Home » Africa (Page 67)

Category Archives: Africa

Those Who Take to this Quest for the Sake of Satisfying Personal Ambition, Will do Better in the End to Leave it Alone!

November 9, 2019 1:23 am

Do not seek to understand me or the time from which I came. You cannot. We cannot avoid using power, cannot escape the compulsion to afflict the World, so let us, cautious in diction and mighty in contradiction, love powerfully. If we hope to mitigate violence, we must deal with it on a level commensurate with the problem. Why do most proposals for alleviating violence strike us as superficial when compared with the problem itself? Take, for example, the common cry that TV is the culprit. The most vocal representative of this argument is the psychiatrist Frederic Wertham, who believes that violence is “socially conditioned and socially preventable.” He holds the mass media largely responsible for the spread of violence since they stimulate children to think violently, acclimatize people to violence, and create a generation of “hard” Americas who are competitive and insensitive and who accept violence as a way of life. However, this argument assumes that violence is a relatively recent arrival on the American scene, born fifty years ago with mass media, which is far from the truth. The problem of violence has been present in American all along. Would Dr. Wertham prefer that wars no longer be covered on TV? The evil is surely not TV, but the war itself. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13

Mass communication holds a mirror up to ourselves, and would those who argue, like Dr. Wertham, break the mirror so that we can remain blissfully innocent of our own destructiveness? “The whole idea is that of ‘original innocence,’” writes Hedy Bookin, in criticizing Dr. Wertham’s view. “Humans would never be so evil if the serpent of the mass media had not tempted them with the forbidden fruit of violence.” Dr. Wertham’s argument would be stronger if it were made against the passive character of television, for a steady diet of TV cultivates not the participation but the spectator role of the viewer. In this way it may cultivate a real feeling of impotence, and this impotence may well contribute to violence. Other practical suggestions that have been offered often impress one as being good but failing to go deeply enough. Konrad Lorenz’s recommendation of holding more international sports contest in order to drain off international competition is sound in itself. However, it again deals mainly with a symptom. The ping-pong matches between the Untied States and China were more a result of a change in attitude between the two countries—they occurred after President Nixon had already planned his trip to China. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13

There is also merit in Anthony Storr’s proposals for greater effort toward birth control and in his acceptance of euthanasia, both aimed at lessening the pressure of the World’s burgeoning populations and the latter at permitting old people to pass out of life with some dignity. However, again, the problem is already upon us, and we must search for ways of dealing with the aggression and violence already present in the Western World. Violence is a symptom. The disease is variously powerlessness, insignificance, injustice—in short, a conviction that I am less than human and I am homeless in the World. For a convenient shorthand I have called the disease impotence, fully recognizing that violence also requires for its triggering some promise, a despair combined with the hope that conditions cannot but be bettered by one’s own pain or death. To strike the disease at its core requires that we deal with the impotence. Ideally, we must find ways of sharing and distributing power so that every person, in whatever realm of our bureaucratic society, can feel that one too counts, that one too makes a difference to one’s fellows and is not cast out on the dunghill of indifferences as a nonperson. Power is the birthright of every human being. It is the source of one’s self-esteem and the root of one’s conviction that one is interpersonally significant. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13

Regardless of a person’s unrepresented status, disposition, mental health, or state of the nation, overpopulation and pollution, the problem is roughly the same—to enable the individual to feel that one will be counted, that one has a valuable function, that “attention will be paid.” I do not speak of external opportunities for being to be individuals—the last two hundred years of inventions have steadily liberated human beings. I speak rather of the inward conviction of significance, the individual’s psychological and spiritual valuing by oneself and by one’s fellows. I wish to illustrate how this distribution of power is possible and how it alleviates violence. The University of Oklahoma was able to avoid riots—and in a creative rather than suppressive way—when most other universities were torn by violence. In September, 1967, under the newly appointed president, J. Herbert Holloman, there was instituted a plan to survey the whole educational project and reconstruct the university. To that end twenty-three committees were set up, comprising all groups affected by the university. This included faculty, students, administrators, private citizens, alumni, and legislators. For students this was no token representation. Their opinion was an essential part of the study. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13

When riots swept over the colleges and universities at the time of the Kent State shooting, Oklahoma had its uproar but no violence. Those in the best position to know at Oklahoma stated that it was this giving the students an integral part of the reconstruction that was responsible for their freedom from violence. It was power distributed—not paternalistically, but authentically. The students’ judgment was valued, desired, and utilized—as, indeed, it would have to be if such a reconstruction was to be effective. It was power with responsibility in accord with the level of development of the persons (for example, students) involved. Responsibility was commensurate with the power. When the threats did come, they did not escalate into violence. Why should the students become violent? They were not impotent; it had already been demonstrated that they have their voice in the direction of the university. An interesting event occurred which shows the changed mood at this university. In the days immediately following the Kent States shooting, a group of radical students carrying North Vietnamese flags rode motorcycles through the lines of parading ROTC. Then they picketed the ROTC building. Tension was high and dangerously near the boiling point. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13

The colonel in charge of ROTC felt this tension, as did everyone else; it was the taut state that called either for action or explosion into violence. What to do! His eye lighted on a large coffee urn in his office. He got this out and with the assistance of a few helpers he served coffee to the picketers. This “blew my mind” said one of the nearby faculty members; and it so impressed the picketers that tension was greatly reduced without violence. This colonel, as I later talked to him, was not an especially imaginative man, and he disclaimed any intention of a nonviolent or altruistic strategy or even any conscious hope that his act would have any effect. He felt only that he had to do something, and the coffee urn was the one thing at hand. It is an interesting illustration of the build-up of energy almost to the breaking point and its rechanneling before its outbreak in a constructive rather than destructive direction. For many years I have been convinced that something occurs in the creative working of the imagination that is more fundamental—but more puzzling—than we have assumed in contemporary psychology. In our day of dedication to the facts and hard-headed objectivity, we have disparaged imagination: it gets us away from “reality”; it taints our work with “subjectivity”; and, worst of all, it is said to be unscientific. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13

As a result, art and imagination are often taken as the “frosting” to life rather than as the solid food. No wonder people think of “art” in terms of its cognate, “artificial,” or even consider it a luxury that slyly fools us, “artifice.” Throughout Western history our dilemma has been whether imagination shall turn out to be artifice or the source of being. What if imagination and art are not frosting at all, but the fountainhead of human experience? What if our logic and science derive from art forms and are fundamentally dependent on them rather than art being merely a decoration for our work when science and logic have produced it? These are the hypotheses I propose here. This same problem is related to psychotherapy in ways that are much more profound than merely the play on words. In other words, is psychotherapy an artifice, a process that is characterized by artificiality, or is it a process that can give birth to new being? Pondering these hypotheses, I brought data to my assistance from the dreams of persons in therapy. By dreaming, persons in analysis, I saw, are doing something on a level quite below that of psychodynamics. They are struggling with their World—to make sense out of nonsense, meaning out of chaos, coherence out of conflict. They are doing it by imagination, by constructing new forms and relationships in their World, and by achieving through proportion and perspective a World in which they can survive and live with some meaning. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13

Here is a simple dream. It was related by an intelligent man who seems younger than his thirty years, coming from a culture where fathers have considerable authority. I was in the sea playing with some large porpoises. I like porpoises and wanted these to be like pets. Then I began to get afraid, thinking that the big porpoises would hurt me. I went out of the water, on the shore, and now I seem to be a cat hanging by its tail from a tree. The cat is curled up in a tear-drop form, but its eyes are big and seductive, one of them winking. A porpoise comes up, and, like a father cajoling a youngster out of bed with “get up and get going,” it hits the cat lightly. The cat then becomes afraid with a real panic and bounds off in a straight line into the higher rocks, away from the sea. Let us put aside such obvious symbols as the big porpoises being father and so on—symbols that are almost always confused with symptoms. I ask you to take the dream as an abstract painting, to look at it as pure form and motion. We see first a smallish form, namely the boy, playing with the larger forms, the porpoises. Imagine the former as a small circle, and the latter as large circles. The playing movement conveys a kind of love in the dream, which we could express by lines toward each other converging in the play. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13

In the second scene we see the smaller form (the boy in his fright) moving in a line out of the sea and away from the larger forms. The third scene shows the smaller form as a cat, now in an elliptical, tearlike, form, the coyness of the cat’s eyes being seductive. The big form now coming toward the cat moves into the cajoling act and the lines here, it seems to me, would be confused. This is a typical neurotic phase consisting of the dreamer trying to resolve one’s relationship with his father and the World. And, of course, it does not work. The fourth and last scene is the panic in which the smaller form, the cat, moves rapidly out of the scene. It dashes toward the higher rocks. The motion is in a straight line off the canvas. The whole dream can be seen as an endeavor through form and motion to resolve this young man’s relationship, in its love and its fear, to one’s father and father figures. The resolution is a vivid failure. However, the “painting” or play, Ionescolike though it be, shows like many a contemporary drama the vital tension in the irresolution of conflict. Therapeutically speaking, the patient is certainly facing his conflicts, albeit he can at the moment do nothing but flee. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13

We also can see in these scenes a progression of planes: first, the plane of the sea; second, the higher plane of the land with the tree; and third, the highest plane of all, namely the rocks on the mountain to which the cat leaps. These may be conceived as higher levels of consciousness to which the dreamer climbs. This expansion of consciousness may represent an important gain for the patient even though in a dream the actual resolution of the problem is a failure. When we turn such a dream into an abstract painting, we are on a deeper level than psychodynamics. I do not mean so we should leave out the contents of the dreams of our patients. I mean we should go beyond contents to the ground forms. We shall then be dealing with basic forms that only later, and derivatively, become formulations. From the most obvious viewpoint, the son is trying to work out a better relationship with his father, to be accepted as a comrade, let us say. However, on a deeper level he is trying to construct a World that makes sense, that has space and motion and keeps these in some proportion, a World that one can live in. You can live without a father who accepts you, but you cannot live without a World that makes some sense to you. Symbol in this sense no longer means symptoms. Symbol returns to its original and root meanings of “drawing together” (sym-ballein). The problem—the neurosis and its elements—is described by the antonym of symbolic, namely diabolic (dia-ballein), “pulling apart.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 13

Dreams are par excellence the realm of symbols and myths. I use the term myth not in the pejorative sense of “falsehood,” but in the sense of a form of universal truth revealed in some partial way to the dreamer. These are ways human consciousness makes sense of the World. Persons in therapy, like all of us, are trying to make sense out of nonsense, trying to put the World into some perspective, trying to form out of the chaos they are suffering some order and harmony. After having studied a series of dreams of persons in therapy, I am convinced that there is one quality that is always present, a quality I call passion for form. The patient constructs in his “unconscious” a drama; it has a beginning, something happens and is “flashed one the stage,” and then it comes to some kind of denouement. I have noted the forms in the dreams being repeated, revised, remolded, and then, like a motif in a symphony, returning triumphantly to be drawn together to make a meaningful whole of the series. There is a formula covering three progressive stages of the quest: Hearing, Reflection, Enlightenment. It means: Receiving instruction, Thinking constantly over the teachings until they are thoroughly assimilated, Experiencing glimpses of a mystical nature. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13

With the end of this third phase, the aspirant has not only repeat and prolong the glimpses until one’s whole life is permeated by the wisdom and peace which is their fruit, but also to receive and apply the highest and final philosophic doctrine. With this, one’s enlightenment becomes natural, effortless, unbroken. It is unified with one’s activity, established whether one is busy in the World or seated in prayer. Beings pass through three stages of development from the Inert through the Passional to the Harmonious. In the course of one’s life the student will pass from one phase of development to another, thus gradually enriching and expanding one’s whole character. To start on the quest is the first step. To continue on it is the second, and possibly harder. Thoroughly to finish the quest is the hardest step of all. It is true that one is only at the beginning of one’s quest for truth, that its fulfillment may be far far away, but everything must have a beginning. It is a progressive training which continues throughout one’s lifetime. There are times to intensify the quest, to hasten its tempo and stiffen its disciplines. With growth of outlook, development of mind, correct instruction from text or teacher, correct interpretation of one’s own and others’ experiences, one moves out of narrow sectarianism into a new Universal level. The attitude of faith in another person is undoubtedly helpful to beginners, provided the faith is justified. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13

However, it is a stage necessarily inferior to the attitude of faith in one’s own soul. To turn inwards rather than outwards, to overcome the tendency towards externality, is to ascend to a higher stage. Judge the sage if you must by the profound impress one makes on the soul of one’s age or by the service which one incessantly renders to the utmost limit of one’s strength. Jesus was moved unweariedly and incessantly trying to awaken the hearts of beings to their true goal and giving to those who approached him with faith the benediction of grace. Death caught him in the midst of so much of this activity that it aroused the hostility of professional religionists whose vested interests were in danger and who to save their own purses put Jesus on the cross. One alone may rightly be called a sage who not only has attained the highest spiritual stage but has also found a new meaning in the finite World and the finite human life. One does not need to run away from the familiar World, for one sees it by a diviner light. One experiences not only its obvious transiency and multiplicity but also its hidden eternality and unity. “And also the Lord will remember the prayers of the righteous, which have been put up unto him for them,” Mormon 5.21. Negative transference, positive transference, balanced orientation, all are staged of external adjustment and deserve no high evaluation than that. On the internal level alone is the surest equilibrium, attainable. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13

Cresleigh Homes

The grass is greener…in a community that you love! 💚 Looking to live in the esteemed city of Rocklin? We still have one home left for sale at #RocklinTrails! Contact us to learn more about Lot 55, a Residence 1 floor plan with a fully landscaped backyard and quick-close. 🏡

Tours by appointment only. | rocklintrails@cresleigh.com

https://cresleigh.com/new-homes-in-rocklin-california-rocklin-trails/

#Rocklin
#HomesOfSacramento
#HomesForSale
#CresleighHomes

Nothing Changes the Scent of Biological Humans, Humans of Body and Soul, to Rule the Planet and Reach for the Stars Beyond it!

November 7, 2019 12:45 am

Nobody knows. It always ends with “nobody knows.” Fate is merciless to the living who lack flesh and blood. And nothing changes the scent of biological humans, humans of body and soul, to rule the planet and reach for the stars beyond it. “You cannot build a culture with Devils out of Hell.” The Hell I can’t is my answer. It comes to that after centuries and centuries of vain hope. You can gaze on the struggling beings around you with a sad detachment. And you can thank Heaven for ignorance, for simple beings who do not long to know anything. The search for a common denominator among Bowery Men always beings—and frequently ends—with the finding that they are all alcoholics. However, this scarcely makes a reliable distinguishing hallmark of the species, because, in the first place, most alcoholics do not become Bowery Men and, in the second place, drinking, while certainly part of life on the Bowery, is not usually an important reason for being there. To insist that a man is on Skid Row because he drinks is like arguing that a man becomes a millionaire because he wears a top hat. Furthermore, if you expect to find the grim, solitary, ugly drunk drowning massives doses calculated to lay one out cold in the shortest possible time, you are less likely to find him in a Bowery saloon than you are among the family men who inhabit the cocktail bars of commuters’ trains. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

A somewhat limited but interesting survey by Alcoholics Anonymous found that ninety-two percent of the moneyed and family class of chronic drinkers are solitary addicts. However, on the Bowery and other Skid Rows only ten percent habitually drink alone, according to a study of Alcohol and the Homeless Man by sociologist Robert Strauss. The same conclusion may be reached with less scientific certainty, perhaps, but more pleasantly by taking a walk along the Street. You can see the Bowery drunk spiking his Cherry Ripple or White Muscatel (inexpensive wine also known as wino wine) with raw alcohol and passing the bottle among his friends, or even among strangers. He drinks to fend off loneliness, or sometimes the lesser chill that the wind sends slashing through his rags. He aspires only to warmth and everlasting “highness,” rarely to total oblivion. On that sunny plateau the Bowery Man has the camaraderie that is more precious to him than love or friendship of the sort so highly valued in the dank valleys of sobriety. He does not want friends—with the incessant demands upon him—but he craves the illusion of friendship. He wants good fellows about him who can help to kill the time that weighs like an albatross about his neck. For him alcohol makes possible a World with rounded, smooth edges—a World of brothers, but not of brotherhood and all the dreary responsibilities which that concept entails. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

The Bowery Man is a social drinker with a sense of group responsibility. He panhandles for liquor money (which is where the “Panhandle District” gets its name) to hold up his end of the bargain so that he may contribute his mite to the collective fund. Then, when the bottle goes around, he takes only one gulp at a time, and that is nicely proportioned to his investment in the bottle. If one’s particular drinking group stakes him to a drink, he repays it with scrupulous correctness. There is an elaborate courtesy in these circles that only a gauche newcomer from uptown would violate. For example, when a man is pitching a line to someone who might give one the price of a drink, he is not to be interrupted or distracted. If he fails, another can try, but there is no uncouth struggling over a “live one” as the prospect is respectfully dubbed. These decorous manners may perhaps serve to distinguish the Bowery Man from an ad agency executive, but they do not mark one as unique. If not alcohol, what else sets these beings apart? What makes them a community? Certainly the do not look alike. They make no gray and faceless mass. Here Swedes and Irish and Poles, Midwesterners, Southerners, New England farm boys to run seed, Black boys, tall and rangy, with life still in them, and old Blacks with the beards and eyes of patriarchs. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

There is in this limiting a nonmaterial character, a spiritual character if you will, that is necessary in all creativity. Our discussion demonstrates something else that the object you see is a product both of your subjectivity and external reality. We not only know the World, but the World at the same time conforms to our ways of knowing. Our perception is determined by our imagination as well as by the empirical facts of the outside World. Here are disabled people and well men, sullen and simple. Some laugh as they shoot crap on the sidewalk and sing karaoke from the juke box with a huge colorful glowing orb. Some just stand in their several layers of rags and look with mild, vacant eyes at the scene and at the stranger who walks among them from the World uptown. Sociologists have counted their noses, tabulated their previous occupations, the first names of their grandparents, and the color of their skins. Psychologists have distributed Rorschach tests free to the needy. Conclusions from all these efforts vary in many respects, but these efforts vary in many respects, but there are some hard, unassailable facts in the picture. There are many Irishmen on the Bowery, for example, very few Italians or Jews, and almost no Chinses, although Chinatown is handy. There are obvious reasons for some Irishmen to linger among the Home Guard. When they fled the famines they became wild geese scattering over the whole World, and many too to the sea. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

The sailor, until he was organized into a trade union, was the traditional foot-loose wanderer from whom no home was really possible, who cultivated a scorn for the landlubber. For seamen who were beached, the Bowery became a shelter. Many Irishmen who did not take to the sea went into one form of transportation or another. They built railroads and ran them. They dug canals and skinned the mules that towed the barges from Albany to Buffalo. Men in transport are men on the go, homeless men who in between jobs, or after the last job, find their home with the other homeless. There is therefore an historical reason for the Irish on the Bowery, but psychologist tend to dismiss this explanation as superficial. The important factors are to be found in family life, they say. Dr. Boris Levinson, who has reported on the Bowery men for the Psychiatric Quarterly and other learned publications, studs his papers with charts that would bring a look of astonishment to his subjects, the quiet old bags of bones asleep in the Bowery doorways. He finds the Irish family to be dominated as a rule by the mother. This generality seems incontrovertible—as generalities go—and even the Irish attest to it willingly enough. The Irishman’s mother tends to be a Madonna and other women—particularly those who would lower themselves to go with him—are likely, in this view, to be women of the evening. He is likely to marry late and then set his wife upon a pedestal. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

In the psychologist’s opinion, marriage to a saint is not conducive to a healthy life in pleasures of the flesh, but the normal Irishman can take all this in his stride and become a poet, a politician, a bus driver, a priest or anything else. However, an Irishman who has some unusual weakness in his moral fiber may refrain from marriage altogether and run away from the woman he fears. He takes a drink easily because the Irish traditionally do not look upon alcohol as repulsive. Alcoholism, it itself, says Dr. Levinson, implies tendencies to homosexuality. In fact, though, homosexuality is present but not rife on the Bowery. When the brothels on the street closed, it was for lack of customers, not because the girls had competition. It seems that there is a flight from all sexuality on the Bowery. There is, in part, the atmosphere of a monastery—a silent withdrawal from all the joys of the World save the passport to Nirvana contained in a little alcohol. Psychologist Marvin K. Opler drew this comparison between the Irish family and Italian families: “The Irish family tends to be dominated by the mother; the father is often a weak and shadowy figure. In the Irish home active expression of emotion is frowned upon; feelings in regards to pleasures of the flesh are clouded with conceptions of sin. All this is reflected in the personality of the male offspring. The Irish male is apt to be quiet, repressed, shy or fearful of woman and as his literature attests, given to fantasy as an outlet for his emotions.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

Opler’s Italian family looked quite different: “The dominant figure is the father. He rules the family with a sometimes benevolent, sometimes rough hand. Emotions and passions are allowed free expression. Little or no sin or guilt is attached to pleasures of the flesh. As a result the Italian male is proverbially excitable, given to acting out his emotions and sometimes hostile to his father and older brothers (to whom the father may delegate authority over him).” This is not to say that the freewheeling, uninhibited Latin may not end up in worse places than the Bowery, but apparently he does not usually seek out this secular, creedless monastery. He has no talent for self-obliteration. The African American is yet another story. As we have seen, he was on the Bowery when the Dutch of New Amsterdam set him free so that he could take the brunt of an Indian attack. Later he was moved down to the squalid tenements of the Five Points near Mulberry Bend. After that he did not reappear in this city’s history until mobs made a victim of him during the draft riots. However, the depression brought a new wave of African Americans to the Bowery. They were a younger group of men than the Whites who were tossed up by the storm and beached on the Bowery. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

Nose-counters and interviewers discovered that the average African American on the Bowery in those days had done more traveling on the road than his white counterpart, but that he was also more likely to have been married, and more likely to be free of the neuroses and psychoses that marked his White brothers on the breadlines. Were the African Americans’ wives displaced, lost, stolen? Why did the storm uproot more stable, wholesome, settle African Americans than Whites? The answers seem to lie more with the economist than the psychologist. Perhaps the economic soil in which the African American families grew so thin, the roots so close to the surface, that even the strongest could not resist. In depression times the steadiest African American family lived in marginal soil close to the hunger line, and the wind that might make a White family man shut the blinds was enough to rip the African America up by the root and set him adrift. Perhaps, too, economic troubles were less traumatic to the African American than to his White brother. He was more used to them. As human beings, we have unlimited potentialities. However, when these movements try to throw form or limits out entirely, they become self-destructive and noncreative. Never is form itself superseded so long as creativity endures. If form were to vanish, spontaneity would vanish with it. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

