. The soul is that venerable place where beings preserve the history of their experience, their tentative experiments, their discoveries, and their plans. In the soul may be found the recipes for daily living—the prescriptions for the mind and the heart. Listening one evening to Bach’s “Passion according to St. Matthew,” I was struck by the text and music of the line, “Then all the disciples forsook hi and fled.” It anticipated the words of Jesus on the Cross, “My God, my god, why hast thou forsaken me?” One who is forsaken by all beings feels forsaken by God. And, indeed, all being left him, and those who were nearest him fled farthest from him. Ordinarily, we are not aware of this fact. We are used to imagining the crucifixion in terms of those beautiful pictures where, along with his mother and other women, at least one disciple is present. The reality was different. They all fled, and some women dared to watch from afar. Only an unimaginable loneliness remained during the hours His life and work were broken. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

How shall we think about these disciples? Our first reaction is probably the questions—how could they forsake him Whom they had called the Messiah, the Christ, the bringer of the new age, whom they had followed after leaving behind everything for his sake? However, this time, when I heard the words and tones of the music, I admired the disciples! For it is they whom we owe the words of our text. They did not hide their flight; they simply stated it in one short sentence, a statement that judges them for all time. The gospel stores contain many judgments against the disciples. We read that they misunderstood Jesus continuously, as did his mother and brothers, and that day by day, their misunderstandings intensified his suffering. We read that some of the most important among them demanded a place of exceptional glory and power in the World to come. We read that Jesus reproached them because their zeal made them fanatical against those who did not follow Him. And we read that Jesus had to call Peter “Satan,” because Peter tried to dissuade him from going to Jerusalem to his death, and that Peter denied his discipleship in the hour of trial. These reports are astonishing. They show what Jesus did to the disciples. He taught them to accept judgement, and not to present themselves in a favorable light. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

Without the acceptance of such judgement, they could not have been his disciples. And if the disciples had suppressed the truth about their own profound weakness, our gospels would not be what they are. The glory of the Christ and the misery of his followers would not be so clearly manifest. And yet even in the same records, human’s desire to cover up one’s own unattractiveness makes itself felt. Later traditions in the gospels try to smooth the hard and hurting edges of the original picture. Apparently, it was unbearable to established congregations that all the disciples fled, that none of them witnessed the crucifixion and the death of the master. They could not accept the fact that only far away in Galilee was their flight arrested by the appearance of him who they deserted in his hour of agony and despair. So, it was stated that Jesus himself had told them to go to Galilee; their flight was not a rea real flight. And still later, it was said that they did not flee at all, but remained in Jerusalem. From earliest times, the church could not stand this judgment against itself, its past and its present. It has tried to conceal what the disciples openly admitted—that we all forsook him and fled. However, this is the truth about all beings, including the followers of Jesus today. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

The flight from God begins in the moment we feel His presence. This feeling is at work in the dark, half-conscious regions of our being, unrecognized, but effective; in the restlessness of the child’s asking and seeking; of the adolescent’s doubts and despairs; of the adult’s desires and struggles. God is present, but not as God; He is present as the unknown force in us that makes us restless. However, in some moments He appears as God. The unknown force in us that caused our restlessness becomes manifest as the God in Whose hands we are, Who is our ultimate threat and our ultimate refuge. In such moments it is as though we were arrested in our hidden flight. However, it is not an arrest by brute force, but one that has the character of a question. And we remain free to continue our flight. This is what happened to the disciples: they were powerfully arrested when Jesus first called them, but they remained free to flee again. And they did when the moment of trial arrived. And so it is with the church and all its members. They are arrested in their hidden flight and brought into the conscious presence of God. However, they remain free to flee again, not only as individual beings, but also as bearers of the church, carrying the church itself on the road to Galilee, separating it as far away as possible from the point where the eternal breaks into the temporal. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

Beings flee from God even in the church, the place where we are supposed to be arrested by the presence of God. Even there we are in flight from him. If the ultimate cuts into life of a being, one tried to take cover in the preliminary. One runs for a safe place, fleeing from the attack of that which strike one with unconditional seriousness. And there are many places that look safe to us as Galilee looked to the feeling disciples. Perhaps the most effective refuge in our time from the threatening presence of God is the work we are doing. This was not always so. The attitude of ancient beings towards work is well summed up in the curse God pronounced over Adam—“In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread,” and in the words of the 90^th Psalm concerning the short years of our life—“yet their span is but toil and trouble.” Later, physical labor with its toil and its drudgery was left to the slaves and serfs or uneducated classes. And it was distinguished from creative work that was based on leisure time, and hence, the privilege of the few. Medieval Christianity considered work a discipline, especially in monastic life. However, in our period of history, work has become the dominating destiny of all beings, if not in reality, at least by demand. It is everything—discipline, production, creation. The difference between labor and work is gone. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

The fact that it stands under a curse in the Biblical view is forgotten. Work has become a religion itself, the religion of modern industrial society. And it has all of us in its grip. Even if we were able to escape the punishment of starvation for not working, something within us would not permit an escape from the bondage to work. For most of us it is both a necessity and a compulsion. And as such, it has become the favored way of the flight from God. And nothing seems to be safer than this way. From it we get the satisfaction of having fulfilled our duty. We are praised by others and by ourselves for “work well done!” We provide support for our family or care for its members. We overcome daily the dangers of leisure, boredom and disorder. We acquire a good conscience out of it and, as a cynical philosopher said, at the end of it, a good sleep. And if we do the kind of work that is called creative, an even higher satisfaction results—the joy of bringing something new into being. Should somebody protest that this is not his or her way of fleeing from God, we might ask one: Have you not sometimes drawn a balance sheet of your whole being, and upon honestly discovering many points on the negative side, then not balanced the sheet by your work on the other? #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

The pharisee of today would boast before God not so much of one’s obedience to the law and of one’s religious exercises as of one’s hard work and one’s disciplined, successful life. And one would also find sinners with whom one could compare oneself favorably. Can these competing tendencies, the extroverting and the introverting, be brought together in a single life? Philosophy not only answers that they can, but also that they mist be integrated if the spiritual life is to reach its fullest bloom. It wisely mingles the two ideals without despoiling either. Here, it not only co-operates with human nature but also imitates the rhythmic pattern of Nature. It is in harmony with the way the Universe goes. It is not enough to develop any one of these parts of our being alone. It is a much more stupendous task to develop al three at the same time. Yet this is what philosophy asks for. Work completely done, the body effectively used, the mind capably directed—such a roundly developed personality is the ideal. If the whole truth is to be discovered, the whole being must be brought to its quest. If this is done, philosophy will be lived as well as known, felt a well as understood, experienced as well as intuited. Beings as a whole must enter on the Quest and then the complete organism will benefit when truth is found. If isolated functions alone enter on it then they alone will benefit by the truth. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

So long as one is an incomplete person, so long will one never be able to find more than an incomplete truth. It is not just one part of being which is to follow the quest but all parts of one. The whole truth can come only to the whole being. Other experiences and other goals demand the strength and activity of only a part of one’s being from one but this search for a higher life demands one’s all. One follows the quest somewhat hesitantly, discontinuously and cautiously, wary lest it demands more from one than one is prepared to give. There is no objection: one my set one’s own pace but in the end, of course, one must come into this quest with all of oneself. Why should one not be a human being as well as an enlightened soul? Why should one not bring all of one’s nature to this co-operative venture that is Life? The quest may become one’s central interest but this is no excuse for one to become unbalanced or disequilibriated. If one comes to the quest with one’s whole being, turning every side of it to the quest’s light and discipline, one may confidently expect the full insight, the full transformation and not a partial, incomplete result. The first reward is truth realized in every part of one’s being, the lower self becoming the instrument of the Soul. The second reward is peace, intense satisfying and joyous. A keen and constant longing after the Soul’s consciousness, a willingness to surrender all to it inwardly, are however necessary prerequisites. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

Let us have faith that right makes right; and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty as we understand it. The acceptance of these ideas can only benefit, and not harm, humanity. God does not want us to do extraordinary things; he wants us to do ordinary things extraordinarily well. When we do the best we can, we never know what miracle is wrought in our life, or in the life of another. The real World as it is given objectively at this moment is the sum total of all its beings and events now. The real World order—it is an order with which we have nothing to do but to get away from it as fast as possible, We break it: we break it into histories, and we break it into arts, and we break it into sciences; and then we began to feel at home. We make ten thousand separate serial orders of it, and on any one of these we react as though the others did not exist. We discover among its various parts relations that were never given to sense at all (mathematical relations, tangents, squares, and roots and logarithmic functions), and out of an infinite number of these we call certain one essential and lawgiving, and ignore the rest. Essential these relations are, but only for our purpose, the other relations being just as real and present as they; and our purpose is to conceive simply and to foresee. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

Are not simple conception and prevision subjective ends pure and simple? They are the ends of what we call science; and the miracle of miracles, a miracle not yet exhaustively cleared up by any philosophy, is that the given order lends itself to the remodeling. It shows itself plastic to many of our scientific, to many of our aesthetic, to many of our practical purposes and ends. When the being of affairs, the artist, or the being of science fails, one is not rebutted. One tried again. One says the impressions of sense must give way, must be reduced to the desiderated form. They are all postulate in the interest of their volitional nature a harmony between the latter and the nature of things. The theologian does no more. And the reflex doctrine of the mine’s structure, though all theology should as yet have failed of its endeavor, could but confess that the endeavor itself at least obeyed in form the mind’s most necessary law. Now, if he did not exist, what kind of a being would God be? The word “God” has come to mean many things in the history of human thought, from Venus and Jupiter to the “Idee” which figures in the pages of Hegel. Even the laws of physical nature have, in these positivistic times, been held worthy of divine honor and presented as the only fitting object of our reverence. Of course, if our discussion is to bear any fruit, we must mean something more definite the this. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

We must not call any object of loyalty a “God” without more ado, simply because to awaken our loyalty happens to be one of God’s functions. He must have some intrinsic characteristics of his own believes that the object of one’s loyalty has those other attributes, negative or positive, as the case may be. Now, as regards a great many of the attributes of God, and their amounts and mutual relations, the World has been delivered over to disputes. Not only such matters as his mode of revealing himself, the precise extent of his providence and power and their connection with our free-will, the proportion of one’s mercy to one’s justice, and the amount of his responsibility for evil; but also his metaphysical relation to the phenomenal World, whether causal, substantial, ideal, or what not—are affairs of purely sectarian opinion that need not concern us at all. Whoso debates them presupposes the essential features of theism to be granted already; and it is with these essential features, the care poles of the subject, that our business exclusively is possessed. The acceptance of these ideas can only benefit, and not harm, humanity. If one will consciously put oneself into line with this higher purpose of human living, one will not only become a better and wiser being but also a happier one. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

The pursuit of Truth is full of certainty. It rewards its own, even in apparent defeat. Out of the Quest will come a yearning for what is the best in life and the highest in Truth. This experience of feeling is really the discovery of unknown elements of self. The phenomenon is the fact that in our daily lives there are a thousand and one reasons for not letting ourselves experience our attitudes fully, reasons from our past and from the present, reasons that reside within the social situation. It seems too dangerous, too potentially damaging, to experience them freely and fully. Just as pain might make a person realize that there is something wrong with one’s body, so neurotic symptoms could draw attention to psychological problems of which the individual was unaware. Introverts are caught up in their inner Worlds; while extraverts lose themselves in the press of events. Because of the achievements of one’s culture, there is an especial tendency toward intellectual hubris; and overvaluation of thinking which could alienate a being from one’s emotional roots. Neurotic symptoms, dreams and other manifestations of the unconscious are often expressions of the “other side” trying to asset itself. There is, therefore, within every individual, a striving toward unity in which divisions would be replaced by consistency, opposites equally balanced, consciousness in reciprocal relation with the unconscious. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

Personalities are manifested by definiteness, wholeness and ripeness. In the safety and freedom of a therapeutic relationship, one can they can be experienced fully, clear to the limit of what they are. They can be and are experienced in a fashion that I like to think of as “pure culture,” so that for the moment the person is one’s fear, or one is one’s anger, or one is one’s tenderness, or whatever. In the first half of life, a person is, and should be, concerned with emancipating oneself from parents and with establishing oneself in the World as spouse, parent and effective contributor. In the modern World, especially, a certain one-sidedness might be needed to fulfill these conventional demands; but, once a person had done so, then one should look inwards. This is the journey toward the wholeness the process of individuation. Sometimes fear kind of seeps through, and people feel they need something to hold on to. Much like a student feels he or she wishes the World would let one have one’s thesis or one’s Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D) because they kind of need that little World. In adult life, we experience a feeling of being all the way to the limit. Being nothing but a pleading little child, supplicating, begging, dependent. At that moment one is nothing but one’s pleadingness, all the way through. Alchemists sought not only to make gold, but to perfect everything in its own nature. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

Moreover, alchemists linked change in matter with change in beings, so that alchemical “work” aimed at perfecting matter was, at the same time, a psychological process aimed at perfecting humans. Some of the alchemists undoubtedly thought of their work as a meditative development of the inner personality. Here we find parallels between the series of changes described by the alchemists and the process of individuation which is taking place within people who reach their limit and are trying to move beyond. Only the being who can consciously assent to the power of the inner voice becomes a personality. By paying attention to the voice within, the individual achieves a new synthesis between conscious and unconscious, a sense of calm acceptance and detachment, and a realization of the meaning of life. If the unconscious can be recognized as a co-determining factor alone with consciousness, and if we can live in such a way that conscious and unconscious demands are taken into account as far as possible, then the centre of gravity of the total personality shifts its position. It is then no longer in the ego, which is merely between conscious and unconscious. This new centre might be called the self. The new centre expressed itself in quaternity symbols and circular structures which are called mandalas. Mandalas symbolize an integrating factor. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

In cases where consciousness is confused, mandalas may appear as compensator attempts at self-healing by imposing an ordered structure. The self, of which the mandala is a symbol, is the archetype of unity and totality. This archetype is the underlying reality manifesting itself in the various systems of monotheism. The self, therefore, is God within; and the individual, in seeking self-relations and unity, becomes the means through which God seeks his goal. By fulfilling one’s own highest potential, the individual is no only realizing the meaning of life, but also fulfilling God’s will. People will feel it is such a wondrous thing to have these new things come out of them. It will amaze them so much each time, and then again there will be that same feeling, kind of feeling scared that one has so much of this that one has been keeping back something. Then one will realize that this has bubbled through, and that for the moment one is one’s dependency in a way which astonished him or her. It is not only dependency that is experienced in this all-out kind of fashion. It may be hurt, or sorrow, or jealousy, or destructive anger, or deep desire, or confidence and pride, or sensitive tenderness, or outgoing love. It may be anything of the emotions of which beings are capable. What I have gradually learned from experiences such as this, is that the individual in such a moment, is coming to be what one is. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

Only exception individuals reach the peeks of individual development. Individuation means parting company with the crowd; and this is first accentuates loneliness, and may seem alarming. Most human beings are content to remain safely with the majority, conforming to the conventions and beliefs shared by members of their family, church or political party. However, exceptional individuals are impelled by their inner nature to seek their own path; and, although human psyches, like human bodies, share a basic structure, the individual psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components. When a person has, throughout therapy, experienced in this fashion all the emotions which organismically arise in one, and has experienced them in knowing and open manner, then one has experienced oneself, in al the richness that exists within oneself. One has become what one is. Childhood discover is of the vital importance of remaining in touch with the inner World and is one factor accounting for it as an emphasis on healing and the growth of personality as essentially an inner process, concentrating upon the individual’s relation with the various aspects of one’s own psyche, rather than upon one’s relationships with other human beings. Individuals can neither be happy nor healthy unless they acknowledge their dependence upon God than that of the ego. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

