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A Precious Mouldering Pleasure it is to for the Soul to Select its Own Society
If they take you into their trust, tell you things that even most people do not know, there will be a bond, and maybe a bond that can somehow save us all. Many of us do not wish to settle for knowing just a little bit of other people, especially those we care about. So, we must find ways of opening up avenues of approach. By experimenting, we can invite these people to come out into the Sunlight and experience as much of life as possible. Why should we? If a person is happy being a Bluffer or an Expert or a Life of the Party, is it our business to take on the role of disturbing that individual? A fair question. First of all, it is not for anybody to say whether a person is truly happy or not. However, it is a peculiar and interesting fact that a self-actualizing person often attracts people who are only living partially. They may see the individual as a happy, effective, comfortable human being and come to that individual, associate with the person, in an effort to discover one’s secrets. Without ever admitting they want to be more than they are, they may show it or hint at it through their valuing or seeking after associations with certain people. Complementary and supplementary relationships are as common as male-female liaisons. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
Often the more fully functioning partner blazes the trail.They shy and fumbling English person was often invited by the confident Zorbato jump in and play, or dance, or go after the woman: “Boss,” he said, “this is where I count on you. Now, don’t dishonor the male species! The god-devil sends you this choice morsel [a beautiful widow]. You’ve got teeth. All right, get ‘em into it. Stretch out your arm and take her! What did the Creator give us hands for?” “I don’t want any trouble!” I replied angrily. It is clear to see that the actualizer suggests, not to taunt or torment but to dare the other person to become more fully what he or she is. Often the half-person will come out and ask about oneself. Then the actualizer has some decisions to make. Will what he or she says make the person feel better or worse? If what must be said is hurtful, can the person take it? Will this interchange drastically affect the kind of relationship they have? Does one really want reality of is one asking for reassurance that one is likeable? If a person with insights into happier more effective living can communicate, the other person may be able to get the factual information one needs to begin working on oneself. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
However, some people may not want to hear the truth about themselves, especially if it is painful. Anybody who has ever been asked to judge a friend’s work knows well the implication of that statement: If friendship or business relations are important to you, do not be negative. It is the rare individual who can objectively take criticism without some twinge of self-righteousness or resentment. Even well-meant, constructive criticism will wound creative people, who live with it and often because of it all their productive lives. A self-actualizing person generally has the peculiar knack of presenting criticism indirectly and one’s suggestions take on the nature of gifts, which tot he partially functioning individual they are. Some people like their coworkers,in the work place, to loosen up and play around sometimes to show that they are fully human. Yet, there are people who want to go to work, excel at their jobs and keep their person lives and business to themselves. It can make people uncomfortable when one of their employees or coworkers seems like a well adjusted superhuman. “I am not shrink, but I get the feeling you are embarrassed to let people see the…oh, the human side of you. Everybody sees Bud Jones, the super-efficient worker. No mistakes, no sloppiness, no margin for error.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
Some people keep their human side to themselves because they have been taught people knowing too much about you and your family life can get you into trouble. “Bud, you are a guy who only let us see the perfect side. We are all human, Bud. It would make some of the newer people feel better about their chances if they could see that you really are flesh and blood. You are a nice and friendly guy, but it does not always show in public. More important than what it did for them, it would do them a lot of good. You do not always need to be person. Nobody expects as much as you do out of yourself. I would like to have you find out that being a human being can be enjoyable, too!” Some self-actualizing people have a trait called the older brother attitude. That is a healthy personality, which includes a high social interest. The older brother type cares about other people and want them to be fully human and to enjoy living rather than merely existing. Self-actualizing people are not running about with signs proclaiming their “Care for Sale,” but they are usually concerned about people and situations. They have enough good will in their beings to let it spill over and help people who really need it. And there are a lot more people living blindly, ignoring human needs, than there are those who care and can share that concern meaningfully and helpfully. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
Though it is idealistic, one of the goals we have is the people,though discovering their own person significance, may want to help others discover theirs. Should this happen, a chain-reaction of fuller and more effective humanness might happen, too. If people got more out of living and took an interest in seeing to it that others got a chance to live more fully as well, we cannot help but feel that things might be a lot easier. The forward-going life instinct is stronger and increases in relative strength the more it grows. As it stands, human’s life is determined by the inescapable alternative between regression and progression, between return to a primal existence and arrival at human existence. Any attempt to return is painful, it inevitably leads to suffering and mental sickness, to death either physiologically or mentally (insanity). Every step forward is frightening and painful too, until a certain point has been reaches where fear and doubt have only minor proportions. Aside from the physiological nourished cravings (hunger, thirst, intimacy), all essential human cravings are determined by this polarity of the forward-going and the retrogressive impulse, which do not have the same biological strength. Humans have to solve a problem, one can never rest in the given situation of a passive adaption to nature. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
Even the most complete satisfaction of all one’s instinctive needs does not solve one’s human problem; one’s most intensive passions and needs are not those rooted in one’s body, but those rooted in the very peculiarity of one’s existence. There lies also the key to humanistic psychoanalysis. As it turns out, the basic force which motivates human passions and desires are not the libido. As powerful as the sexual drive and all its derivations are, they are by no means the most powerful forces within humans and their frustration is not the cause of mental disturbance. The most powerful forces motivating human’s behavior stem from the condition of one’s existence, the human situation. Human cannot like statically because of their inner contradictions drive them to seek for an equilibrium, for a new harmony instead of the lost soul harmony with nature. After one has satisfied their basic needs, one is drive by the human needs. Human behavior is governed by a large number of types of motives, some that are physiological, but many more that are acquired and learned through social interaction, personal experience, and growth experiences. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