Research in self-disclosure has shown that what a person will disclose to another is a function of many variables, including the subject matter to be disclosed, characteristics of the person, the setting in which discloser is to take place, and—more important—characteristics of the audience-person. The most powerful determiner of self-disclosure appears to be the willingness of the audience to disclose oneself to the subject to the same extent that one expects the subject to confide one’s experience. This is termed the “dyadic effect.” It asserts, as a general principle, that disclosure begets disclosure. Now this is not, by any means, the only condition under which a being reveal one’s experience to another. One will often disclose oneself unilaterally, without reciprocation, when one believes that it serves one’s interests to do so. This is what happens, for example, in much psychotherapeutic interviewing. The patient discloses much more about oneself than the therapist does, on the implicit promise that is one does so one’s lot will improve. When we allow individual projects a definition of the situation when one appears before others, we must also see that the others, however passive their role may seem to be, will themselves effectively project a definition of the situation by virtue of their response to the individual and by virtue of any lines of action they initiate to one. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

Ordinarily the definition of the situation projected by the several different participants are sufficiently attuned to one another so that open contradiction will not occur. I do not mean that there will be a kind of consensus that arises when each individual present candidly expresses what one really feels and honestly agrees with the expressed feelings of others present. This kind of harmony is an optimistic ideal and in any case not necessary for the smooth working of society. Rather, each participant is expected t suppress one’s immediate heartfelt feelings, conveying a new of the situation which one feels the others will be able to find at least temporarily acceptable. The maintenance of this surface of agreement, this veneer of consensus, is facilitated by each participant concealing one’s own wants behind statements which assert values to which everyone present feels obliged to give lip service. Further, there is usually a kind of division of definitional labor. Each participant is allowed to establish the tentative official ruling regarding matters which are vital to one but not immediately important to others, for instance, the rationalizations and justifications by which one accounts for one’s past activity. In exchange for this courtesy one remains silent or non-committal on matters important to others but not immediately important to one. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

We have than a kind of interactional modus vivendi. Together the participants contribute to a single over-all definition of the situation which involves not so much a real agreement as to what exists but rather a real agreement as to whose claims concerning what issues will be temporarily honored. Who, upon seeing them, has not been seized by wonder and perplexity at the gargoyles leering from their perches just below the roofs of Hearst Castle in California? These half-animal, half-human creatures eating other animals alive, these satanic figures with the tongues stuck out at the hordes of people in the city square below the mountain, with expressions of contempt carved in stone, who sit watch in broad daylight over San Semeion—are they in some way the devil’s hostages? No such evasive answer is possible. They are expressions of a tension that exists in all of us, a dialectic between light and darkness, good and evil. These expressions of the daimonic are critically important to the fact that this American nation could construct castles that emanate such beauty. For the artist who lights up our World, as those sculptors did, lives and breathes with the daimonic. What we used to call beauty (a work we should not use very often in our day) is impossible if we cut loose our connection with this nether World. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

The artist faces an ancient and powerful interdiction in the second of the Ten Commandments: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven images, or likeness of anything that is in Heaven above, or that is in the Earth beneath, or that is in the water under the Earth.” This is an interdiction against the worships of idols. It is also a prohibition of magic placed upon the ancient Hebrew, and interdiction of the primitive way of getting power over an animal or a person by drawing one’s likeness in the sand. People around the Mediterranean are to this day skittish about having their snapshots taken—apparently a carry-over of the early feeling that if you got their image by means of camera or crayon or paint, you captured part of their soul. The “graven image” must relate to the form of the person, something that one experiences as crucial to one’s autonomy. I cited this as a “primitive” idea, but it is a sophisticated insight as well. For the portrait as drawn or painted by any competent artist is related not so much to the appearance of the subject but rather to what the artist sees in the subject, which will be something of the latter’s underlying form. However one phrases the problem, it is a sign of courage that a person commits oneself to becoming an artist in the first place. One has to have considerable rebelliousness to set oneself against the archetypal prohibition. #RandolpHarris 12 of 17

Art is a substitute for violence. The same impulses that drive some persons to violence—the hunger for meaning, the need for ecstasy, the impulse to risk all—drive the artist to create. One is by nature our archrebel. I am not speaking of art as social protest: it can be that, as it was with Delacroix, and artist are almost always in the front line of social causes. I mean rather that one’s whole work is a rebellion against the status quo of the society—that which would make the society banal, conformist, stagnant. Often this takes the form of rebellion against the academic tradition in art itself—vide van Gogh, Cezanne, Picasso. However, the essence of the rebellion is in the new way of seeing nature and life. The art consists of the discovery and expression of this new way of seeing, which in turn is related to the artist’s originality, one’s sense of newness and freshness, one’s criticism of the past and present in the light of future possibilities. Artist teach humankind to see. However, the artist teaches us the possibilities of new forms as well. This inner form of art comes from the poet, and consists of the passion he or she puts into the poem. The organic aspect of form causes it to grow on its own; it speaks to us down through the ages revealing new meaning to each generation. Centuries later we may find meaning in it that even the author did not know was there. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

Artists show us new options of perceiving and responding to the World and each other which did not exist before one saw them and pointed them out. One does not impose form on a chaotic World as the thinker does; one exists in this form. Hence it becomes significant form. As long as the artist can create, one does not have to resort to violence. As a person one is generally an unbellicose, unaggressive type and exists by the live-and-let-live code, although we find that in heated discussions one can be stubborn and reach heights of passion which in someone else would be expressed in violence. Hence the artist has a proportionately harder time in periods of transition like ours—harder, say, than the doctor, whose subject (the human body) remains relatively constant even in periods of social upheaval. Contemporary artist may feel this difficulty keenly, as they will reveal in conversation. This is the first age in which the artist has had to create one’s own community. However, some artists now say that there is no meaningful society into which they can fit. They have no community. Society appears to worship the artist, but this is pretense; actually contemporary society buys and sells one, and any individual with money can buy up all an artist’s canvases and dump them into a big hole in a field. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

Society can enthrone the artist—very much like they did in the case of the scapegoat king. This happened to Jackson Pollock. He appeared on the cover of Life magazine—that highest throne in those says of the beginning of mass communication—with the caption, “Is Pollock the Greatest American Painter?” He was acknowledged a great public success, and such acknowledgment is very hard to take. Shortly afterward he ended his life by driving his car off the road. Mark Rothko became financially successful and then committed suicide. These and other artists’ suicides may mean many things. However, they also seem to support my artist-friends’ claim that society only pretends to value the artist. The artist is actually a second-class citizen; one is accepted as the frosting and not the bread of life. The age that admires art as a financial investment, then goes merrily on its way with technological gimmicks. To see this we need not look far. The skyline of New York, once one of the wonders of the modern World, has been progressively ruined by the conglomerate, haphazard erection of skyscrapers thrown together with no reference at all to an over-all form or vision. Yes, they are built with glass and glistening aluminum and all sorts of other interesting materials. Once can build a cesspool out of interesting materials. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

The contemporary artist finds oneself in a strange bind and is tempted to fall into despair. Some of them say that Mondrian, for example, went as far as anyone could in rebellion, and his rebellion has had precious little effect on anyone. They also point out the war in Vietnam is too vivid, with the bombing of villages and the defoliation of the land, all of which is accepted apathetically by the citizenry. How can you force people to see—which is the artist’s function—with such competition? However much one may talk of Charles Manson was groomed for his later violence by the postgraduate training in crime he received during his thirteen years in prison, his satanic cult illustrates how actual murder can be recorded by the murderers themselves on film and in music as an artistic experience. One can and must note these things. True, my concept of the artist as rebel can be exaggerated to the degree of pathology, especially when it occurs in a technological civilization characterized by built-in violence on the roads and in actual motor cars and in imaginary TV programs of violence in any city on any day. However, the fact that something can be pushed to a pathological extreme does not make it the norm, nor is it any argument against the norm. Crimes involving pleasure of the flesh are no argument against healthy experience of pleasures of the flesh. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

These disturbing facts make the thesis of the artist as rebel more serious and more real. The artist as rebel is a gadfly to the culture. One’s task is still to follow one’s talent of perceiving and showing us the new forms in which we, too, can see and experience the World around us. If we wish to learn what the spiritual content of our new World will be, we must pay attention to the artist. The stages of the Quest for Truth pass by degrees from the disciplining of the ego to the opening of consciousness to God. One this journey there are stages of ascent, stations of understanding, lights of peace, and shadows of despair. The Quest must traverse the three level of body, mind, and spirit. “Therefore, blessed are they who will repent and harken unto the voice of the Lord their God; for these are they that shall be saved. And may God Grant, in his great fulness, that people might be brought unto repentance and good works, that they might be restored unto grace for grace, according to their works,” reports Helaman 12.23-24. Our power is possessed in keeping ourselves busy with constant service of humanity. One can awaken some persons to this divine presence within themselves, but not all. One may do this mysteriously by some unknown process, or one may do it deliberately and with the display of one’s technique. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17Cresleigh Homes

We can’t wait to make ourselves at home here in Plumas Lake, CA. Stay tuned for updates on our newest community. Now selling at #PlumasRanch! Residence Two a spacious single story home with over 2,500 square feet of home thoughtfully designed to maximize every available foot of space. Three bedrooms, three bathrooms, and a three car garage all come included in this home. The layout if an entertainer’s dream with large kitchen and working island, dining room connected through the butler’s pantry, and a large great room overlooking the ample rear yard.

https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-riverside-at-plumas-ranch/

#NewHomes
#CresleighHomes

Unwise People Do Not Understand How that Which Differs With itself is in Agreement: Harmony Consists of Opposing Tensions!

November 6, 2019 2:09 am

I did not know that I could live with such a decision, and I was certain that they could not mentally or spiritually survive such a denial. Yet I felt compelled to ponder. And ponder I did. Why does one become an alcoholic? Since no final answer to this question is available, since the subject is complex and the size of this paper limited, a relatively brief and rigid phrased description will follow. In accord with the two essentials for the development of the condition, it will be divided into two parts: one, the habitual use of alcohol; two, certain personality types or structures. There is not much evidence of a physiological or constitutional basis for alcoholism. Neither of these alone can bring on alcoholism. There are many individuals with personalities similar to those found in alcoholics who never become alcoholics, who may never touch alcohol; there are tends of millions of individuals who use alcohol who never become alcoholics. The combination of the two factors is essential for the appearance of alcoholism. Alcohol is a depressant, the direct opposite of a stimulant. Taken in sufficient quantities it produces sleep. Its depressant action is gradual, however; and as it depresses certain control functions of the brain it allows behavior and attitudes which are usually repressed. (It is this less controlled behavior which makes people believe that it is a stimulant.) #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

Alcohol, even in small quantities, lowers sensitivity, relieves tension, allows the forgetting of difficult and unpleasant conceptions and memories. It reduces accuracy of judgment and discrimination, especially about the self. With alcohol, then, one can temporarily escape worries and anxieties, temporarily ease tensions, feel as if one were happy, clever, witty, graceful or, at least, less unhappy, less inept, less awkward. And one can gain this temporary feeling without utilizing the effort and ability which real achievement of such feeling would demand. Of the personality types significant for alcoholism only two will be mentioned. It should be recognized that there are psychotics and feebleminded persons who are also alcoholics, that there are persons, apparently quite normal, who under extraordinary stress may become compulsive drinkers. The great bulk of the alcoholics, however, fit into the two classes to be described, the primary and the secondary compulsive drinker types. The primary type may be likened to that category of persons labeled neurotic. This over-used and little understood word in the present instance at least serves to point out that primary compulsive drinkers were definitely maladjusted before they began drinking. Here, for example, is the individual whose personality was warped, whose emotional development was unhealthy from infancy or childhood on. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

The maladjustment might be seen as an inability to compete with equals or superiors without feeling extreme anxiety or apprehension of undefined, future pain. Or it might be seen as an unusual fear of contact with those of the opposite gender, or as a general conception of the self as unworthy, inefficient, and socially awkward. These states of mind are fairly common though irregular occurrences among adolescents, but as continued attitudes in a young or middle-aged adult they are out of keeping with the demands of our society. In the early twenties and certainly by the age of thirty there is great pressure on adults to be socially and economically competitive and appropriately self-assertive, to be married, and to have attained a relatively mature independence of self-control. As individuals of poor or no adjustment along these lines grow older, the pressures upon them grow stronger and the maladjustment becomes increasingly harder to bear. No statement is presented to explain why or how these individuals comes to be “neurotics.” It is a matter of common observation that there are many such persons. If such persons are, like most Americans, introduced to the custom of drinking, and if anxieties about drinking are not too great and no other way out of their dilemma is found, then they are likely candidates to start out on the road to alcoholism. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

Alcohol allows them to compete without anxiety, to mingle without or with less fear in mixed company, perhaps even to initiate courtship behavior, to forget their own interpretation of their personal inadequacies; it allows them relief from whatever their problem may be. Small wonder that they come to lean upon this crutch with increasing dependency. This development illustrates the conception that for the type of person described alcohol is an adjustment. However, the alcohol wears off while the neurotic characteristics remain as before. Furthermore, the memory of having acted aggressively or assertively, of having shown interest in the opposite gender because of alcohol creates new anxieties; the knowledge of having been “out-of-control” also adds guilt and remorse. However, in the long run the rewards of drinking for the incipient alcoholic are greater than these feelings. Later on, one may use alcohol to get rid of the post-alcoholic guilt and anxiety. Thus, a vicious circle comes into operation. The vicious circle is stimulated further by the inevitable extension and intensification of old problems and the rise of news one due to increasing periods of inebriety. Family and friends, employers and neighbors, customers and strangers, all will punish the person who often gets drunk. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

With the increase in problems the relieving, soothing, encouraging effects of alcohol become all the more desirable. So, although alcohol is an adjustment, it is a short-run, temporary adjustment and leads to further maladjustment. Before one’s drinking starts the secondary compulsive type appears on the surface as a fairly well-adjusted person. He or she has utilized social customs, attitudes, and organizations with considerable ability. Certainly the label “neurotic” would never have been applied. Some of this type may be more extroverted than those around them, tending to be the leader in the group, the excessive practical joker, the most aggressive salesman. The implication from this is sense of personal adequacy, of being a significant member of their group. Whatever the case, it is noticeable that they can differ markedly from the earlier mentioned “neurotic” type, that they have utilized customs, associations and attitudes which were socially acceptable; this plays an important role in the discussion of therapy. The prospective secondary type of compulsive drinker, when introduced to the drinking customs, appears to take it with great satisfaction. One already belongs to a group which usually drinks a good deal or one shortly joins such a group and become a regular drinker, later perhaps a heavy drinker, but one is not yet an alcoholic; one is in control of the drinking, not the drinking in control of one. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

Many people can be so characterized, and they need not become alcoholics. For the individual in whom we are interested, however, a process sets in which has been called the pampering effect of alcohol. Alcohol lowers sensitivity, discrimination, control and efficiency. Unless counteracting forces arise, it allows the drinker to respond to stimuli less adequately and to follow personal inclinations in the face of contrary social demands with less notice and less care. As a result the fairly constant heavy drinker may become a more careless worker, a more thoughtless father and husband, or mother and wife, a more demanding friend, a more aggressive neighbor. Nor is this the only effect. On the negative side one may be seen as failing to exercise one’s social abilities and one’s intellectual techniques. Without practice the personality assets become dulled and more difficult to use. This process may take place by almost imperceptible steps. The result of this process is inevitable—occupational, familial, financial, and neighborly problems are going to arise. Unfortunately, the individual has learned a simple response to avoid such problems—drinking. Again, a vicious circle can be seen. A second result of this process, a result which may confuse the therapist, is that the personality of the drinker seems to change. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

The personality change is not hard to explain. The individual finds oneself losing the affection and regard of one’s spouse, one’s boss, one’s friends; whereupon one loses affection and regard for them. One finds that one is less popular in one’s club, among fellow workers, or in community groups; whereupon one gives up these organizations. One can hardly help but realize that one’s work is not as good as it was; whereupon one talks it up, idealizes what one is going to do, what one has done; while realistic accomplishment continues downhill. One becomes increasingly isolated and consequently self-centered. As one loses friends and interests, one become cynical, self-conscious and suspicious of others. One rationalizes one’s situation, and as one’s rationalizations are not subject to the discipline of realistic give-and-take, one becomes overly idealistic or overly optimistic or pessimistic. Gradually one takes on more and more of the characteristics of the primary type. When one has achieved the full status of an alcoholic one may seem not a whit different from the primary type. From the point of view of rehabilitation, however, he or she is a decidedly different person; the changes of recover are far better than for those of the primary types. These descriptions of the two largest categories of compulsive drinkers, categories based on the developmental nature of the disease, are not a full answer to the question “Why does one become an alcoholic?” #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

The answers we discussed may help, however, toward a better understanding of the sorts of processes, conditions and factors involved in the development of the alcoholic condition. The human character is a structure built up to avoid perception of the terror, perdition and annihilation that dwell next door to every being. The task of psychology is to discover the strategies that a person uses to avoid anxiety. What style does one use to function automatically and uncritically in the World, and how does this style cripple one’s true growth and freedom of action and choice? Basically, how is a person being enslaved by one’s characterological lie about oneself? Most people live in a half-obscurity about their own perceptions of reality. Understating the compulsive character, means recognizing the rigidity of the person who has had to build extra-thick defenses against anxiety, a heavy character armor. A partisan of the most orthodoxy knows it all, one bows before the holy, truth is for one an ensemble of ceremonies, one talks about presenting oneself before the throne of God, of how many times one must bow, one knows everything the same way as does the pupil who is able to demonstrate a mathematical proposition with the letters ABC, but not when they are changed to DEF. One is therefore in dread whenever one bears something not arranged in the same order. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

In society today there is a shut-upness which we refer to as repression; it is the closed personality, the one who had fenced oneself around in childhood, not tested one’s own powers in action, not been free to discover oneself and one’s World in a relaxed way. If the child is not burdened by too much parental blocking of one’s action, too much infection with the parents’ anxieties, one can develop one’s own defenses in a less monopolizing way, can remain somewhat fluid and open in character. One is prepared to test reality in terms of one’s own action and experimentation and less on the basis of delegated authority and prejudgment or preperception. It is of infinite importance that a child be brought up with a conception of the lofty shut-upness [reserve], and be saved from the mistake kind. In an external respect it is easy to perceive when the moment has arrived that one ought to let the child walk alone; the art is to be constantly present and yet not be present, to let the child be allowed to develop itself, while nevertheless one has constantly a survey clearly before one. The art is to leave the child to itself in the very highest measure and on the greatest possible scale, and to express this apparent abandonment in such a way that, unobserved, one at the same time knows everything. And the father who educates or does everything for the child entrusts to one, but had not prevented one from becoming shut-up, has incurred a great accountability. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

The parent should let the child do one’s own exploration of the World and develop one’s own sure experimental powers. One knows that the child has to be protected against dangers and that watchfulness by the parent is of vital importance, but one does not want the parent to obtrude one’s own anxieties into the picture, to cut off the child’s action before it is absolutely necessary. Today we know that such an upbringing alone gives the child a self-confidence in the face of experience that one would not have if one were overly blocked: it gives one an inner sustainment. And it is precisely this inner sustainment that allows the child to develop a lofty shut-upness, or reverse: that is, an ego-controlled and self-confident appraisal of the World by a personality that can open up more easily to experience. Mistaken shut-upness, on the other hand, is the result of too much blockage, too much anxiety, too much effort to face up to experience by an organism that has been overburdened and weakened in its own controls: it means, therefore, more automatic repression by an essentially closed personality. The good is the opening toward new possibility and choice, the ability to face into anxiety; the closed is the evil, that which turns one away from newness and broader perceptions and experiences; the closed shut out revelation, obtrudes a veil between the person and one’s own situation in the World. Ideally these should be transparent, but for the closed person they are opaque. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

This shut-upness is precisely a lite of character. It eo ipso signifies a lie, or if you prefer, untruth. However, untruth is precisely unfreedom; the elasticity of freedom is consumed in the service of close reserve. Close reserve was the effect of the negating retrenchment of the ego in the individuality. And this is a perfectly contemporary psychoanalytic description of the costs of repression on the total personality, which could lead to things like alcoholism because the person becomes fragmented within oneself by the repression. Meanwhile, the real reality dwells under the surface, close at hand, ready to break through the repression, but the repression seemingly leaves the personality intact, seemingly functioning as a whole, in continuity—and that is how continuity is broken, how the personality is really at the mercy of the discontinuity expressed by the repression. The lie of character is built up because the individual needs to adjust to the World, to the parents, and to one’s own existential dilemmas. It is built up before the child has a chance to learn about oneself in an open or free way, and thus character defenses are automatic and unconscious. The problem is that the child becomes dependent on them and comes to be encased in one’s own character armor, unable to see freely beyond one’s own prison or into oneself, into the defenses on is using, the things that are determining one’s unfreedom. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

The best thing that the child can hope is that one’s shut-upness will not be of the mistake or massive kind, in which one’s character is too fearful of the World to be able to open itself to the possibilities of experience. However, that depends largely on the parents who have incurred a great accountability, and so they are obliged to shut themselves off from possibility. Styles of denying possibility and lies of character are the same thing. It leads to what we call inauthentic beings, beings who avoid developing their own uniqueness; they follow out the styles of automatic and uncritical living in which they were conditioned as children. They are inauthentic in that they do not belong to themselves, are not their own person, do not act from their own center, do not see reality on its terms; they are the one-dimensional being totally immersed in the fictional games being played in their society, unable to transcend their social conditioning: the corporation men and women in the West, the bureaucrats in the East, the tribal beings locked up in tradition—beings everywhere who do not understand what it means to think for themselves, and who, if one did, would shrink back at the idea of such audacity and exposures. The immediate man or woman, one’s self or one oneself is something included along with the other in the compass of the temporal and the Worldly. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

Thus, because these beings derive their identity from the collective, the self coheres immediately with the other, wishing, desiring, enjoy, and so forth, but passively; one manages to imitate other men or women, noting how they manage to live, and so one too lives after a sort. In Christendom one too is Christian, goes to church every Sunday, hears and understands the parson, yea, they understand one another; one dies; the parson introduces one into eternity for the price of $10—but a self one was not, and a self one did not become. For the immediate being does not recognize one’s self, one recognizes oneself only by one’s dress, one recognizes that one has a self only by externals. This is the automatic cultural human—human as confided by culture, a slave to it, who imagines that one has an identity if one pays one’s insurance premium, that one has control of one’s life if one guns one’s sports car or works one’s electric toothbrush. Today the inauthentic or immediate beings are familiar types, after decades of Marxist and existentialist analysis of being’s slavery to one’s social system. However, at some time, it must have been a shock to be a modern European city-dweller and be considered a Philistine at the same time. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

Philistinism is triviality, beings lulled by the daily routines of one’s society, content with the satisfactions that it offers one: in today’s World the car, the shopping center, the two-week Summer vacation. Beings are protected by the secure and limited alternatives one’s society offers one, and if one does not look up from one’s path one can live out one’s life with a certain dull security. Devoid of imagination, as the Philistine always is, one lives in a certain trivial province of experience as to how things go, what is possible, what usually occurs….Philistinism tranquilizes itself in the trivial. Why do beings accept to live a trivial life? Because the danger of a full horizon of experience, of course. This is the deeper motivation of philistinism, that it celebrates the triumph over possibility, over freedom. Philistinism knows its real enemy: freedom is dangerous. If you follow it to willingly in threatens to pull you into the air; if you give it up to wholly, you become a prisoner of necessity. The safest thing is to tow the mark of what is socially possible. For philistinism thinks it is in control of possibility, it thinks that when it has decoyed this prodigious elasticity into the field of probability or into the madhouse it holds it a prisoner; it carries possibility around like a prisoner in the change of the probable, shows it off. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