When we think about what it means to become one’s self, it is a most perplexing question. Often times during the reflective process, various facades by which one has been living have somehow crumpled and collapsed, bring a feeling of confusion, but also a feeling of relief. It may seem as if all the energy that goes into holding the arbitrary pattern together is quite unnecessary—a waste. One might think that one has to make the pattern one’s self; but there are so many pieces, and it is so hard to see where they fit. Sometimes one may put them in the wrong place, and the more pieces mis-fitted, the more effort it takes to hold them in place, until at last you are so tired that even that awful confusion is better than holding on any longer. Then one will discover that left to themselves the jumbled pieces fall quite naturally into their own places, and a living pattern emerges without any effort at all one one’s part. Your job is just to discover it, and in the course of that, you will find yourself and your own place. One must even let their own experience tell one its meaning; the minute one tells it what it means, one is at war with one’s self. To be yourself means to find the pattern, the underlying order, which exists in the ceaselessly changing flow of one’s experience. Rather than trying to hold one’s experience into the form of a mask, or to make it be a form or structure that it is not, being one’s self means to discover the unity and harmony which exists in one’s own actual feelings and reactions. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

Being one’s self means that the real self is something which is comfortably in one’s experiences, not something imposed upon it. It seems that as we learn to self-actualize that gradually, painfully, the individual explores what is behind the masks one presents to the World, and even behind the masks which one has been deceiving oneself. Deeply and often vividly one experiences the various elements of oneself which have been hidden within. Thus, to an increasing degree one becomes oneself—not a façade of conformity to others, not a cynical denial of all feeling, nor a front of intellectual rationality, but a living, breathing, feeling, fluctuating process—in short, one becomes a person. We should be ruled by affirmation of individuality. A being who understands and comes to terms with the different aspects of one’s inner being is enabled to live life more completely. It is possible to look at one and the same event through two different frames of reference which, though mutually exclusive, are nevertheless complementary. You can learn anything you need to learn to achieve any goal you set for yourself. There are no limits except the limits you place on your imagination. So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbable and then, when we summon the will, they seem become inevitable. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

We must not, in trying to think about how we can make a big difference, ignore the daily small differences we can make which, over time, add up to big differences that we often cannot foresee. O Lord God, Who didst bow the Heavens, and come down for the salvation of humankind, look upon Thy servants and Thine inheritance. For to Thee, the awful and benignant Judge, Thy servants have bowed the head and stooped the neck, looking for no help of humans, but waiting for Thy pardon and salvation. Guard them at all times, and this evening, and in the ensuing night, from every foe, from every adverse working of the devil, from idle thoughts and wicked imaginations. “And if the time comes that the voice of the people doth choose iniquity, then is the time that the judgments of God will come upon you; yea, then is the time he will visit you with great destruction even as he has hitherto visited this land,” reports Mosiah 29.30. O Lord our God, refresh us with quiet sleep, when we are wearied with the day’s labour; that being assisted with the help which our weakness needs, we may be devoted to Thee both in body and mind; through Jesus Christ our Lord. “And I command you to do these things in the fear of the Lord; and I command you to do these things, and that ye have no king; that if these people commit sins and iniquities they shall be answered upon their own heads” reports Mosiah 29.30. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

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One Must be Able to Turn to the Soul with Clear Confidence that there they Can Freely Seek the Whole Unvarnished and Uncompromised Truth!

November 25, 2019 10:02 pm

Anything short of God is not rational, anything more than God is not possible. If the human mind be in truth the triadic structure of impression, reflection, and reaction, we think the outset of this dynamic has allowed access to the spirit of God, which is the superb, the supreme act of truly great civilizations. Of all the creations that purport to link humanity with the divine, the soul stands virtually alone in accomplishing this mission. We always knew humans tried to achieve the impossible, that one was a proud, confused, and stubborn being and because of that got themselves into mischief. Humans want above all to endure and prosper, to achieve immortality in some way. Because humans know they are mortal, the things they want most to deny is their mortality. Mortality is connected to the natural, terrestrial side of existence; and so beings reach beyond and away from that side. So much so that people try to deny finitude completely. However, humans not only have a fear of death, but also a fear of life. There are called twin fears. Still humans do not actually live stretched openly on a rack of cowardice and terror; if they did, they could not continue on with such apparent equanimity and thoughtlessness. Human’s fears are buried deeply by repression, which gives to everyday life its tranquil façade; only occasionally does the desperation show through, and only for some people. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

You are today where your thoughts have brought you; you will be tomorrow where your thoughts take you. It is repression, then, that great discovery of psychoanalysis, that explains how well people can hide their basic motives even from themselves. However, people also live in a dimension of carefreeness, trust, hope, and joy which gives them a buoyancy beyond that which repression alone could give. In a general way, all educated people know what reflex action means. It means that the acts we perform are always the result of outward discharged from the nervous centres, and that these outward discharges are themselves the result of impression from the external World, carried in along one or another of our sensory nerves. The symbolic engineering of culture gives beings a new and durable life beyond that of the body. The dynamic of human misery on this planet all stems from humans trying to be other than one is, trying to deny their terrestrial nature. This is the cause of all psychic illness, sadism, and war. The mean of rational opinion, the centre of gravity of all attempts to solve the riddle of life—some falling below it by defect, some flying above it by excess, itself alone satisfying every mental need in strictly normal measure. Our gain will thus in the first instance be psychological. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

God may be called the normal object of the mind’s belief. Whether over and above this he be really the living truth is another question. If he is, it will show the structure of our mind to be in accordance with the nature of reality. Whether it be or not in such accordance is, it seems to me, one of those questions that belong to the province of personal faith to decide. Each one of us is entitled to either to doubt r to believe in the harmony between one’s faculties either to doubt or to believe in the harmony between one’s faculties and truth; and that, whether one doubt or believe, one does alike on one’s personal responsibility and risk. People so willingly give over their destiny to the state and a great leader because tit is the politician who promises to engineer the World, to raise beings above their natural destiny, and so beings put their whole true in them. The central power promised to give them unlimited immunities and prosperities. Humans have tried to avoid the natural plagues of existence by giving themselves over to structures which embody immunity power, but they only have succeeded in laying waste to themselves with the new plagues unleased by their obedience to the politicians. We describe politicians as political plague-mongers. They are the ones who lie to the people about the real possibility and launch humankind on impossible dream which take impossible tolls of real life. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

The conceiving or theorizing faculty—the mind’s middle department—functions exclusively for the sake of ends that do not exist at all in the World of impression we receive by way of our senses, but are set by our emotional and practical subjectivity altogether. It is a transformer of the World of our impressions into a totally different World—the World of our conception: and the transformation is effected in the interest of our volitional nature, the definite subjective purposes, preferences, fondness for certain effects forms, orders, and not the slightest motive would remain for the brute order of our experience to be remodeled at all. But, as we have the elaborate volitional constitution we do have, the remodeling must be effected; there is no escape. The World’s contents are given to each of us in an order so foreign to our subjective interests that we can hardly by an effort of the imagination picture to ourselves what it is like. We have to break that order altogether—and by picking out from it the items which concern us, and connecting them with others far away, which we say “belong” with them, we are able to make out definite threads of sequence and tendency; to foresee particular liabilities and get ready for them; and to enjoy simplicity and harmony in place of what was chaos. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

However, once you base your whole life-striving on a desperate lie and try to implement that lie, try to make the World just the opposite of what it is, then you instrument your own undoing. You are spoiling everything for yourself, contaminating your purity and brining disease and weakness into your vitality. Then you have a mandate to launch a political campaign to make the World pure. Hardly anyone knows the names of the real benefactors of humankind, whereas every child knows that name of the generals of the political plague. Natural science is constantly drilling into human’s consciousness that fundamentally one is a lower than a worm’s belly in the Universe. The political plague-monger is constantly harping on chaos and destruction, but has no ideas how to make life easier on the people. This is thrusting people into the shadow World. The shadow is the other side. It is the expression of our own imperfection and Earthliness, the negative which is incompatible with the absolute values. The shadow becomes a dark thing in one’s own psyche, an inferiority which none the less really exists even though dimly suspected. The person wants to get away from this inferiority, naturally; one wants to jump over one’s own shadow. The most direct way of doing this is by looking for everything dark, inferior, and culpable in others. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

Humans are not comfortable with guilt, it strangles them, literally is the shadow that falls over their existence. The guilt-feeling is attributable to the apperception of the shadow. This guilt-feeling based on the existence of the shadow is discharged from the system in the same way both by the individual and the collective—that is to say, by the phenomenon of the projection of the shadow. The shadow, which is in conflict with the acknowledged values [for instance, the cultural façade over terrestrial being] cannot be accepted as a negative part of one’s own psyche and is therefore projected—that is, it is transferred to the outside World and experienced as an outside object. It is combated, punished, and exterminated as the alien out there instead of being dealt with as one’s own inner problem. We have the dynamic for the classic and age-old expedient for discharging the negative forces of the psyche and the guilt: scapegoating. It is precisely the split-off sense of inferiority and immoral which is projected onto the scapegoat and then destroyed symbolically with one. When people stigmatize others or hurt others for no reason all the many reasons adduced, there is one reason that goes right into the heart of mind of each person, and that is the projection of the shadow. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

The principal and indeed the only thing that is wrong with the World is humans. Given what both the stigmatized and the normal introduce into mixed social situations, it is understandable that all will not go smoothly. We are likely to attempt to carry on as though in fact one is wholly fitted one of the types of persons naturally available to us in the situation, whether this means treating one as someone better than we feel one might be or someone worse than we feel one probably is. If neither of these tacks is possible, then people may try to act as if the individual were a non-person, and not present at all as someone of whom ritual notice is to be take. One, may in turn, is likely to go along with these strategies, at least initially. In consequence, attention is furtively withdrawn from its obligatory targets, and self-consciousness and other-consciousness occurs, expressed in the pathology of interaction—uneasiness. In social situations with an individual known or perceived to have stigma, we are likely, then, to employ categorizations that do not fit, and we and the stigmatized individual is likely to become the more adept at managing them. One who always wears the mask of a friendly being must at last gain a power over friendliness of disposition, without which the expression itself of friendliness is not to be gained—and finally friendliness of disposition gains the ascendancy over one—one is benevolent. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

We all do a certain amount of acting. However, we may act in two ways. In the first way, we try to change how we outwardly appear. The action is the body language, the put-on sneer, the posed shrug, the controlled sigh. This is surface acting. The other way is deep acting. Here, display is a natural result of working on feeling; the actor does not try to seem happy or sad but rather expresses spontaneously a real feeling that has been self-induced. In deep acting and surface acting, feelings do not erupt spontaneously or automatically. In both cases the actor has learned to intervene—either in creating the inner shape of a feeling or in shaping the outward appearance of one. In surface acting, the expression on my face or the posture of my body feels put on. It is not part of me. In deep acting, my conscious mental work—the effort to imagine a tall surgeon looming over me, for example—keeps the feeling that I conjure up from being part of myself. Thus in either method, an actor may separate what it takes to act from the idea of a central self. However, whether the separation between “me” and my face or between “me” and my feeling counts as estrangement depends on something else—the outer context. In the World of the theater, it is an honorable art to make maximum use of the resources of memory and feeling in stage performance. In private life, the same resources can be used to advantage, though to a lesser extent. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

However, when we enter the World of profit-and-loss statements, when the psychological costs of emotional labor are not acknowledged by the company, it is then that we look at these otherwise helpful separations of “me” from my face and my feeling as potentially estranging. In surface acting the actor does not really experience the World from an imperial viewpoint, but one works at seeming to. What is on the actor’s mind? The audience, which is the nearest mirror to one’s own surface. This type of art is less profound than beautiful. It is more immediately effective than truly powerful; [its] form is more interesting than its content. It acts more on your sense of sound and sight than on your soul. Consequently it is more likely to delight than to move you. You can receive great impressions through this art. But they will neither warm your soul nor penetrate deeply into it. Their effect is harp but not lasting. Your astonishment rather than your faith is aroused. Only what can be accomplished through surprising theatrical beauty or picturesque pathos lies within the bounds of this art. However, delicate and deep human feelings are not subject to such technique. They call for natural emotions at the very moment in which they appear before you in the flesh. They call for the direct cooperation of nature itself. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

There are two ways of doing deep acting. One is by directly exhorting feeling, the other by making indirect use of a trained imagination. Only the second is true Method acting. However, in either case the acting of passions grows out of living in them. People sometimes talk as much about their efforts to feel (even if these efforts fail) as they do not about having feelings. In the flow of experience, there are occasional common but curious shades of will—will to evoke, will to suppress, and will to somehow allow a feeling, as in “I finally let myself feel sad about it.” Sometimes there is only a social custom in mind—as when a person wishes to feel sad at a funeral. However, other times there is a desperate inner desire to avoid pain. Some people fight against love, they fight against grief, they fight against anger. All of these emotions are linked. One man’s effort to prevent himself from feeling love made him remind himself when he touched, moved, overwhelmed by the sights and smell of her, or a sight and smell which recalled her, or passing their old house or eating their foods, or walking on their streets; do not do this, do not feel. First he succeeded in removing her from the struggle. He lost his love. He lost his anger. She became a limited idea, like a newspaper death notice. He did not lose her entirely, but chipped away at it: do not, do not, do not, he would remind himself in the middle of the night; do not feel; and then dream what he could. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

There are almost like orders to a contrary horse (whoa, giddyup, steady now), attempts to exhort feelings as if feeling can listen when it is talked to. It also presupposes an aspiration to feel. The being who fought against love wanted to feel the same about his former wife as he thought she felt about him; if he was a limited idea to her, he wanted her to be that for him. A country lover in twelfth-century France or a fourteen-year-old American female rock fan might have been more disposed to aspire to one-sided love, to want it that way. Deep acting comes with its social stories about what we aspire to feel. Coaching our emotions only addresses the capacity to duck a signal, to turn away from what evokes feeling. It does not move to the home of the imagery, to that which gives power to a sight, a sound, or a smell. It does not involve the deeper work of retraining the imagination. Ultimately, direct prods to feeling are not based on a deep look into how feeling works, and for this reason people are not under any circumstances use action which is directed immediately at the arousing of feeling for its own sake. The man who wanted to fight off love for his former wide might have approached the situation differently. First, it may have been more effective to use emotion memory: he might consider remembering the times he had felt furious at his wife’s thoughtlessness or cruelty. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

It might have helped the man forget his feelings for his wife if he focused on one most exasperating instance of this, reevoking all the circumstances. Perhaps she had forgotten his birthday, had made no effort to remember, and failed to feel badly about it afterwards. Then he would use the “if” supposition and say to himself: “How would I feel about her if this is what she really was like?” He would not prompt himself not to feel love; rather he would keep alive the cruel episode of the forgotten birthday and substation the “if.” He would not, then, fall naturally out of love. He would actively conduct himself out of love through deep acting. To store a wealth of emotion memories, the actor must remember experiences emotively. However, to remember experiences emotively, one must first experience them in that way too, perhaps with an eye to using the feelings later. The mind acts as a magnet to reusable feeling. So the conceiving of emotion memory as a noun, as something one has, brings with it a conceiving of memory and of spontaneous experience itself as also having the qualities of a useable, nounlike thing. Feeling—whether at the time, or as it is recalled, or as it is later evoked in acting—is an object. It may be a valuable object in a worthy pursuit, but it is an object nonetheless. Some feelings are more valuable object than others, for they are more richly associated with other memorable events: a terrifying train ride may recall a childhood fall or nightmare. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