While our bodies tell humans what to eat and what to avoid—one conscious ought to tell one which needs to cultivate and satisfy, and which needs to let wither and starve out. However, hunger and appetite are functions of the body with which people are born—conscience, while potentially present,requires the guidance of people and principles which develop only during the growth of culture. All passions and strivings of humans are attempts to find an answer to one’s existence or, as we may also say, they are an attempt to avoid insanity. (It may be said in passing that the real problem of mental life is not why some people become insane, but rather why most avoid insanity.) Both the mentally healthy and the neurotic are driven by the need to find an answer, the only difference being that one answer corresponds more to the total needs of humans, and hence is more conducive to the unfolding of one’s powers and to one’s happiness than the other. All cultures provide for a patterned system in which certain solutions are predominant, hence certain strivings and satisfactions. Whether we deal with primitive religions, with theistic or non-theistic religions, they are all attempts to give an answer to human’s existential problem. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
The finest, as well as the most barbaric cultures have the same function and that is to answer the human existential problem—the difference is only whether the answer given is better or worse. The deviate from the cultural pattern is just as much in search of an answer as one’s more well-adjusted brother. One’s answer may be better or worse than the one given by one’s culture—it is always another answer to the same fundamental question raised by human existence. In this sense all cultures are religious and every neurosis is a private form of religion, provided we mean religion an attempt to answer the problem of human existence. Indeed, the tremendous energy in the forces producing mental illness, as well as those behind art and religion, could never be understood as an outcome of frustrated or sublimated physiological needs; they are attempts to solve the problem of being born human. All people are idealist and cannot help being idealists, provided we mean by idealism the striving for the satisfaction of needs which are specifically human and transcend the physiological needs of the organism. The difference is only that one idealism is a good and adequate solution, the other a bad and destructive one. The decision as to what is good and bad has to be made on the basis of our knowledge of human’s nature and the laws which govern its growth. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
The distinction of the three types of anxiety is supported by the history of Western civilization. We find that at the end of ancient civilization ontic anxiety is predominant, at the end of the Middle Ages moral anxiety, and at the end of the modern period spiritual anxiety. However, in spite of the predominance of one type the others are also present and effective. Enough has been said about the end of the ancient period and its anxiety of fate and death in connection with an analysis of Stoic courage. As Stoics, we learn to focus on what is in our power. We ask ourselves what can we do to create a good life,no matter the circumstances we find ourselves in and what is required of us as human beings and what prevents us from living out to our full potential? Consistent stoic practice increasing our resilience, contentment, joy, and gives us the boldness necessary to tackle the tasks presented to us in life. We believe that we all have the ability to live artfully, and that requires effort. Living naturally means to take actions that we allow us to flourish. We are looking for our best possible selves. Humans are rational, social being. Therefore, there nature is to use their rational mind for the benefit of oneself and their society. Virtuous life is fully sufficient for happiness. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
The sociological background is well known: the conflict of the imperial powers, Alexander’s conquest of the East, the war between his follower, the conquest of West and East by republic Rome, the transformation of republican into imperial Rome through Caesar and Augusts, the tyranny of the post-Augustan emperors, the destruction of the independent city and nation states,the eradication of the former bearers of the aristocratic-democratic structure of society, the individual’s feeling of being in the hands of powers, natural as well as political, which are completely beyond his control and calculation—all this produced a tremendous anxiety and the quest for courage to meet the threat of fate and death. At the same time the anxiety of emptiness and meaninglessness made it impossible for many people, especially of the educated classes, to find a basis for such courage. Ancient Skepticism from its very beginning in the Sophists united scholarly and existential elements. Skepticism in its late ancient form was despair about the possibility of right acting as well as right thinking. It drove people into the desert where the necessity for decisions, theoretical and practical, is reduced to a minimum. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
However, most of those who experienced the anxiety of emptiness and the despair of meaninglessness tried to meet them with a cynical contempt of spiritual self-affirmation. Yet they could not hide the anxiety under skeptical arrogance. The anxiety of guilt and condemnation was effective in the groups who gathered in the mystery of cult with their rites of expiation and purification. Sociologically these circles of the initiated were rather indefinite. In most of them even slaves were admitted.In them, however, as in the whole non-Jewish ancient World more the tragic than the personal guilt was experiences. Guilt is the pollution of the soul by the material realm or by demonic powers. Therefore the anxiety of emptiness, within the dominating anxiety of fate and death. Only the impact of the Jewish-Christian message changed this situation, and so radically that toward the end of the Middle Ages the anxiety of guilt and condemnation was decisive.If one period deserves the name of the age of anxiety it is the pre-Reformation and Reformation. The anxiety of condemnation symbolized as the wrath of God and intensified by the imagery of hell and purgatory drove people of the late Middle Ages to try various means of assuaging their anxiety. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