Consciousness itself is born out of the awareness of these limits. Human consciousness is the distinguishing feature of our existence; without limitations we would never have developed it. Consciousness is the awareness that emerges out of the dialectical tensions between possibilities and limitations. Infants begin to be aware of limits when they experience the balls as different from themselves; mother is a limiting factor for them in that she does not feed them every time they cry for food. Though a multitude of such limiting experiences they learn to develop the capacity to differentiate themselves from others and from objects and to delay gratification. If there had been no limits, there would be no consciousness. Our discussion so far may seem, at first glance, to be discouraging, but not when we probe more deeply. It is not by accident that the Hebrew myth that marks the beginning of human consciousness, Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, is portrayed in the context of rebellion. Consciousness is born in the struggle against a limit, called there a prohibition. Going beyond the limit set by Yahweh is then punished by the acquiring of others limits which operate inwardly in the human being—anxiety, the feeling of alienation and guilt. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

However, valuable qualities also come out of this experience of rebellion—the sense of personal responsibility and ultimately the possibility, born out of loneliness, of human love. Confronting limits for the human personality actually turns out to be expansive. Limiting and expanding thus go further. Civilization arose out of out physical limitations, or what some called inferiority. Tooth for tooth and claw for claw, men and women were inferior to the wild animals. In the struggle against these limitations for their survival, human beings evolved their intelligence. Conflict is both king of all and father of all. Conflict presupposes limits, and the struggle with limits is actually the source of creative productions. The limits are as necessary as those provided by the banks of the river, without which the water would be dispersed on the Earth and there would be no river—that is, the river is constituted by the tension between the flowing water and the banks. Art in the same way requires limits as a necessary factor in its birth. Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem. Again listen, unwise people do not understand how that which differs with itself is in agreement: harmony consists of opposing tension, like that of the bow and the lyre. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

In a discussion of how he composed his music, Duke Ellington explained that since his trumpet play could reach certain notes beautifully but not other notes, and the same with his trombonist, he had to write his music within those limits. “It’s good to have limits,” he remarked. True, in our age there is occurring a new valuation of spontaneity and a strong reaction against rigidity. This goes along with a rediscovery of the values of the childlike capacity to play. In modern art, as we all know, there has evolved a new interest in children’s painting as well as in peasant and primitive art, and these kinds of spontaneity often are used as models for adult art work. This is especially true in psychotherapy. The great majority of patients experience themselves as stifled and inhibited by the excessive and rigid limits insisted on by their parents. One of their reasons for coming for therapy in the first place is this conviction that all of this needs to be thrown overboard. Even if it is simplistic, this urge toward spontaneity obviously should be valued by the therapist. If they are to become integrated in any effective sense, people must recover the lost aspects of their personalities, lost under a pile of inhibitions. However, we must not forget that these stages in therapy, like children’s art, are interim stages. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

Children’s art is characterized by an unfinished quality. Despite the apparent similarity with nonobjective art, it still lacks the tension necessary for authentic mature art. It is a promise but not yet an achievement. Sooner or later the growing person’s art must relate itself to the dialectic tension that comes out confronting limits and is present in all forms of mature art. Michelangelo’s writhing slaves; van Gogh’s fiercely twisting cypress trees; Cezanne’s lovely yellow-green landscapes of southern France, reminding us of the freshness of eternal spring—these works have that spontaneity, but they also have the mature quality that comes from the absorption of tension. This makes them much more than interesting; it makes them great. The controlled and transcended tension present in the work of art is the result of the artists’ successful struggle with and against the limits. Remember, what is within you is everywhere. What is not, is nowhere. To start our quest for truth, we must start in the land where we are living, where destiny has put us. Look deeper into your own heart, for that is where what you really seek is. Enlightenment involves liberation from one’s ego, its captivity and deceitfulness. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

It is not emotional exuberance which produces a high spiritual result, but the depth and concentration with which truth is seen. The vibrations it emits will now clear you of external influences of false Gods and help you to center within your divine self. Prepare for your journey into eternal light and abundance and its integration with your soul. Know that the comfort you will find is that which you have the strength to create and perceive. Find strength to create and perceive comfort and joy within you soul as you connected with our Heavenly Father. “We would subject ourselves to the yoke of bondage if it were requisite with the justice of God, or if he should command us so to do. However, behold God doth not command us that we shall subject ourselves to our enemies, but that we should put our trust in him, and he will deliver us. Therefore, let us resist evil, and whatsoever evil we cannot resist with our words, yea, such as rebellions and dissension, let us resist them with our swords, that we may retain our freedom, that we may retain our freedom, that we may rejoice in the great privilege of our church, and in the cause of our Redeemer and our God,” reports Alma 61.12-14. Many an old fable is a perfect allegory of this quest. The temptations and perils, the toils and adventures of its hero are faithful references to what the aspirant has always encountered in the past and will encounter in our own day. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

BRIGHTON STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH

Rancho Cordova, CA |

Now Selling!

NOW SELLING! Brighton Station at Cresleigh Ranch is Rancho Cordova’s newest home community! This charming neighborhood offers an array of home types with eye catching architecture styles such as Mid-Century Modern, California Modern, Prairie, and Contemporary Farmhouse.

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

https://cresleigh.com/brighton-station/

A Benign Influence Diffused itself from One and is Felt by the Sensitive, as if Borne on Telepathic Waves

November 5, 2019 1:44 am

Not to care, not to question, not to bother—all this had been part of the old way for me, one of shame and melancholy, an existence in which I assumed completely that we were cursed and were guilty victims of Original Sin. I have not seen us as worthy of ceremonies. Great social problems can be disregarded or responded to ineffectively if they have been carefully hidden, as in the case of people’s diaries, of if they are loudly and continuously talked about in distorted and misleading ways. This last has been the development in the field of alcoholism. As a result, new attempts to meet the problems of alcoholism are confronted with a task of uprooting old and fallacious conceptions in addition to the task of presenting new and more efficient responses to this age-old problem. To list some of the most common distortions: Alcohol is the cause of alcoholism; drunkenness and alcoholism are the same thing; alcoholism is often inherited and (completely incompatible with this and equally fallacious) alcoholism is due to lack of will power; alcohol causes 60 or 80 or 100 percent of crime; most alcoholics come from various social strata; “It Never Could Happen to Me’”; and so on and so on. All these ideas are fallacious, and this can be proved by logic, by facts, and by experimentation. However, to have people accept the proofs and act accordingly is far from easy. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

To appreciate the nature and extent of alcoholism, it is necessary to realize that there is a large body of organized misinformation and that this and the accompanying misconceptions are a part of the casual, undefined thinking of many, many, Americans. Unless this is realized, all that follows will be useless or misused. If one believes, for example, that alcoholism is a deviation from morality and that deviations from mortality should be punished, then, no matter what other knowledge or conceptions are present, one is going to punish the alcoholic by attitude, words, imprisonment, or otherwise. Punishment, however, will not alleviate, cure, or prevent any sickness, whether mumps, mental disease, or alcoholism. To this, the answer of the being with unconsciously distorted training is almost sure. One knows Paris, Britney, and Harry, punished after being drunk, never got drunk again or never took a drink again. One does not realize that this observation is irrelevant because drunkenness and alcoholism are quite different things. Misconceptions pile upon misconceptions. If this problem had been hidden rather than have been so loudly, so continuously, and so mistakenly talked about, it might have been better for any ultimate solution. What is an alcoholic? Alcoholics may be distinguished from other drinkers primarily by the purpose for which they drink. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

Some people drink to fulfill religious ritual, others in order to be polite, still others for a good time, or to make friends, to experiment, show off, get warm or cool, quench thirst, or because they like a particular alcoholic beverage as a condiment, or because they want to go on a spree. None of these is the purpose of the alcoholic, although one might claim any or al to satisfy some questioner. The alcoholic drinks because one has to if one is to go on living. One drinks compulsively; that is, a power greater than rational planning brings one to drinking and to excessive drinking. Most alcoholics hate liquor, hate drinking, hate the taste, hate the results, hate themselves for succumbing, but they cannot stop. Their drinking is as compulsive as the stealing by a kleptomaniac or the continual hand-washing of a person with a neurosis about cleanliness. It is useful to think of their drinking behavior as a symptom of some inner maladjustment which they do not understand and cannot control. The drinking may be the outward, obvious accompaniment of this more basic and hidden factor. From this statement alone it can be seen that alcoholism and drunkenness are different phenomena. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

All alcoholics exhibit drunkenness, but many who get drunk are not alcoholics. For example, the college boy on a spree, or a member of a group which drinks regularly (and usually to excess) on specific occasions, such as holidays, reunions, Saturday nights, may or may not get drunk, but they are not alcoholics unless their drinking is compulsive, brought about by some inner need or unresolved conflict. Compulsive drinking is a progressive condition. Its course may be rapid or extremely slow. Some few persons exhibit wild drinking behavior and uncontrollable need for alcohol immediately following their introduction to drinking. These individuals are probably in the category of psychotics; their alcoholism may be very obvious, but in actuality it is only a minor symptom of a major disease. A great many alcoholics have a history of 10 or 15 years of relatively controlled drinking. Sometimes in their career they may have experienced a few “blackouts” during drunkenness; they may have started sneaking a few drinks more than their companions. After a while it began to happen that on occasions when they “only intended to have a couple” they wound up drunk. They may have developed a need to rationalize their heavy drinking. Solitary drinking, morning drinking, and benders may appear as a regular practice anywhere from 4 to 7 years after the first blackouts. By this time the stage of alcoholism has been achieved, but it may not be recognized by the individual or by more than a few intimates. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

Attempts at control or at changing the pattern of drinking may follow. Feelings of remorse become persistent. The individual become socially isolated. One may develop deep anxieties, tremors, obvious physical symptoms. It may be 7 to 10 years from the time of one’s first “blackout,” 15 years since one’s first drink. By now, however, one is recognized by all, perhaps even by oneself, as an alcoholic. Some may take only three years to reach the undoubted stage of alcoholism. A clinical description of the alcoholic as one appears in the final stages may conclude this statement answering the question “What is an alcoholic?” No two alcoholics are identical. Some are sufficiently different to be labeled as different types. Nevertheless there are enough common characteristics in addition to the compulsive nature of the drinking and the progressive nature of the affliction to allow a general statement. Physically, many alcoholics in the later stages of this condition are characterized by undernourishment, highly irregular routine, inadequate sleep, and an over-all attitude of hopelessness, plus unrelieved tension. As a result they are highly susceptible to accidents and to other diseases. It should be carefully noted that these are not directly effects of alcohol. They follow upon the behavioral consequences of continued excessive drinking. Not all alcoholics present this picture since they may be closely protected by family, friends, or independent means. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

Psychologically the alcoholic in the later and last stages of his illness is characterized by being in continual and awful pain, by a set of responses which may be summed up as immaturity, and by an over-all attitude of extreme egocentricity. The pain is not merely or even importantly related to the physical aspects of one’s condition or the inconveniences occasioned by one’s type of life. It is centered around one’s inner feelings of self-depreciation, self-hate, self-pity, guilt, and all-encompassing remorse. Since one cannot explain this, one often attempts to hide it. Pain, however, is the constant comrade of the alcoholic. And a dreadful (in the deal meaning of the term) comrade it is. The immaturity of the alcoholic may be illustrated by one’s rapid mood swings, superficially sly rationalizations, adolescent self-consciousness, magnificent ideals which are almost inevitably linked with minuscule accomplishments, and juvenile techniques of hiding bottles, lying about drinking, and wheedling pity and free drinks. The alcoholic generally lacks interests in anything outside oneself and one’s problems. Such outside interests as one may manifest are usually temporary and directly and immediately related to a desire to show off or achieve some quick benefit. One’s continual comparison of all things to oneself, easy cynicism about anything not connected to oneself, self-pity, intense feelings of guilt and increasingly solitary existence, all bear witness to one’s egocentricity. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

Socially, the alcoholic in the final stages tends to be isolated, undersocialized. An amazing proportion of alcoholic males have never married. Of those who have, the proportioned of separated and divorced is many times that in the general population. The alcoholic frequently moves from place to place, from job to job. One has few if any close friends. Typically, the alcoholic does not do very much; one does not have hobbies, go to the movies, join in any group activities. As a result of this undersocialization or desocialization the alcoholic is susceptible to fewer stimuli than people with friends and groups membership. One receives fewer satisfactions and rewards. Punishment is less and less meaningful since the strength of punishment varies with its source; if a father or wife or friend punishes, the effect is far greater than if the actions comes from an impersonal source. Since the alcoholic has given up these associations, one is less stimulated, and only with difficulty is rewarded or punished effectively. One becomes one’s own source of stimulation, reward and punishment and thus one may vary greatly from the social norms, possess ridiculous ideals, vastly overpunish oneself, and lapse into minimum activity. Many diseases are iatrogenic—outcomes of the doctor-patient relationship or the impact of certain environments on patients. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

In research, we have recognized the social desirability variable. It has been investigated, and we recognize subjects’ tendencies to misrepresent their experience, to produce some desired image of themselves on the mind of the investigator is often a factor. Subjects in a research project are no fool. One knows that many times one’s future career may be at stake, depending upon how one has appeared through test and experimental findings. So one has a vested interest in such misrepresentation. It is very sane for one to protect oneself. One has no guarantee, at least in one’s experience, that one’s responses will help the psychologist to help one (the subject) fulfill oneself more fully. Our commitments as experimenters and the settings in which we work sometimes make it insane for a person to uncloak oneself. There was an experiment which studied the behavior of normal people under a particular situation, that of playing the roles of prisoners and guards respectively, in a mock prison. The general thesis of the experiment was perhaps the majority of people can be made to do almost anything by the strength of the situation they are put in, regardless of their morals, personal convictions, and values. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

More specifically, that in this experiment the prison situation transformed most of the subjects who played the role of guards into brutal sadists and most of those who played the role of prisoner into abject, frightened, and submissive me, some having such severe mental symptoms that they had to be released after a few days. In fact, the reactions of both groups were so intense that the experiment which was to have lasted for two weeks was broken off after six day. Students who were selected for the experiment answered an ad in the newspaper which asked for male volunteers to participate in a psychological study on prison life in return for payment $130.11 a day. The students who responded completed an extensive questionnaire concerning their family background, physical and mental health history, prior experience and attitudinal propensities with respect to sources of psychopathology (including their involvement in crime). Each respondent who completed the background questionnaire was interviewed by one of the two experimenters. Finally, the subjects who were judged to be most stable (physically and mentally), most mature, and least involved in anti-social behaviors were selected to participate in the study. On a random basis, half the Ss were assigned the role of guard, half were assigned to the role of prisoner. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

The final sample of subjects chose were administered a battery of psychological tests on the day prior to the start of the simulation, but to avoid any selective bias on the part of the experimenter-observers, scores were not tabulated until the study was completed. They had selected a sample of individuals who did not deviate from the normal range of the population, and who showed no sadistic or masochistic predisposition. The mock prison was constructed in a 35-foot section of a basement corridor in the psychological building at Stanford University. All subjects were told that they would be assigned either the guard or the prisoner ole on a completely random basis and all had voluntarily agreed to play either role for $130.11 per day for up to two weeks. They signed a contract guaranteeing a minimally adequate diet, clothing, housing and medical care as well as the financial remuneration in return for their stated “intention” of serving in the assigned role for the duration of the study. It was made explicit in the contract that those assigned to be prisoners should expect to be under surveillance (have little or no privacy), and to have some of their basic civil rights suspended during their imprisonment, excluding physical abuse. They were given no other information about what to expect nor instructions about behavior appropriate for a prisoner role. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

Those actually assigned to this treatment were informed by phone to be available at their place of residence on a given Sunday when we would start the experiment. The subjects assigned to be guards attended a meeting with the “Warden” (an undergraduate research assistant) and the “Superintendent” of the prison (the principal investigator). They were told that their task was to maintain the reasonable degree of order in the prison necessary for its effective functioning. Our intention not was to create a literal simulation of an American prison, but rather a functional representation of one. For ethical, moral, and pragmatic reasons we could not detain our subjects for extended or indefinite periods of time, we could not exercise the threat and promise of severe physical punishment, we could not allow homosexual or racist practices to flourish, nor could we duplicate certain other specific aspects of prison life. Nevertheless, we believed that we could create a situation with sufficient mundane realism to allow the role-playing participation to go beyond the superficial demands of their assignment into the deep structure of the characters they represented. To do so, we established functional equivalents for the activities and experiences of actual prison life which were expected to produce qualitatively similar psychological reactions in our subjects—feelings of power and powerlessness, of control and oppression, of satisfaction and frustration, or arbitrary rule and resistance to authority, of status and anonymity, of machismo and emasculation. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

How were the “prisoners” treated? They had been told to keep themselves ready for the beginning of the experiment. With the cooperation of the Palo Alto City Police Department all of the subjects assigned to the prisoner treatment were unexpectedly “arrested” at their residence. A police officer charged them with suspicion of burglary or armed robbery, advised them of their legal rights, handcuffed them, thoroughly searched them (often as curious neighbors look on) and carried them off to the police station in the rear of the police car. At the station they went through the standard routines of being fingerprinted, having an identification file prepared and then being placed in a detention cell. Each prisoner was blindfolded and subsequently driven by one of the experimenters and a subject-guard to our mock prison. Throughout the entire arrest procedure, the police officers involved maintained a formal, serious attitude, avoiding answering any questions of clarification as to the relation of this “arrest” to the mock study. Upon arrival at our experimental prison, each prisoner was stripped, sprayed with a delousing preparation (a deodorant spray) and made to stand alone naked for a while in the cell yard. After being given the uniform described previously and having an I.D. picture taken (“mug shot”), the prisoner was put in his cell and ordered to remain silent. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

Since “arrests” were carried out by the real police (one wonders about the legality of their participation in this procedure), as far as the subjects knew these were real charges, especially since the officers did not answer questions about the connection between the arrest and the experiment. What were the subjects to think? How were they to know that the “arrest” was no arrest; that the police had lent themselves to making these false accusations and to use force just to give more color to the experiment? The uniforms of the “prisoners” were peculiar. They consisted of loosely fitting muslin smocks with an identification number in front and back. No underclothes were work beneath these “dresses.” A light chain and lock were placed around one ankle. On their feet they wore rubber sandals and their hair was covered with a nylon stocking made into a cap. The prisoners’ uniforms were designed not only to deindividuate the prisoner but to be humiliating and serve as symbols of their dependence and subservience. The ankle chain was a constant reminder (even during their sleep when it hit the other ankle) of the oppressiveness of the environment. The stocking cap removed any distinctiveness associated with hair length, color or style (as does shaving of heads in some real prisons and the military). #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

The ill-fitting uniforms made the prisoners feel awkward in their movements; since these dresses were worn without undergarments, the unfirmed forced them to assume unfamiliar postures, more like those of a woman than a man—another part of the emasculating process of becoming a prisoner. What were the reactions of the prisoners and the guards to this situation during the six days of the experiment? The most dramatic evidence of the impact of this situation upon the participants was seen in the gross reactions of five prisoners who had to be released because of extreme emotional depression, crying, rage and acute anxiety. The pattern of symptoms was quite similar in four of the subjects and began as early as the second day of imprisonment. The fifth subject was released after being treated for a psychosomatic rash which covered portions of his body. Of the remaining prisoners, only two said they were not willing to forfeit the money they had earned in return for being “paroled.” When the experiment was terminated prematurely after only six days, all the remaining prisoners were delighted by their unexpected good fortune. In contrast most of the guards seemed to be distressed by the decision to stop the experiment and it appeared to us that they had become sufficiently involved in their roles that they now enjoyed the extreme control and power which they exercised and were reluctant to give up. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

None of the guards ever failed to come to work on time for their shift, and indeed, on several occasions guards remained on duty voluntarily and complaining for extra hours—without additional pay. The extremely pathological reactions which emerged in both groups of subjects testify to the power of the social forces operating, but still there were individual differences seen in styles of coping with this novel experience and in degrees of successful adaptation to it. Half the prisoners did endure the oppressive atmosphere, and not all the guards resorted to hostility. Some guards were tough but fair (“played by the rules”), some went far beyond their roles to engage in creative cruelty and harassment, while a few were passive and rarely instigated and coercive control over the prisoners. The percentage of actively sadistic guards, quite inventive in their techniques of breaking the spirit of the prisoners is estimated to be about one third. The rest are divided among the two other categories which are described, respectively as being tough but fair or good guards from the prisoner’s point of view since they did them small favors and were friendly; this is a very different characterization from that of being passive and rarely instigating coercive control, as expressed by a later report. It is believed that it proves that the situation alone can within a few days transform normal people into abject, submissive individuals or into ruthless sadists. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

However, if in spite of the whole spirit of this mock prison which, according to the concept of the experiment was meant to be degrading and humiliating (obviously the guards must have caught on to this immediately), two thirds of the guards did not commit sadistic acts for personal kicks, the experiment seems rather to prove that one can not transform people so easily into sadist by providing them with the proper situation. The difference between behavior and character matters very much in this context. It is one thing to behave according to sadistic rules and another thing to want to be and to enjoy being cruel to people. Still, character traits are often entirely unconscious and, furthermore, cannot be discovered by conventional psychological tests; as far as projective tests are concerned, such as the T.A.T or the Rorschach, only investigators with considerable experience in the study of unconscious process will discover much unconscious material. The data on the guards are open to question for still another reason. These subjects were selected precisely because they represented more or less average, normal men, and they were found to be without sadistic predispositions. This result contradicts empirical evidence which shows that the percentage of unconscious sadists in an average population is not zero. Some studies have shown this, and a skilled observer can detect it without the use of questionnaires or test. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

However, whatever the percentage of sadistic characters in a normal population may be, the complete absence of this category does not speak well for the aptness of the tests used with regard to this problem. Some of the puzzling results of the experiment are probably to be explained by another factor. The authors state that the subjects had difficulty in distinguishing reality from the role they were playing, and assume this to be a result of the situation; this is indeed true, but the experimenters built this result into the experiment. In the first place the prisoners were confused by several circumstances. The conditions they were told and under which they entered into the contract were drastically different from those they found. They could not possibly have expected to find themselves in a degrading and humiliating atmosphere. More important for the creation of the confusion is the cooperation of the police. Since it is most usual for police authorities to lend themselves to such an experimental game, it was very difficult for the prisoners to appreciate the difference between reality and role-playing. The report shows that they did not even know whether their arrest had anything to do with the experiment, and the officers refused to answer their questions about this connection. Would not any average person be confused and enter the experiment with a sense of puzzlement, of having been tricked, and of helplessness? #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

When some prisoners tried to break out of the mock situation, the guard prevented them by force. It seems that they were given the impression that only the parole board could give them permission to leave. One of the most remarkable incidents of the study occurred during a parole board hearing when each of five prisoners eligible for parole was asked by the senior author where he would be willing to forfeit all the money earned as a prisoner is he were to be paroled (released from the study). Three of the five prisoners said, “yes,” they would be willing to do this. Notice that the original incentive for participating in the study had been the promise of money, and they were, after only four days, prepared to give this up completely. And, more surprisingly when told this possibility would have to be discussed with members of the staff before a decision could be made, each prisoner got up quietly and was escorted by a guard back to his cell. If they regarded themselves simply as subjects participating in an experiment for money, there was no longer any incentive to remain in the study and they could have easily escaped this situation which had so clearly become aversive for them by quitting. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

Yet, so powerful was the control which the situation had come to have over them, so much a reality had this simulated environment become, that they were unable to see that their original and singular motive for remaining no longer obtained, and they returned to their cells to await a parole decision by their captors It seems that the prisoners became confused and did not know any longer what was what and who was who. Many people do not understand why anyone would conduct such a study. There is ample evidence of the effects of Hitler’s concentration camps and many credible studied done on prisons. This experiment allowed the researchers and guards to amuse themselves by sadistic behavior, and they did so without fearing any punishment. In real life, people cannot understand why they, who had always obeyed the law without question, were being persecuted. Even as they are unjustly imprisoned, the dared not oppose their oppress even in the thought, though it would have given them a self respect they were badly in need of. All they could do was plead, and many groveled. Since law and police had to remain beyond reproach, they accepted as just whatever the Gestapo did. The SS made fun of them, mistreated them badly, while at the same time enjoying scenes that emphasized their position of superiority. “Salvation is freedom,” reports 2 Nephi 2.4. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

Cresleigh Homes

Brighton Station at Cresleigh Ranch | Residence 3

Welcome to #BrightonStation Residence 3 at #CresleighRanch located in Rancho Cordova! Join Abbie Johnson as she walks through this beautiful two-story floor plan.