However, memory is not enough. The memory, like any image drawn to mind, must seem real now. The actor must believe that an imagined happening really is happening now. To do this, the actor makes up an “as if,” a supposition. One actively suspends the usual reality testing, as a child does at play, and allows a make-believe situation to seem real. Often the actor can manage only a precarious belief in all of an illusion, and so one breaks it up into sturdier small details, which take one by one are easier to believe: “if I ere in a terrible storm” is chopped up into “if my eyebrows were wet and if my shoes were soaked.” The big if is broken into many little ones. The furnishings of the physical stage—a straight horse-hair chair, a pointer leaning against the wall—are used to support the actor’s if. Their purpose is not to influence the audience, as in surface acting, but to help convince the person doing deep acting that the if events are really happening. You have got to get to the stage of life where going for it is more important than winning or losing. It appears that the goal the individual most wishes to achieve, the end which one knowingly and unknowingly pursues, is to become oneself. When people are facing troubles because of their unique combination of difficulties, it is important to make them feel free and safe. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

To help others, we have to understand the way one feels in one’s own inner World, to accept one as he or she is, to create an atmosphere of freedom in which one can move in one’s thinking and feeling and being, in any direction one desires. How does the individual use this freedom? It is my experience that one uses it to become more and more oneself. One begins to drop the false fronts, or the masks, or the roles, with which one has a faced life. One appears to be trying to discover something more basic, something more truly oneself. At first one lays aside mask which one is to some degree aware of using. We can use our relationships to explore, to examine the various aspect of our own experience, to recognize and face up to the deep contradictions which one often discovers. One learns how much of this behavior even how much of the feeling one experiences, is not real, is not something which flows from the genuine reactions of one’s organism, but is a façade, a front, behind which one has been hiding. One discovers how much of one’s life is guided by what one thinks one should be, not by what one is. Often one discovers that one exists only in response to the demands of others, that one seems to have no self of one’s own, that one is only trying to think, and feel, and behave in the way that others believe one ought to think, and feel and behave. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

The dilemma of the individual, the most common despair is to be in despair at not choosing, or willing, to be oneself; but that the deepest form of despair is to choose to be another than oneself. On the other hand to will to be that self which one truly is, is indeed the opposite of despair, and this choice is the deepest responsibility of humans. Exploring the reality of self is often a painful and troubling search. This exploration becomes even more disturbing when one finds oneself involved in removing the false faces which one had not known were false faces. One begins to engage in the frightening task of exploring the turbulent and sometimes violent feelings with in oneself. To remove a mask which one has thought was part of one’s real self can be a deeply disturbing experience, yet when there is freedom to think and feel and be, the individual moves toward such a goal. Many people who put up a false front, if the wall, the damn, is not maintained, then everything will be swept away in violence of the feelings that one discovers pent-up in one’s private World. Yet it also illustrates the compelling necessity which the individual feels to search for and become oneself. It also begins to indicate the way in which the individual determines the reality in oneself—that when one fully experiences the feelings which at an organize level one is, as one experiences self-pity, hatred, and love, then one feels an assurance that one is being a part of one’s real self. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

We cannot simply repair people for more bad use of themselves. Every time a timid husband or a hardworking wife is helped to fuller functioning and changed ways, a tiny sector of society has been changed. Every time a son is released from morbid dependency upon his parents or slavish conformity to his father’s orders, a victory in the struggle for political freedom has been gained. If the father or mother can be enlightened, so much better. In such cases, the tyrannical government exists in the home; but the home is a microcosm of society at large. The purpose for which the society came into being is freedom, albeit responsible freedom. Whilst there are parts of our nature which remain still undeveloped, we are not complete humans. It is the wholeness of one’s bodily, mental, and spiritual being that humans must develop. Results will best prove the soundness of the integrated path, the effectiveness of the integrated personality. Humans are a many-sided being. One’s development must accordingly be correlated with this fact. The whole psyche of humans must get into this task of self-spiritualization. Feeling alone cannot do it, will alone cannot do it, thinking alone cannot do it, and initiating alone cannot do it. Every element must contribute to it and be shaped by it. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

Let us have faith that right makes right; and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty as we understand it. O God, who by the light of Thy Word scatterest away the darkness of ignorance, increase in our hearts the power of faith which Thou hast given; that no temptations may avail to quench the fire which Thy grace hath caused to be enkindled; through Jesus Christ our Lord. We beseech Thee, O Lord, in Thy loving kindness, to pour Thy holy light into out souls; that we may ever be devoted to Thee, by Whose wisdom we were created, and by Whose providence we are governed; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Let our prayer, O Lord, come before Thee in the morning. Thou didst take upon Thee our feeble and suffering nature; grant us to pass this day in gladness; and peace, without stumbling and without stain; that reaching the eventide without any temptation, we may praise Thee the eternal King: though Thy mercy, O our God, Who art blessed, and dost live, and govern all things, World without end. In the evening, and mourning, and noonday, we praise Thee, we bless Thee, we thank Thee, and pray Thee, Master of all, to direct our prayers as incense before Thee; and let not our hearts turn away to words of thoughts of wickedness, but rescue us from all thing that hunt our souls. For to Thee, Lord, Lord our eyes look up, and our hope is Thee. Confound us not, O our God. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17

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Mills Station at Cresleigh Ranch | Residence 3

This week, follow Abbie Johnson on a tour of #MillsStationResidence 3 at #CresleighRanch! This home is highly customizable, with 3-4 bedrooms, 3 & 1/2 bath, covered patio, extendable living space, and more! Visit our website to use the interactive blueprint tool, or schedule a tour with us to see this home for yourself! Link: https://cresleigh.com/mills-station/residence-3/

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The Future Movements of the Stars or the Facts of Past History are Determined Now Once and for All!

November 25, 2019 2:35 am

Defend your soul as if your freedom depended on it. The soul is meant to satisfy the curiosity of the curious, provide a place for the lonely where they may enjoy the companionship and warmth of God. It supplies insight for those seeking knowledge, love for the yearning desires of the heart, truth for those in need of discernment, and makes available the blessings of reality which will eventually haunt one so successfully. How far you go in life depends on your being tender with your youth, compassionate as you age, sympathetic with those striving, and accepting of the weak and the strong. Immortality has come to reside in accumulated wealth. And once individuals and families were free to negotiate their value in this kind of coinage, there was no stopping the process. Uncertainty is no longer acceptable; the general mind will fail to come to rest in their presence, and will seek for solutions of a more reassuring kind. Primitive beings lived in a World devoid of clocks, progressive calendars, once-only numbered years. Nature was seen in her imagined purity of endless cycles of Sun risings and settings, Moon waxing and waning, seasons changing, animals dying and being born, and so forth. However, this kind of cosmology was not favorable to the accumulation of either guilt or property, since everything was wiped away with the gifs and nature was renewed with the help of ritual ceremonies and regeneration. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

Because of their cosmology in primitive times, beings did not feel that they have to pile things up. Primitive beings lived in an eternal now; they experienced the flow of time because they experienced guilt. That is, in terms of our discussion of guilt, primitive beings lived in certain universal binds that characterized human life, and so they had to experience time flow because these beings are composed with the passage of time. Guilt and time, then, are inseparable, which is why primitive beings so elaborately tried to deny them both with regenerative rituals. It took the longest time for this denial to be given up; the Greeks and Romans were reluctant to admit that the old regenerative rituals no longer worked. Probably the repeated sacking of Rome graphically swung the balance. It could no longer be pretended that the ancient rituals of renewal could keep regenerating the city, and at this time growing numbers of people opted for Christianity, which promised the impending end of the World; after Augustine, time was firmly set in a liner way while waiting for that end. Witness the attempt to overcome the “problem of evil,” the “mystery of pain.” There is no “problem of good.” We are still today ticking off the years, but we no loner know what for, unless it is for compounding interest. Compounding interest is one of the few meaningful thing to do in an irreversible time stream that is wholly secular and visible. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

No wonder the confusion of the ancient World was so great and tension and anxiety were so high: beings had already amassed great burdens of guilt by amassing possession, and there was no easy way to atone for this. Being were no longer safely tucked into the group, but they still had their human burdens. They were still in flight from themselves, from their own mortality. But as one’s abilities to do lie wholly in the line of one’s natural propensities; as one enjoys reacting with such emotions as fortitude, hope, rapture, admiration, earnestness, and the like; and as one very unwillingly reacts with fear, disgust, despair, or doubt, which is sure to leave the mind a prey to discontent and craving. In the lower forms of life no one will pretend that cognition is anything more than a guide to appropriate action. This is how we understand the growth of the notion of “sin” historically. Theologically, sin means literally separation from the powers and protection of the gods, a setting up of oneself as a causa sui. Sin is the experience of uncertainty in one’s relation to the divine ground of one’s being; one no longer is sure of possessing the right connection, the right means of expiation. One feels alone, exposed, weighed down by the burden of guilt accumulated in this World by the acts of one’s body and one’s material desires. One’s experience of physicalness of life obsesses one. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

The experience of sin, for simple believers, is merely one of “uncleanliness” and straightforward prohibition of specific acts. It is not the experience of one’s whole life as a problem. We have put time on a wholly unilinear basis, and so money and cumulative interest have become our unequivocal god. There is no experience of sin where the body is not felt to be a problem, where one imagines that one does indeed have full control over one’s own destiny on the physical level alone. Separation from the divine powers is not felt because these powers are denied by the primary power of the visible things. In other words, we have succeeded better than ever the primitives in avoiding sin, by simply denying the existence of the invisible dimension to which it is related. In contrast with guilt, we do not even have to repress it, since it does not arise in our experience of the World. Secularization of the economy means that we can no longer be redeemed by work, since the creation of a surplus is no longer addressed as a gift to the gods. Which means that the new god Money that we pursue so dedicatedly is not a god that gives expiation! It is perverse. We wonder how we could allow ourselves to do this to ourselves, but right away we know the answer: we did not take command of history at some given point where civilization started. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

Rather, history took command of us in our original driveness toward heroism; and our urge to heroism has always taken the nearest means at hand. The result of this secularization process is that we have an economy driven by the pure sense of guilt, unmitigated by any sense of redemption. Human beings have changed from the giving beings, the one who passes things on, to the wholly taking and keeping one. By continually taking and piling and computing interest and leaving to one’s heirs, beings contrives the illusion that one is in complete control of one’s destiny. After all, accumulated things are a visible testimonial to power, to the fact that one is not limited or dependent. Beings imagine that the causa sui project is firmly in one’s hands, that one is the heroic maker and doer who takes what one creates, what is rightfully theirs. And so we see how modern beings, in one’s one-dimensional economics, is drive by the idea of one’s life, by one’s denial of limitations, of the trust state of natural affairs. Basically, human beings have become a greater victim of their drivenness when heroism pushed expiation out of the picture; beings are now giving expression to only one side of their nature. One still needs expiation for peace of one’s life because one is stuck with one’s natural and universal experience of guilt. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

The being who takes is strong enough to shoulder one’s own guilt, and the process of expiation of modern beings has been reified and passes into piles of stone and gold. Granted that money represents the new causa sui project, that the infantile omnipotence is no loner in one’s body but in things. However, to repress guilt is not to shoulder it; it is not that guilt has vanished by being transmuted into things or expiated by things; rather, that which is denied must come out by some other means. History is the tragic record of heroism and expiation out of control and of human’s effort to earn expiation in new, frantically driven and contrived ways. The burden of guilt created by cumulative possessions, liner time, and secularization is assuredly greater than that experienced by primitive beings; it has come out some way. Most of the evil that humans have visited on their World is the result precisely of the greater passion of one’s denial and historical drivenness. This leads us directly from problems of psychoanalysis and history right up to the problem of science of humans itself: what is the nature of evil in human affairs, and how can we come to grips with it as thoughtful beings trying to take back some control over our own destiny, trying to fish ourselves out of the whirlpool of our historical passion? The only way that seems open to reason is to continue to try to soberly sort out our own motive, those that have led to our present state. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

We are acquainted with a thing as soon as we have learned how to behave toward it, or how to meet the behavior which we expect from it. Up to that point it is still “strange” to us. All of our human problems, with their intolerable sufferings, arise from human’s ceaseless attempts to make this material World into a human-made reality…aiming to achieve on Earth a “perfection” which is only to be found in the beyond, thereby hopelessly confusing the values of both spheres. Willingness to live with energy, though energy brings pain is the test to find whether your mission on Earth is finished; if you are alive, it is not. No one can make you feel inferior without your consent. The unknowable may be unfathomed, but if it makes such distinct demands upon our activity, we surely are not ignorant of its essential quality. The inmost nature of the reality is congenial to powers which you possess. Take repentance: the person who can do nothing righty can at least repent of one’s failures. The seeker will pass through three periods successively before one can enter the sublime land of realization. First one must experiment with and exhaust the external possibilities of religion; then one must practise the internal rite of prayer; lastly one must, with sharpened intelligence, pursue the subtlest of all philosophies. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

That a higher existence is possible for humankind may be a strong intuitive feeling or a strong religious belief. It can develop through experience of a spiritual glimpse into personal realization or more lastingly, more truthfully, through experience of philosophic insight. Humans need a rule for their will, and will invent one be not given. Our own thoughts are what we are most at home with, what we are least afraid of. To say then that the Universe essentially is thought, is to say that I myself, potentially at least, am all. There is no radically alien corner, but an all-pervading intimacy. When Benjamin Franklin observed the spark coming from the key on his kite-string, he did not, fortunately, fall under the spell of its immediate and practical uses. Instead, he began to inquire into the basic process which made such a phenomenon possible. Happiness is a habit. Practise unhappy attitudes and become an unhappy person. Practise happy attitudes and learn that the habit becomes the person. Let optimistic thoughts become your habits. If you did your best yesterday, you have begun to die; if you are doing your best today, you are beginning to live! When we focus on solving problems is usually when we find ourselves just experiencing ourselves. The innermost core of human’s nature, the deepest layers of one’s personality, the base of terrestrial nature, the good in nature—is basically socialized, forward-moving, rational and realistic. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

At the heart, human beings are irrational, unsocialized, destructive of others and self—and this concept is accepted almost without question. The anti-social emotions—hostility, jealousy, and so forth—result from frustration of more basic impulses for love and security and belonging, which are in themselves desirable. However, cooperation, rather than struggle, is the basic law of human life. Just because the fact that in therapy there are continually being uncovered hostile and anti-social feelings, it is easy to assume that this indicates the deeper and therefore the basic nature of humans. Only slowly has it become evident that these untamed and unsocial feeling are neither the deepest nor the strongest, and that the inner core of human’s personality is the organism itself, which is essentially both self-preserving and social. There is an overpowering desire at moments to escape personality, to revel in the actions of forces that have no respect for our ego, to let the ties flow, even though they flow over us. The strife of these two kinds of mental temper will, I think, always be seen in philosophy. Some people will keep insisting on the reason, the atonement, that is possessed in the heart of things, and that we can act with; others, on the opacity of brute fact that we must react. In some people there is an underlying bitterness and hatred and a desire to get back at the World which has cheated them, and it is an anti-social feeling, a deep experience of having been hurt. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