To escape anxiety, people took pilgrimages to holy places,of possible to Rome; ascetic exercises, sometimes of an extreme character; devotion to relics, often brought together in mass collections; acceptance of ecclesiastical punishments and the desire for indulgences; exaggerated participation in masses and penance, increase in prayers and alms. In short they asked ceaselessly: How can I appease the wrath of God, how can I attain divine mercy, the forgives of sin? This predominant form of anxiety embraces the other two forms. The personified figure of death appeared in painting, poetry, and preaching. However, it was death and guilt together. Death and the devil were allied in the anxious imagination of the period. The anxiety of fate returned with the invasion of late antiquity. Fortuna became a preferred symbol in the art of the Renaissance, and even the Reformers were not free from astrological beliefs and fears. And the anxiety of fate was intensified by fear of demonic powers acting directly or through other human beings to cause illness, death, and all kinds of destruction. At the same time, fate was extended beyond death into the pre-ultimate state of purgatory and the ultimate state of Hell of Heaven. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
The darkness of destiny could not be removed; not even the Reformers were able to remove it, as their doctrine of predestination shows. In all these expressions the anxiety of fate appears as an element within the all-embracing anxiety of guilt and in the permanent awareness of the threat of condemnation. The late Middle Ages was not a period of doubt; and the anxiety of emptiness and loss of meaning appeared only twice, both remarkable occasions,however, and important for the future. One was the Renaissance, when theoretical skepticism was renewed and the question of meaning haunted some of the most sensitive minds. In Michelangelo’s prophets and sibyls and in Shakespeare’s Hamlet there are indications of a potential anxiety of meaninglessness. The other was in the demonic assaults that Martin Luther experienced, which were neither temptations in the moral sense nor moments of despair about threatening condemnation, but moments when belief in his work and message disappeared and no meaning remained. Similar experiences of the desert or the night of the soul are frequent among mystics. It must be emphasized however that in all these cases the anxiety of guilt remained predominant, and that only after the victory of humanism and Enlightenment as the religious foundation of Western society could anxiety about spiritual nonbeing become dominant. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
The sociological cause of the anxiety of guilt and condemnation that arose at the end of the Middle Ages is not difficult to identify. In general one can say it was the dissolution of the protective unit of the religiously guided medieval culture. More specifically there must be emphasized the rise of an educated middle class in the larger cities, people who tried to have as their own experience what had been merely an objective, hierarchically controlled system of doctrines and sacraments. In this attempt, however, they were driven to hidden or open conflict with the Church, whose authority they still acknowledged. There must be emphasized the concentration of political power in the princes and their bureaucratic-military administration, which eliminated the independence of those lower in the feudal system. There must be emphasized the state absolutism which transformed the masses in city and country into subjects whose only duty was to work and obey, without any power to resist the arbitrariness of the absolute rulers. There must be emphasized the economic catastrophes connected with early capitalism, such as the importation of gold from the New World, expropriation of the less affluent and so on. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
In all these often described changes it is the conflict between the appearance of independent tendencies in all groups of society, on the one and,and the rise of an absolutist concentration of power on the other that is largely responsible for the predominance of the anxiety of guilt. Their rational, commanding, absolute God of nominalism and the Reformation is partly shaped by the social, political, and spiritual absolutism of the period;and the anxiety created in turn by one’s image is partly an expression of the anxiety produced by the basic social conflict of the disintegrating Middle Ages. The breakdown of absolutism, the development of liberalism and democracy, the rise of a technical civilization with its victory over all enemies and its own beginning disintegration—these are the sociological presupposition for the third main period of anxiety. In this anxiety of emptiness and meaninglessness is dominant. We are under the threat of spiritual nonbeing. The threats of moral and ontic nonbeing are, of course, present, but they are not independent and not controlling. This situation is so fundamental to the question raised in this book that it requires fuller analysis than the two earlier periods, and the analysis must be correlated with the constructive solution. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
It is significant that the three main periods of anxiety appear at the end of an era. The anxiety which, in its different forms, is potentially present in every individual becomes general if the accustomed structures of meaning, power, belief, and order disintegrate. These structures, as long as they are in force, keep anxiety bound within a protective system of courage by participation. The individual who participates in the institutions and ways of life of such a system is not liberated from one’s personal anxieties but one has means of overcoming them with well known methods no longer work. Conflict between the old, which tries to maintain itself, often with new means, and the new, which deprives the old, which tries to maintain itself, often with new means, and the new, which deprives the old of its intrinsic power, produce anxiety in all directions. Nonbeing, in such a situation, has a double face, resembling two types of nightmare (which are perhaps, expressions of an awareness of these two faces). The one type is the anxiety of annihilating narrowness, of the impossibility of escape and the horror of being trapped. The other is the anxiety of annihilating openness, of infinite, formless space into which one falls without a place to fall upon. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
Social situation like those described have the character both of a trap without exist and of an empty, dark, and unknown void. Both faces of the same reality arouse the latent anxiety of every individual who looks at them. Today most of us do not look at them. “And they all cried with one voice, saying: Yea, we believe all the words which thou hast spoken unto us; and also, we know of their surety and truth, because of the Spirit of the Lord Omnipotent, which has wrought a mighty change in us, or in our hearts, that we have no more disposition to do evil, but to do good continually. And we, ourselves, also, though the infinite goodness of God, and the manifestations of his Spirit, have great views of that which is to come; and were it expedient, we could prophesy of all things. And it is the faith which we have had on the things which our king has spoken unto us that has brought us to this great knowledge, whereby we do rejoice with such exceedingly great joy,” Mosiah 5.2-4. Keep your eyes on God, not on people. “It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you,” reports Acts 1.7. Spiritual programs are filled with concerns for individual progress, acceptance by authorities, and the wish for sainthood or some other high position. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
I Cannot Tell You, but You Feel it—Who Ponders this Tremendous Faith which is the Experiment of Our Lord!