Visit our website to check out its many features and optional add-ons. Click the link: https://cresleigh.com/brighton-station/residence-3/

On this Journey there are Stages of Ascent, Stations of Understanding, Lights of Peace, and Shadows of Despair!

November 4, 2019 1:23 am

Pain fused with the love, undeniable pain. The expression of pain and love so fused in the face that I could hardly bear to look at it, aware suddenly of a huge pain inside me, inside my heart, pain blooming in me as if it were unstoppable, out of all control, and would soon be more than I could bear. I heard the sound of weeping only it had no sound. I heard it rising all around me the way the sound of falling rain can rise as it strikes more and more surfaces around one, pattering on streets and roofs and leaves and boughs. It is a normal evening at the coffee-bar where I am in the habit of dropping by. The kids are jiving and punching each other around in the juke-box room, an amateur rock-and-roll session is in violent practice upstairs somewhere, and some of us are gathered at the counter sucking Coca-Cola through straws. Through the big front window we can see a few of the boys horsing around on their hire-purchased motorbikes. Fat, moonfaced Dave walks in and asks us if we want a ride on his bike and we say no, we will hang around a while. Len buys Ginger and Dave and me Coca-Cola. He is on casual work now, he says, after quitting a warehouse where he moved fridges. “Keep on casual till they nick me,” he says. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

I tell Len that I have heard he was up at Notting Hill during the troubles. “Yeah,” Len replies, “three nights all in a row.” He is stating a fact, not boasting. “What were you doing up there?” I ask. “Hittin’ the folks,” he says. Dave, off his motorbike, offers that he spent only a single night “huntin’ folks.” Ginger, who resembles Jimmy Dean and likes being told about it, says, “Nah, that was not the way—all in a mob. Coppers see you. Thing to do, three, four of us, down a side street at night, in a fast car, jump out, do a chump, jump in. That way you can do a dozen chumps a night.” Len is a lanky, shamble-shouldered bleach-haired boy, with a tall thin blonde face and small blank eyes and virtually no upper eyelids. I ask Len if he enjoyed himself during the riots. He says, “Sure.” I ask him what he did. “Hit chumps,” he says and shrugs. Did many boys from the café go with him? No, not many. “It was the Fascists done the work up there,” Len says. How is he so sure? “I drove around, first night in a jeep with one of them. A reporter from one of the newspapers gets out of his car and asks us what the trouble is. This Fascist smashed him square in the face, ‘e did. Reporter got back in his car and rolled up all the windows.” Dave and Ginger say they chased a few chumps without much success. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

Dave says that his high point came when he led a mob of teenagers to St. Mark’s Crescent and pointed a milk bottle at a reporter’s house. Ginger had no individual exploits to his credit. He wears a brightly colored Palm Beach shirt and talks like an American radio comedian. He does not tell jokes, just maintains a patter of small, pseudo-ironical remarks. They listen while Len speaks of the Fascists. He says that, contrary to public belief, the Fascists still wear the black shirt with the silver lightning insignia. Is he a member of the Union Movement himself? With a quick dart of the long blonde head he says no, not a member, only a follower. “Fascists was active before all the troubles,” he says, “and now they are getting lots of members. Brown shirts started that way, did they not? I mean, it does not mean just because you start out small that you some day will not be over the whole country, does it?” Dave and Ginger remains neutral in the face of ideology. What Len was doing at Notting Hill was fine with them, but not when he wants to do it in uniform. I ask Len if it is the uniform that attracts him. He says no, not particularly, it is what the Fascists stand for. “Riddin’ Britain of the chumps,” he says. When I ask him what he has against the chumps, Dave and Ginger chime in eagerly. It is not so much traditional target they mind. It is the new people. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

Dave says, “Y’know, when I went in for my national assistance, all they did give me was forty-four quid after an argument. Crazy chump after me comes out with three hundred and fifty-five quid.” How did the chump manage this? Dave says the Chump claimed a family back in their home country. Ginger says, “They come here and they use all our money, lower our standards, that is what they do.” “Chumps live on forty-four quid a week,” says Ginger, “eatin’ cat food. It is the truth. I seen em’.” “Live like pigs,” says Dave. Len adds, “An’ the way they walk around, they got no respect. The clothes they wear. I seen one last night, suit the color of milk, milk mind you, black shoes with a green tassel, and with a girl.” Was the girl White? Len nods. He says, “Ever see the pants they wear? Big and wide up here, tiny and little at the bottom. Why do they have to dress that way? Crazy pants.” His own trousers are drain pipe, of a gray tweed material I am not familiar with. Ten minutes later he is to tell me that he had to sleep at a friend’s house a week ago because of a row with his old lady over his trousers. It boils down to this: the chumps live too high and live like pigs. When I ask them if they do not see a contradiction in this, Len with the plodding seriousness that is characteristic, says sincerely, after a little confused thought, “They live in dirt in private and like kings the rest of the time.” He says he used to live in Notting Hill but that a chump bought the house and threw them out. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

“The coppers,” says Len, “they was all on the side of the chumps.” Dave and Ginger nod vigorously. I say that the that the chumps I have spoken with claim differently. “Chu,” exclaims Ginger, “see what we mean? Liars, all the chumps. Cannot trust any of ‘em.” Do they know any “chumps” personally? Vague replies. Len grins slyly, more animation than I usually get from him. “Yeah, I knew one,” he says. “Hit him over the head with my shovel.” It happened three weeks ago, at work. “See what I mean?” says Len. “I was working on this building site. Driving a dump truck. I got sick, y’know. Out two days. While I was gone this chump tells the boss he can drive a truck too. When I comes back there he is in my cab. I tell him to get down out of my truck and he says no he will not. So me and my mates pull him down and I hit him over the head with my shovel.” Ginger says, “What are you gonna do with people who come to take your jobs? How much you willin’ to work for, Len?” Len says, five hundred and fifty to seven hundred and seven hundred fifty quid a week. “No,” says Ginger, “I mean, how much would you ask for?” Len says staunchly, “I would work for four hundred and fifty quid.” “See,” says Ginger. “Guv’nor knows Len will not work for less than four hundred and fifty quid, a chump will come along who says two fifty quid and he is the one who gets the job.” Len, Dave and Ginger all left school at 15. They are 18 now. Len is a casual laborer, Dave a public service worker, while Ginger is an assistant to a skilled craftsman. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

Dave says, “Four years.” Ginger says, “Four almighty years.” Len says, “Four years is a long time.” The boys are genuinely in awe. Len snaps out of it. “Four bloody years for that? Salmon, that Yid.” When the boys talk it is with a peculiar, rushing, staccato tempo which is the trademark of their group. Dave and Ginger swear the chumps are lazy, and that the “guv’nors” prefer them to the native-born Englishmen; that they live on nothing a week, and spend all their money on offensive hedonisms, and are worse than savages. Do they resent the chumps for fighting back? “Bloody well do,” says Dave. “What right they got comin’ to this country, anyway? We get the worst types.” All agree that the chump immigrants ought to be returned to their source, but if they are not, to serve docilely as fair game for mobs. Len says, “On the second day I got me a few. Fell in with this crowd chasing chumps. We saw a chump conductor on a trolley bus. We chased it. All the people in the bus ran out. But I did not get to the chump. The mob was in there before me.” I asked Len I he was disappointed. He nods sadly. “That is all right,” he says. “Later on, on the corner there was this gang, and they was kicking this chump on the ground. I ran up and got a few kicks in too.” I asked him if he thought this was fair. “Yeah, it was fair,” he says. Dave and Ginger leave for a ride on Dave’s motorbike. Len and I watch them roar away. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

The quest for power is, as we have seen, a protection against helplessness and against insignificance. This latter function it shares with the quest for prestige. The neurotic that falls in this group develops a stringent need to impress others, to be admired and respected. One will have fantasies of impressing others with beauty or intelligence or with some outstanding accomplishment; one will spend money lavishly and conspicuously; one will have to be able to talk about the latest books and plays, and to know prominent people. One will not be able to have anyone as a friend, husband, wife, employee, who does not admire one. If one does not receive admiration, one’s entire self-esteem rests on being admired, and shrinks to nothing. Because of one’s excessive sensitivity, and because one is continually sensing humiliations, life is a constant ordeal. Often one is unaware of feeling humiliated, because the knowledge would be too painful; but whether aware of it or not, one reacts to any such feeling with rage proportionate to the pain felt. Hence this attitude leads to a constant generation of new hostility and new anxiety. For purposes of mere description such a person could be called narcissistic. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

If one is considered dynamically, however, the term is misleading because, though one is constantly preoccupied with inflating one’s ego, one does it not primarily for the sake of self-love, but for the sake of protecting oneself against a feeling of insignificance and humiliation, or, in beneficial terms, for the sake of repairing a crushed self-esteem. The more distant one’s relations with others, the more one’s quest for prestige can be internalized; it appears then as a need to be infallible and wonderful in one’s own eyes. Every shortcoming, whether recognized as such or only felt dimly, is considered humiliation. Protection against helplessness and insignificance or humiliation can be had also, in our culture, by striving for possession, inasmuch as wealth gives both power and prestige. The irrational quest for possession is so widespread in our culture that one recognizes that it is not a general human instinct, either in the form of an acquisitive instinct or in the form of a sublimation of biologically founded drives. Even in our culture compulsive striving for possession vanishes as soon as the anxieties determining it are diminished or removed. The specific fear against which possession is a protection is that of impoverishment, destitution, dependence on others. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

The fear of impoverishment may be a whip driving a person to work incessantly and never miss a chance of earning money. The defensive character of this striving shows in one’s inability to use one’s money for the sake of greater enjoyment. The quest for possession need not be directed only toward money or material things, but may appear as a possessive attitude toward others and serve as a protection against losing affection. As the phenomenon of possessiveness is well known, particularly from its appearance in marriages, where law supplies a legal basis for such claims, and as its characteristics are much the same as those described when discussing the quest for power, I shall not give special examples here. The strivings I have described served, as I have said, not only as reassurance against anxiety but also as a means of releasing hostility. Depending on which striving is dominant, this hostility takes the form of a tendency to domineer, a tendency to humiliate or a tendency to deprive others. The domineering characteristic of the neurotic striving for power does not necessarily appear openly as hostility toward others. It may be disguised in socially valuable or humanistic forms, appearing for example as an attitude of giving advice, liking to manage other persons’ affairs, taking the initiative or lead. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

However, if there is hostility concealed in such attitudes, the other persons—children, marriage partners, employees—will feel it and react either with submissiveness or with opposition. The neurotic oneself is usually unaware of the hostility involved. Even if one becomes infuriated when things do not go one’s way, one still maintains one’s belief that one is essentially a gentle soul who is annoyed only because people are so ill advised to oppose one. What actually takes place, however, is that the neurotic’s hostility is pressed into civilized forms and breaks out when one does not succeed in having one’s own way. The occasions of one’s irritation may be of a kind which other persons would not feel as opposition, such as a mere difference in opinion or failure to follow one’s advice. Yet considerable rage may be generated by such trifles. One might consider the domineering attitude a safety valve through which a certain amount of hostility may be discharged in a non-destructive way. Since it is itself an attenuated expression of hostility it provides a means of checking purely destructive impulses. The rage arising from opposition may be repressed and, as we have seen, the repressed hostility may then result in new anxiety. This may manifest itself in depression or fatigue. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

Since the occasions which arouse these reactions are so insignificant that they escape attention, and since the neurotic is not aware of one’s own reactions, such depressions or anxiety states may seem to have no external stimulation. Only accurate observation can gradually uncover the connection between the stimulating event and the subsequent reactions. A further peculiarity resulting from the compulsion to domineer is the person’s incapacity to have any fifty-fifty relationships. One either has to lead or one feel entirely lost, dependent and helpless. One is so autocratic that everything falling short of complete domination is felt as subjugation. If one’s anger is repressed the repression may result in one’s feeling depressed, discouraged, and fatigued. What is felt as helplessness may, however, be only a circuitous way of assuring dominance or of expression hostility for not being able to lead. A woman, to cite an example, was taking a walk with her husband in a foreign city, and up to a certain point, she had studied a map in advance, and too the lead. However, when they came to places and streets she had not studied on the map, and where she consequently felt insecure, she yielded the guidance of the walk altogether to her husband. And although she had been gay and active until then, she suddenly felt overwhelmed by fatigue, and could hardly put one foot before the other. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

Most of us know relationships between marriage partners, siblings, friends, in which the neurotic person acts like a slave driver, using one’s helplessness as a whip in order to compel the other to serve one’s will, in order to command unending attention and help. It is characteristic of these situations that the neurotic person never benefits from the efforts made for one, but responds only with renewed complaints and renewed demands, or worse, with accusations that one is neglected and abused. The same behavior can be observed in the process of analysis. Patients of this kind may ask desperately for help, yet not only will fail to follow any suggestion, but they will express resentment at not being helped. If they do receive help by reaching an understanding of some peculiarity they immediately fall back into the previous vexation and, as if nothing had been done, they will manage to erase the insight which was the result of the analyst’s hard labor. Then the patient compels the analyst to put in new efforts which again are doomed to failure. The patient may receive a double satisfaction from such a situation: by presenting oneself as helpless one receives a sort of triumph at being able to compel the analyst to slave in one’s service. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

At the same time this strategy tends to elicit feelings of helplessness in the analyst, and thus, since one’s own entanglements prevent one from dominating in a constructive way, one finds a possibility of destructive domination. Needless to say, the satisfaction gained in this way is entirely unconscious, just as the technique used in order to gain it is applied unconsciously. All that the patient oneself is aware of is that one is in great need of help, and does not get it. Hence the patient not only feels completely justified in one’s own eyes in acting as one does, but one also feels that one has a good right to be angry with the analyst. At the same time one cannot help registering the fact that one is playing an insidious game and consequently one is afraid of discovery and retaliation. Therefore in defense one feels it necessary to strengthen one’s position, and one does this by turning the tables. It is not that one is secretly carrying out some destructive aggression, but that the analyst is neglecting, cheating and abusing one. This position, however, can be assumed and maintained with conviction only if one really feels victimized. Not only has a person in this condition no interest in recognizing that one is not maltreated, but on the contrary one has a strong interest in maintaining one’s belief. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

One’s insistence that one is being victimized often gives rise to the impression that one wants to be maltreated. In reality one wants it as little as any of us wants it, but one’s belief in being maltreated has acquired too important a function to be given up easily. There may be so much hostility involved in the domineering attitude that it creates a new anxiety. This may then result in such inhibitions as an inability to give orders, to be decisive, to express a precise opinion, with the result that the neurotic often appears unduly complaint. This in turn leads one to mistake one’s inhibition for an innate softness. The need to satisfy one’s need for affection, approval, and feel safe is so compelling that everything one does is oriented toward its fulfillment. In the process one develops certain qualities and attitudes that mold one’s character. Some of these could be called endearing: one becomes sensitive to the needs of others—within the frame of what one is able to understand emotionally. For example, though one is likely to be quite oblivious to a detached person’s wish to be aloof, one will be alert to another’s need for sympathy, help, approval, and so on. One tries automatically to live up to the expectations of others, or to what one believes to be their expectations of others, or to what one believes to be their expectations, often to the extent of losing sight of one’s own feelings. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

One becomes unselfish, self-sacrificing, undemanding—expect for one’s unbound desire for affection. One becomes complaint, overconsiderate—within the limits possible for one—overappreciative, overgrateful, generous. One blinds oneself to the fact that in one’s heart of hearts one does not care much for others and tends to regard them as hypocritical and self-seeking. However, if I may use conscious terms for what goes on unconsciously—one persuades oneself that one likes everyone, that they are all nice and trustworthy, a fallacy which not only makes for heartbreaking disappointments but adds to one’s general insecurity. These qualities are not as valuable as they appear to the person oneself, particularly since one does not consult one’s own feelings or judgment but gives blindly to others all that one is driven to want from them—and because one is profoundly disturbed if the returns fail to materialize. The belief that we have to travel to far places for the light of Truth is not really true but our own feebleness may have to make it true. As soon as we settle down in hope and confidence to discover the deeper forces within ourselves they begin to become active. We delude ourselves with the dream that we are travelling to Italy or to Austria; it is not we who are travelling, but the ship, plane, train, or car. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

We only travel when our souls move out of their narrow encasements and seek a larger life. And that can happen anywhere: it might be at our own familiar fireside at the bidding of an illumined book; it might come, of course, with our first view of the Winchester Mansion. However, merely to move our bodies from one place to a distant one, without a corresponding movement of the soul, is not travel; it is dissipation. It is then just a matter of consuming and taking in power which is already yours. The strength of your opposition will depend on the intensity of these hindrances that keep the various levels of your consciousness isolated from each other. Preparation for this work is important. Your thoughts, words, and deeds must reflect the objective of overcoming the specific force. You are a living God. Act as one and devour the tyrant. Not just for your liberation but the liberation of all of creation. Win. Become a cyclone of love and light which is noting, yet everything in existence. The enemy will have nothing to attack. They will have no strategy to counter for they are facing the divine source of self which is anthropomorphic incarnate manifestation of God upon the corporeal plane. “For behold, the Lord had blessed them so long with riches of the World that they had not been stirred up to anger, to wars, nor to bloodshed,” reports Helaman 6.17. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

CRESLEIGH RIVERSIDE AT PLUMAS RANCH

Plumas Lake, CA | from the low $400,000’s

Now Selling!

Cresleigh Riverside is now selling! Nestled at the southern end of Plumas Lake, bordering an orchard to the west, Cresleigh Riverside is home to the largest home sites in the three Plumas Ranch communities. Its executive-style residences feature space and amenities that are well beyond the norm – many on country lots that back up to the Ranch’s adjacent fruit orchards. With four floor plans available, we are certain you will find the home that fits your needs and lifestyle. Popular design elements include open floor plans, large kitchen islands, and flex spaces are staples in Cresleigh homes. Additional game rooms, bedroom space and three-car garages provide other custom possibilities.

Residence Three is the largest of the single story homes offered in Cresleigh Riverside. At 2,827 square feet you’ll be hard pressed to a contemporary floorplan that offers this much space. There are four bedrooms, two and one half bathrooms, and a three car garage. Utilize the den as your own private study or convert into an optional fifth bedroom if needed. The Dining Room and Kitchen are well situated to make entertaining a breeze. The location of the Master Suite makes it feel like a separate wing from the rest of the home allowing for maximum privacy and retreat.

https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-riverside-at-plumas-ranch/

Evil Flows from Poisoned Wells; Good Flows from Pure and Crystal Fountains, Dazzling a Silvery Shower of Love and Beauty!