People who are hurt are deeply trying to express something within their soul which is difficult to formulate. Sometimes they like to torment themselves, and to chase things down. People often have feelings that go against the grain of their culture, they feel bound to say that the core of themselves is not bad, nor terribly wrong, but something beneficial. Underneath the layer of controlled surface behavior, underneath the bitterness, underneath the hurt, is a self that is good, and that is without hate. If hatefulness seems like a rather neutral or negative concept, people need love most then they deserve it least. And the deeper when digs into themselves, they will realize the less they have to fear; and instead of finding something terribly wrong within oneself, one may gradually uncover a core of self which wants neither to reward nor punish others, a self without hate, a self which is deeply socialized. In this sense a person becomes for the first time the full potential of the human organism, with the enriching element of awareness freely added to the basic aspect of sensory and visceral reaction. The person comes to be what he or she is. What this seems to mean is that the individual some to be—in awareness—what one is—in experience. One is, in other words, a complete and fully functioning human organism. Through self-actualization, people learn to control themselves, and one is incorrigibly socialized in one’s desires. There is no beast in human beings. There is only a human in humans and this we have to be able to release. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

There is a difference between having access to the soul and having the faith it takes to interpret it. Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is still theoretically possible; and as the test of belief is willingness to act, one may say that faith is the readiness to act in a cause the prosperous issue of which is not certified philosophies seeking the inconcussum are fruits of mental natures in which the passion for identity (which we see to be but one factor of the rational appetite) plays an abnormally exclusive part. In the average being, on the contrary, the power to trust, to risk a little beyond the literal evidence, is an essential function. Any more of conceiving the Universe which makes an appeal to this generous power, and makes the being seem as if one were individually helping to create the actuality of the truth whose metaphysical reality one is willing to assume, will be sure to be responded to by large numbers. The human personality has to be ready to go in for what it feels to be right, in spite of all appearances. The concrete being has but one interest—to be right. That for one is the art of all arts, and all means are fair which help one to it. Vulnerable, we are flung into the World, and between us and nature there are no rules of civilized warfare. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

When the human’s unique capacity of awareness is thus functioning freely and fully, we find that we have not an animal whom we must fear, not a beast who must be controlled, but an organism able to achieve, through the remarkable integrative capacity of its central nervous system, a balanced, realistic, self-enhancing, other-enhancing behavior as a resultant of all these elements of awareness. To put it another way, when humans are less than fully human—when one denies to awareness various aspect of one’s experience—then indeed we have all too often reason to fear one and one’s behavior, as present World situation testifies. However, when one is fully human, when one is one’s complete organism, when awareness of experience, that peculiarly human attribute, is most fully operating, then one is to be trusted, then one’s behavior is constructive. It is not always convent in one’s work; the brilliant student, at the top of one’s class, who is paralyzed by the conviction that one is hopelessly and helplessly inadequate; the parent who is distressed by one’s child’s behavior; the popular girl who finds herself unaccountably overtaken by sharps spells of morbid depression; the woman who fears that life and love are passing her by, and that her good graduate record is a poor recompense; the man who has become convinced that powerful or sinister forces are plotting against him;–I could go on and on with the many different and unique problems which people bring to us. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

The kaleidoscope of problems runs the gamut of life’s experiences. Yet there is no satisfaction in giving this type of catalog, for, as counselor, I know that the problem will eventually be resolved. However, the real problem seems to be people are trying to figure out who they are. They want to get in touch with themselves. They want to become their authentic self. All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare. We cannot live or think at all without some degree of faith. Faith is synonymous with working hypothesis. The only difference is that while some hypotheses can be refuted in five minutes, others may defy ages. A chemist who conjectures that a certain wall-paper contains arsenic, and has faith enough to lead one to take the trouble to put some of it into a hydrogen bottle, finds out by the results of one’s action whether he was right or wrong. However, theories like that of Darwin, or that of the kinetic constitution of matter, may exhaust the labors of generations in their corroboration, each tester of their truth proceeding in this simple way—that one acts as if it were true, and expects the result to disappoint one if one’s assumption is false. The longer disappointment is delayed, the stronger grows one’s faith in one’s theory. Strongest minds are often those whom the noisy World hears least. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

We make a living by what we get, we may a life by what when give. Belief (as measured by action) not only does and must continually outstrip scientific evidence, but there is a certain class of truths of whose reality belief is a factor as well as a confessor; and this class of truths is regarded as faith and is not only licit and pertinent, but essential and indispensable. The truths cannot become true toll our faith has made them so. Part of wisdom clearly is to believe what one desires; for the belief is one of the indispensable preliminary conditions of the realization of its object. There are then cases where faith creates its own verification. Believe, and you shall be right, for you shall save yourself; doubt, and you shall again be right, for you shall perish. The only difference is that to believe is greatly to your advantage. What is going to succeed must need fall back on personal belief as one of the ultimate conditions of truth. For again and again success depends on energy of act; energy again depends on faith that we shall not fail; and that faith in turn on the faith that we are right—which faith thus verifies itself. Take as an example the question of optimism or pessimism, which makes so much noise. Every human being must sometime decide for oneself whether life is worth living. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

Suppose that in looking at the World and seeing how full it is of misery, of old age, of wickedness and pain, and how unsafe is one’s own future, one yields to the pessimistic conclusion, cultivates disgust and dread, ceases striving and finally commits suicide. The personal’s picture illumined by no gleam of good allowed pessimism to supply one’s belief about all that life was lacking, and no it made this belief right. Little inconveniences, exertions, pains—these are the only things in which we rightly feel our life at all. If these be not these, existence becomes worthless, or worse; success in putting them all away is fatal. So it is beings engaged in athletic sport, spend their holidays in climbing up mountains, find nothing so enjoyable as that which taxes their endurance and their energy. This is the way we are made, I say. It may or may not be a mystery or a paradox; it is a fact. Now, this enjoyment in endurance is just according to the intensity of life: the more physical vigor and balance, the more endurance can be made an element of satisfaction. A sick man cannot stand it. The line f enjoyable suffering is not a fixed one; it fluctuates with the perfectness of the life. That our pains are, as they are, unendurable, awful, overwhelming, crushing, not to be borne save in misery and dumb impatience, which utter exhaustion alone makes patient—that our pains are thus unendurable, means not that they are too great, but that we are sick. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

We have not got our proper life. So you perceive pain is no more necessarily an evil, but an essential element of the highest good. However, if we try pertinaciously enough, the highest good can be achieved only by our getting our proper life; and that can come about only by help of a moral energy born of the faith that in some way or other we shall succeed in getting it. This World is good, we must say, since it is what we make it—and we shall make it good. How can we exclude from the cognition of a truth a faith which is involved in the creation of the truth? All depends on the character of personal contribution. Wherever the facts to be formulated contain such a contribution, we may logically, legitimately, and inexpugnably believe what we desire. The belief creates it verification. The thought becomes literally father to the fact, as the wish was father to the thought. If we had no courage to attempt anything, what would life be? The interest ae not there merely to be felt—they are to be believed in and obeyed. Not only is it best for my social interests to keep my promise, but best for me to have those interests, and best for the cosmos to like me. One who believes this to be a radically moral Universe must hold the moral order to rest either on an absolute and ultimate should, or on a series of should all the way down. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

There is no better place to be than where you are, and no better time than now to make a difference. Be yourself, try your best, and never be afraid to dream. A soul represents the mind of its collector, one’s fancies and foibles, one’s strength and weakness, one’s prejudices and preference. Particularly is this the case if to the character of a collector one adds—or tries to add—the qualities of a person who wishes to know the soul and grace of God. The grace of God in our lives, the phases of our growth, the vagaries of our mind, all are represented in God’s reality. If you proceed to act upon your theory it will be reversed by nothing that later turns up as your action’s fruit; it will harmonize so well with the entire drift of experience that the latter will, as it were adopt it, or at most give it an ampler interpretation, without obliging you in any way to change the essence of its formation. If this can be objectively moral Universe, all acts that I make on that assumption, all expectations that I ground on it, will tend more and more completely to interdigitate with the phenomena already existing. A soul should be like a pair of open arms. You and your acts and the nature of things will be alike enveloped in a single formula, a universal vanitas vanitatum. But nature has put into our hands two keys, by which we may test the lock. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

If we try the unmoral key and it fits, it is an unmoral lock. I cannot possibly conceive of any other sort of evidence or proof than this. It is quite truth that the co-operation of generations is needed to educe it. However, in these matters the solidarity (so called) of the human race is a patent fact. The essential thing to notice is that our active preference is a legitimate part of the game—that it is our plain business as people to try one of the keys, and the one in which we mist confide. If then the proof exist not till I have acted, and I must needs in acting run the risk of being wrong, how can the popular science professors be right in objurgating in me as infamous a credulity which the strict logic of the situation requires? If this really be a moral Universe; if by my acts I be a factor of its destinies; if to believe where I may doubt be itself a moral act analogous to voting for a side not yet sure to win—by what right shall they close in upon me and steadily negate the deepest conceievable function of my being by their preposterous command that I shall stir neither hand nor foot, but remain balancing myself in eternal and insoluble doubt? Why, doubt itself is a decision of the widest practical reach, if only because we may miss by doubting what goods we might be gaining by espousing the winning side. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

It is never too late to be what you might have been. Skepticism in moral matters is an active ally of immorality. Who is not for is against. The Universe will have no neutrals in these questions. All one needs to be free and hearty again in the exercise of their birthright is that these fastidious vetoes should be swept away. All that the human heart wants is its chance. If only it can be allowed to feel that in them it has that same inalienable right to run risks, the heart will willingly forgo certainty in universal matters, which no one dreams of refusing to it in the pettiest practical affairs. We give Thee thanks, Holy Lord, Father Almighty, everlasting God, who hast been pleased to bring us though the night to the hours of morning; we pray Thee to grant us to pass this day without sin, so that at eventide we may again give thanks to Thee; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Look mercifully, O Lord, on the morning prayers of Ty suppliants, and enlighten with Thy healing goodness the secrets of our secrets of our heart; that no dark desires may have possession of those whom the light of Heavenly grace has renewed; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Send forth, O Lord, we pray Thee, Thy light into our hearts; that we may perceive the light of Thy commandments, and, walking in Thy way, may fall into no error; through Jesus Christ our Lord. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

People do Not Desire Money Because You can Buy things for it, but You can Buy things for Money Because People Desire it!

November 24, 2019 12:32 am

The soul transforms reality from a mausoleum into many theaters. There are high spots in all of our lives and most of them come about through encouragement from someone else. Encouragement is the oxygen of the soul. You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. Life is not about the breaths we take, it is about the moments that take our breath away. When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it. If immortality is the unchangeable motive, then all social custom is essentially sacred. It is important to gain insight into the evolution of new structures of power. We saw that with the decline of the primitive World and with the rise of kingship, beings came to imitate kings in order to get power. Now what did kings pursue besides immortality in the royal family? Why of course: skills, courtesans, fine swords, horses and monuments, city palaces and country estates—all the things that can be bought with gold. If you gained immortality by leaving behind Earthly sons, why not equally gain it by leaving behind vast accumulations of other physical mementos to your image? And so the pursuit of money was also opened up to the average being; gold became the new immortality symbol. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

In the temple buildings, palaces, and monuments of the new cities we see a new kind of power being generated. No longer the power of the totemic communion of persons, but the power of the testimonial of piles of stone and gold. In monumental forms, as money or as the city itself, each generation inherits the ascetic achievements of its ancestors…as a debt to be paid by further accumulation of monuments. Through the city the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children, every city has a history and a rate of interests. In other words, the new patriarchy passes not only family immortality to the son, but also accumulated gold, property, and interest—and the duty to accumulate these in turn. The assures his own self-perpetuation by being “greater” than the father: by leaving behind a larger mark. Immortality comes to reside no longer in the invisible World of power, but in the very visible one, and death is overcome by accumulating time-defying monuments. These accumulations of stone and gold make possible the discovery of the immortal soul. Death is overcome on condition that the real actuality of life pass into these immortal and dead things; money is the man; the immortality of the estate or a corporation resides in the dead things which alone endure. The pyramid directed its hope of immortality to the sky which it tried to penetrate, but it displayed itself before beings and laid its heavy burden on their backs. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

The material that flowed in the veins was gold. Beings now took the sacred and tried to give it monumental, enduring form; it was natural, then, that in the city one finally settled upon the most durable precious metals. If the new dramatization of immortality was to be in the power and glitter of the visible rather than the invocation of the invisible, then that drama had to be transformed from the group to the new magic object, money. Money is the new “totemic” possession. This new equation of money and totemic spirits is not meant to be frivolous. With the decline of tribal society, rituals were also discredited. Yet beings needed new rituals because they gave order and form to society and magically tied the whole World of experience together. And this is probably the fundamental reason that money entered the picture in the ancient World with such ineluctable force: it filled the vacuum left by ritual and itself became the new ritual focus. Money provides a fixed, external, recognizable sign for what would be confused, contradictable operations: ritual makes visible external signs of internal states. Money mediates transactions; ritual mediates experience, including social experience. Money provides a standard for measuring worth; ritual standardizes situations, and so helps to evaluate them. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

Money makes the link between the present and the future, so does ritual. The more we reflect on the richness of the metaphor, the more it becomes clear that this is no metaphor. Money is only an extreme and specialized type of ritual. However, modern humans seem to have trouble understanding money; it is too close to them, too much a part of their lives. Let each of us aspire to inspire, before we expire. The last thing a fish would discover is water, since it is so unconsciously and naturally a part of its life. Beyond all of this, the reason money is so elusive to our understanding is that it is still sacred, still a magical object on which we rely for our entrance into immortality. Or, put another way, money is obscure to analysis because it is still a living myth, a religion. When one points out their truth, religions die. From this point of view, the religion of money has resisted the revelation of its truth; it has not given itself over to science because it has not wanted to die. Money is what is is—sacred power—and not a thing. In primitive society, dog’s teeth, sea shells, bands of feathers, and mats were used as money! These things not only seem to us worthless, they may even be repugnant to our senses of what is proper to carry around and to value. The key to the whole thing is, of course, that we live in a different power World than did the primitives. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

For us, BMW motors, Winchester guns, Microsoft electric circuits embody power, for the primitives, power resided in the qualities of living thins and in the organs that embodied those qualities: teeth equaled biting and tearing power, with their uncanny smoothness and white luster and their terrible destructiveness to living beings; feathers equaled the freedom and miraculousness of flight; and so on. These forms of primitive money, then, did not have mere ornamental value or practical exchange values as we understand it; they had real spirit-power value. And when it comes to the evolution of our own money we must look to the same source, to its origin in magic amulets or tokens. In everyone’s life, at some time our inner focus fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should al be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit. The grand essentials of happiness are: something to do, something to love, and something to hope for. When we think about the origin of gold as a thing of great value in ancient Egypt, what led these beings to assign great value to it? Things that give life, enable beings to triumph over weakness and death by borrowing some of the power of the gods is what makes something valuable. Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent imagination. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

Life is not about the breaths we take, it is about the moments that take our breath away. There was a cowrie shell in the Red Sea which came to be prized as a token of life-giving powers, as an amulet to ward off he danger of death and to prolong the existence of the souls of those already dead. It was an immortality symbol, then, that came to be identified with the goddess Hathor, the divine cow, the Great Mother. The people of Egypt began to make models of these and other magical shells in clay, stone and any other material that came to hand. These were believed to have the magic of real shells. In the course [of time they] discovered that they could make durable and attractive models by using the soft plastic metal which was lying around unused and unappreciated in the Nubian desert. The lightness and beauty of the untarnishable yellow metal material made an instant appeal. The gold models soon became more popular than the original shells, and the reputation for life-giving was then in large measure transferred from mere form of the amulet to the metal itself. In other words, the powers of the god came to be present in the metal. Gold was straightforwardly identified with the fire god Agni. Gold could be substituted for the Sun in the sacred ritual. The gold plate was the same as truth. The Sun was the same as truth. It was thought to be made of gold; for gold is light, and he (the Sun) is light; gold is immortality, and he is immortality; it is round, for he is round. Indeed, the gold plate was considered the Sun. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