It is tempting to try to live without an underworld, without soul, and without concern for the mysterious elements that touch on the spiritual and the religious. Anxiety and fear have the same ontological root but they are not the same actuality. This is common knowledge, but it has been emphasized and overemphasized to such a degree that a reason against it may occur and wipe out not only the exaggerations but also the truth of the distinction. Fear, as opposed to anxiety has a definite object (as most authors agree), which can be faced, analyzed, attacked, endured. One can act upon it, and in acting upon it participate in it—even if in the form of struggle. In this way one can take it into one’s self-affirmation. Courage can meet every object of fear, because it is an object and makes participation possible. Courage can take the fear produced by a definite object into itself, because this object, however frightful it maybe, has a side with which it participates in us and we in it. One could say that as long as there is an object of fear, love in the sense of participation,can conquer fear. However, this is not so with anxiety, because anxiety has no object, or rather, in a paradoxical phase, its object is the negation of every object. Therefore participation, struggle, and love with respect to it are impossible.One who is in anxiety is, insofar as it is mere anxiety, delivered to it without help. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14
Helplessness in the state of anxiety can be observed in animals and humans alike. It expresses itself in loss of direction, inadequate actions, lack of intentionality (the being related to meaningful contents of knowledge or will). The reason for this sometimes striking behavior is the lack of an object on which the subject (in the state of anxiety) can concentrate.The only object is the threat is nothingness. Anxiety is a normal human emotion. Everyone experiences it. It is part of the opposition in all things,without which there would be no happiness nor misery, neither sense nor insensibility. As such, this emotion serves us well. It is part of our emotional alarm system.It motivates us to prepare for important events. It causes us to protect ourselves when we feel threatened. It enhances performance. Anxiety can always help us make thoughtful decisions, solve problems, and prepare for challenges.It reveals what we care about. However, one might ask whether this threatening nothing is not the unknown, the indefinite possibility of an actual threat? Does not anxiety cease in the moment in which a known object of fear appears? Anxiety then would be fear of the unknown. However, this is an insufficient explanation of anxiety. For there are innumerable realms of the unknown, different for each subject, and faced without any anxiety. It is the unknown of a special type which is met with anxiety. It is the unknown which by its very nature cannot be known, because it is nonbeing. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14
Fear and anxiety are distinguished but not separated. They are immanent within each other: The sting of fear is anxiety, and anxiety strives toward fear. Fear is being afraid of something, a pain, the rejection by a person or a group, the loss of something or somebody, the moment of dying.However, in the anticipation of the threat originating in these things, it is not the negativity itself which they will bring upon the subject that is frightening but the anxiety about the possible implications of this negativity.The outstanding example—and more than an example—is the fear of dying. Insofar as it is fear its object is the anticipated event of being killed by sickness or an accident and thereby suffering agony and the loss of everything. Insofar as it is anxiety its object is the absolutely unknown after death, the nonbeing which remains nonbeing even if it is filled with images of our present experience. The dreams in Hamlet’s soliloquy, “To be or not to be,” which we may have after death and which make cowards of us all are frightful not because of their manifest content but because of their power to symbolize the threat of nothingness, in religious terms of eternal death. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14
The symbols of hell created by Dante produce anxiety not because of their objective imagery but because they express the nothingness whose power is experienced in the Inferno could be met by courage on the basis of participation and love. However, of course the meaning is that this is impossible; in other words they are not real situations but symbols of the objectless, of nonbeing. The fear of death determines the element of anxiety in every fear. Anxiety, if not modified by the fear of an object, anxiety in its nakedness, is always the anxiety of ultimate nonbeing. Immediately seen, anxiety is the painful feeling of not being able to deal with the threat of a special situation. However, a more exact analysis sows that in the anxiety about any special situation anxiety about the human situation as is implied. It is the anxiety of not being able to preserve one’s own being which underlies every fear and is the frightening element in it. In the moment, therefore, in which naked anxiety lays hold of the mind, the previous object of fear cease to be definite objects. They appear as what they always were in part, symptoms of human’s basic anxiety. As such they are beyond the reach of even the most courageous attack upon them. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14
This situation drives the anxious subject to establish objects of fear. Anxiety strives to become fear, because fear can be met by courage. It is impossible for a finite being to stand naked anxiety for more than a flash of time. People who have experienced these moments, as for instance some mystics in their visions of the night soul, or Luther under the despair of the demonic assaults have told of the unimaginable horror of it. This horror is ordinarily avoided by the transformation of anxiety into fear of something, no matter what. The human mind is not only a permanent factory of idols, it is also a permanent factory of fears—the first in order to escape God who is really God means facing also the absolute of nonbeing. The naked absolute produces naked anxiety; for it is the extinction of every finite self-affirmation, and not a possible object of fear and courage. However, ultimately,the attempts to transform anxiety of a finite being about the threat of nonbeing,cannot be eliminated. It belongs to existence itself. If we do not resolve the distorted thinking common to adulthood, we become the slaves rather than the masters of our high standards, and we become vulnerable to extreme anxiety.#RandolphHarris 5 of 14