November 2, 2019 1:40 am

We seek to perfect what we are, not to constantly alter it. We seek to find something that is a true expression of our soul with which is to shape what makes up our form. However, there is no need for you to trouble yourself over these things. If your reasoning is correct, it should throw some light upon the peculiar quality of property delinquency in the delinquent subculture. We have already seen how the rewardingness of a college-boy and middle-class way of life depends, to a great extent, upon general respect for property right. In an urban society, in particular, the possession and display of property are the most ready and public badges of reputable social class status and are, for that reason, extraordinarily ego-involved. That property actually is a reward for middle-class morality and the possession of property. The middle-classes have, then, a strong interest in scrupulous regard for property rights, not only because property is intrinsically valuable but because the full enjoyment of their status requires that status be readily recognizable and therefore that property adhere to those who earn it. The cavalier misappropriation or destruction of property, therefore, is not only a diversion or diminution of wealth; it is an attack on the middle-class where their egos are most vulnerable. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

Group stealing, institutionalized in the delinquent subculture, is not just a way of getting something. It is a means that is the antithesis of sober and diligent labor in a calling. It expresses contempt for a way of life by making its opposite a criterion of status. Money and other valuables are not, as such, despised by the delinquent. For the delinquent, and the non-delinquent alike, money is a most glamorous and efficient means to a variety of ends and one cannot have too much of it. But, in the delinquent subculture, the stolen dollar has an odor of sanctity that does not attach to the dollar saved or the dollar earned. This delinquent system of values and way of life does its job of problem-solving most effectively when it is adopted as a group solution. We have stressed that the efficacy of a given change in values as a solution and therefore the motivation to such a change depends heavily upon the availability of reference groups within which the deviant values are already institutionalized, or whose members would stand to profit from such a system of deviant values if each were assured of the support and concurrences of the others. So it is with delinquency. We do not suggest that joining in the creation or perpetuation of a delinquent subculture is the only road to delinquency. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

We do believe, however, that for most delinquents delinquency would not be available as a response were it not socially legitimized and given a kind of respectability, albeit by a restricted community of fellow-adventurers. In this respect, the adoption of delinquency is like the adoption of the practice of appearing at the office in open-collar and shirt sleeves. It is much more comfortable, is it more sensible than full regalia? Is it neat? Is it dignified? The arguments in the affirmative will appear much more forceful if the practice is already established in one’s milieu or if one sense that others are prepared to go along if someone makes the first tentative gestures. Indeed, to many of those who sweat and chafe in ties and jackets, the possibility of an alternative may not even occur until they discover that it has been adopted by their colleagues. This way of looking at delinquency suggests an answer to a certain paradox. Countless mothers have protested that their “Simon” was a good boy until he fell in love it a certain bunch. However, the mothers of each of Simon’s companions hold the same view with respect to their own offspring. It is conceivable and even probable that some of these mothers are naïve, that one or more of these youngsters are “rotten apples” who infected the others. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

We suggest, however, that all of the mothers may be right, that there is a chemistry in the group situation itself which engenders that which was not there before, that group interaction is a sort of catalyst which releases potentialities not otherwise visible. This is especially true when we are dealing with a problem of status-frustration. Status, by definition, is a grant of respect from others. A new system of norms, which measure status by criteria which one can meet, is of no value unless others are prepared to apply those criteria, and others are not likely to do so unless one is prepared to reciprocate. We have referred to a lingering ambivalence in the delinquent’s own value system, an ambivalence which threatens the adjustment one has achieved and which is met through the mechanism of reaction-formation. The delinquent may have to contend with another ambivalence, in the area of one’s status sources. The delinquent subculture offers him status as against other children of whatever social level, but is offers hum this status in the eyes of one’s fellow delinquents only. To the extent that there remains a desire for recognition from groups whose respect has been forfeited by commitment to a new subculture, one’s satisfaction in one’s solution is imperfect and adulterated. One can perfect one’s solution only by rejecting as status sources those who reject one. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

This too may require a certain measure of reaction-formation, going beyond indifference to active hostility and contempt for all those who do not share one’s subculture. One becomes all the more dependent upon one’s delinquent gang. Outside that gang one’s status position is now weaker than ever. The gang itself tends toward a kind of sectarian solidarity, because the benefits of membership can only be realized in active face-to-face relationships with group members. This interpretation of the delinquent subculture had important implications for the sociology of social problems. People are prone to assume that those things which we define as evil and those which we define as good have their origins in separate and distinct features of our society. Evil flows from poisoned wells; good flows from pure and crystal fountains. The same source cannot feed both. Our view is different. It holds that those values which are at the core of the American way of life, which help to motivate the behavior which we most esteem as typically American, are among the major determinants of that which we stigmatize as pathological. More specifically, it holds that the problems of adjustments to which the delinquent subculture is a response are determined, in part, by those very values which respectable society holds most sacred. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

The same value system, impinging upon children differently equipped to meet it, is instrumental in generating both delinquency and respectability. The rebel insists that one’s identity be respected; one fights to preserve one’s intellectual and spiritual integrity against the suppressive demands of one’s society. One must range oneself against the group which represents to one conformism, adjustment, and the death of one’s own originality and voice. Continuously through human history and through the life-span of each one of us, there goes on this dialectical process between individual and society, person and group, being and community. When either pole of the dialectic is neglected, impoverishment of the personality sets in. Every being has from time to time impulses to shock one’s society, fantasies of outraging one’s neighbors. Paradoxically enough, one’s own continued mental vitality depends on this. Also, paradoxically, the community itself, even though it condemns the outrage, gets its health, vitality and new growth from the outrage. This shows once again that human beings do not grow in one-dimensional fashion toward something better and better, but rather by a dynamic process, a thesis and antithesis; they grow down at the same time as they grow up, deeper while they grow higher. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

The Garden of Eden myth portrays the rebellion as being against God. And, indeed, it is against authority, against the status quo, against whatever clings to the values of the past rather than looks to the future. What is omitted from the rhetoric in this rebellion is that the outcome is not either/or, but a dialectical interplay: we need authority as we rebel against it. We rebel against the culture with the very language and knowledge that we learned from the culture; we revolve against or parents while loving them at the same time. The rebel also needs one’s society. One’s language, one’s concepts, one’s way of relating to others all come from that culture which one now opposes. One rises from the society, criticizes it, and aligns oneself with those who are trying to reform it; and all the while one is a member of the very culture one opposes. If one thinks of civilization as ungrateful in killings its prophets, one also sees the absurdity of the whole question of gratitude or ingratitude in the behavior of the rebel. This is why I call the relationship dialectic. It is a dynamic interrelationship in which each pole exists by virtue of the other pole—as one changes, the other does likewise. Beings therefore have a right to fear that society may unhuman them. Yet no being has made the best of one’s gifts without the setting [up] of a helpful society, such as the Greek or the Italian city states. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

Always the animal drive for self, the jungle of nature, waits to disrupt one’s city. And yet that force, anti-social as it is, is not all alien or all bad. The mind that drives it is full of human wishes. The Greeks remembered that every mind, good as well as bad, takes strength from our animal body. It is the nature of society to suppress that individual person. Pointing this out, it is a surprise that people do often talk as through the group ought to behave differently. Society can be spoken of as being bureaucratic, juggernaut, supertechnocratic, all implying that while society has its faults, we are what we are. On one hand, this arises from a utopianism—the expectation that when we develop a society which trains us rightly, we will all be in fine shape. On the other hand, it is like a child wheeling one’s parents because they are not taller or in some other way different from what they are. All of which society cannot be expected to be. For society, on one side, is us. The rebel is a split personality that one realizes one’s society nursed one, met one’s needs, and gave one security to develop one’s potentialities; yet one smarts under its constraints and finds it stifling. The rebel is continually struggling to make the society into a community. People feel they rebel, therefore they exist. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

In our particular day, the rebel fights the mechanizing bureaucratic trends not because these in themselves are evil, but because they are the paramount modern channels for the dehumanizing of beings, the stultifying loss of integrity, and the indignity of beings. One fights affluence for a similar reason, for one thinks that an abundance of wealthy may erode power, and riches are particularly dangerous for the well-being of republics because corruption has a tendency to set in and take precedence over justice, family values and human rights. The rebel also may be found in the colorful, albeit sometimes tattered, clothes of the dropout. The young person rightly sensing the threat to one’s values and to one’s life in the Syrian war, pollution, and the dehumanization which seems to accompany our vast technological progress, drops out of society for a period. One’s action is protest against the rigidity of society, but it is also a time in which one can find oneself. It is similar to the withdrawal of Jesus to the wilderness to find inner integrity before beginning their ministries. It is also similar to that period of wandering taken by the students of the Middle Ages as an integral part of their education. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

True, the dropout can never completely deny one’s culture, never entirely sever one’s umbilical cord. One takes it with one to the mountain or the dessert in one’s language, one’s way of thinking, and even as an object against which to protest. However, in one’s withdrawal one can get new perspective, a new awareness of oneself which may stand one in very good stead later on. I have had the impression in talking with hipsters that for some of them the year or so they dropped out protected them from psychosis. It gave them some breathing time in the burdensome sequence of nursery, elementary school, high school, college, graduate school—during which many of them find themselves in a genuine danger of suffocation. Often the dropping out serves a purpose similar to psychoanalysis. No one would argue that the dropout has not selected a more satisfactory way of working things out, not to say less expensive for all concerned, than a stint in a mental hospital. It is entirely possible that one comes back from one’s seemingly lighthearted wanderings with a new seriousness in one’s relationship to oneself and one’s society. Human beings can be conditioned into any form of Nazilike obedience or antlike organization of colonies. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

However, we must not forget at the same moment that there are individuals who from time to time pull themselves and oppose the group even to the extent of going to prison. Edward Snowden, the Berrigan brothers, and Bonhoeffer come to mind. Daniel Ellsberg’s decision to make the Pentagon Papers available to the people was the one tangible step he felt he could take to shorten the Vietnam war. Some people become rebels because they have empathy for the suffering of people, especially helpless children. Rebellion can be a flamboyant, long struggle for psychological integrity. However, whatever the motives, it is clear that rebels step out because in many cases they are performing acts against law and order. With social media, people are less dependent on the news because they can get their points out using mass communication and modern technology in the service of the rebellion. There is no escape from living through this dialectical conflict of individual and society. The only choice is whether one will live it through constructively and with zest and dignity or waste one’s energy and substance protesting against a Universe which is not organized according to one’s living. No matter how much society is changed—and much of it cries to high Heaven for change—there still will exist the fundamental dialectical situation of individuation against the conformist, leveling tendencies of the society. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

Some societies have recognized and made allowance for the destructive, protesting, anarch needs of the citizens. Then you get situations like what is going on in China. Tens of thousands of protesters in Hong Kong are peacefully marching on the 22^nd anniversary of the former colony’s handover from Britain to China, but also a group of protestors took their frustrations out, as hundreds of young protestors broke into the heart of the government of Hong Kong’s legislative council. We need our ways of mocking authority. We have our Halloween and April Fools’ Day. However, we need ways of channeling our secret dreams of outraging our neighbors and scandalizing the town fathers—in short, of symbolically expressing our dreams of revenge on a society that thwarts and confines us. An interesting example of this is the scapegoat king, who accepts the scepter knowing that he will be killed during some riotous saturnalia in which all authority is mocked. And consider the mocking of ultimate religious authority in the crucifixion of God’s son, Jesus. The expression of our disdain and mocking—indeed, of all these so-called negative and destructive emotions—enables us then to see and experience more clearly the beneficial side of religious conviction. We can change the forms of these beneficial and negative sides of human nature, but we cannot change the fact of them without amputating part of human experience and impoverishing ourselves. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

Are not the excesses in American life—one of which is violence—symptoms in part of a lack of sound opportunities to let out the secret dreams of revenge on the society that thwarts and contains the individual. You cannot in fact bottle up these deep feelings of protest in a World as mechanical as ours and think that you will syphon them off casually in lacy thrillers and in little evasins of the forces of order. Anti-social feelings in a hierarchy society like ours are first a power, then a commodity on which some unscrupulous leader can raise to fame, and become the spokes persons for the dream of violence of all the underrepresented. The recognition of the value of the rebel would go a long way in channeling such daimonic forces in constructive directions. For the rebel does what the rest of us would like to do but do not dare. Not that Christ willingly takes on Himself the sins and the scorns of beings; He acts, lives, and dies, vicariously for the rest of us. This is what makes Him a rebel. The rebel and the savior then turn out to be the same figure. Through his rebellion the rebel saves us. We see here another demonstration of my previous thesis—that civilization needs the rebel. The possibilities of the human being are unlimited, and that statement can be de-energizing. If you take it at face value, there is no real problem anymore. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

Every problem will sooner or later be overcome by these unlimited possibilities; there remain only temporary difficulties that will go away on their own accord when the time comes. Saying that possibilities are unlimited to a person who has not figured out how to overcome a situation, however, is like putting someone into a canoe and pushing one out into the Atlantic toward England with the cheery comment, “The sky is the limit.” The canoer is only too aware of the fact that an inescapably real limit is also the bottom of the ocean. There is the inescapable physical limitation of death. We can postpone our death slightly, but nevertheless each of us will die and at some future time unknow to and unpredictable by us. Sickness is another limit. When we overwork, we get ill in one form or another. There are obvious neurological limits. If the blood stops flowing to the brain for as little as a couple of minutes, a stroke or some other kind of serious damage occurs. Despite the fact that we can improve our intelligence to some degree, it remains radically limited by our physical and emotional environment. There are also metaphysical limitations which are even more interesting. We can blind ourselves to reality and come to grief. True, we can surpass to some extent the limitations of our family backgrounds or our historical situations, but such transcendence can occurs only to those who accept the fact of their limitation to begin with. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

For seekers of truth, real fruit is only borne when one seeks within, for the indwelling God, who author of our soul. The question of how far one will be prepared to travel in this quest has no geographical reference. It is a metaphorical one and refers only to the time one can give each day to the exercises, studies, and devotions, as well as to the moral ideals one can bring oneself to pursue. One is not asked for more than one feels one can humanly give under one’s present circumstances and responsibilities. We do not need to cross the sea to find God—the Word is nigh thee, is in thy heart. To come to know our true divine power, we must continually become something greater and therefore that which we were must come to an end. Immortality through it sounds good on the surface in an exoteric sense is truly the source of attachment and fear of change. Embracing God is overcoming perfection. Through the depths of your soul you must also come to realize that all systems of enslavement which emanate from this concept of external divinity are equally useless when compared to your potential. Simply reading and understanding it intellectually is not enough. It must be experiences through the work itself so that you have become stronger in faith, so strong that you can rise above stress and anxiety. “They were in captivity, and again the Lord did deliver them out of bondage by the power of his word; and we were brought into this land, and here we began to establish the church of God throughout this land also,” reports Alma 5.5. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15

Of Luxuries Bright, Milky Soft and Rosy– Shall Not the Judge of All the Earth do Right?

October 30, 2019 11:09 pm

I want you to go to New York. New York is the capitol of the World. And I want you to go to school there. You are to have other companions now, good, decent security guards who will keep you safe. I want you to have the finest education. Remember, whatever you have suffered, no matter how bad it has been, you can use that, use that to be a stronger person. Once people believed that the World was flat; however, science has proved that the World is round. Now in spite of that, one still believes that life is flat and goes from birth to death. However, life is probably round and much superior in extension and capacity to the hemisphere known to us at present. Future generations will probably enlighten us on this so interesting subject; and then science itself might arrive—willy0nilly at conclusions relation to the other half of existence. We respect the voyager, the explorer, the climber, the cosmonaut. It makes far more sense to me as a valid project—indeed, as a desperately and urgently required project for our time—to explore the inner space and time of consciousness. In over 100 cases where we studied the actual circumstances around the social event when one person comes to be regarded as schizophrenic, it seems to us that without exception the experience and behavior that get labeled schizophrenic is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

Schizophrenia can be a potential breakthrough as well as breakdown. Some schizophrenics are exceptionally bright and sensitive. They cannot dismiss the lies and distortions that beset them (indeed, all of us). They are extremely vulnerable, therefore, and experience full range of degradations. At the same time, they cannot tolerate these degradations. They do not know how to handle or rechannel them. So they build massive defenses against them, withdrawing, dissociating, or exploding. Yet, these excesses are also potentialities. They can, if properly integrated, signify the awakenings of freer minds. They can point beyond stifling patterns and pave the way to more creative, flexible lifestyles. Roman clap-trap? To the contrary. Consider such luminaries as Blake, Van Gogh, and Nietzsche. Consider numerous studies of the creative process. I believe that the key to significant life change is to be found in recovering one’s centering of life in one’s subjective vision. Genuine insight is to my mind is inner-sight, subjective vision. So-called insight that is chiefly derived from the therapist’s perceptions and interpretations is not inward-seeing; it is objective information about the person the patient has been, but is not evocative of one’s present being. I have always wanted to be one of the right people, always since my earliest recollections. My mother was a great admirer of cultured people. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

Very early I somehow got the idea that cultured people had a different skin texture than most people—maybe it was because another favorite word of hers described cultured people as finer. Being right is so important and so easily lost. Obviously, being right means pleasing the teachers. Clearly, being right means being like Dad, who is loving and dependable. And so the explorations go. In some ways, I get confirmation of being right—recognitions, offices, approval. However, always the secret self must be hidden, that I know it right. It is shameful because it is emotional and unpractical, because it really wants to play many times when I force it to work, because it likes to daydream instead of being realistic. To selves: gradually one becomes more public, the other more hidden. We discover with how crippled and stifled a life can be when it is half-lived, half-listened to, and half-searched. Attending to the process of becoming aware, of inner searching, is another healing process. It is the capacity to reinterpret what cannot be denied. It might also be simply called the capacity for creative change. Such capacity means turning one’s dual nature into rewarding personal and professional activity, including enjoying one’s family, teaching and practicing psychotherapy. For clients and many of us, creative change also means a wealth of personal and career transformations with fresh ways to reunite and reframe our lives. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

Something more has emerged from the explorations of my awareness…Something has been created. New meanings, new perceptions, new relationships, new possibilities now exit where they were not to be found before. In short, my inner vision is a creative process that does more than observe what is already at hand; it brings into being fresh possibilities. This is the astonishing and creative possibility latent in our being. Life that is searched and found choice, that chose and found change, that changed and found power. Again and again, I find that those to whom I speak or write take other—and to me, lesser—point as more fresh or meaningful. And yet, it is this very knowing as distinct from knowing about, which must be taken seriously; it is the World which so often calls out to be bridged. It is our lost sense, the inner awareness that has the potential to let each of us live in wholeness and with true realization of his or her unique nature. [And] it is our avenue toward the most profound meaning of life and the Universe. It is a plausible assumption that the working-class boy whose status is low in middle-class terms cares about that status, that this status confronts him with a genuine problem of adjustment. To this problem of adjustment there are a variety of conceivable responses, of which participation in the creation and the maintenance of the delinquent subculture is one. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

What does the delinquent response have to offer? Let us be clear, first, about what this response is. The hallmark of the delinquent subculture is the explicit and wholesale repudiation of middle-class standards and the adoption of their very antithesis. The corner-boy culture is not specifically delinquent. Where it leads to behavior which may be defined as delinquent, for instance, truancy, it does so not because nonconformity to middle-class norms defines conformity to corner-boy norms, but because conformity to middle-class norms interferes with conformity to corner-boy norms. The corner-boy plays truant because he does not like school, because he wishes to escape from a dull and unrewarding and perhaps humiliating situation. However, truancy is not defined as intrinsically valuable and status-giving. The member of the delinquent subculture plays truant because good middle-class (and working-class) children do not play truant. Corner-boy resistance to being herded and marshaled by middle-class figures is not the same as the delinquent’s floating and jeering of those middle-class figure and active ridicule of those who submit. The corner boy’s ethic of reciprocity, his quasi-communal attitude toward the property of in-group members, is shared by the delinquent. However, this ethic of reciprocity does not sanction the delinquent and malicious violation of the property rights of persons outside the in-group. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

We have observed that the differences between the corner-boy and the college-boy or middle-class culture are profound but that in many ways they are profound differences in emphasis. We have remarked that the corner-boy culture does not so much repudiate the value of many middle-class achievements as it emphasizes certain other values which make such achievement improbable. In short, the corner-boy culture temporizes with middle-class morality; the full-fledged delinquent subculture does not. It is precisely here, we suggest, in the refusal to temporize, that the appeal of the delinquent subculture is possessed. Let us recall that it is characteristically American, not specifically working-class or middle-class, to measure oneself against the widest possible status Universe, to seek status against all comers, to be as good as or better than anybody—anybody, that is, within one’s own age and gender category. As long as the working-class corner-boy clings to a version, however attenuated and adulterated, of the middle-class culture, he must recognize his inferiority to working-class and middle-class college-boy. The delinquent subculture, on the other hand, permits no ambiguity of the status of the delinquent relative to that of anybody else. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

In terms of the norms of the delinquent subculture, defined by this negative polarity to the respectable status system, the delinquent’s very nonconformity to middle-class standards sets one above most exemplary college boy. Another important function of the delinquent subculture is the legitimation of aggression. We surmise that a certain amount of hostility is generated among working-class children against middle-class persons, with their airs of superiority, disdain or condescension and against middle-class norms, which are, in a sense, the cause of their status-frustration. TO infer inclinations to aggression from the existence of frustration is hazardous; we know that aggression is not an inevitable and not the only consequence of frustration. Nevertheless, despite our imperfect knowledge of these things, we would be blind if we failed to recognize that bitterness, hostility and jealousy and all sorts of retributive fantasies are among the most common and typically human responses to public humiliation. However, for the child who temporizes with middle-class morality, overt aggression and even the conscious recognition of one’s own hostile impulses are inhibited, for one acknowledges the legitimacy of the rules in terms of which one is stigmatized. For the child who breaks clean with the middle-class mortality, on the other hand, there are no moral inhibitions on the free expression of aggression against the sources of frustration. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

Moreover, the connection we suggest between status-frustration and the aggressiveness of the delinquent subculture seems to us more plausible than many frustration-aggression hypotheses because it involves no assumptions about obscure and dubious displacement of aggression against substitute targets. The targets in this case is the manifest cause of the status problem. It seems to us that the mechanism of reaction-formation should also play a part here. Its hallmark is an exaggerated, disproportionate, abnormal intensity of response, inappropriate to the stimulus which seems to elicit it. The unintelligibility of the response, the overreaction, becomes intelligible when we see that it has the function of reassuring the actor against an inner threat to one’s defenses as well as the function of meeting an external situation on its own terms. Thus we have the mother who compulsively shows inordinate affection upon a child to reassure herself against her latent hostility and we have the male adolescent whose awkward and immoderate masculinity reflects a basic insecurity about one’s own gender-role. In like manner, we would expect the delinquent boy who, after all, has been socialized in a society dominated by a middle-class mortality and who can never quite escape the blandishments of middle-class society, to seek to maintain one’s safeguards against seduction. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

Reaction-formation, in his case, should take the form of irrational, malicious, unaccountable hostility to the enemy within the gates as well as without: the norms of the respectable middle-class society. Any genuine symbol, with its accompanying ceremonial rite, becomes the mirror the reflects insight, new possibilities, new wisdom, and other psychological and spiritual phenomena that we do not dare experience on our own. We cannot for two reasons. The first is our own anxiety: the new insights often—and, we could even say, typically—would frighten us too much were we to take fully and lonely responsibility for them. In the age of ferment such insights may come frequently, and they require more psychological and spiritual responsibility than most individuals are prepared to bear. In dreams people can let themselves do things that would normally be too outrageous to think or say in ordinary speech. The second reason is we escape hubris. The value of the dreams, like these divinations, is not that they give a specific answer, but that they open up new areas of psychic reality, shake us out of our customary ruts, and throw light on a new segment of our lives. The philosopher came to the conclusion that it meant one is wisest because one had admitted one’s own ignorance. Ecstasy is a time honored method of transcending our ordinary consciousness and a way of helping us arrive at insights we could not attain otherwise. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

An element of ecstasy, however slight, is part and parcel of every genuine symbol and myth; for if we genuinely participate in the symbol or myth, we are for that moment taken out of and beyond ourselves. The humanity of the rebel is possessed in the fact that civilization rises from one’s deeds. The function of the rebel is to shake the fixated mores and the rigid order of civilization; and this shaking, though painful, is necessary if the society is to be saved from boredom and apathy. Obviously I do not refer to everyone who calls oneself a rebel, but only to the authentic rebel. Civilization gets its first flower from the rebel. Civilization begins with a rebellion. Prometheus, one of the Titans, steals fire from the gods on Mount Olympus and brings it as a gift to beings, marking the birth of human culture. For this rebellion Zeus sentences him to be chained to Mount Caucasus where vultures consume his lover during the day and at night it grows back only to be again eaten away the next day. This is a tale of the agony of the creative individual, whose nightly rest only resuscitates him so that he can endure his agonies the next day. However, note also that Prometheus is released from his sufferings only when an immortal renounces his immortality in Prometheus’ favor. This Chiron does. What a vivid affirmation of human life, one of the essential characteristics of which is that each one of us will some day die! #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