Money suggests a common origin for the gold coin, the crown, and the halo, since all three represents the Sun’s disc. (We liked to imagine that we knew coins were round because they could fit more comfortably in our pockets.) The special attraction of gold and sliver as primary monetary values was due to their symbolic identification with the Sun and Moon, which occupied a primary sacred place in the early cosmic government cosmologies. Even more fascinating is the fact that the value ratio of gold and sliver has remained stable from classical antiquity through the Middle Ages and even into modern times as 1.13 ½ (Sarah Winchester’s favorite time of day). Such a stability cannot be explained in logical terms of rational supply and demand: the explanation must be possessed in the astrological magic has been in history, even in the face of its vitality still today. Beings have always sought to discover special magical properties in nature and bring them to bear in their lives. The ancients sought these special qualities in qualities of living things, in natural miraculous objects like the Sun, and in the ratios they could tease out of nature. Until very modern times, to take one example, musical instruments were built in magical astrological proportions so as to make the most divinely harmonious sounds; and I personally know one inspired guitar maker who uses the ancient “Greek foot” as a basic measure. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

Currency, then, seems to have had its origin in magic amulets and magic imitations of the Sun, which were worn or stored because they contained the protecting spirit powers. If gold had any utility, it was a supernatural utility: a little of it was given away in exchange for quantities of stuff because a few ounces of divinity were worth pounds of gross matter. And so we see ow it was that money came to buy many other things: If it was magic, people would give anything to have it. Originally people do not desire money because you can buy things for it, but you can buy things for money because people desire it. Because gold was considered sacred, we can now understand how it was that the first banks were temples and the first ones to issue money were the priests. With the ascendancy of the priestcraft it became the priests themselves who monopolized the official traffic in sacred charms and in the exchange of favors for gold. The first mints were set up in the temples of the gods, whence our word “money”—from the mint in the temple of Jun Moneta, Juno the admonisher, on the Capitoline Hill in Rome. Forgery was sacrilege because the coins embodied the powers of the gods and only the priests could handle such powers; we get the same feeling about counterfeiters today, that they are practicing an unspeakable usurpation of hallowed powers. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

The temples, then, were clearinghouses for money transactions, just like banks today. It was surely not lost on the priests—the first leisure class—that the tiniest quantity of sacred gold-power could bring in huge amounts of food and other stuffs. Priests may have talents for dealing with the supernatural, but they have very human appetite (and often lots of it); and if they have the leisure to ply their trade, it is because since earliest times they have convinced their fellows that it is important to assure that leisure by bringing part of the fruit of the sweat of their brow to the priests. And so the food producers must have brought food to the temples in exchange for prayers and sacrifices being performed on their behalf. Also, it must have worked the other way too: gold was a fee paid to the priest for one’s intercessions with the invisible powers. The gold fee was the proper one to pay to a god, whose essence was gold. Whence the tradition of the earliest coins being imprinted with the images of gods, then divine kings, sown to presidents in our time. All visitors to the most holy temples could bring back with them gold encapsulations of sacred power that would keep them safe throughout the year. As we finger, in our pocket, the face on the silver dollar, we reexperience some of the quiet confidence of the ancients who left the temples with the life-securing charms. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

We know that the persists were part of the immortality ideology of what has aptly been called “cosmic government” and “the astrobiological unification of divine kingship.” We have already described the hierarchy: the king got his powers from the Heavens and radiated them in one’s own person to the people with the help of the priests, to the benefit of the patriarchal families. We might say that money coinage fit beautifully into this scheme, because now the cosmic powers could be the property of every being, without even the need to visit the temples: you could now traffic in immortality in the marketplace. (Probably why the consumer is the heart of the American economy.) Nor is this just a manner of speaking, for this traffic was a most serious new business that arose. Admittedly, when we reconstruct the phenomenological history of money it is impossible for us moderns to get into the mind and behind the eyes of ancient negotiators. However, a new being emerged in the ancient World, a being who based the value of one’s life—and so one’s immortality—on a new cosmology centered on coins. We cannot very well grasp what the painting visible even today at the entrance of a house in the ruins of Pompeii meant to the owner of the house or to the passerby whom it was obviously supposed to impress. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

However, a picture of a man proudly weighing his phallus in a scale of gold coins must convey a feeling that the powers of nature as exemplified in the reproductive life force have their equivalency in gold, even perhaps that fatherhood is given by gold as well as the phallus—and generally that the causa sui project it well in hand. And the two chest of coins just inside the entrance, adjacent to the sleeping rooms of the adult occupants, surely convey the new way of life based on the feeling in the painting. Money became the distilled value of existence. When Corinth was destroyed, the melting-down the statues for coinage and the auctioning of the inhabitants at the slave-mart were, for Classical minds, one and the same operation—the transformation of corporeal objects into money. Or, we might say, into a single immortality symbol, a ready way of relating the increase of oneself to all the important objects and events of one’s World. In this sense, money seems to have represented a cosmological unification of visible and invisible powers—powers of the gods, of kings, of heroic victors in way—and the distillation of the booty of war. And at the center of this cosmology stood the person oneself with the visible counters of one’s own increase, the divine testimonial to one’s own immortal worth, distilling and spanning both Worlds. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

Money is sacred as all cultural things are sacred. Custom is essentially sacred—and why should money be any exception? The thing that connect money with the domain of the sacred power. We have long known that money gives power over humans, freedom from family and social obligation, from friends, bosses, and underlines; it abolishes one’s likeness to others; it creates comfortable distance between persons, easily satisfies their claims on each other without compromising them in any direct and personal ways; on top of this it gives literally limitless ability to satisfy appetites of almost any material kind. Power is not an economic category, and neither is it simply a social category: All power is essentially sacred power. This is perfect. All power is in essence power to deny mortality. Either that or it is not real power at all, not ultimate power, not the power that humankind is really obsessed with. Power means power to increase oneself, to change one’s natural situation from one of smallness, helplessness, finitude, to one of bigness, control durability, importance. In its power to manipulate physical and social reality money in some way secures one against contingency and accident; it buys bodyguards, bullet-proof BMWs, and better medical care. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

Most of all, money can be accumulated and passed on, and so radiates its powers even after one’s death, giving one a semblance of immortality as one lives in the vicarious enjoyments of one’s heirs that one’s money continues to buy, or in the magnificence of the art work that one commissioned, or in the statues of oneself and the majesty of one’s own mausoleum. In short, money is the human mode par excellence of coolly denying animal boundness, the determinism of nature. Money has been supercharged with the yearning of ambition and hope; money is a denial of filth, physicalness, of animality, of decay and death. The peculiar human fascination with excrement is the peculiar human fascination with death. Think; if a race of beings with advanced learning, health, and weapons were to land on our planet and tell us about the god who sustains them in Alpha Centauri, a new religion would sweep over large numbers of people overnight and discredit most of our institutions. Underneath the different historical forms of immortality striving has pulsated the lifeblood of money. In this sense, the social-structural forms of immortality striving that succeed each other up to modern times have been a kind of mask or façade over the deeper-going immortality symbol, money. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

Money gives power now—and, through accumulated property, and, and interest, power in the future. Beings have become dependent on social symbols of prestige that single one out as especially worthy of being remembered in the eyes of gods and in the minds of humans. And this, too, of course, is the traditional meaning of the symbol of the Devil: he represents physical, Earthly, visible power on this planet easily hold sway over his more ethereal competitor, spiritual power. This is what theologians have meant when they have said that on this Earth God must obey the Devil. The Earth runs on physical laws. No wonder economic equality is beyond the endurance of modern democratic humans: the house, the car, the bank balance are their immortality symbols. Modern beings cannot endure economic equality because they have no faith in self-transcendent, otherworldly immortality symbols; visible physical worth is the only thing they have to give them external life. No wonder that people segregate themselves with such consuming dedication, that specialness is so much a fight to the death: beings lash out all the harder when they are cornered, when they are a pathetically impoverished immortality seeker. One dies when one’s little symbols of specialness die. However, your success and happiness are possessed within you. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

Occasionally modern beings are moved to philosophize on the human condition, and stumbles on the great insight that you cannot take it with you. This leads one to pause and heave a sigh over the perversity of nature, but it does not really touch one, since one leaves behind precisely the immortal marks of one’s own achievement. One might feel self-pity and bitterness about the one-dimensionality of one’s immortality, but in matters of eternity you take what you can get. No wonder either, that the other modern ideology of egalitarianism has also found real economic equality to be unendurable. Are we puzzled that people create new prestige classes, pursue patriarchal family and the careers of their children, and pursue money and goods? They too exist only on the level of the visible, and must somehow secure their immortality here. At the beginning of the revolution they got immortality be merging with the totemic group souls of revolutionary activity; now they must try to establish the marks of each one’s personal merit. Therefore, do not go where the path may lead you, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail of success. Primitive Christianity is one of the few ideologies that has kept alive the idea of the invisible dimension of nature and the priority of this dimension of assuring immortality. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

Thus Christianity is a threat to any one-dimensional immortality ideology, and could work in a democracy that modern democratic beings themselves find too burdensome, a society free of class and race struggle, because symbols of class and race prestige do not carry weight in the realm of the invisible spirit, which may be why people are so concerned with the state being separating from the church, but the state steadily forming incestuous bonds with the media and Hollywood as a method of control, so that people forget that God is the ultimate power and authority. Attitude is the paintbrush of the sou. The word “listen” contains the same letters are the word “silent.” Since the heart can thus wall out the ultimate irrationality which the head ascertains, the erection of its procedure into a systematized method would be a philosophic achievement of first-rate importance. Every generation will produce its Job, its Hamlet, its Prince Lestat, its Hamlet, its Faust, or its Sartor Resrtus. Rationality must, in a general way at least, banish uncertainty from the future. Our consciousness at a given moment is never free from the ingredient of expectancy. Everyone knows how when a painful thing has to be undergone in the near future, the vague feeling that it is impending penetrates all our thought with uneasiness and subtly vitiates our mood even when it does not control or attention; it keeps us from being at rest, at home, in the given present. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

When a great happiness awaits us, the same is true. However, when the future is neutral and perfectly certain, we do not mind it, as we say, but given an undisturbed attention to the actual. Let now this haunting sense of futurity be thrown off its bearings or left without an object, and immediately uneasiness takes possession of the mind. However, in every novel or unclassified experience this is just what occurs; we do not know what will come next; and novelty per se becomes a mental irritant, while custom per se it a mental sedative, merely become the one baffles wile the other settles our expectations. Every reader must feel the truth of this. What is meant by coming to feel at home in a new place, or with new people? It is simply that, at first, when we take up our quarters in a new room, we do not know what draughts may blow in upon our back, what doors may open, what forms may enter, what interesting objects may be found in cupboards and corners. When after a few days we have learned the range of all these possibilities, the feelings of strangeness disappears. And so it does with people, when we have got past the point of expecting any essentially new manifestations from their character. The utility of this emotional effect of expectation is perfectly obvious; natural selection, in fact, was bound to bring it about sooner or later. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

Sometimes we wish for the better, when we have it as good as it gets. People may look into their soul to find themselves, but they may find an entire community of like-minded individuals when they open their eyes. To those with ears to hear, the souls is a really noisy place. In its caverns we hear the captured voices of the centuries-old conversations that makes up our civilization. O God of hope, the true Light of faithful souls, and perfect Brightness of the blesses, Who art verily Light of Thy Church, grant that our hearts may both render Thee a worthy prayer, and always glorify Thee with the offering of praises; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Be present, O Lord, to Thy faithful people; and as Thou dost in Thy compassion vouchsafe them a hearty desire to pray, grant them, O Most Loving, the assistance of Thy comfort; through Jesus Christ our Lord. O God, the Life of the faithful, the Bliss of the righteous, mercifully receive the prayers of Thy suppliants, that the souls which thirst for Thy promises may evermore be filled from Thine abundance; through Jesus Christ our Lord. From the night of our spirit awaketh unto Thee, O God, for They precepts are a light unto us. Teach us, O God, Thy righteousness, Thy commandments, and Thy judgments. Enlighten the eyes of our mind, that we sleep not in sins unto death. Drive away all darkness from our hearts. Vouchsafe us the Sun of Righteousness. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

Guard our life from all reproach by the Seal of Thy Holy Spirit. Guide our steps into the way of peace. Grant us to behold the dawn and the day with joyfulness, that we may send up to Thee our Prayers at eventide. We give Thee thanks, Lord God of our salvation, because Thou doest all things for the good of our life, that we may always look steadfastly unto Thee, the Saviour and Benefactor of our souls; for Thou hast refreshed us in the night past, and raised us up from our beds, and brought us to worship Thy glorious Name. Wherefore we beseech Thee, O Lord, give us grace and power that we may be accounted worthy to sing praise to Thee with understanding, and to pray to Thee without ceasing, in fear and trembling working our out our salvation, through the assistance of Thy Christ. Shine into our hearts, O loving Master, by the pure light of knowledge of Thyself; and open the eyes of our mind to the contemplation of Thine Evangelic teaching, and put into us the fear of Thy blessed commandment; that trampling down all carnal appetites, we may follow a spiritual life, thinking and doing all things according to Thy good pleasure. For Thou art our sanctification and our illumination, and to Thee we render glory, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, now and ever, and unto ages of ages. O God, Who dividest the day from the night, separate our deeds from the gloom of darkness, that every meditating on things holy, we may continually live in Thy light; through Jesus Christ our Lord. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

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I Was Heartsick—The Door Had Been Shut to My Life!