Since we are social beings, we need other people for sheer survival from the beginning of life. Once the physiological needs are met, we cultivate needs that still involve other people. These social needs are secondary motives in the sense that they are learned, not inborn. However, secondary is not equivalent to unimportant or peripheral. Most of us are heavily involved in meeting our social needs. We need others for love experiences. Solitary people usually do not even love themselves. People who love themselves in a healthy fashion are people who also love others. In fact they are people who love widely and deeply because they have been loved—by others and then by themselves—and are in continual cycle of re-experiencing. True self-love is self-respect,self-appreciation, and self-knowledge. The self-love that grasps and demands and exploits others is a false love called narcissism. Real self-love enables us to involve ourselves with others, fully, deeply, real-ly, and satisfyingly for all concerned. We do not possess al the resources necessary to satisfy ourselves. For supplementation we have to go to another person. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14
It is the realization that we need other people for supplementation that makes social intercourse, and intimacy, possible. We often find ourselves in the situation of experiencing emptiness or shallowness. We may have been too long alone with our own thoughts or feelings. We may have had too limited a social situation, knowing and experiencing a too limited or small group of others. At times we find it necessary to replenish our supply of social feeling or social interest. It is at these times that we are strongly pushed or pulled toward other people, new people, or familiar people in differing or new circumstances. “Charity is the pure love of Christ, and it endures forever; and whoso is found possessed of it at the last say, it shall be well with him,” reports Moroni 7.47. At times professional people find the company of colleagues to be tiring or uninspiring and are refreshed or stimulated by enjoying a meal or conversation with persons from other disciplines and academic levels. For those who may view this as using otherpeople, we would clarify. We all use other people: we pick their minds, we ask their opinions, we ask them to appraise our work, our looks, our ideas; we curry their favor. They, in turn, use us for the same kinds of things. This is simply wholesome, cooperative interaction. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14
There is also abuse of other people. A synonym for it is exploitation: to take advantage, uncaringly, of another person. Slavery is an obvious example, but far more subtle examples occur every day whenever someone takes something for another and does not give much back. Think of the adulation a movie star may take from a fan, without really giving much back. Psychotherapists often take from their patients the good feelings they have to give, and often do not give the patient something in return. This does not happen often, but there are good cases in point. Many therapists feel pleasure at the Godlike role into which their patents put them, and a few succumb to this and allow the patients to literally worship their every word, their very being. Then the patient gets very little that is real in return. When the healthy, self-actualizing person goes to another person, it is because there is a strong need for the presence and fellowship of that person. If one gets something from the involvement, one usually gives as much as one gets back. No contract is signed, no concern that the dividends will be absolutely equal to the investment! Between two people in the love that friends or lovers have there is no worry or greed. It is a continual round of sharing. When this happens, re-creation of each person takes place. It is again like two complementary halves making up an integrated whole.#RandolphHarris 8 of 14
Love is a re-freshment. It is a time and opportunity for newness and re-birth. There is so much to be gained from giving in the shared love relationships, not the least of which is growth of selfhood and of social feeling. One good turn deserves another way of saying that when one has experienced the growth of wholeness that comes from the being deeply involved with another human being, one wants to repeat the experience, time and time again. This feeling has been reported by many people as a phenomenon of any wholesome,satisfying social interaction and certainly seems to demonstrate the necessity of frequent and rewarding social contacts. Simple contacts, like casual conversation with strangers, apparently have beneficial and growth-producing effect. How many people get deeply involved in conversations wit perfect strangers!Taxi drivers, fellow drinkers at bars, bartenders, waiters, newsstand dealers,door-to-door salespeople, are literally invited into the lives of lonely people. It appears that there is greater hunger for human companionship or listeners.A few years ago, a group of New York City bartenders asked a psychotherapist to give them lessons in simple counseling because they were so often put into the role of counselor by their customers. The therapist reasoned that there might be some therapeutic advantage in helping these people to be effective listeners. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14