It is saying: “I willingly give up immortality to affirm humanity; I am willing to die in order to affirm human civilization.” It is death which humanizes us. And the fact that we die is intimately bound up with our rebellion and our creating civilization. This is a truth which can be known in its full force only by the rebel. A similar rebellion and a similar acceptance of mortality are central in another account of the beginning of civilization, that of the story of Adam and Eve. The essence of their deed is rebellion—with prompting from that daimonic element in nature, the snake. The remarkable parallel in the stories of Prometheus and Adam is that the gods are pictured as the enemies of humans; they seek to keep humans perpetually subordinated. Yahweh is worried least Adam and Eve, having eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, will also eat of the tree of eternal life. Again, the fact of being’s mortality is brought in as a necessary prerequisite for creativity and civilization. True, we yearn for immortality, we struggle to form symbols of it, and we smart under the necessity of dying. Do not go gentle into that good night, rage, rage against the dying of the light. However, if we did not know that we will die we would create no more than did the gods, lolling away their endless days on Mount Olympus, a boring succession of tomorrow and tomorrow relieved only by occasional pleasures of the flesh affairs with mortals. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

Consciousness itself, which includes anxiety, guilt, and a sense of responsibility, is born when Adam and Eve are ejected from Eden. And all this happens in an act of rebellion. This is not foreign to psychology: there is no meaningful “yes” unless the individual could also have said “no.” Consciousness requires the exercise of the individual’s counterwill; it is called forth, inspired, and developed by the conflicts that occur in every individual’s life which force one to wonder and to call on power one did not know one possessed. Consider also he tale of Orestes. This is a representation of beings assuming responsibility for one’s own life, likewise a prerequisite of civilization. It is similar to the story of Prometheus and that f Adam and Eve in the sense that it depicts the taking of a giant step forward in the humanization of beings; and the fact that Orestes identifies with his father should not be allowed to obscure the fact that the myth emphasizes even more profoundly that an individual’s existence must start with a rebellion against his mother, to whom he is tied at birth by the umbilical cord. After Orestes’ assassinates his mother, and his cutting himself loose from Mycenae, he endures persecution by the Erinyes, who drive him to virtual insanity. Likewise many persons in psychotherapy struggle, on the brink of psychosis, toward autonomy. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

The stages of the dramas are Orestes’s act, his guilt and atonement, his assuming responsibility for his deed, and his ultimate forgiveness in the Eumenides, the final play of Aeschylus’ trilogy, by a court composed of men, not gods. It is a portrayal of the importance of rebellion for the capacity to assume responsibility for one’s own and one’s fellow’s lives. We also note that startling regularity through history with which society martyrs the rebel in one generation and worships him in the next. Sokrates, Jesus, Prince Lestat, William Blake—the list is as endless as it is rich. It we look more closely at the first two, we shall see how the rebel typically challenges the citizenry with his visions. Jesus’ dictum was: “It was said unto you of old, but I say unto you.” Although Sokrates refused to evade the law, he challenged it: “Men of Athens, I shall obey God rather than you, and so long as I live I shall never cease from the teaching of philosophy.” Both are introductions to frank espousal of rebellious teachings; they are challenges to the structure and stability of the society. Society can tolerate only a certain amount of threat to its mores, laws, and established ways. However, if civilization has only its own mores and no input to fertilize its growth—that is, has only its established ways—it stagnates in passivity and apathy. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

The adaptation that has been worked out is to martyr the rebel during the time in which he or she lives and then, when he or she is dead and there is no chance for one to alter one’s message (it is now established), disinter one, apotheosize one, and finally worship one. If the gods are occupied with keeping beings subordinate, why do not we simply say: “Away with them!” Then we could, as rationalist through the ages have tried to do, simply accept Jesus and Sokrates and Prince Lestat as the sensitive human beings they were. However, that is to misunderstand the function of the gods. Gods are, culturally speaking, symbols of our ideal yearnings and visions. (Symbols encompasses diverse stands of reality and participates in the reality itself.) God is the symbol of the power human beings year for but do not have. We are always enlarging our insights and visions. To simply deny the god function in human life is to impoverish our lives, specifically our ideals and our visions. However, as we enlarge and purify our insights (say about justice) and our visions (say of a better World), we also enlarge our symbols of the gods. This is why one reads in the Old Testament of the curious phenomenon of Abraham arguing with God not to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, saying: “Far be that from Thee! Shall not the judge of all the Earth do right?” (Genesis 18.25). #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

Abraham takes God to task for not living up to his own principles. God in terms of his new vision of what God ought to be and stand for. This curious phenomenon—source of much gymnastics among theologians—makes no sense when we define God as the all-perfect, purely ineffable. However, it makes entire sense when we see God, as I believe the higher religions have always seen Him, as the confluence of the Ground of Being (the given aspect of life) and being’s own capacity for spiritual insight (the autonomous aspect of the individual being). The highest function of rebellion is the rebellion in the name of “God above God.” Everyone at one time or another finds oneself in a situation where one must decide whether one shall use or avoid the name of God, whether one shall talk with personal involvement about religion matters, either for or against them. Making such a decision is often difficult. We feel that we should remain silent in certain groups of people because it might be tactless to introduce the name of God, or even to talk about religion. However, our attitude is not unambiguous. We believe we are being tactful, when actually we may be cowardly. And then sometimes we accuse ourselves of cowardice, although it is really tact that prevents us from speaking out. This happen not only to those who would speak out for God, but also to those who would speak out against God. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

Whether for or against Him, God’s name is on our lips and we are embarrassed because we feel that more is at stake than social tact. So we keep silent, uncertain as to whether we are right or wrong. The situation itself is uncertain. Perhaps we might isolate ourselves or seem ridiculous by even mentioning the divine name, affirming or denying it. However, there might also be another present for whom the mention of the divine name would produce a first experience of the Spiritual Presence and a decisive moment in one’s life. And again, perhaps there may be someone for whom a tactless allusion to God would evoke a definite sense of repulsion against religion. One may now think that religion as such is an abuse of the name of God. No one can look into the hearts of others, even if one converses with them intimately. We must risk now to talk courageously and now to keep silent tactfully. However, in one case should we be pushed into a direct affirmation or denial of God which lacks the tact that is born of awe. The sublime embarrassment about His real Presence in and through His name should never leave us. When they have had to teach their children the divine name, many persons have felt the pain of this embarrassment, and others have felt it perhaps when they tried to protect their children against a divine name that they considered an expression of dangerous superstition. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

It seems natural to teach child about most objects in nature and history without embarrassment, and there are parents who think it is equally natural to teach them divine things. However, I believe that many of us as parents in this situation feel a sublime embarrassment. We know as Jesus knew that children are more open to the divine Presence than adults. It may well be, however, that if we use the divine name easily, we may close this openness and leave our children insensitive to the depth and the mystery of what is present in the divine name. However, if we try to withhold it from them, whether because we affirm or because we deny it, emptiness may take hold of their hearts, and they may accuse us later of having cut them off from the most important thing in life. A Spirit inspired tact I necessary in order to find the right way between these dangers. No technical skill or psychological knowledge can replace the sublimely embarrassed mind of parents or teachers, and especially of teachers of religion. There is a form of misuse of the name of God that offends those who hear it with a sensitive ear, just because it did not worry those who misused it without sensitivity. I speak now of a public use of the name of God which has little to do with God, but much to do with human purpose—good or bad. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

Those of us who are grasped by the mystery present in the name of God are often stung when this name is used in governmental and political speeches, in opening prayers for conferences and dinners, in secular and religious advertisements, and in international war propaganda. Often the frequent use of the name of God is praised, as this is an indication that we are a religious nation. Ans one boasts of this, comparing one’s nation with others. Should this be condemned? It is hard not to do so, but neither is it easy. If the divine name is used publicly with full conviction, and therefore with embarrassment and Spiritual tact, it may be used without offense, although this is hardly ever so. It is usually taken in vain when used for purposes that are not t the glory of His name. Through the process of learning to respect God and his name, one will begin to unlock the deeper mysteries of the Holy Ghost. You will gain greater knowledge in regard to your own divine power and creation itself. It will become clear that through perception we can turn power n and off and will come to understand that gaining power is not really about obtaining something we do no have. It is more about learning to perceive what already dwells within the soul. The soul with allow us to experience God and the vast power of the concept through a continual process of becoming. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

Many are worshipping a false divine blueprint drawn upon the collective mind of humanity which binds individual desire to guilt and evil, syphoning the minds of people turning them into slaves, and this is destroying the ability to love self. Evil is a power which cuts down love. This separation from God is the impetus which forces humankind to give up their power of loving, faith and adoring the divine source leaving a black hole of hatred within that cases prejudice, spite, and lack of compassion for the totality. It is not empowering, but separating human beings from the inherent power. “And now behold, we desire to know the cause of this exceedingly great neglect; yea, we desire to know the cause of your thoughtless state. Can you think to sit upon your thrones in a state of thoughtless stupor, while your enemies are spreading the work of death around you? Yea, while they are murdering thousands of your people?” reports Alma 60.6-7. “And now behold, I say unto you, I fear exceedingly that the judgments of God will come upon this people, because of their exceeding slothfulness, yea, even the slothfulness of our government, and their exceedingly great neglect toward their brethren, yes, towards those who have been slain,” report Alma 60.14. The other ways were not without their usefulness and helpfulness, of course, but they lost that value the moment they were turned into substitute for the interior way, which is unique and without a second because each one of us is unique. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

Each person gets one’s own special experience of life, makes one’s own special set of contact with other persons, and meets one’s own particular destiny. In one’s reactions to and dealings with all this, one is really reacting to and dealing with oneself. One is showing quarrelsomeness, or trying to conquer it; ne is losing oneself in the day’s activity, or saving oneself from it in a half-hour retreat. One is letting negative thoughts or feelings stay in one’s heart, or trying to drive them out of it. One is practicing a larger relationship and a kindlier attitude toward those one encounters in one’s day-to-day business, or one is failing to recognize why they—and not others who are quite different—have been put into one’s path by the Infinite Intelligence (God). Our environment is really a testing-place and a disciplinary school. Speech is no longer a means to express internal power and raise one’s vibrational frequency via the vibrations of the tonal sound. It is no longer a tool to speak our reality into existence. It is through God’s angelic force that words of power are reserved for the few. Speech is not used for mere conversation even though its power really serves a much deeper and greater purpose. “When a person speaks by power of the Holy Ghost, that power carries it unto hearts,” reports 2 Nephi 33.1. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

Cresleigh Homes

California beauty as far as the eye can see. ☀️ Interested in becoming a part of a Cresleigh Homes community? Visit our website to learn more about Plumas Ranch, now selling!

https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-riverside-at-plumas-ranch/

#PlumasLake
#California
#NewHomes

Nature Keeps Her Equilibrium by Bringing in Counter Forces, or Complementary Ones, to Correct or Balance Any Condition where to Much has Gone too Far!

October 30, 2019 1:39 am

You know why this disconcerts you so very much? I will tell you why! Because you never admitted to yourself that what you did in writing your books, in writing your songs, in singing your songs…you never admitted that it was all for us. You always pretended it was some great gesture to humankind and for their benefit. Wipe us out. Really! You never admitted that you were one of us, talking to the rest of us, and what you did, you as part of us! It may be argued that the working-class boy does not care what middle-class people think of him, that he is ego-involved only in the opinions of his family, his friends, his working-class neighbors. A definitive answer to this argument can come only from research designed to get at the facts. This research, in our opinion, is yet to be done. There is, however, reason to believe that most children are sensitive to some degree about the attitudes of any persons with whom they are thrown into more than the most superficial kind of contact. The contempt or indifference of others, particularly of those like schoolmates and teachers, with whom we are constrained to associate for long hours every day, is difficult, we suggest, to shrug off. It poses a problem with which one may conceivably attempt to cope in a variety of ways. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

One of the ways we may attempt to deal with the problem is by making an active effort to change oneself in conformity with the expectations of others; one may attempt to justify or explain away one’s inferiority in terms which will exculpate one; one may tell oneself that one really does not care what these people think; one may react with anger and aggression. However, the least probable response is simple, uncomplicated, honest indifference. If we grant the probable truth of the claim that most American working-class children are most sensitive to status sources on their own level, it does not follow that they take lightly rejection, disparagement and censure from other status sources. Even on their own social level, the situation is far from simple. The working class, we have repeatedly emphasized, is not culturally homogeneous. Not only is there much diversity in the cultural standards applied by one’s own working-class neighbors and kin so that it is difficult to find a working-class milieu in which middle-class standards are not important. In addition, the working-class culture we have described is, after all, an ideal type; most working-class people are culturally ambivalent. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

Due to lack of capacity, of the requisite character structure or of luck, they may be working-class in terms of job and income; they may have accepted this status with resignation and rationalized it to their satisfaction; and by example, by class-linked techniques of child training and by failure to support the middle-class agencies of socialization they may have produced children deficient in the attributes that make for status in middle-class terms. Nevertheless, all their lives, through all the major media of mass indoctrination—the school, the movies, the radio, the newspapers and the magazines—the middle-class powers-that-be that manipulate these media have been trying to sell them on middle-class values and middle-class standards of living, for the most part. However, TV News has become nothing but reports of crime, destruction, and anchored by talking heads who are pushing for rebellion and an abortion of American family values. Nonetheless, there is the propaganda of the deed, the fact that the middle-class powers-that-be have seen with their own eyes working-class contemporaries get ahead and make the grade in the middle-class World. In consequence of all this, we suspect that few working-class parents unequivocally repudiate as intrinsically worthless middle-class objectives. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

There is good reason to believe that the modesty of working-class aspirations is partly a matter of trimming one’s sails to the available opportunities and resources and partly a mater of unwillingness to accept the discipline which upward striving entails. However complete and successful one’s accommodation to an humble status, the vitality of middle-class goals, of the American Dream, is nonetheless likely to manifest itself in one’s aspirations for one’s children. One’s expectations may not be grandiose, but ne will want one’s children to be better off than one is. Whatever one’s own work history and social reputation may be, one will want one’s children to be steady and respectable. One may exert few beneficial pressures to succeed and the experiences one provides one’s children may even incapacitate them for success; one may be puzzled at the way they turn out. However, whatever the measures of one’s own responsibility in accounting for the product, one is not likely to judge that product by unadulterated corner-boy standards. Even corner-boy parents, although they may value in their children such corner-boy virtues as generosity to friends, personal loyalty and physical prowess, are likely also to be gratified by the recognition by middle-class representatives and by the kinds of achievement for which the college-boy want of life is a prerequisite. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

Even in the working-class milieu from which one acquired his incapacity for middle-class achievement, the working-class corner-boy may find himself at a status disadvantage as against his more upwardly mobile peers. Lastly, of course, is that most ubiquitous and inescapable status of sources, oneself. Technically, we do not call the person’s attitudes towards oneself status but rather self-esteem, or, when the quality of the self-attitude is specifically moral, conscience or superego. The important question for us is this: To what extent, if at all, do boys who are typically working-class and corner-boy in their overt behavior evaluate themselves by middle-class, college-boy standards? For our overt behavior, however closely it conforms to one set of norms, need not argue against the existence of effectiveness of alternative and conflicting norms. The failure of our own behavior to conform to our own expectations is an elementary and commonplace fact which gives rise to the tremendously important consequences of guilt, self-recrimination, anxiety and self-hatred. The reasons for the failure of self-expectations and overt conduct to agree are more complex. One reason is that we often internalize more than one set of norms, each of which would dictate a different course of action in a given life situation; since we can only do one thing at a time, however, we are forced to choose between them or somehow to compromise. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

In either case, we fall short of the full realization of our expectations and must somehow cope with the residual discrepancy between those expectations and our overt behavior. The love of violence is, to me, the ancient and symbolic gesture of beings against the constraints of society. Vicious beings can exploit impulse as vicious. For no society is strong which does not acknowledge the protesting being; and no being is human who does not draw strength from the natural animal. Violence is the sphinx by the fireside, and she has a human face. In Truffaut’s film The Wild Child, we see a re-enactment of an actual event that took place in the eighteenth century but which has special poignancy for us here. A doctor tries to teach a savage boy who was found in the forest living as an animal to see if he can be brought back to the human condition. The affectionate Victor, as Truffaut has named the boy, learns to speak and to count in rudimentary fashion. However, these small successes and failures only add up to ambiguity. In a moment of discouragement, Truffaut as the doctor resolves to stake all on one unambiguous test to find out whether Victory is human—will the boy fight back when he is punished? Knowing that Victory accepts punishment—being shut in a closet—when he has made a mistake, Truffaut tried to shut him in the closet when he had correctly done the task he was assigned. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

Victory puts up a fight because he did nothing wrong and is being shoved in a closet. With a glad sigh of recognition the doctor stats that there is present in the boy the central element which constitutes the human being. What is this element? It is the capacity to sense injustice and take a stand against it in the form of I-will-be-destroyed-rather-than-submit. It is a rudimentary anger, a capacity to muster all one’s power and asset it against what one experiences as unfair. However it may be confounded or covered up or counterfeited, this elemental capacity to fight against injustice remains the distinguished characteristic of human beings. It is, in short, the capacity to rebel. In the present day, when multitudes of people are caught in anxiety and helplessness, they tend psychologically to freeze up and to cast out the city walls whoever would disturb their pretended peace. Ironically, it is during just those periods of transition when they most need the replenishing that the rebel can give them that people have the greatest block in listening to him. However, in casting out the rebel, we cut our own lifeline. For the rebel function is necessary as the life-blood of culture, as the very roots of civilization. First I must make the important distinction between the rebel and the revolutionary. One is in ineradicable opposition to the other. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

The revolutionary seeks an external political change, the overthrow or renunciation of one government or ruler and the substitution of another. The origin of the term is the World revolve, literally meaning a turnover, as the revolution of a wheel. When the conditions under a given government are insufferable some groups may seek to break down that government in the conviction that any new form cannot but be better. Many revolutions, however, simply substitute one kind of government for another, the second no better than the first—which leaves the individual citizen, who has had to endure the inevitable anarchy between the two, worse off than before. Revolution may do more harm than good. The rebel, on the other hand, is one who opposes authority or restraint: one who breaks with established custom or tradition. His distinguished characteristic is his perpetual restlessness. He seeks above all an internal change, a change in the attitudes, emotions, and outlook of the people to whom he is devoted. He often seems to be temperamentally unable to accept success and the ease it brings; he kicks against the pricks, and when one frontier is conquered, he soon becomes ill-at-ease and pushes on to the new frontier. He is drawn to the unquiet minds and spirits, for he shares their everlasting inability to accept stultifying control. He may, as Sokrates did, refer to himself as the gadfly for the state—the one who keeps the state for settling down into complacency, which is the first step toward decadence. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

No matter how much the rebel gives the appearance of being egocentric or of being on an ego trip, this is a delusion; inwardly the authentic rebel is anything but bash. True to the meaning of the rebel as one who renounces authority, he seeks primarily not the substitution of one political system for another. He may favor such political change, but it is not his chief goal. He rebels for the sake of a vision of life and society which he is convinced is critically important for himself and his fellows. Every act of rebellion tacitly presupposes some value. Whereas the revolutionary tends to collect power around himself, the rebel does not seek power as an end and has little facility for using it; he tends to share his power. Like the resistance fighters in France during the last World war, the rebel fights not only for the relief of his fellow men and women but also for his personal integrity. For him these are but two sides of the same coin. The enslaved being who kills one’s master is an example of the revolutionary. He can then only take his master’s place and be killed in turn by later revolutionaries. However, the rebel is the one who realizes that the master is as much imprisoned, if not as painfully, as he is by the institution for slavery; he rebels against that system which permits slaves and masters. His rebellion, if successful, saves the master also from the indignity of own slaves. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

We can see in the superb statues of Apollo carved at this time of Greek opulence—the archaic figure with his strong, straight form, his calm beauty of head, his ordered features which are eloquent with controlled passion, even down to the slight knowing smile on the almost straight mouth—how this god could be the symbol in which the Greek artists as well as other citizens of that period perceived their longed-for order. There is a curious feature in these statues that I have seen: the eyes are dilated, made more open than is normal in the head of living man or in classical Greek statues. If you walk through the archaic Greek room of the National Museum in Athens, you will be struck by the fact that the dilated eyes of the marble figures of Apollo give an expression of great alertness. What a contrast to the relaxed, almost sleepy eyes of the familiar fourth-century head of Hermes by Praxiteles. These dilated eyes of the archaic Apollo are characteristic of apprehension. They express the anxiety—the excessive awareness, the looking about on all sides least something unknown might happen—that goes with living in fomenting age. There is a remarkable parallel between these eyes and the eyes in the figures Michelangelo painted in another formative period, the Renaissance. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

Almost all of Michelangelo’s human beings, powerful and triumphant as they appear at first glance, have on closer inspection, the dilated eyes which are a telltale sigh of anxiety. And as if to demonstrate that he is expressing the inner tensions not only of his age but of himself as a member of his age, Michelangelo in his self-portraits paints eyes that are again markedly distended in the way that is typical of apprehension. The poet Rilke also was struck by Apollo’s prominent eyes with their quality of seeing deeply. In his “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” he speaks of “…his legendary head in which the eyeballs ripened,” and then continues “…But his torso still glows like a candelabrum in which his gaze, only turned low, holds and gleams. Else could not the curve of the breast blind you, nor in the slight turn of the loins could a smile be running to that middle, which carried procreation. Else would this stone be standing maimed and short under the shoulders’ translucent plunge nor flimmering like the fell of beasts of prey nor breaking out of all its countours like a star: for there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.” In this vivid picture we note how well Rilke catches the essence of controlled passion—not inhibited or repressed passion, as was to be the goal during the later Hellenistic age of the Greek teachers who had become afraid of vital drives. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

These early Greeks, who wept and made love and killed with zest, gloried in passion and Eros and the daimonic. (Persons in therapy nowadays, considering the strange spectacle in ancient Greece, remark on the fact that it is the strong person like Odysseus or Achilles who weeps.) However, the Greeks knew also that these drives had to be directed and controlled. It was the essence, they believed, of a man of virtue (arete) that he chooses his passions rather than be chosen by them. In this lies the explanation of why they did not need to go through the self-castrating practice of denying Eros and the diamonic, as modern Western beings do. The sense of the archaic period is shown even in Rilke’s curious last sentence, which seems at first (but only at first) to be a non sequitur: “You must change your life.” This is the call of passionate beauty, the demand that beauty makes on us by its very presence that we also participate in the new form. Not all moralistic (the class has nothing whatever to do with right or wrong), it is nevertheless an imperious demand which grasps us with the insistence that we take into our own lives this new harmonious form. Christianity actually entered the confusion of the Roman World in order to simplify it and to lighten the terrible burdens of the miscarried sexual era. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

Christianity was seen as the era of the son in revolt against the oppressions and inequalities of the era of the family. Under Christianity the spiritual fatherhood of Christ took the place of biological fatherhood of the family. Christ poses a totally new and radical question: “Who are my mother and brothers?” The son was now completely independent; he could freely choose his own spiritual father and was no longer bound by the fatalities of heredity. The individual could fashion his or her own salvation, independent of any Earthly authority. Christianity was a great democratization that put spiritual power right back into the hands of the single individual and in one blow wiped away the inequalities of this dispossessed and the slaves that had gradually and inexorably developed since the breakup of the primitive World and that had assumed such grotesque proportions in the mad drivenness of the Mediterranean World. As many historical scholars have pointed out, Christianity in this sense dipped back into paganism, into primitive communalism, and extended it beyond the tribe. Christianity was seen as a new form of democratic, universal, magical self-renewal. The person recaptured some of the spiritual integrity that the primitive had enjoyed. But as in all things human, the whole picture is ambiguous and confused, far different from the ideal promise. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