November 23, 2019 12:56 am

The soul can play a large part in bolstering the faith of individuals who feel frustrated and upset by the tremendous problems that face the World. The more complex the World grows, the more necessary it is to spread the knowledge and wisdom to be found in the soul. Lacking the salutary feed-back of daily social intercourse with others, the self-isolate can become suspicious, depressed, hostile, anxious, and bewildered. The awareness of inferiority means that one is unable to keep out of consciousness the formulation of some chronic feeling of the worst sort of insecurity, and this means that one suffers anxiety and perhaps even something worse, if jealousy is really worse than anxiety. The fear that others can disrespect a person because of something one shows means that one is always insecure in one’s contact with other people; and this insecurity arises, not from mysterious and somewhat disguised sources, as a great deal of our anxiety does, but from something which one knows one cannot fix. Now that represents an almost fatal deficiency of the self-system, since the self is unable to disguise or exclude a definite formulation that reads, “I am inferior. Therefore people will dislike me and I cannot be secure with them.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 14

When normal and stigmatized do in fact enter one another’s immediate presence, especially when they there attempt to sustain a joint conversational encounter, there occurs one of the primal scenes of sociology; for, in many cases, these moments will be the ones when the cause and effects of stigma must be directly confronted by both sides. The stigmatized individual may find that one feels unsure of how we normal will identify one and receive one. An illustration may be cited from a student of physical disability: “Uncertainty of status for the disabled person obtains over a wide range of social interactions in addition to that of employment. The visually impaired, the ill, those with auditory impairments, people with mobility issues can never be sure what the attitude of a new acquaintance will be, whether it will be rejective or accepting, until the contact has been made. This is exactly the position of the adolescent, the light-skinned African America, the second generation immigrant, the socially mobile person and the woman has entered a predominantly masculine occupation.” This uncertainty arises not merely from the stigmatized individual’s not knowing which of several categories one will be place in, but also, where the placement is favorable, from one’s knowing that in their hearts the other maybe defining one in terms of one’s stigma. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14

The student goes on to say: “And I always feel this with straight people—that whenever they are being nice to me, pleasant to me, all the time really, underneath they are only assessing me as a criminal and nothing else. It is to late for me to be any different now to what I am, but I still feel this keenly, that that is their only approach, and they are quite incapable of accepting me as anything else.” Thus in the stigmatized arises the sense of not knowing what the others present are “really” thinking about one. Further, during mixed contacts, the stigmatized individual is likely to feel that one is “on,” having to be self-conscious and calculating about the impression one is making, to a degree and in areas of conduct which one assumes others are not. Also, one is likely to feel that the usual scheme of interpretation for everyday events has been undermined. One’s minor accomplishments, one feels, may be assessed as signs of remarkable and noteworthy capacities in the circumstances. At the same time, minor failings or incidental impropriety may be interpreted as a direct expression of one’s stigmatized differences. Former mental patients, for example, are sometimes afraid to engage in sharp interchanges with spouse or employer because of what a show of emotion might be take as a sign of. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14

People with mental disabilities are also worried about how they respond to situations because they face a similar contingency: “It also happens that if a person of low intellectual ability gets into some sort of trouble the difficulty is more or less automatically attributed to ‘mental defect’ whereas if a person of ‘normal intelligence’ gets into a similar difficulty, it is not regarded as symptomatic of anything in particular.” When the stigmatized person’s failing can be perceived by our merely directing attention (typically, visual) to one—when, in sort, one is a discredited, not discreditable, person—one is likely to feel that to be present among normal nakedly exposes one to invasions of privacy, experienced most pointedly perhaps when children simply stare at them. This displeasure in being exposed can be increased by the conversations strangers may feel free to strike up with one, conversations in which they express what one takes to be morbid curiosity about one’s condition or in which they proffer help that one does not need or want. One might add that there are certain classic formulae for these kinds of conversations, where people pretend to understand or be sympathetic, when they really have no idea what it is like. However, that is better than the cold shoulder, when other try to make it seem like an individual just has a problem and nothing is really going on. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14

However, instead of cowering, the stigmatized individual may attempt to approach mixed contact with hostile bravado, but this can induce from others its own set of troublesome reciprocations. It may be added that the stigmatized person sometimes vacillates between cowering and bravado, racing from one to the other, thus demonstrating one central way in which ordinary face-to-face interaction can run wild. I am suggesting, then, that the stigmatized individual—at least the “visibly” stigmatized one—will have special reasons for feeling that mixed social situations make for anxious unanchored interaction. However, if this is so, then it is to be suspected that we normal will find these situations shaky too. We will feel that the stigmatized individual is either too aggressive or to shamefaced, and in either case too ready to read unintended meanings into our actions. We ourselves may feel that if we show direct sympathetic concern for one’s condition, we may be overstepping ourselves; and yet if we actually forget that one has a failing we are likely to make impossible demands of one or unthinkingly slight one’s fellow-sufferers. Each potential source of discomfort for one when we are with one can become something we sense one is aware of, aware that we are aware of, and even aware of our state of awareness about ones awareness; the stage is then set for the infinite regress of mutual consideration that Meadian social psychology tells us how to begin but not how to terminate. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14

Personal counselors and psychotherapists specialize in helping individuals. Informed by knowledge about beings in general, they seek to learn about the particular being who consults them, to help one overcome impasses in one’s life, fulfill more of one’s possibilities, and live more effectively. It is their tasks to learn about the determiners and limits in human existence and teach those who consult them how to understand, master, and transcend these limits—then to pursue and enlarge their freedom. If for on other reason than to insure society is not disorganized into a mob of mutually destructive deviants, it is necessary for everyone in society to learn and to conform to laws and customs. It has been discovered that the suburbs often are helpfully for many people because the community is like a family and people want to conform and fit in. As a result, the suburbs often help to keep marriages monogamous because people do not want to break up the group with divorces as it would disrupt more than one household. And they have subtle clues to let you know when they do not want guest, such as keeping the Venetian blinds closed during the day. Nonetheless, society is organized such that some people enjoy higher status and more wealth and power than others. Every society in conservative. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14

Change in the social order is resisted, often with brute force by those with the most privilege and freedom. They are quick to detect threats to their status from whatever source. The entire institutional structure of society is the economic and political system in its present form. The family begins a socialization process, shaping children to the habits, values, and beliefs that will make the child “fit.” The school system, far from educating, is actually an additional training institution, directing people to the ways in which they must go, else they will not reach minimally privileged status. The organized churches, instead of the liberating beings from the sometimes crushing grip of social conformity, actually collude with “Caesar,” admonishing people to live in ways that prevent constructive social and political change. People inevitably sicken as they live in the ways their society seems to demand. I have come to see sickness of all kinds, whether physical or mental, as a form of protest against a way of life that is not fit for the person who has been living it. Sickness is a way of checking out of one’s usual roles and responsibilities in order to regain strength and perspective. I see sickness as an opportunity to meditate upon one’s life, to examine values and goals, relationships with people, and one’s life, to examine values and goals, relationships with people, and one’s usual practices with the aim of understanding how one because sick and how one might live one’s life in a more fulfilling way. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14

Indeed, the episodes of illness are actually the last and loudest protest of a violated organism against the destructive way of life that has been lived. If the ill person had been more sensitive to one’s own experience of oneself, and more imaginative and courageous, one would have noted “all-is-not-well” signals” long before one collapsed or broke down. The pain, fatigue, boredom, anxiety, depression, or feelings of futility would have caught one’s attention. One would have reflected upon them and sought to change one’s ways of living life so as to restore a sense of meaning, a feeling of zest and satisfaction. However, change calls of courage. And it calls for imagination, to invent new ways to live that will not jeopardize other values crucial to one’s existence. The courage, the imagination, and the capacity for reflective self-awareness, so necessary for the maintenance of health, are conspicuous lacking in the vast majority of people. These life saving capacities are usually trained out of people during the period of their growing up. We are taught to believe that there is only one proper way for a person to be and to live. All other ways are deemed evil, illegal, or insane. Grouping efforts to protest or to experiment are met by an onslaught that begins with parental criticism and may culminate with ostracism, imprisonment, or incarceration in a mental hospital. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14

If a person persists in the way of life that is dispiriting one, one will eventually break down with some form of physical complaint. The medical profession then springs to action and repairs the damage, so the person again can take one’s place in a system that is crushing one. One will sicken again. However, one must not change one’s ways. If the sufferer is called a “mental patient,” one typically will be treated with tranquilizing drugs, electroshock, or a form of “psychotherapy” that persuades one to conform to existing patterns. When we look at the psychotherapeutic professions and the physicians in this light, it becomes clear that practitioners of these arts are actually (though usually unwittingly) political agents. They are, in a real sense, counterrevolutionaries, opponents of those whose very sickness is a protest against prevailing ways to live. Physicians especially are earning the criticism that they are unimaginative in their treatment of sickness, that they function like middlemen between thee pharmaceutical houses and the customer. They persist in treating symptoms of illness with a drug or knife, rather than exploring other methods, such as enlightened inquiry into the patient’s way of living one’s life. Indeed, undue reliance upon drugs to treat symptoms or causes of illness is pernicious, for it diverts attention from the quest for causes and cures of disease in the way a being lives! #RandolphHarris 9 of 14

Psychiatrists have followed the example of their medical colleagues and treat the miserable and the ineffective as if they were “sick,” rather than the ineffective protestants against an unlivable life style. However, let me turn to the outcomes of therapy, to the relatively lasting changes which occur. As in the other things I have said I will limit myself to statements borne out by research evidence. The client changes and reorganizes one’s concept of one’s self. One moves away from perceiving one’s self as unacceptable to oneself, as unworthy of respect, as having to live by standards of others. One moves toward a conception of one’s self as a person of worthy, as a self-directing person. Able to form one’s standards and values upon the basis of one’s own experience. One develops much more beneficial attitudes toward oneself. One study showed that at the beginning of therapy current attitudes toward self were four to one negative, but in the finial fifth of therapy self-attitudes were twice as often positive as negative. One becomes less defensive, and hence more open to one’s experience of oneself and of others. One becomes more realistic and differentiated in one’s perceptions. One improves in one’s psychological adjustment, whether this is measured by the Rorschach test, the Thematic Apperception Test, the counselor’s rating, or other indices. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14

One’s aims and ideals for oneself change so that they are more achievable. The initial discrepancy between the self that one is and the self that one wants to be is greatly diminished. Tension of all types is reduced—physiological tension, psychological discomfort, anxiety. One perceives other individuals with more realism and more acceptance. One describes one’s own behavior as being more mature and, what is more important, one is seen by others who know one well as behaving in a more mature fashion. Not only are these changes shown by various studies to occur during the period of therapy, but careful follow-up studies conducted sic to eighteen months following the conclusion of therapy indicate that these changes persist. Perhaps the fact I have given will make it clear why I feel that we are approaching the point where we can write genuine equation in this subtle area of interpersonal relationships. It also helps in relationships in general if we can be more real and genuine, empathic, and have an unconditional regard for others so they can move away from being static, fixed, unfeeling, and impersonal. For many people the World is frightening, and they tightly try to hold it in place. It would help to sense the feelings of the people we care about and let them know we understand their feelings. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14

We should let others know that we stand with them in their tight, constricted little World, and that we can look upon it relatively unafraid. Perhaps we can make the World safer for them. Personally, I would like my feelings in a relationship to be as clear and transparent as possible, so that they are discernible real to another individual, to which one can return again and again. I would like to go with one on the fearful journey into oneself, into the buried fear, and hate, and love which one has never been able to let flow in one. I recognize that this is a very human and unpredictable journey for me, as well as for one, and that I may, without even knowing my fear, shrink away within myself, from some of the feelings one discovers. To this extent I know I will be limited in my ability to help one. I realize that at ties one’s own fears may make one perceive me as uncaring, as rejecting, as an intruder, as one who does not understand. I want fully to accept these feelings in one, and yet I hope also that my own real feelings will show throw clearly that in time one cannot fail to perceive them. Most of all I want one to encounter in me a real person. I do not need to be uneasy as to whether my own feelings are therapeutic. What I am and what I feel are good enough to be a basis for therapy, if I can transparently be what I am and what I feel in relationship to one. Then perhaps one can be what one is, openly and without fear. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14

Sometimes in life, we feel as if we are floating along the current of life, very adventurously, being who we are. We get defeated sometimes, we get hurt, but we learn that those experiences are not fatal. We may not know exactly who we are, but we can feel our reactions at any given moment, and they seem to work out pretty well as a basis for our behavior from moment to moment. Maybe this is what it means to be who we are. But of course we can only do this because we feel safe. Though some people possess immense spiritual power which may irresistibly influence your life, one will seem quite unconscious of it. One makes no claim to the possession of peculiar powers. One is completely without pose or pretense. The things which arouse passion or love or hatred in beings do not seem to touch one; one is indifferent to them as Nature is to our comments when we praise her Sunshine or revile her storms. For in one, we have to recognize a being freed, loosed from every limit which desire and emotion can place upon us. One walks detached from the anxious thoughts or seductive passions which eat out the hearts of beings. Through enlightened individuals behave and live simply and naturally, we are aware that there is a mystery within that beings. We are unable to avoid the impression that because one’s understanding has plumbed life deeper than other being’s, we are compelled to call a halt when we would attempt to comprehend one. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14

Despite all one’s psychical knowledge and personal attainment, the enlightened individual never loses one’s deep sense of the mystery which is at the heart of existence, which is God. O LORD our God, Who alone foreseest and bestowest things needful for our salvation; do Thou both bestow, we pray Thee, on our souls the hearty desire of imploring Thy mercy, and graciously vouchsafe us what will be for our good; through Jesus Christ our Lord. We beseech Thee, O Lord, vouchsafe us an unceasing perseverance in praying unto Thee; that as Thou dost not forsake us when we are bowed down in tribulation, so Thou mayest cherish us with more abundant grace when we continually beseech Thy Majesty; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Let the prayers Thy suppliants, O Lord, come up to the ears of Thy mercy; and that we may obtain what we ask, make us ever to ask what pleases Thee; through Jesus Christ our Lord. We beseech Thee, O Lord, to govern the hearts of Thy Faithful servants; and that they may by Thy bounty obtain Thy good things, grant first of all that their own wills may be good; through Jesus Christ our Lord. We beseech Thee, O Lord, make us subject unto Thee with a ready will, and evermore stir up our wills to make supplication unto Thee; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Grant, O Lord, we beseech Thee, such a heart unto Thy people, that as they are brought together by their necessities to seek Thy favour, they may by their free will also become devoted to Thy Majesty; through Jesus Christ our Lord. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14

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The Soul Can Become a Big Factor in Raising the Level of Intelligence in the World and in Developing Leaders!

November 22, 2019 1:37 am

I was taken with your earnestness, your passion. You were not jaded or cynical. There was an immediacy to your feelings for these happenings, these creatures, those question. You make well ask, “But why does a person who is seeking help change for the better when one is involved, over a period of time, in a relationship with a therapist which contains conditions without a “front” or façade, openly being the feeling and attitudes which at the moment are flowing in one?” Few people think about the noble role that the soul plays. Our ability to collect, organize, and preserve the voice and observations we have is critical to our continued survival as a species. The more genuine and congruent the therapist in the relations is, the more probability there is that change in personality in the client will occur. As one find someone who is willing to listen acceptantly to one’s feelings, one little by little become sable to listen to oneself. One begins to receive the communications from within oneself—to realize that one is angry, to recognize when one is frightened, even to realize when one is feeling courageous. As one becomes more open to what is going on within one, one becomes able to listen to feelings which one has always denied and repressed. One can listen to feelings which have seemed to one so terrible, or so disorganizing, or so abnormal, or so shameful, that one has never been able to recognize their existence in one’s self. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14

While one is listen to their soul, one also becomes more acceptant of one’s self. As an individual expresses more and more of the hidden and awful aspects one oneself, one finds that the therapist showing a consistent and unconditional beneficial regard for one and one’s feelings. Slowly one moves towards taking the same attitude toward oneself, accepting oneself as one is, and therefore ready to move forward in the process of becoming. In being a sincere person, we learn that we cannot say one thing and believe in another. Take the fact of your sincerity and enthusiasm as testimony to the value of the techniques of emotion and management. It is precisely by such a technique of emotion management that sincerity itself is achieved. And so, through this hall of mirrors in the soul, when learn that when we become angry, our bodies become tense. Our heart races. We breathe more quickly and get less oxygen. Our adrenaline gets higher. When some people get angry, they cuss, want to hit someone, yell in a bucket, cry, eat, smoke a cigarette, talk to themselves. However, these responses carry a risk of offending someone, and could possibly make an individual seem less attractive or dangerous. So we need to consider some ways of how to alleviate angry toward an irate person. There is no celestial witch-doctor, no angelic magician coming to change their character overnight. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14

When I deal with an irate person, I pretend something traumatic has happened in their lives. Once I had an irate that was complaining about me, cursing at me, threatening to get my name and report me to the company. I later found out his son had just died. Now when I meet an irate, I think of that man. If you think about the other person and why they are so upset, you have taken attention off of yourself and your own frustration. And you will not feel so angry. If anger erupts despite these presentative tactics, then deep breathing, talking to yourself, reminding yourself that “you do not have to go home with that individual” are offered as ways to manage emotions. Using these, the worker become less prone to cuss, hit, cry, or smoke. The goal is to keep the focus on your response and on ways to prevent an angry repose through anger-desensitization. And sometimes you have to realize people are mentally disturbed, maybe they cannot afford their medication, and that may help you to not let them upset you so much, but it may allow you to feel more compassion for them. Imagine how hard it must be for mentally ill people to live with themselves and not seek help. Many theorists have seen emotion as a sealed biological event, something that external stimuli can bring on, as cold weather brings on a cold. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14