The social experience is rewarding and regenerating because we know—whether we fully acknowledge it or not—that there is a strong bond among all human beings. Rugged individualist, cynical loners, bitter hermits may deny it, but most of us are more than willing to acknowledge that we feel a sense of kinship with other people, a fellow-feeling with all humankind, which is more like saying that all Homo sapiens are in the same boat. Some individuals identify so strongly with others that they emphatically experience sorrow with those in dire circumstances and joy with their happier fellows. All of these experiences of empathy are growth-producing. Cultivating a strong feeling of kinship adds to a personal sense of fulfillment and worth. In German, the word is Gemeinschaftsgefuhl. It means feeling-sense of community,in a meager literal translation. Social interest or sense of community with others is based on feelings of worth and is assisted by growth-producing interactions with other people. It is a very productive and satisfying circle:From satisfying self-feeling to satisfying group-feeling back to satisfaction with one’s selfhood. Humans are a creature and creator of humans. Come into the World a mewling helpless little creature, driven by diffuse strivings of a peculiar body one is totally dependent on human warmth and care to survive and be. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14
At once humans are enmeshed in social life, at once begins to learn and share in culture. Dualities and paradox pervade one’s life:instincts and culture, the separate being and the vital social bones, the truly felt and the way to be, uniqueness of oneself and the sameness with all humankind. We are vastly various and laughably alike. Helpless yet vastly powerful,driven by irrational passions yet open to gigantic rationality, able at Olympian detachment and prone as well to boundaryless immersion in depths of oceanic feeling, of oneness with the heard or with ineffable mysteries of the Universe—all of these are human. Bodily female or bodily male, a part of oneself is the other gender, or no gender at all. The World of others, one’s bonds with them, are ordered and chaotic both. Human beings become a human personality only through the joys and pains of human contact, care and giving and taking, and only through learning the ways of that small portion of humankind that is one’s tribe or community or nation at a particular time in history. Our need for others may at times be compulsive (where we are driven by needs or motives we can hardly control) or impulsive (as when a spur of the moment sensation allows or unleashed certain behaviors). #RandolphHarris 11 of 14
We may plan our social involvements or we may just enjoy them as happenings. The very fact that every culture ever studied has had to make a place for social intercourse give us some appreciation for just how universal this behavior must be. The hermit, the lone wolf, the isolate, the alienated: these are deviant humans. We must assume that some painful interaction has caused their solitary behavior to become a way of life. So we go out from our own centers of being to touch the beings of others, partly to reassure ourselves of our sameness, our bonds of likeness, and partly to restore some of the social feelings we lose in our work or play or states of fear. It takes a drastic or traumatic series of events to convince us that it is unsafe or unwise to seek out others. It seems unlikely that any one event could sever our bonds with the rest of humankind. No single trauma or hurt can drive us away from each other. It must require dozens of intensely painful and frightening experiences of rejection to develop a hermit or a social isolate.#RandolphHarris 12 of 14
In our social interaction, then, is a play element. We use the social experiences to re-create aspects of our selfhood that we have lost,or that have become fatigued, or which we doubt. We go to another person to gain validation of our own selfhood, whether in conversation, love, affection, argumentation, nurturance, punishment, or competition. We play games with these people, not just to structure our time or keep them away from intimate knowledge of us, but to get them to declare something about us. In challenging someone to a game of chess or tag or political discussion, we hope that they will see in us some element of worth or challenge to which they can respond. Their response is a statement that we are worthy of their rime and effort. It is a form of stroking, or social response. Stroking may be used as a general term for intimate physical contact; in practice it may take various forms. Some people literally stroke an infant others hug or pat it, while some pinch it playfully or flip it with a fingertip. These all have their analogue sin conversation, so that it seems one might predict how an individual would handle a baby by listening to the infant talk. By extension of meaning,stroking may be employed colloquially to denote any act implying recognition of another’s presence. Hence a stroke may be used as the fundamental unit of social action. An exchange of strokes constitutes a transaction, which is the unit of social intercourse. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14
Each time we are acknowledged or recognized by another person it is as though we are being patted or told “Yes, I know you are there and I acknowledge your being.” You may think this is overdrawn, but them you might recall times when some people literally looked right through you and how you felt then. You may have felt the eerie sensation of doubting that you were visible. You may have felt diminished as a person, no matter who the other person was. If person is ignored or looked through, it has the effect, whatever his ego strength, of making one feel smaller, less important, insignificant. That show important other people are to us. You know how effective silence or non-hearing of a person’s words can be in putting one down. If you agree or disagree with him, you have given him a stroke. You have at least acknowledged his presence. However, by not hearing him, you say, in effect, you are not even there! On the more optimistic side, we find that other people add to our dimensions of selfhood and in wholesome social intercourse this is a mutual, reciprocal event. We validate each other’s existences. Though this is not necessary all of the time, it seems to be important for all of us at some time. Healing best begins with sincere prayer asking our Father in Heaven for help. That use of our agency allows divine intervention. When we permit it, the love of the Savior will soften our hearts and break the cycle of abuse that can transform a victim into an aggressor. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14
The Past is Such a Curious Creature—What Soft Cherubic Beings these People are!