Actually Christianity was harnessed by the state, and its power was infused into the institution of kingship to keep its authority; the attack on the fatality of biology, the accidents of heredity, was put into the service of the ideology of the family, and it reinforced patriarchy. We still see this in Roman Catholic countries today. In other words, Christianity failed to establish the universal democratic equality that it had promised historically—the reinstitution of the sacred primitive community plus a valuation of the individual person that had no existed before. Such a revolution in thought and in social forms would have kept everything that was best in the primitive World view, and at the same time it would have liberated the person from the dead weight of communal constraints and conservatism that choked off individual initiative and development. Obviously, this failure of Christianity was intimately tied up with the general problem of class, slavery, real economic inequality. This had been the tragedy that Rome herself was unable to resolve. Rome created a new type of citizen but failed to carry through and create the necessary economic equality of the families, which was the only thing that could guarantee the new structure. After all, if each being was a king in one’s own family, one had to be an equal king with all others; otherwise the designation lost all meaning. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

Theoretically, the state was dedicated to this kind of democracy because it arrogate to itself the power to hid everything in balance, to checkmate competing powers and to protract the citizens against each other. In the earlier chiefdoms, the kin group still kept their power, and there was no one to keep them from feuding among themselves. The chief’s kin group was usually the strongest, and he could punish those who attacked him, but he did not monopolize force as the later state did; he could not, for example, compel the people to go to war. The crucial characteristic of the state, and the hallmark of its genuine power and tyranny, was that it could compel its subjects to go to war. And this was because the power of each family was given over to the state; the idea was that this would prevent the social misuse of power. This made the state a king of power-bank, but the state never used this power to abolish economic inequalities; as a result it actually misused the social power entrusted to it by the families and held them in unequal bondage. Christianity, too, perpetuated this economic inequality and slavishness of the would-be free, democratic citizen; and there never has been, historically, any fundamental change in the massive structure of domination and exploitation represented by the sate after the decline of primitive society. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

The Reformation was a late attempt to reassert the promise of early Christianity—true individual power and equality—but it too failed by being absorbed in the unequal state scramble. It was not until World War I that the whole stricture finally crumbled, after the rumbling blow given by the French Revolution: the patriarchal family, divine monarchy, the dominance of the Church, the credibility of the democratic state in its promise of true equality. The Soviets alone pushed several of these down a mine shaft along with the czar. We are struggling today in the mire of this very discredit of all overlapping traditional immortality symbols. The struggle actually began at the time of the Roman Empire, and we have still not resolved it. We consult astrology charts like the Babylonians, try to make our children into our own image with a firm hand like the Romans, elbow others to get a breath-quickening glimpse of the queen in her ritual procession, and confess to the priests and attend church. And we wonder why, with all this power capital drawn from many sources, we are deeply anxious about the meaning of our lives. The reason is plain enough: none of these, nor all of them taken together, represents an integrated World conception into which we fit ourselves with pure belief and trust. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

Not that promise of the ancient World and of Christianity failed completely. Something potentially great did emerge out o them: the era of psychological man. We can look at it as a development out of the era of the son. It took the form of a new kind of scientific individualism that burst out of the Renaissance and the Reformation. It represented a new power candidate for replacing all the previous ideologies of immortality, but now an almost completely and unashamedly secular one. This was a new Faustian pursuit of immortality through one’s own acts, one’s own works, one’s own discovery of truth. This was a kind of secular-humanist immortality based on the gifts of the individual. Instead of having one hero chieftain leading a tribe or a kingdom or one hero savior leading all humankind, society would not become the breeding ground for the development of as many heroes as possible, individual geniuses in great number who would enrich humankind. This was the explicit program of Enlightenment thinkers and of the ideology of modern Jeffersonian democracy. But alas it has been our sad experience that the new scientific austian being too has failed—in two resounding ways. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

These two ways of failure were represented almost all by themselves sum up the crisis of the end of our century. For one thing, modern democratic ideology simply repeated the failure of Rome and Christianity: it did not eliminate economic inequality. And so it was caught in the same fundamental and tragic contradictions as its predecessors. Second, the hope of Fustian beings was the they would discover Truth, obtain the secret to the workings of nature, and so assure the complete triumph of beings over nature, one’s apotheosis on Earth. Not only have Faustian beings failed to do this, but one is actually ruining the very theater of one’s own immortality with one’s own poisonous and madly driven works; once one had eclipsed the sacred dimensions, one had only the earth left to testify to the value of one’s life. This is why, I think, even one-dimensional politicians and bureaucrats, in both capitalist and communist countries, are becoming anxious about environmental collapse; the Earth is the only area of self-perpetuation in the new ideology of Faustian beings. “Hello, son, you are ready to come into the end? We cannot wait to hold you and rock you to sleep in your rocking chair. Before you know it, you will be standing, crashin ‘round the house like bandits, all day. You cannot get in to too much trouble, nothing gonna stop me from loving you always. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

“My wild, wild son, run free. Oh, you will know it when you are were you are supposed to be. Oh, my wild, wild, son, run free. Oh, you will know it when you are living out your dream. Someday when you leave the house and the open road calls, just know your heart will not lie to you if you learn to listen close. When you meet your queen, go, get her make sure that she knows you will love her always, ‘fore you know it, your own child’s standing. You can crash around with them like bandits all day,” (Wild, Wild Son by Armin van Buuren). When you power is developed and accumulated it can then transmute and purify the energy of others so that it can be harnessed and channeled according to intent. We study God’s word to make sure that we have been adequately conditioned to raise our own store of personal power, and that way we are less likely to become a parasite. This kind of work should be employed strategically to take power from people who abuse power to level the playing field a bit. With the grace of God you will enhance your chances of success in your health, career, family, and education and in all things your power focuses on will be greatly intensified. “And he hath said: Repent all ye ends of the Earth, and come unto me, and be baptized in my name, and have faith in me, that ye may be saved,” reports Moroni 7.34. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

Cresleigh Homes

Brighton Station at Cresleigh Ranch | Residence 2

Welcome to #BrightonStation Residence 2 at #CresleighRanch located in Rancho Cordova! Join Abbie Johnson as she walks through this beautiful single-story floor plan.

Visit our website to check out its many features and optional add-ons. Click the link https://cresleigh.com/brighton-station/residence-2/

View this post on Instagram

Welcome to #BrightonStation Residence 2 at #CresleighRanch located in Rancho Cordova! Join Abbie Johnson as she walks through this beautiful single-story floor plan. Visit our website to check out its many features and optional add-ons. Click the link in our bio! #CresleighHomes

A post shared by Cresleigh Homes | California (@cresleighhomes) on Oct 29, 2019 at 11:22am PDT

#CresleighHomes

There is an Invisible Mechanism within the Universe and an Intelligent Mind (God) Directing this Mechanism!

October 29, 2019 1:21 am

Maybe it is time I discovered what is going on here for myself. Now listen to me. I want you to go belowstairs and stay there. If someone benighted emissary of the thing should crash-land on our wintry little paradise, you will be sage from it down there. Stay there till I return. This is the same precaution being taken by others the World over. Belowground you are safe. And if this thing talks to you, this Voice, well, try to learn more about it. In the settlement houses and other adult-sponsored and managed recreational agencies similar conflicts may often be seen between the middle-class values of the adults in charge and the working-class values of the children for whose benefit the institution ostensibly exist. Such organizations smile upon neat, orderly, polite, personable, mannerly children who want to make something of themselves. The sponsor, directors and group work leaders find it a pleasure to work with such children, whose values are so like their own, and make them feel welcome and respected. They do indeed feel a special responsibility toward the boy whose family and neighborhood culture have not equipped him with those values, the rough boy, the dirty boy, the bum who just hangs around with the gang on the corner, in the pool hall or in the candy store. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

However, the responsibility they feel toward him is to encourage him to engage in more worthwhile activities, to join and to be a responsible member of some wholesome adult-supervised club or other group, to expurgate one’s language and, in general, to participate in the constructive program of the institution. Indeed, like the school, it functions to select potentially upwardly mobile working-class children and to help and encourage them in the upward climb. It is common experience of such organizations that they are very successful and do a lot of good but do not seem to get children who need them most. The reason is that here, as in the school, it is almost impossible to reward one or quite openly, punishing its absence or its opposite. The corner boy quickly senses that he is under the critical or at best condescending surveillance of people who are foreigners to his community and who appraise him in terms of values which he does no share. He is aware that he is being invidiously compared to others; he is uncomfortable; he finds it hard to accommodate himself to the rules of the organization. To win the favor of the people in charge he must change his habits, his values, his ambitions, his speech and his associates. Even were these things possible, the game might not be worth the candle. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

So, having sampled what they have to offer, he returns to the street or to his clubhouse in a cellar where facilities are meager but human relations more satisfying. Not only in terms of standards of middle-class adults but in terms of their children’s standards as well, the working-class culture is likely to be a failure. Despite the existence among middle-class children of a youth culture which may differ in significant ways from the culture of their parents, the standards these children apply are likely to relegate to an inferior status their working-class peers. Gradually the group became more critical of prospective members. A process somewhat evident from the beginning became more obvious. In general only boys who measured up to the group’s unwritten, unspoken and largely unconscious standards were ever considered. These standards, characteristics of their middle-class homes, required the suppression of the impulsive disorderly behavior and put a high value on controlled cooperative attitudes. Hence even these normally healthy and boisterous boys were capable of rejecting schoolmates they considered too wild and boisterous. Coincident with this was an emphasis on intellectual capacity and achievement. They preferred smart as contrasted with dumb prospects. The boys seemed to use their club unconsciously to express and reinforce the standards learned in their homes and the community. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

Not only teachers but schoolmates, in evaluating the character of other children, tend to give the highest ratings to the children of the higher social levels, although the correlation between social class and character reputation is far from perfect. Beneficial correlations between various indices of social class status of the home and social status in the schools as measured by pupils’ choices have been found. We have seen how social class and the behavior and personality associated with social class membership operate to determine prestige and clique and date patterns among high school boys and girls. This process operates in all classes, but it is especially noticeable in contacts with class V [lower-lower]. This class is so repugnant socially that adolescents in the higher classes avoid clique and dating ties with its members. Furthermore, working-class children are less likely to participate, and if they participate are less likely to achieve prominence, in extra-curricular activities, which are an important arena for the competition for status in the eyes of the students themselves. In the area of organized athletics the working-class boy is perhaps least unfitted for successful competition. Even here, however, he is likely to be at a disadvantage. Adherence to a training regimen and a schedule does not come to him as easily as to the middle-class boy and, unless he chooses to loosen his ties to his working-class friends, he is likely to find some conflict between the claims of the gang and those of his athletic career. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

Finally, although we must not minimize the importance of athletic achievement as a status-ladder, it is, after all, granted to relatively few, of whatever social class background, to achieve conspicuously in this area. In summary, it may confidently be said that the working-class boy, particularly if his training and values be those we have here defined as working-class, is more likely than his middle-class peers to find himself at the bottom of the status hierarchy whenever he moves in a middle-class to which he values middle-class status, either because he values the good opinion of middle-class persons or because he had to some degree internalized middle-class standards himself, he faces a problem of adjustment and is in the market for a solution. The delinquent subculture, we suggest, is a way of dealing with the problems of adjustment we have described. These problems are chiefly status problems: certain children are denied status in the respectable society because they cannot meet the criteria of respectable status system. The delinquent subculture deals with these problems by providing criteria of status which these children can meet. We remarked earlier that our ego-involvement in a given comparison with others depends upon status universe. Whom do we measure ourselves against? #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

In some other societies virtue may consist in willing acceptance of the role of peasant, low-born commoner or member of an inferior caste and in conformity to the expectations of that role. If others are richer, more nobly-born or more able than oneself, it is by he will of an inscrutable Providence and not to be imputed to one’s own moral defect. The sting of status inferiority is thereby removed or mitigated; one measures oneself only against those of like social position. We have suggested, however, that an important feature of American democracy, perhaps of Western European tradition in general, is the tendency to measure oneself against all comers. This means that, for children as for adults, one’s sense of persona worth is at stake in status comparisons with all other persons, at least of one’s own age and gender, whatever their family background or material circumstances. It means that, in the lower levels of our status hierarchies, whether adult or juvenile, there is a chronic fund of motivation, conscious or repressed, to elevate one’s status position, either by striving to climb within the established status system or by redefining the criteria of status so that one’s present attributes become status-giving assets. To manage private loves and hates is to participate in an intricate private emotional system. When elements of that system are taken into the marketplace and sold as human labor, they become stretched into standardized social forms. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

In these forms, a person’s contribution of feeling is thinner, less freighted with consequence but at the same time it is less seen as coming less from the self and being less directed to the other. For that reason it is more susceptible to estrangement. I followed emotion work into the job market via two routes. First I entered the World of the flight attendant. As a point of entry, I chose American Airlines for several reasons: it puts a higher premium on service than other airlines do; its in-flight training program is perhaps the best in the World; its service has been ranked very high; and it has some of the best uniforms for flight attendants and pilots. For all these reasons, American’s company demands are higher and its work demands are met with success. Thus American fulfills the demands they put on flight attendants. It also gives sharper point to the general case about emotion work in public life. When emotional labor is put into the public marketplace, it behaves like a commodity: the demand for it waxes and wanes depending upon the competition with the industry. I gathered information at American in various ways. First, I watched. The head of American Airlines Training and Conference Center in Fort Worth, Texas, a gentle young man called Jim Thomas, allowed me to attend classes there. I watched recruits learning passenger landing and meal service in the mock cabin. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

I got to know the trainers, who patiently explained their work to me. They were generous with their time on duty and off; one trainer invited me home to dinner, and several repeatedly invited me to lunch. Over countless other breakfasts, lunches, and dinners, and in the airport bus, I talked with students doing Initial Training and with experienced flight attendants attending the mandatory Recurrent Training sessions. I interviewed twenty American officials, from the executive vice-president, training, sales, and billing. I held a group interview with seven supervisors. I interviewed four advertising agents employed by the firm commissioned to promote American Airlines and its flight attendants, and I looked through microfilms of thirty years of American Airlines advertising. Finally, I also interviewed the two public relations officials who were in charge of handling me. It is an elite occupation, it is difficult to find one of these prestigious careers. Flight attendants do emotion work to enhance the status of the customer and entice further sales by their friendliness, there is another side of the corporate show, represented by the bill collectors who are taught to deflate the anger and frustration of customers, so they are more likely to pay their bills on time. Therefore, some emotional labor principles apply to very different jobs and very different feelings. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

A nineteenth-century child working in a challenging Lincrusta-Walton wallpaper factory and a well-paid twenty-first century American flight attendant have something in common: in order to survive in their jobs, they must mentally prepare themselves—the factory worker from his own body and physical labor, and the flight attendant from his or her own feelings and emotional labor. I am interested in telling the flight attendant’s story in order to promote a fuller appreciation of the costs of what one does. And I want to base this appreciation on a prior demonstration of what can happen to any of us when we become estranged from our feelings and the management of them. We feel. But what is a feeling? I would define feeling, like emotion, as a sense, like the sense of hearing or sight. In a general way, we experience it when bodily sensation are joined with what we see or imagine. Like the sense of hearing, emotion communicates information. Anxiety is a signal function. From feeling we discover our own viewpoint on the World. We often say that we try to feel. However, how can we do this? Feelings are not stored inside us, and they are not independent of acts of management. Both the act of getting in touch with feeling and the act of trying to feel may become part of the process that makes the thing we get in touch with, or the thing we manage, into a feeling or emotion. In managing feeling, we contribute to the creation of it. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

If this is so, what we think of as intrinsic to feeling or emotion may have always been shaped to social form and put to civic use. Consider what happens when young men roused to anger go willingly to war, or when followers rally enthusiastically around their king, or mullah, or football team. Private social life may always have called for the management of feelings. They party guest summons up a gaiety owed to the host, the mourner summons up a proper sadness for the funeral. Each offers up a feeling as a momentary contribution to the collective good. What gives social patterns to our acts of emotion management? I believe that when we try to feel, we apply latent feeling rules. We say, “I should not feel so angry at what she did,” or “given our agreement, I have no right to feel jealous.” Act of emotion management are not simply private acts; they are used in exchanges under the guidance of feeling rules. Feeling rules are standards used in emotional conversation to determine what is rightly owed and owing in the currency of feeling. Through them, we tell what is due in each relation, each role. We may tribute to each other in the currency of the managing act. In interaction we pay, overpay, underpay, play with, acknowledge our dues, pretend to pay, or acknowledge what is emotionally due another person. In these ways, we make our try at sincere civility. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

Because the distribution of power an authority is unequal in some of the relations of private life, the managing acts can also be unequal. The myriad momentary acts of management compose part of what we summarize in the terms relation and role. Like the tiny dots of Seurat painting, the microcates of emotion management compose, through repetition and change over time, a movement of form. Some forms express inequality, others equality. Now what happens when feeling rules, like rules of behavioral display, are established though private negotiation but by company manuals? What happens when social exchanges are not, as they are in private life, subject to change or termination but ritually sealed and almost inescapable? What happens when the emotional display that one person owes another reflects a certain inherent inequality? The airline passenger may choose not to smile, but the flight attendant is obliged not only to smile but to try to work up some warmth behind it. What happens, in other words, when there is a transmutation of the private ways we use feeling? One sometimes needs a grand word to point out a coherent pattern between occurrences that would otherwise seem totally unconnected. My word is “transmutation.” When I speak of the transmutation of an emotional system, I mean to point out a link between a private act, such as attempting to enjoy a party, and a public act, such as summoning up good feeling for a customer. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

What is it that we do privately, often unconsciously, to feelings that nowadays often fall under the sway of large organization, social engineering, and the profit motive. Trying to feel what one wants, expects, or thinks one ought to feel is probably no newer than emotion itself. Conforming to or deviating from feeling rules is also hardly new. In organized society, rules have probably never been applied only to observable behavior. “Crimes of the heart,” have long been recognized because proscriptions have long guarded the preactions of the heart; the Bible say not to covet your neighbor’s wife, not simply to avid acting on that feeling. What is new in our time is an increasingly prevalent instrumental stance toward out native capacity to play, wittingly and actively, upon a range of feelings for a private purpose and the way in which that stance is engineered and administered by large organizations. This transmutation of the private use of feeling affects the two genders and the various social classes in distinctly different ways. Emotion management has been better understood by professionals because they have to create the emotional tine of social encounters: expressing joy at the Christmas presents others open, creating the sense of surprise at birthdays, or displaying alarm at the car speeding down the road. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

Now given the fact that others are likely to check up on the more controllable aspects of behavior by means of the less controllable aspects of behavior by means of the less controllable, one can expect that sometimes the individual will try to exploit this very possibility, guiding the impression one makes through behavior felt to be reliably informing. For example, in gaining admission to a tight social circle, the participant observer may not only wear an accepting look while listening to an informant, but may also be careful to wear the same look when observing the informant talking to others; observers of the observer will then not as easily discover where one actually stands. When a neighbor dropped in to have a cup of tea, he would ordinarily wear at least a hint f an expectant warm smile as he passed through the door into the Cresleigh home. Since lack of physical obstructions outside the home and beautiful trees around the home, it usually made it possible to observe the visitor unobserved as he approached the house, islanders sometimes took pleasure in watching the visitor drop whatever expression he was manifesting and replace it with a sociable one just before reaching the door. However, some visitors, in appreciating this examination was occurring, would blindly adopt a social face a long distance from the house, thus ensuring the projection of a constant image. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

This kind of control upon the part of the individual reinstates the symmetry of the communication process, and sets the stage for a kind of information game—a potentially infinite cycle of concealment, discovery, false revelation, and rediscovery. It should be added that since the others are likely to be relatively unsuspicious of the presumably unguided aspect of the individual’s conduct, he can gain much by controlling it. The others of course may sense that the individual is manipulating the presumably spontaneous aspects of his behavior, and seek in this very act of manipulation some shading of conduct that the individual has not managed to control. This again provides a check upon the individual’s behavior, this time his presumably uncalculated behavior, thus re-establishing the asymmetry of the communication process. Here I would like to add the suggestion that the arts of piercing an individual’s effort at calculated unintentionality seems better developed than our capacity to manipulate our own behavior, so that regardless of how many steps have occurred in the information game, the witness is likely to have the advantage over the actor, and the initial asymmetry of the communication process is likely to be retained. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

What is of great interest in this development is the intimate unity of patriarchal family ideology with that of kingship. The king represented the new fountainhead of spiritual power in which the subjects were nourished. In primitive society the entire group had created magical power by means of the jointly celebrated ritual. However, with the gradual development of specialized ritualists and priests, the power to create power often fell to a special class and was no longer the possession of the whole collectivity. Where this happened it helped to turn the average man into an impotent subject. In many agrarian societies the priests went on to develop astronomy, calendars, and rituals of power for the control of nature via magic, whereas previously each person had helped exercise such control via the communal rituals. Without the priests’ calendar, how would the farmer know the auspicious days for planting? With their astronomy the priests accrued the tremendous prestige of predicting eclipses; and then they exercised the fantastic power of brining back the Sun out of the clutches of darkness. Not only did they save the World from chaos in such ways, but in some places they possessed the secret ritual for the creation of the kind’s power. Often the kings and priests were solidly allied in a structure of domination that monopolized all sacred power; this completed the development for the tribal level where the shaman would sometimes ally with the chief. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

All the less affluent subject could do in these societies was to grovel to the king and bring food to the priests in order to get a mite of magical protective power. The fathers imitated the kings so as to reenact the divine plan in their own homes; in this way they got a reflection of the king’s powers. If the gentlemen and ladies observed proper ritual behavior, the kingdom would flourish. So long as everyone in the kingdom copied the king, fathered sons, married off daughters, kept order in the family, and observed the household rituals, the balance of nature would not be upset in the divine household. All this took place in the divine cities, which themselves were eternal, connected to Heaven (Babylon equals Gate of the Gods), and protected and regenerated by the priestly rituals. Each city with its pyramidal temples and towers rose like a spire to penetrate the sky, the dimensions of invisible power, and to bathe itself in it. We can still feel this Gothic cathedral which penetrated Heaven and was bathed in the light of powers of Heaven. Rome is called the eternal city not because today tourists can always go back and find her as she was when they first visited her a few decades ago, but because she was regenerated in ancient times by centennial rituals, and was thought to have so much power sustaining her that she would never falter. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