Furthermore, once emotion—which we call a biological response syndrome is operating, the individual passively undergoes it. This is an organismic conception. However, it seems to me a limited view. For if we conceive of emotion as only this, what are we to make of the many ways in which people taught to attend to stimuli and manage emotion, ways that can actually change feeling? It we conceive of feeling not as a periodic abdication to biology but as something we do by attending to inner sensation in a given way, by defining situations in a given way, by managing in given ways, then it becomes plainer just how plastic and susceptible to reshaping techniques a feeling can be. The very act of managing emotion can be seen as part of what the emotion becomes. However, if we assume, as the organismic theorists do, that how we manage or express feeling is extrinsic to emotion, this idea gets lost. The organismic theorists want to explain how emotion is motored by instinct, and so they by-pass the question of how we come to assess, label, and manage emotion. Emotion is a bodily orientation to an imaginary act. As such, it has a signal function; it warns of where we stand vis-à-vis outer or inner events. Feeling as it spontaneously emerges acts for better or worse as a clue. It filters out evidence about the self-relevance of what we see, recall, or fantasize. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14

The exact point at which we feel injured or insulted, complimented or enhanced, varies. Seeing and hearing is a way of knowing about the World. It is a way of testing reality. Anxiety has a signal function. It signals danger from inside, as when we fear an overload of rage, or from outside, as when an insult threatens to humiliate us beyond endurance. However, it is important to heed your feelings and sometimes turn back, it may protect you from danger. Every emotion has a signal function. No every emotion signals danger. However, every emotion does signal the “me” I put into seeing “you.: It signals the often unconscious perspective we apply when we go about seeing. Feeling signals that inner perspective. Thus, by using helpful techniques for changing feeling—in the service of avoiding stress on ourselves and making life pleasanter for those around us—we can intervene in the signal function of feeling. This simple point is obscured whenever we apply the belief that emotion is dangerous in the first place because it distorts perception and leads people to act irrationally—which means that all ways of reducing emotion are automatically good. Of course, a person gripped by fear may make mistake, may find reflection difficult, and may not (as we say) be able to think. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14

However, a persona totally without emotion has no warning system, no guidelines to the self-relevance of a sight, a memory, or a fantasy. Like one who cannot feel and touches fire, an emotionless person suffers a sense of arbitrariness, which from the point of view of his or her self-interests is irrational. In fact, emotion is a potential avenue to the reasonable view. We may misinterpret an event, feel accordingly, and then draw false conclusions from what we feel. (We sometimes call this neurosis.) We can handle this by applying a secondary framework that corrects habits of feeling and inference, as when we say, “I know I have a tendency to interpret certain gestures as rejections.” However, feeling is the essential clue that a certain viewpoint, even though it may need frequent adjustment, is alive and well. Furthermore, it can tell us about a way of telling us about a way of seeing. A less affluent person may see the deprivations of the ghetto more accurately, more rationally, through indignation and anger than through obedience or resigned realism. One will focus clearly on the police officer’s smoking gun, the landlord’s Cadillac, the look of disapproval on the employment agent’s affluent face. Outside of anger, these images become like boulders on a mountainside, minuscule parts of the landscape. Likewise, a chronically morose person who falls in love may suddenly see the World as happier people do. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14

Emotion locates the position in the viewer. It uncovers an often unconscious perspective, a comparison. “You look tall” may mean “From where I lie on the floor, you look tall.” “I feel awe” may mean “compared with what I do or think I could do, he is awesome.” Awe, love, anger, and envy tell of a self vis-à-vis a situation. When we reflect on feeling we reflect on this sense of “from where I am.” The word objective means “free from personal feeling.: Yet ironically, we need feeling in order to reflect on the external or “objective” World. Taking feelings into account as clues and then correcting for them may be our best shot at objectivity. Like hearing or seeing, feeling provides a useful set of clues in figuring out what is real. A show of feeling by someone else is interesting to us precisely because it may reflect a buried perspective and may offer a clue as to how that person may act. In public life, expressions of feeling often make for news. For example, a TV sports newscaster noted: “Reese Witherspoon has passed the stage of trying to survive in a commercial sport. We are beyond that now. The women’s tennis teams, too. The woman are really serious players. They get really mad if the hit a net ball. They get even madder than the guys, I would say.” He had seen Reese Witherspoon miss a shot (it was a new ball), redden in the face, stamp her foot, and spank the net with her racket. From this her inferred that women “really wants to win.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 14

Wanting to win, she is a “serious” player—a pro. Being a pro, she can be expected to see the tennis match as something on which her professional reputation and financial future depend. Further, from the way she broke an ordinary field of calm with a brief display of anger, she was really serious. He also inferred that she really meant it—she was “serious.” He also inferred what she must have wanted and expected just before the net ball and what the newly grasped reality—a miss—must have felt like. He tried to pick out what part of her went into seeing the ball. A miss, if you really want to win, is maddening. From the commentator’s words and tone, TV viewers could infer his point of view. He assessed the woman’s anger in relation to a prior expectation about how pros in general see, feel, and act and about how women in general act. Women tennis pros, he implied, do not laugh apologetically at a miss, as a nonprofessional woman player might. They feel, he said, in a way that is appropriate to the role of a professional player. In fact, as newcomers they overconform. “They get even madder than the guys.” Thus the view can ferret out the sportscaster’s mental set and the role of women in it. In the same way that we infer other people’s view points from how they display feeling, we decide what we ourselves are really like by reflecting on how we feel about ordinary events. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14

Consider this example, a statement from a young man of nineteen: I had agreed to give a party with a young woman who was an old friend. Ad the time approached, it became apparent to me that, while I liked her, I did not want the [social] identification with her that such an action [the jointly sponsored party] would bring. I tried explaining this to her without success, and at first I resolved to do the socially acceptable thing—go through with it. But the day before the party, I knew I simply could not do it, so I canceled out. My friend did not understand and was places in a very embarrassing position. I cannot feel ashamed no matter how hard I try. All I felt then was relief, and this is still my dominant response. I acted selfishly, but fully consciously. I imagine that my friendship could not have meant that much. The young man reached his conclusion by reasoning back from his absence of guilt or shame, from the feeling of relief he experienced. (He might also have concluded: “I have show myself to be the sort of fellow who can feel square with himself in the cases of unmet obligation. I can withstand the guilt. It is enough for me that I tried to feel shame.”) For the sportscaster and the young man, feeling was taken as a signal. To observer and actor alike it was a clue to an underlying truth, a truth that had to be dug out or inferred, a truth about the self vis-à-vis a situation. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14

The sportscaster took the anger of the women tennis player as a clue to how seriously Reese took the game of tennis. The young man who backed out on his friend took his sense of relief and absence of guilt feelings as a clue to the absence of seriousness in his “old friendship.” Feeling can be used to give a clue to the operating truth, but in private life as well as on the job, two complications can arise. The first one lies between the clue of feeling and the interpretation of it. We are capable of disguising what we feel, of pretending to feel what we do not—of doing surface acting. The box of clues is hidden, but it is not changed. The second complication emerges in a more fundamental relation between stimulus and response, between a net ball and feeling frustration, between letting someone down and feeling guilty, between being called names by an “irate” and getting angry back. Here the clues can be dissolved by deep acting, which from one point of view involves deceiving oneself as much as deceiving others. In surface acting we deceive others about what we really feel, but we do not deceive ourselves. Diplomats and actors do this best, and very small children do it worst (it is part of their charm). In deep acting we make feigning easy by making it unnecessary. When we are more successfully at emotional control, the techniques of deep acting are joined to the principles of social engineering. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14

Can a person suppress one’s anger at a person who insults one? People can be taught how—if one is qualified by a demonstrably friendly disposition to start with. Ne may have most for a while the sense of what one would have felt has one not been trying so hard to feel something else. By taking over the levers of feeling production, by pretending deeply, one alters oneself. Deep acting has always had the edge over simple pretending in its power to convince. In jobs that require dealing with the public, employers are wise to want workers to be sincere, to go well beyond the smile that is “just painted on.” Always be honest. Behind the most effective display is the feeling that fits it, and that feeling can be managed. As workers, the more seriously social engineering affects our behavior and our feelings, the more intensely we must address a new ambiguity about who is directing them (is this me or the company talking?). As customers, the greater our awareness of social engineering, the more effort we put into distinguishing between gestures of real personal feelings and gestures of company policy. We have practical knowledge of the commercial takeover of the signal function of feeling. In a routine way, we make up for it; at either end, as worker or customer, we try to correct for the social engineering of feeling. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14

We mentally subtract feeling with commercial purpose to it from the total pattern of display that we sense to be sincerely felt. In interpreting a smile, we try to take out what social engineering put in, pocketing only what seems meant just for us. We say, “It is her job to be friendly,” or “They have to believe in their product like that in order to sell it.” In the end, it seems, we make up an idea of our “real self,” an inner jewel that remains our unique possession no matter whose billboard is on our back or whose smile is on our face. We push this “real self” further inside, making it more inaccessible. Subtracting credibility from the parts of our emotional machinery that are in commercial hands, we turn to what is left to find out who we “really are.” And around the surface of our human character, where once we were vulnerable, we don a cloak to protect us against the commercial elements. And finally as one listens more accurately to the feelings within, and become less evaluative and more acceptant toward oneself, one also moves towards greater congruence. One finds it possible to move out from behind the facades one has used, to drop one’s defensive behaviors, and more openly to be what one truly is. As these changes occur, as one becomes more self-aware, more self-acceptant, less defensive and more open, one finds that one is free to change and grow in the directions natural to the human organism. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14

In regard to feelings and personal meanings, one moves away from a state in which feelings are unrecognized, unowned, unexpressed. One moves toward a flow in which ever-changing feelings are experiences in the moment, knowingly and acceptantly, and may be accurately expressed. The process involves a change in the manner of one’s experience. Initially one is remote from one’s experiencing. An example would be the intellectualizing person who talks about oneself and one’s feelings in abstractions, leaving you wondering what is actually going on within him or her. From such remoteness one moves toward an immediacy of experiencing in which one lives openly in one’s experiencing, and knows that one can turn to it to discover its current meanings. The process involves a loosening of the cognitive maps of experience. From construing experience in rigid ways, which are perceived as external facts, the client moves toward developing changing, loosely held construings of meaning in experience, constructs which are modifiable by each new experience. In general, the evidence shows that the process moves away from fixity, remoteness from feelings and experience, rigidity of self-concept, remoteness from people, impersonality of functioning. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14

It moves toward fluidity, changingness, immediacy of feelings and experience, acceptance of feelings and experience, tentativeness of constructs, discovery of a changing self in one’s changing experience, realness and closeness of relationship, a unity and integration of functioning. We are continually learning more about this process by which change comes about, and I am not sure that this very brief summary conveys much of the richness of our findings. LORD our God, great, eternal, wonderful in glory, Who keepest covenant and promises for those that love Thee with their whole heart; Who art the Life of all, the Help of those that flee unto Thee, the Hope of those who cry unto Thee; cleanse us from our sins, secret and open, and from every thought displeasing to Thy goodness,–cleanse our bodies and souls, our hearts and consciences, that with a pure heart and a clear soul, with perfect love and calm hope, we may venture confidently and fearlessly to pray Thee. LORD, we beseech Thee, let thy favour be present to Thy people who supplicate Thee; that what by Thy inspiration they faithfully ask, by the speedy bounty they may obtain; through Jesus Christ our Lord. We beseech Thee, O Lord, to look upon Thy servants, whom Thou hast enabled to put their trust in Thee; and grant them both to ask such things as shall please Thee, and also to obtain what they ask: through Jesus Christ our Lord. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14

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The Soul is Considered the Most Fundamental Activity of the Human Mind—Last Night I Loved, this Morning I am Love!

November 21, 2019 2:28 am

I have traveled the World twice over, met the famous; saints and sinners, poets and artists, kings and queens, old stars and hopeful beginners, I have been where no-one’s been before, learned secrets from writers and cooks, and one frequently finds, people who lower their voices and raise their minds are the one’s who organize the Universe of knowledge into some systematic order. Community cooperation in the creation of goods and services and a framework of complete social and economic security are in themselves great advances over forms of society which sanction gross and unfair relations among beings and which deprive some people of the minimum prerequisites for a decent living. A modern philosophy of life, however, cannot content itself with equality and security alone. Our generation, perhaps, more than all others, has witnessed the creation of chains of bondage and horror in the name of equality and economic security. The soul acquires what we cannot afford, retain what we prize and adore, restore the worn, ignores fashion, and repulses prejudice. There are both gender patterns and class patterns to the civic and commercial use of human feeling. That is the social point. However, there is also a personal point, too. There is a cost to emotion work: it affects the degree to which we listen to feeling and sometimes our very capacity to feel. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

Managing feelings is an art fundamental to civilized living, and I assume that in broad terms the cost is usually worth the fundamental benefit. Enjoyable as the instinct for pleasures of the flesh is, we are wise in the long run to give up some gratification of it. However, when the transmutation of private use of feeling is successfully accomplished—when we succeed in lending our feelings to the organizational engineers of worker-customer relations—we may pay a cost in how we hear our feelings and a cost in what, for better or worse, they tell us about ourselves. When a speed-up of the human assembly line makes genuine personal service harder to deliver, the worker may withdraw emotional labor and offer instead a thin crust of display. Then the cost shifts: the penalty becomes a sense of being phony or insincere. In short, when the transmutation works, the worker risks losing the signal function of feeling. When it does not work, the risk is losing the signal function of display. Certain social conditions have increased the cost of feeling management. One is an overall unpredictability about our social World. Ordinary people nowadays move through many social Worlds and get the gist of dozens of social roles. As a result, we moderns spend more mental time on the question “What, in this situation, should I be feeling?” #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

Because of our socially constructed reality may not jive with our soul, we ask ourselves, “Who am I?” as if the question permitted a single neat answer. We still search for a solid, predictable core of self even though the conditions for the existence of such a self have long since vanished. In the face of these two conditions, people turn to feelings in order to locate themselves or at least to see what their own reactions are to a given event. That is, in the absence of unquestioned external guidelines, the signal function of emotion becomes more important, and the commercial distortion become more important, and the commercial distortion of the managed heart becomes all the more important as a human cost. We may well be seeing a response to all this in the rising approval of the unmanaged heart, the greater virtue now attached to what is “natural” or spontaneous. The high regard for “natural feeling,” then, may coincide with the culturally imposed need to develop the precise opposite—and instrumental stance toward feeling. We treat spontaneous feeling, for this reason, as if it were scarce and precious; we raise it up as a virtue. It may not be too much to suggest that we are witnessing a call for the conversation of inner resources, a call to save another wilderness from corporate use and keep it forever wild. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

With growing celebration of spontaneity have come the robot jokes. Robot humor plays wit the tension between being human—that is to say, having feeling—and being a cog in a socioeconomic machines. The charm of the little robot R2-D2, in the film Star Wars, is that he seems so human. Films like this bring us the familiar in reverse: every day, outside the movie house, we see human beings whose show of feeling has a robot quality. The ambiguities are funny now. Many people turn into robot humans because they do not want to be exploited or stigmatized. However, sometimes the trials that we suffer are a blessing in disguise, especially because of what it is felt that suffering can teach one about life and people. When one evaluates what one has learned, it is clear that it is not only suffering: it is also learning through suffering. The awareness of others can be deepened and increased, and those around one can count on one to turn all one’s mind and heart and attention to their problems. That is something that cannot be learned by dashing all over the shopping mall. Correspondingly, one can come to re-assess the limitations of normals. Both healthy minds and healthy bodies may be crippled. The fact the normal people can get around, can see, can hear, does not mean that they are seeing or hearing. They can be very visually impaired to the things that spoil their happiness, or suffer extreme hearing impairments that make them unable to recognize the pleas of others for kindness. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