God has unlimited goodness, knowledge, and power. The omnipotence of God requires that he should be able to do what we would understand as being logically impossible, and thus the eternal truths are dependent on God’s will. The concept of self-preservation as well our interpretative concept self-affirmation, if taken ontologically, posit a serious question. What does self-affirmation mean if there is no self, e.g. in the inorganic realm or in the infinite substance, in being-itself? Is it not an argument against the ontological character of courage that it is impossible to attribute courage to large sections of reality and to the essence of all reality? Is courage not a human quality which can be attributed even to higher beings only by analogy but not properly? Does this not decide for the moral against the ontological understanding of courage? In stating this argument one is reminded of similar arguments against metaphysical concepts in history of human thought. Concepts like the World soul, microcosmos, instinct, the will to power, and so on have been accused of introducing subjectivity into the objective realm of things. However, these accusations are mistaken. They miss the meaning of ontological concepts. It is not the functions of these concepts to describe the ontological nature of reality in terms of the subjective or the objective side of our ordinary experience. #RandolphHarris 1 of 10
A human’s power is nothing in comparison to that of one’s maker. Indeed, a person is helpless to do anything expect sin unless one is assisted by the power and grace of God—God works in us both to will and to do. It is the function of an ontological concept to use some realm of experience to point to the characteristics of being-itself which lie above the split between subjectivity and objectivity and which therefore cannot be expressed literally in terms taken from the subjective or the objective side. Ontology speaks analogously. Being as being transcends objectivity as well as subjectivity. However, in order to approach it cognitively one must use both. And one can do so because both are rooted in that which transcends them, in being-itself. It is the light of this consideration that the ontological concepts referred to must interpreted. They must be understood not literally but analogously. This does not mean that they have been produced arbitrarily and can easily be replaced by other concepts. Their choice is a matter of experience and thought, and subject to criteria which determine the adequacy or inadequacy of each of them. This is true also of concepts like self-preservation or self-affirmation, if taken in ontological sense. It is true of every chapter of an ontology course. #RandolphHarris 2 of 10
God knows what will come to pass, but his knowing does not cause anything to happen. Both Self-preservation and self-affirmation logically imply the overcome of something which, at least potentially, threatens or denies the self. There is no explanation of this something in the minds of some. If everything follows by necessity from the nature of the eternal substance, no being would have the power to threaten the self-preservation of another being. Every thing would be as if it is and self-affirmation would be exaggerated word for the simple identity of a thing with itself. Self-affirmation and self-preservation are powerful and part of growth. Therefore, the will does not strive for something it does not have, for some object outside of itself, but wills itself in the double sense of preserving and transcending itself. This is its power, and also its power over itself. Will to power is the self-affirmation of the will as ultimate reality. Life in this term is the process in which the power of being actualizes itself. However, in actualizing itself it overcomes that in life which, although belong to life, negates life. One could call it the will which contradicts the will to power. Life has many aspects, it is ambiguous. Its ambiguity most typically in the last fragment of the collection of fragments which is called the Will to Power. #RandolphHarris 3 of 10
Courage is the power of life to affirm itself in spite of this ambiguity, while the negation of life because of its negativity is an expression of cowardice. We can develop a prophecy and philosophy of courage in opposition to the mediocrity and decadence of life in the period which is to come. It is your dearest Self, your virtue what is good. The Self has itself, but at the same time it tries to reach to itself. Life is that special substance. The truth of virtue is that the Self is in it and not an outward thing. Courage is the affirmation of one’s self it is virtue altogether. The self whose self-affirmation is virtue and courage is the self which surpasses itself. Life creates life loves and what is has created is the will to power which is more than life. Life, willing to surpass itself, is the good life, and the good life is the courageous life. It is the life of the powerful soul and the triumphant body whose self-enjoyment is virtue. Such a soul banishes everything cowardly; it says: bad—that is cowardly. However, in order to each such a nobility it is necessary to obey and to command and to obey while commanding. This obedience which is included in commanding is the opposite of submissiveness. The latter is the cowardice which does not dare to risk itself. The submissive self is the opposite of the self-affirming self, even if it is submissive to a God. It wants to escape the pain of hurting and being hurt. #RandolphHarris 4 of 10
God’s views of all things from the perspective of eternity—the simultaneous and complete possession of infinite life. In such a conception there is no suggestion of succession in time, and God must thus see all things in a manner similar to that in which we view things spread out in a given moment. The obedient self, on the contrary, is the self which commands itself and risks itself thereby. In commanding itself it becomes its own judge and its own victim. It commands itself according to the law of life, the law of self-transcendence. The will which commands itself is the creative will. It makes a whole out of fragments and riddles of life. It does not look back, it stands beyond a bad conscience, it rejects the spirit of revenge which is the innermost nature of self-accusation and of the consciousness of guilt, it transcends reconciliation, for it is the will to power. In doing al this the courageous self is united with life itself and its secret. One acts voluntarily and freely, then, in doing what one wills, prefers, or chooses. The unconscious is the master of every fate and the captain of every soul. The courage to look into the abyss of nonbeing in the complete loneliness of one who accepts the message that we have to manifest God in our daily lives has the experience of courage and proves to be an outstanding key for the ontological approach to reality. #RandolphHarris 5 of 10