One of the strong impetuses to the triumph of Christianity was the increasing sackings of Rome by the barbarians, which showed everyone that something was wrong with the old powers and some new magical sources had to be tapped. The divine king in the sacred city bathing the holy empire—these were a power tool in which the fathers nourished themselves while they assured their own perpetuation in the person of their sons. We can see that this represents a new kind of unification experience, with a focal point of power, that in its own way tries to recapture the intense unity of primitive society, with its focus of power in the clan and the ancestral spirits. The emperors and kings who proclaimed themselves divine did not do so out of mere megalomania, but out of a real need for a unification of experience, a simplification of it, and a rooting of it in a secure source of power. The leader, like the people, senses a need for a strongly focused moral unity of the sprawling and now senseless diversity of the kingdom, and he tries to embody it in his own person: By proclaiming themselves gods of empire, Sargon and Rameses wished to realize in their own persons that mystic or religious unity which one constituted the strength of the clan, which still maintained the unity of the kingdom, and which could alone form the tie between all the peoples of an empire. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

Alexander the Great, the Ptolemies, and the Caesars, will, in their turn, impose upon their subjects the worship of the sovereign, not so much out of vanity as to consolidate moral unity…And so through its mystic principle the clan has survived in the empire. I must also warn that many will seem to have disdain for you because they are beings of false light. Their connection to divinity has been served due to a strategic plan of enslavement. Therefore, the masses will likely shun and reject you. However, you will cyclically being to attract others who align with your perfectly through time. This is not a path of severe loneliness, but rather a means to realize just how badly the human race has been shackled. We must awaken to this in order to see the truth of the lie and perceive the lie of truth. Do not take it personally. People are naturally God fearing and will as a result feel threatened by your power. “And it came to pass that they did break forth, all as one, in singing, and praising their God for the great thing which we had done for them, in preserving them from falling into the hands of their enemies. Blessed be the name of the Lord God Almighty, the Most High God. And their hearts were swollen with joy, unto the gushing out of many tears, because of the great goodness of God in delivering them out of the hands of their enemies; and they knew it was because of their repentance and their humility and that they had been delivered from an everlasting destruction,” reports 3 Nephi 4.30-33. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

Indeed, the Cosmic Vision, which revealed the Presence of Infinite Intelligence throughout life, throughout the Universe and throughout history, which explained so many of the Higher Laws to me, came incongruously enough while I was sitting in a Cresleigh Hub Apartments in Folsom, California. With this humbling insight, the need to go abroad disappeared. And I then saw that it was really an ancient complex—a kind of auto-suggestion—inherited from my own far, reincarnatory past. Indeed, I found out that if I had remained loyal to the inward direction I had originally travelled, I need never have gone overseas at all, nor to those other Asiatic countries where I sought for Truth. What I needed could be very well found within myself. However, I had accepted the suggestion our of my past as well as out of the lips and writings of other persons. And so I deviated from the inward way. The shortcut, which the journeys to Asia offered, turned out to be a long way, for I traveled beautiful roads, and, in the end, had to return, as well as all have, to my own road. Indeed, there was nowhere else to go, and my Quest ended there. As this change occurs within, the external corporeal reality also begins to reflect that change. This is how the shackles of limitation will be broken and humankind will be liberated. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

This great work forces the physical plane to conform to and align with the plane of unlimited possibility by destroying the imposed limits of the false egregores of social, political and religion control. Then human beings, even those in high places, will come to be conscious of exactly how immortal they are not. If you are a God, why would you need to steal $1,000,000.00 USD from a child? As the World elevates to a higher level of thinking, then humankind can take back their sovereign right to rule over their own life. These are the true Olympians, not the mythic beings of human creation. Not until the light one has received becomes stabilized as a permanent thing can one be regarded as a master, and not until it is also full and complete can one be regarded as a sage. Sage is someone who is not only wide and dispassionate but who is also ready to proffer counsel out of one’s superior wisdom. One may dwell apart from humanity, if one chooses, but one’s Olympian aloofness will not be such that you cannot get a word of guidance out of one’s shy shut lips. Somehow we feel, and rightly, that the anchorite who has lost compassion or grown wholly self-centered may be pure and peaceful—but one cannot be a sage. One is a true messenger who seeks to keep one’s ego out of one’s work, who tries to bring God and beings together without oneself getting in between them. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

One Who Knows Not the World-Order, Knows Not One’s Own Place therein!

October 28, 2019 8:49 am

There were the films of symphony performances, the full-scale operas, the unending virtuous concerts! I thought I would go mad with the beauty of it—witnessing in living color and mesmerizing detail the London Philharmonic play Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, or the great Itzhak Perlman racing through the Brahms Concerto with an orchestra surrounding me. One of the situations in which children of all social levels come together and compete for status in terms of the same set of middle-class criteria and in which working-class children are most likely to be found wanting is in the schooled. American educators ae enamored of the idea of “democracy” signifies the fullest realization of the individual’s potentialities, the development of skills to an optimal level, the development of character and the abilities which can be bound by others, preparation for effective participation in the adult vocational World. Despite reservations such as with due regard to individual differences, this conception of democratic education implies that a major function of the schools is to promote, encourage, motivate, stimulate, in brief, reward middle-class ambition and conformity to middle-class expectations. However sincerely one may desire to avoid odious comparisons and to avoid, thereby, injury to the self-esteem of those who do not conform to one’s expectations, it is extremely difficult to reward, however subtly, successful conformity without at the same time, by implication, condemning and punishing the non-conformist. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

That same teacher who prides oneself on one’s recognition and encouragement of deserving work-class children dramatizes, by that very show of pride, the superior merit of the college-boy or college-girls working-class child to one’s less gifted or [street] corner-boy and corner-girl working-classmates. There are three goof reasons why status in the school, insofar as it depends upon recognition by the teacher, should be measured by middle-class standards. First, the teacher is hired to foster the development of middle-class personalities. The middle-class board of education, the middle-class parents whom they represent and, it is to be presumed, many of the working-class parents as well expect the teacher to define one’s job as the indoctrination of middle-class aspirations, character, skills and manners. Second, the teacher oneself is almost certain to be a middle-class person, who personally values ambition and achievement and spontaneously recognizes and rewards these virtues in others. The third relates to the school itself as a social system with certain structural imperatives of its own. The teacher’s textbooks in education and one’s own supervisors may stress individualization and consideration for the needs, limitations and special problems of each student. Nonetheless, the teacher actually handles 20, 30, or 40 students at a time. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

Regardless of what one conceives one’s proper function to be, the teacher necessarily looks with favor on the quiet, cooperative, well-behaved pupils who make one’s job easier and with disapproval and vexation on the lusty, irrepressible boisterous youngsters who are destructive of order, routine and predictability in the classroom. Furthermore, the teacher is like to be upwardly mobile or at least anxious about the security of one’s tenure in one’s present job. One is motivated, therefore, to conform to the criteria in terms of which one’s superiors evaluate one. Those superiors may themselves be progressive and in teacher meetings preach democracy in the classroom and individualization and indeed genuinely believe in those goals. However, the degree to which a teacher tries to achieve these goals or succeeds in doing so is not highly visible and readily determined. On the other hand, grades, performance and standardized examinations, the cleanliness and orderliness of the classroom and the frequency with which the children are sent to the front office are among the most easily determined and objective bases for the evaluation of teacher performance. A good rating, then, by one’s supervisors is possible only if the teacher sacrifices to some degree the very individualization and tolerance which those same supervisors may urge upon one. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

Research on the kinds of behavior which teachers regard as the most problematical among their pupils gives results consistent with our expectations. The most serious problems, from the standpoint of the teacher, are those children who are restless and unruly, who fidget and squirm, who annoy and distract, who create discipline problems. The good children are the studious, the obedient, the docile. It is precisely the working-class children who are most likely to be problems because of their relative lack of training in order and discipline, their lack of interest in intellectual achievement and their lack of reinforcement by the home in conformity to the requirements of the school. Both in terms of conduct and in terms of academic achievement, the failures in the classroom are drawn disproportionately from the lower social class levels. The child has little or no choice in selecting the group within which one shall compete for status and one is evaluated against the total range of the ability distribution. It is here that, day after day, most of the children in the lower fourth of the distribution have their sense of worth destroyed, develop feelings of insecurity, become frustrated and lose confidence in their ability to learn that which they are capable of learning. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

In dialogue, each experiences the other as a person, as the origin and source of one’s intentional acts. Each participant aims to show one’s being to the other as it is for the individual. Transparency, not mystification, is one of the goals. It matters little whether the dialogue is nonverbal or verbal; whether it occurs between a philosopher and one’s pupil, a therapist and one’s patient, a parent and child, or two friends. The aim is to show oneself in willful honesty before the other and to respond to the other with an expression of one’s experience as the other has affected it. Dialogue is like mutual unveiling, where each seeks to be the experienced and confirmed by the other as the one he or she is for oneself. Such dialogue is most likely to occur when the two people believe each is trustworthy and of goodwill. The threat that motivates people to conceal their intentions and experience in manipulative encounters is absent in dialogue. The aims that makes the action of each intelligible to other will be fully revealed. Now, I would like to examine the relationship between an experimenter and one’s subject in the light of those analyses of the two kinds of encounter. The usual encounter between a psychological researcher and one’s subject has more in common with the example of the young being on the make than it has with dialogue. The experimenter wants something from the subject, but one wants to keep the individual partly mystified as to what it is. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

Moreover, one does not want to frighten the subject away; so the psychological researcher often cloaks one’s intentions with camouflage. If one tips one’s hand, one may influence the subject and bias one’s findings. One tells the subject as little as one can when the latter appears in the laboratory. Actually, in some ways a research psychologist tries to impersonate a machine by depersonalizing oneself. One tries to be invisible or to be constant. One seldom tries to fin out from one’s subject just how that person experiences one, the researcher, either perceptually or in one’s fantasy. When an individual appears before others one’s actions will influence the definition of the situation which they come to have. Sometimes the individual will act in a thoroughly calculating manner, expressing oneself in a given way solely in order to give the kind of impression to others that is likely to evoke from them a specific response one is concerned to obtained. Sometimes the individual will be calculating in one’s activity but be relatively unaware that this is the case. Sometimes one will intentionally and consciously express oneself in a particular way, but chiefly because the tradition of one’s group or social status require this kind of expression and not because of any particular response (other than vague acceptance or approval) that is likely to be evoked from those impressed by the expression. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

Sometimes the traditions of an individual’s role will lead one to give a well-designed impression of a particular kind and yet one may be neither consciously nor unconsciously disposed to create such an impression. The others, in their turn. May be suitably impressed by the individual’s efforts to convey something, or may misunderstand the situation and come to conclusions that are warranted neither by the individual’s intent nor by the facts. In any case, in particular impressions, we may take a functional or pragmatic view and say that the individual has effectively projected a given definition of the situation and effectively fostered the understanding that given state of affairs obtains. There is one aspect of the others’ response that bear special comment here. Knowing that the individual is like to present oneself in a light that is favorable to one, the others may divide what they witness into two parts; a part that is relatively easy for the individual to manipulate at will, being chiefly one’s verbal assertions, and a part in regard to which one seems to have little concern or control, being chiefly derived from the expressions one gives off. The others may then use what are considered to be the ungovernable aspects of one’s expressive behavior as a check upon the validity of what is conveyed by the governable aspects. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

In this fundamental asymmetry is demonstrated in the communication process, the individual presumably being aware of only one stream of the individual’s communication, the witnesses of this stream and one other. For example, in Shetland Isle one crofter’s wife, in serving native dishes to a visitor from the mainland of Britain, would listen with a polite smile to his polite claims of liking what he was eating; at the same time she would take note of the rapidity with which the visitors lifted one’s fork or spoon to one’s mouth, the eagerness with which one passed food into one’s mouth, and the gusto expressed in chewing the food, using these signs as a check on the stated feelings of the eater. The same woman, in order to discover what one acquaintance (A) actually thought of another acquaintance (B), would wait until B was in the presence of A but engaged in conversation with C. No being in conversation with B, and not being directly observed by him, A would sometimes relax usual constraints and tactful deceptions, and freely express what one was actually feeling about B. This Shetlander, in short, would observe the unobserved observer. Those who discuss labor often comment that nowadays most jobs call for a capacity to deal with people rather than with things, for more interpersonal skills and fewer mechanical skills. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

The fact that individuals now talk to other individuals, rather than interact with a machine, is the fundamental fact about work in the post-industrial society. There is a continual subdivision of work in many branches of the economy. Complex tasks in which a craftsman used to take pride are divided into simpler, more repetitive segments, each more boring and less well paid than the original job. Work is deskilled and the worker belittled. However, celebrants and critics alike have not inspected at close hand or with a social-psychological eye what it is that people jobs actually require of workers. They have not inquired into the actual nature of this labor. Some do not know exactly what, in the case of emotional labor, becomes deskilled. A second discourse, closer to the person and more remote from the overall organization of work, concerns the display of feelings. There are many minor traffic rules of face-to-face interaction as they emerge at a card game, in an elevator, on the street, or at the dining table of an insane asylum. We cannot dismiss the small as trivial by show how small rules, transgression, and punishments add up to form the longer strips of experience we call work. At the same time, it is hard to explain, for example, why companies train flight attendants in smiling, or how emotion tone is supervised, or what profit is ultimately tied to emotional labor. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

It is hard, in other words, to draw on this discourse alone and see how display work fits into the larger scheme of things. The third discourse takes pace in a quiet side street of American social science; it deals with the timeless issues of what an emotion is and how we can manage it. To uncover the heart of emotional labor, to understand what it takes to do it and what it does to people, it is important to realize that certain events in economic history cannot be fully understood unless we pay attention to the filigreed patterns of feeling and their management because the details of these patterns are an important part of what may men and women do for a living. Because such different traditions are joined here, my inquiry will have a different relevance for those who do the work it describes—the flight attendants. However, most of us have jobs that require some handling of other people’s feelings and our own, and in this sense we are all partly flight attendants. One who has realized truth according to the Secret Doctrine may continue to follow the same vocation which one was practising before. That is, a king may remain a king and a carpenter may continue one’s carpentering. There is no law or rule which may be laid down as to the kind of work an illuminate may perform or abstain from performing. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

Similarly, the illuminate is not to be judged by one’s practice of or one’s omission to practise asceticism. The secretary who creates a cheerful office that announces her company as friendly and dependable and her boss as up-and-coming, the waitress or the waiter who creates an atmosphere of pleasant dining, the tour guide or hotel receptionist who makes us feel welcome, the social worker whose look of solicitous concern makes the client feel cared for; the salesman who creates the sense of a hot commodity, the bill collector who inspires fear, the funeral parlor director who makes the bereaved feel understood, the minister who creates a sense of protective outreach but even-handed warmth—all of them must confront in some way or another the requirements of emotional labor. Emotional labor does not observe conventional distinctions between types of jobs. By my estimate roughly 33 percent of American workers today have jobs that subject them to substantial demands for emotional labor. Moreover, of all women working, roughly 50 percent have jobs that call for emotional labor. As traditionally more accomplished managers of feeling in private life, women more than men have put emotional labor on the market, and they know more about its personal costs. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

Any functioning society makes effective use of its members’ emotional labor. We do not think twice about the use of feeling in the theater, or in psychotherapy, or in forms of group life that we admire. It is when we come to speak of the exploitation of those at the lower level of the hierarchy by those at the higher levels in any society that we become morally concerned. In any system, exploitation depends o the actual distribution of many kinds of profits—many, authority, status, honor, well-being. It is not emotional labor itself, therefore, but the underlying system of recompense that raises the question of what the cost of it is. In the primitive World, we might say, the child had been the bearer of the collective immortality, since it was through him or her that the souls of the ancestors reentered the World. This is one reason why many primitives handled their children so gently: the child was actually in the process of giving birth to himself or herself with the help of the ancestral spirit; if one was mean to the child, the spirit might be upset and withdraw from the World. Under the ideology of the patriarchal family, the child becomes the individual successor to his father—actually, then, merely, the son of a father, and is no longer the independent mediator of the spirts from the ancestral World. However, this now the only spiritual lineage in which the on can perpetuate himself in turn. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

This is why, too, fathers could be despotic with their children: they were merely objects to whom one had oneself given life. Today we are shocked when we read of the ancient Greek who blinded his sons for disobeying him and going off to war—but their lives were literally his personal property, and he had this authority and used it. Considering that science is widely regarded as the highest value in contemporary industrial society, it is very difficult for the average person to believe that what science commands could be wrong or immortal. If the Lord had not told Abraham not to kill his son, Abraham would have done it, like millions of parents who practiced child sacrifice in history. For the believer neither God nor his modern equivalent, Science, can command anything that is wrong. For this reason, the high degree of obedience is not more surprising than that 35 percent of the group refused at some point to obey; in fact this disobedience of more than a third might well be considered more surprising—and encouraging. People remove the awareness of the conflict by renationalization, and the conflict manifests itself only unconsciously in increased stress, neurotic symptoms, or feeling guilty for the wrong reasons. Subjects are in a conflict situation because they are caught between obedience to authority and behavior patterns learned from childhood on: not to harm other people. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

However, is this really so? Have we learned not to harm other people? That may be what children are told in Sunday school. In the realistic school of life, however, they learn that they must seek their own advantage even if other people are harmed. It seems 65 percent of the subjects could be conditioned to behave cruelly, but a reaction of indignation or horror against this sadistic behavior was clearly present in most of them. Apparently they had little or no feeling of opposition to the cruel acts they were performing. Possibly this is because they enjoyed the suffering of others and felt no remorse when their behavior was sanctioned by authority. Another possibility is that they were such highly alienated or narcissistic people that they were insulted against what went on in other people: or they might be psychopaths, lacking in any kind of mortal reaction. As for those in whom the conflict manifested itself in various symptoms of stress and anxiety, it should be assumed that they are people who do not has a sadistic or destructive character. (If one had undertaken and even could have made an educated guess as to how people would behave.) However, we cannot forget in more people the presence of conscience, and their pain when obedience made them act against their conscience. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

Thus, while it may seem there is proof of the easy dehumanization of beings, the subjects’ reactions show rather the contrary—the presence of intense forces within them that find cruel behavior intolerable. We have to consider not only cruel behavior but the—often unconscious—guilty conscience of those who obey authority. (The Nazis had to use an elaborate system of camouflage of atrocities in order to cope with the conscience of the average being.) Another attitude in the striving for power is that of never giving in. Agreeing with an opinion or accepting advice, even if they are considered right, is felt as a weakness, and the mere idea of doing so provokes rebellion. Persons for whom this attitude is important are inclined to lean over backward and, out of sheer fear of giving in, compulsively take the opposition stand. The most general expression of this attitude is the neurotic’s secrete insistence that the World should adapt itself to one instead of adapting oneself to the World. One of the basic difficulties in psychoanalytic therapy comes from this source. The ultimate reason for a patient’s analysis is not the gaining of knowledge or insight, but the use of this insight in order to change one’s attitudes. In spite of recognizing that a change would be for one’s own good, a neurotic of this type abhors this prospect of changing because in implies for one a final giving in. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

The incapacity to do his has implications also for love relationship. Love, whatever else it may mean, always implies surrender, giving in to the lover as well as to one’s own feelings. The more a person, whether man or woman, is incapable of such giving in, the more unsatisfactory will be one’s love relationships. This same factor may have a bearing also on frigidity, inasmuch as having a climax presupposes just this capacity of completely letting go. The influence which we have seen that the striving for power has on love relations allows us to understand more completely many of the implications of the neurotic need for affection. Many of he attitudes involved in the striving for affection cannot be wholly understood without considering the part that is play in them by the striving for power. It is impossible to present the basic conflict by simply showing it in operation in a number of individuals. Because of its disruptive power the neurotic builds a defensive structure around it which serves not only to bolt it from view but so deeply imbeds it that it cannot be isolated in pure form. The result is that what appears on the surface is more the various attempts at solution than the conflict itself. A simple detailing of case histories, therefore, would not bring all its implications and nuances to full relief; the presentation would necessarily be too circumstantial and give too untransparent a picture. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

When we look at the complaint type of personality, it manifests all the traits that go with moving toward people. One shows marked need for affection and approval and an especial need for a partner—that is, a friend, lover, husband or wife who is to fulfill all expectations of life and take responsibility for good an evil, one’s successful manipulation becoming the predominant task. These needs have the characteristics common to all neurotic trends; that is, they are compulsive, indiscriminate, and generate anxiety or despondence when frustrated. They operate almost independently of the intrinsic worth of the others in question, as well as of the person’s real feelings toward them. However, these needs may vary in their expression, they all center around a desire for human intimacy, a desire for belonging. Because of the indiscriminate nature of one’s needs, the complaint type will be prone to overrate one’s congeniality and the interests one has in common wit those around one and disregard the separating factors. One’s misjudging of people this way is not due to ignorance, stupidity, or the inability to observe, but is determined by one’s compulsive needs. One feels-as illustrated by a patient’s drawing—like a baby surrounded by strange and threatening animals. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

There she stood, tiny and helpless, in the middle of the picture, around her a huge bee ready to sting her, a dog that could bite her, a cat that could jump at her, a bull that could gore her. Obviously, then, the real nature of other beings does not matter, expect in so far as the more aggressive ones, beings the more frightening, are the ones whose affection is the most necessary. In sum, this type needs to be liked, wanted, desired, loved; to feel accepted, welcomed, approved of, appreciated; to be needed, to be of importance to others, especially to one particular person; to be helped, protected, taken care of, guided. When in the course of analysis the compulsive character of these needs is pointed out to be a patient, one will be likely to assert that all these desires are quite natural. And, of course, here one is on defensible ground. Except for persons whose whole being has become so warped by sadistic trends that the desire for affection is choked beyond all possibility of functioning, it is safe to assume that everyone dos not to feel liked, to belong, to be helped, and so on. Where the patient errs is in claiming that all one’s frantic beating about for affection and approval is genuine, while in reality the genuine portion is heavily overshadowed by one’s insatiable urge to feel safe. Only when a being finds out one’s correct relation to the Universe and to one’s fellow creatures will one find one’s own well-being. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

Randolph Harris II International Institute

Category Archives: Africa

Those Who Take to this Quest for the Sake of Satisfying Personal Ambition, Will do Better in the End to Leave it Alone!

Cresleigh Homes

Nothing Changes the Scent of Biological Humans, Humans of Body and Soul, to Rule the Planet and Reach for the Stars Beyond it!

Unwise People Do Not Understand How that Which Differs With itself is in Agreement: Harmony Consists of Opposing Tensions!

BRIGHTON STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH

Rancho Cordova, CA |

Now Selling!

A Benign Influence Diffused itself from One and is Felt by the Sensitive, as if Borne on Telepathic Waves

Cresleigh Homes

On this Journey there are Stages of Ascent, Stations of Understanding, Lights of Peace, and Shadows of Despair!

CRESLEIGH RIVERSIDE AT PLUMAS RANCH

Plumas Lake, CA | from the low $400,000’s

Now Selling!

Nature Keeps Her Equilibrium by Bringing in Counter Forces, or Complementary Ones, to Correct or Balance Any Condition where to Much has Gone too Far!

One Who Knows Not the World-Order, Knows Not One’s Own Place therein!

Post navigation