When I think of people who are living in lack and limitation and cannot make use of their God given functions because they are unaware or chose to ignore their soul, it makes one realized how blessed one is not to be like them, even if you are not physically or mentally perfect—at least you are not ignorant. Perhaps in some small way, those of us who are defective can be the means of opening their eyes and ears to the beauties around us: things like a warm handclasp, a voice that is anxious to cheer, a spring breeze, music to listen to, a friendly nod. These people, even if they are not aware of their impact on others, are still important, and we can help them. In this light, we can perceive, for instance, that some inadequacy like the inability to accept human love can effectively diminish satisfaction of living almost to the vanishing point, but it is unusual for the being who suffers from such a malady even to know he or she has it and self-pity is, therefore, impossible for one. I believe that we can no longer afford to ignore the effect of the experimenter on the experience and behavior of the subject. We can no longer afford to divert nice, tender-hearted humanitarians into clinical work and leave the research for hard-nosed, hardhearted impersonal folk. If an experimental psychologist is unpleasant and threatening in the eyes of others, it might be better to confine one to the calculating room or else let one contact human subjects only when the design for the experiment calls for an impersonal investigator. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

If a person has gone into psychology to get away from people, let one design experiments, build equipment, analyze data, run computers, and so on. We need all the versatility we can get in psychology. How strange that good animal psychologists view their animal subjects like individual persons, worthy of respect, while experimental psychologist frequently treat their human subjects as if they were anonymous animal objects! It is already known that gentled tame animals show different behavioral and physiological characteristic from nongentled or wild ones (wild means, here, defensive and hostile in the presence of humans). Yet many of our subjects are assumed to be tame and trusting when, in fact they are wild. Genuine dialogue may prove to be the appropriate context for research in human (free) beings. I believe each of us working in the field of human relationships has a similar problem in knowing how to use such research knowledge. We cannot slavishly follow such findings in a mechanical way or we destroy the personal qualities which these very studies show to be valuable. It seems to me that we have to use these studies, testing them against our own experience and forming new and further personal hypotheses to use and test in our own further personal relationships. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

There are somethings we need to figure out such as: Can I be in some way which will be perceived by the other person as trustworthy, as dependable or consistent in some deep sense? I used to feel that if I fulfilled all the outer conditions of trustworthiness—keeping appointments, respecting the confidential nature of the interviews, and so forth—and if I acted consistently the same during meetings with people, then this condition would be fulfilled. However, the experience drove home the fact that to act consistently acceptant, for example, if in fact I was feeling annoyed or skeptical or some other non-accepted feeling, was certain in the long run to be perceived as inconsistent or untrustworthy. I have come to recognize that being trust worthy does not demand that I be rigidly consistent but that I be dependably real. The term “congruent” is one that I used to describe the way I would like to be. By this I mean that whatever feeling or attitude I am experiencing would be matched by my awareness of that attitude. When this is true, then I am a unified or integrated person in that moment, and hence I can be whatever I deeply am. This is a reality which I find others experience as dependable. A very closely related question is this: Can I be expressive enough as a person that what I am will be communicated unambiguously? I believe that most of my failures to achieve a helping relationship can be traced to unsatisfactory answers to these two questions. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

When I am experiencing an attitude of annoyance toward another person but am unaware of it, then my communication contains contradictory messages. My words are giving one message, but I am also in subtle ways communicating the annoyance I feel and this confuses the other person and makes one distrustful, though one too may be unaware of what is causing the difficulty. When as a parent or a therapist or a teacher or an administrator I fail to listen to what is going on in me, fail because my own defensiveness to sense my own feelings, then this kind f failure seems to result. It has made it seem to me that the most basic learning for anyone who hopes to establish any kind helping relationship is that it is safe to be transparently real. If in a given relationship I am reasonably congruent, if no feelings relevant to the relationship are hidden either to me or the person, then I can be almost sure that the relationship will be a helpful one. One way of putting this which may seem strange to you is that if I cam form a helping relationship to myself—if I be sensitively aware of and acceptant toward my own feelings—then the likelihood is great that I can for a helping relationship toward another. Now, acceptantly to be what I am, in this sense, and to permit this to show through to the other person, is the most difficult task I know and one I never fully achieve. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

However, to realize that I must be acceptant towards other people is my task and it has been most rewarding because it has helped me to find what has gone wrong with interpersonal relationships which have become snarled and to put them on a constructive track again. It has meant that if I am to facilitate the personal growth of others in relations to me, then I must grow, and while this is often painful it is also enriching. Another questions: Can I let myself experiences optimistic attitudes toward this other person—attitudes of warmth, caring, liking, interest, respect? It is not easy. I find in myself, and feel that I often see in others, a certain amount of fear of these feelings. We are afraid that if we let ourselves freely experience these beneficial feelings toward another we may be trapped by them. They may lead to demands on us or we may be disappointed in our trust, and these outcomes we fear. So as a reaction we tend to build up distance between ourselves and others—aloofness, a professional attitude, an impersonal relationship. I feel quite strongly that one of the important reasons for the professionalization of every field is that it helps to keep this distance. In the clinical areas we develop elaborate diagnostic formulations, seeing the person as an object. In teaching and in administration we develop all kinds of evaluative procedures, so that again the person is perceived as an object. In these ways, I believe, we can help ourselves from experiencing the caring which would exist if we recognized the relationship as one between two persons. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

When we can learn, even in certain relationships or at certain times in those relationships, that it is safe to care, that it is safe to relate to the other as a person for whom we have beneficial feelings, the relationship is a real achievement. Another question the importance of which I have learned in my own experience is: Can I be strong enough as a person to be separate from the others? Can I be a sturdy respecter of my own feelings, my own needs, as well as his or hers? Can I own and, if need be, express my own feelings as something belonging to me and separate from one’s feelings? Am I strong enough in my own separateness that I will not be downcast by one’s depression, frightened by one’s fear, nor engulfed by one’s dependency? Is my inner self hardy enough to realize that I am not destroyed by one’s anger, take over by one’s need for dependence, nor enslaved by one’s love, but that I exist separate from one with feelings and rights of my own? When I can freely feel this strength of being a separate person, then I find that I can let myself go much more deeply in understanding and accepting one because I am not fearful of losing myself. While in the presence of others, the individual typically infuses one’s activity with signs which dramatically highlight and portray confirmatory facts that might otherwise remain unapparent or obscure. For if the individual’s activity is to become significant to others, one must mobilize one’s activity so that it will express during the interaction what one wishes to convey. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

In fact, the performer may be required not only to express one’s claimed capacities during the interaction but also to do so during the split second in the interaction. Thus, if a baseball umpire is to give the impression that he or she is sure of one’s judgment, one must forgo the moment of thought which might make one sure of one’s judgment; one must give an instantaneous decision so that the audience will be sure that one is sure of one’s judgment. The next question is closely related. Am I secure enough within myself to permit him or her his or her separateness? Can I permit one to be what one is—honest or deceitful, infantile or adult, despairing or over-confident? Can I give one the freedom to be? Or do I feel that one should follow my advice, or remain somewhat dependent on me, or mold oneself after me? In this connection I think of the interesting study that found that the less well adjusted and less competent counselor tends to induce conformity to oneself, to have clients who model themselves after one. On the other hand, the better adjusted and more competent counselor can interaction with a client through many interviews without interfering with freedom of the client to develop a personality quite separate from that of one’s therapist. I should prefer to be in this latter class, whether as a parent or supervisor or counselor. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

There are test, dangers, and pitfalls at various stages of self-actualization. The momentary glimpse of God provides the real beginning of one’s quest. The uninterrupted realization of it provides the final ending. Another question I can ask myself is: Can I let myself enter fully into the World of one’s feelings and personal meanings and see these as one does? Can I step into one’s private World so completely that I lose all desire to evaluate or judge it? Can I enter it so sensitively that I can catch not only the meanings of which are only implicit, which one sees only dimly or as confusion? Can I extend this understanding without limit? I think of the client who said, “Whenever I find someone who understands a part of me at the time, then it never fails that a point is reached where I know they are not understanding me again. What I have looked for so hard is for someone to understand.” For myself I find it easier to feel this kind of understanding, and to communicate it, to individual clients than to students in a class or staff members in group in which I am involved. There is a strong temptation to set students “straight,” or to point out to a staff member the errors in one’s thinking. Yet when I can permit myself to understand in these situations, it is mutually rewarding. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

And with clients in therapy, I am often impressed with the fact that even a minimal amount of empathic understanding—a bumbling and faulty attempt to catch the confused complexity of the client’s meaning—is helpful, though there is no doubt that it is most helpful when I can see and formulate clearly the meanings in one’s experience which for one have been unclear and tangled. Still another issue is whether I can be acceptant of each facet of this other person which one presents to me. Can I receive one as one is? Can I communicate this attitude? Or can I only receive one conditionally, acceptant of some aspect of one’s feelings and silently or openly disapproving of other aspects? It has been my experience that when my attitude is conditional, then one cannot change or grow in these respects in which I cannot fully receive one. And when—afterward and sometimes too late—I try to discovery why I have been unable to accept one in every respect, I usually discover that is because I have been frightened or threatened in myself by some aspect of one’s feelings. If I am to be more helpful, then I must myself grow and accept myself in these respects. First, one has a vague feeling of being attracted towards God. Then one bestows more attention upon God, thinks of him frequently; at length attention grows into concentration and this, in turn, culminates in absorption. In the end, one can say, “I live not in myself, only in God. Last night I loved. This morning I am Love.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

A specific aspect of the preceding question but an important one is: Can I free one from the threat of external evaluation? In almost every phase of our lives—at home, at school, at work—we find ourselves under the rewards and punishments of external judgments. “That is good”; “that is naughty”; “that is poor counseling.” Such judgments are a part of our lives from infancy to old age. I believe they have a certain social usefulness to institutions and organizations such as schools and professions. Like everyone else I find myself all too often making such evaluations. However, n my experience, they do not make for personal growth and hence I do not believe that they are a part of a helping relationship. Curiously enough the beneficial evaluation is as threatening in the long run as a negative one, since to inform someone that one is good implies that you also have the right to tell one he or she is bad. So I have come to understand that the more I can keep a relationship free of judgment and evaluation, the more this will permit the other person to reach the point where one recognizes that the locus of evaluation, the center of responsibility, is possessed within oneself. The meaning and value of one’s experience is in the last analysis something which is up to one, and no amount of external judgment can alter this. So I should like to work toward a relationship in which I am not, even in my own feelings, evaluating one. This I believe can set one free to be a self-responsible person. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

The stages in philosophic training usually begin with gaining a theoretical knowledge of the teachings. When this is well established, it grows in time into an aspiration for self-improvement and into an effort to mold character and conduct in conformity with the philosophical ideal. Such a maturation period is often long and a difficult one. In the third stage the glimpse of enlightenment begins to be experienced. The first glimpse has a far-reaching effect and is likely to be associated with the first contact with an inspired spiritual guide, or with the writings of such a being. In the case of some persons there is a different series of steps. The glimpse comes first, the theoretical study next, the striving to express through living comes last. Sometimes we wonder: Can I meet this other individual as a person who is in process of becoming, or will I be bound by one’s past and by my past? If, in my encounter with one, I am dealing with one as an immature child, an ignorant student, a neurotic personality, or a psychopath, each of these concepts of mine limits what one can be in the relationship. We must confirm the other. Confirming means accepting the whole potentiality of the other. I can recognize in one, know in one, the person one has been crated to become. I confirm one in myself, and then in one, in relation to this potentiality that can now be developed, can evolve. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

One has to make oneself ready for the illumination, then only will one get it. As a consequence of all these efforts and aspirations, one will begin to grow out of oneself. Wisdom comes with the end of a long probation. If I see a relationship as only an opportunity to reinforce certain types of words or opinions in the other, then I tend to confirm one as an object—a basically mechanical, manipulable object. And if I see this as one’s potentiality, one tends to act in ways which support this hypothesis. If, on the other hand, I see a relationship as an opportunity to reinforce all that one is, the person tat one is with all one’s existent potentialities, then one tends to act in ways which support this hypothesis. I have then confirmed one as a living person, capable of creative inner development. Personally I prefer this second type of hypothesis. The optimal helping relationship is the kind of relationship created by a person who is psychologically mature. Or to put it another way, the degree to which I can crate relationships which facilitate the growth of others as separate persons is a measure of the growth I have achieved in myself. In some respects this is a disturbing thought, but it is also a promising or challenging one. It would indicate that if I am interested in creating helping relationships I have a fascinating lifetime job ahead of me, stretching and developing my potentialities in the direction of growth. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

All of us who are working in the field of human relationships and trying to understand the basic orderliness of that field are engaged in the most crucial enterprise in today’s World. If we are thoughtfully trying to understand our tasks as administrators, teachers, educational counselors, vocational counselors, therapist, then we are working on the problem which will determine the future of this planet. For it is not upon the physical sciences that the future will depend. It is upon us who are trying to understand and deal with the interations between human beings—who are trying to create helping relationships. So I hope that the questions I ask of myself will be of some use to you in gaining understanding and perspective as you endeavor, in your way, to facilitate growth in your relationship. People would like to live quiet, tumult-free lives, without the feeling of being continuously uprooted on one pretext or another. Every normal person yearns for the luxury of anonymity at some time or another, and has some part of oneself which one does not choose to reveal to others, desires to make one’s own decisions in certain spheres of life, and need some time to spend alone with oneself in whatever form one chooses. If people do not have enough room to satisfy their own individual needs within the collective framework, they leave or else build up sublimated pressures within the community, which it sometimes cannot withstand. The system thus makes it possible for some people to live a parasitic life. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

The higher stage is pure philosophy, for it re-educates one’s outlook and hence one’s high consciousness. It demands close, concentrated study, however, and therefore few care for it. It is based on reasoning, not on mystic intuitions, and will be the logical development of modern science if it keeps on probing. Reason is not to be confused with logic, either; the latter is limited and cannot yield truth. The soul is always helpful and often almost absurdly knowledgeable. Its skills are probably very underestimated and largely underemployed. Anyone who has a soul and a garden wants for nothing. We find God’s language. O God the Father of our Lord God and Savior Jesus Christ, Lord, Whose Name is great, Whose nature is blissful, Whose goodness is inexhaustible, Thou God and Master of all things, Who art blessed for ever; Who Sittest on the Cherubim, and art glorified by the Seraphim; before Whom stand thousands of thousands and tens of thousands times ten thousand, the host of holy Angles and Archangels; sanctify, O Lord, our souls and bodies and spirits, and touch our apprehensions and search out or consciences, and cost out of us every evil thought, every base desire, all envy, and pride, and hypocrisy, all falsehood, all deceit, and all Worldly anxiety, all covetousness, vainglory, and sloth, all malice, all wrath, all anger, all remembrance of injuries, all blasphemy, and every motion of the flesh and spirit that is contrary to Thy holy will. And grant us, O Lord, the Lover of humans, with freedom, without condemnation, with a pure heart and a contrite soul, without confusion of face and with sanctified lips, boldly to call upon Thee, or holy God and Father Who art in Heaven. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

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Randolph Harris II International Institute

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