God is not deceiver; hence, we may conclude that we are not systematically misled with respect to those things which we have a strong natural tendency to believe and, accordingly, we are not misled in supposing that there is both a part and an external World. One of the faults in the way most of us think is the strong tendency to dichotomize, to divide things up into mutually exclusive opposites. If work is viewed as a curse, not working is viewed as a blessing. Mainly we view work as a necessary evil and our leisure time and days off as the necessary and balancing good. Partly because we still hold onto the Work-Sin Ethic and partly because of this dichotomous way of thinking, play takes on the interesting character of being something earned, a reward for working so hard. Most of us do not know how to use leisure time or play in a creative and restorative way. For some the reward comes from sleeping late on days off, refusing to do anything in the way of labor, avoiding chores or tasks, and resenting people or things that interfere with just laying about the house. #RandolphHarris 6 of 10
A few people occupy themselves with eating or drinking or smoking too much on their days off. Reward mechanisms take many forms, and for all that people may resent immature behavior, they fail to recognize that their work as rewardable at all is a juvenile attitude. Work in the general sense need not be such a drag as to engender this necessarily to escape into activities that are merely different without necessarily being pleasant or fun. Therefore, in order to discuss attitudes toward play, we must first consider attitudes toward work as play. There are lot of examples of work that must be considered nothing more than drudgery. However, it is possible to note that there are many people who are capable of finding enjoyment, even fun, it the most menial or tedious kinds of work. How? Possibly the answer, complex as it is, lies not in the nature of the work experience, but in the person doing the work. The person who brings to one’s work, ether ditch-digging or book-writing, a sense of personal expression is likely to enjoy one’s work. To actually be able to see work as an outgrowth of selfhood makes it more enjoyable. Many people report that their work is considered a chance to demonstrate their personal sense of selfhood. #RandolphHarris 7 of 10
People who take their work as an expression of themselves find work that enables them to test out certain skills or that gives them an opportunity to explore other, often hidden, skills. They take on new tasks, or do old tasks in new ways, because it is a form of self-expression. Any job, no matter how insignificant it may seem at the time, becomes a challenge in some sense. There is an increasing tendency on the part of aware people to seek out work that is meaningful to them and to whomever they work for. Many are unwilling to take just any job simply to earn money or job security. They recognize that in a complex and highly varied society such as ours there are thousands of different kinds of work, with some of the less traditional jobs and the newer ones offering individuals new chances to explore and express their selfhood. However, how does playfulness enter into working? It can be artificially inserted by those who try to find aspects of the work that are enjoyable, stimulating, fun. Or the work or the particular task may be visualized as a game. One of the advantages of playing at work is that overly self-absorbed people can learn not to take themselves quite so seriously, to be so concerned about how they look, or what others think or feel about them that they literally sit in judgment on themselves. #RanolphHarris 8 of 10
People who criticize themselves for the type of work they do or let the judgments of others get to them about their personal job or career choice are demonstrating a lack of confidence or self-liking. They are too dependent on external validation of their selfhood to be in the same category with self-actualizing people. Better than artificially creating games or play is attitude-changing. Work and play are not absolute polar extremes. Most jobs are situations that include relaxation and drudgery, challenge and monotony, delight and disgust, exhilaration and tedium, inspiration and irritation, fulfillment and frustration, self-satisfaction and service. The creative, self-actualizing people is capable of experiencing all of these and growing from them. It is important to feel motivated and inspired in your career. Without the drive to excel, your performance will lack passion and, in turn, your company may suffer. Productivity allows one to work in the most efficient manner, which makes room for downtime and encouraged work-life balance. If one is passionate about one’s, one is likely to take an active interest in learning every aspect of the business. Many people are too afraid to follow their dreams and do what they love, but keep in mind it is important that we challenge ourselves so we can achieve our vision. #RandolphHarris 9 of 10
Testimony is personal knowledge, based up the witness of the Holy Ghost, that certain facts of eternal significance are true. The Holy Ghost is the messenger for the Father and the Son and the teacher of and guide to all truth. This, by the power of the Holy Ghost we may know the truth of all things. The knowledge and spiritual conviction we receive from the Holy Ghost are the results of revelation Seeking for and obtaining these blessings require a sincere heart, real intent, and faith in Christ. A personal testimony also brings responsibility and accountability. “Neither take ye thought beforehand what ye shall say; but treasure up in your minds continually the words of life, and it shall be given you in the very hour that portion that shall be meted unto every person,” report Doctrine and Covenants 84.85. Therefore, let naturally occurring times happen where one can have a conversation and testify of specific blessings one has received during the course of relatively routine activities of that day, which is one of the reasons Sunday Dinner is so important to many God loving families. The truth is the scripture has always been a source of direction for many and Sunday Dinner is a time the family uses to illuminate the needs and better understand each other in a supportive and secure environment. #RandolphHarris 10 of 10
Pretty Tunes Play as the Sunshine Entertains Our Mines like Pearls so Divine and We Dream the Days Away
Last night she lay on the bed for hours. She was whispering things. I could not hear her. She would not talk to me. She would not come out of it. She would not get dressed for bed, or take anything to eat or drink. I lay beside her—what you told me to do. I held her. I even sang to her. Sleep does many things for us. In sleep there is the obvious function of resting the tired cells of the body. They are not called upon to fire and react as much as during sleep as during the average day. Do the cells are allowed to go through a longer period of what we call absolute refraction. In the period they build up potentially for future use more easily and efficiently than when they might be called on for quick reactivity with short periods of rest. Also in sleep we have the chance to escape from conscious and direct involvement with the World around us. We can shut out some of the pressures we face in a waking state, and one good turn gets most of the blanket. Sleep can also be an exquisite personal, and spiritual experience. Falling asleep can be an experience to look forward to each night. In a state of slumber, we experience the process of surrendering. That is important because in order to really derive enjoyment and true peace in this sublime state of being, we must be relaxed. Relaxation does not begin until after we have completed the last thing on our list. It is cultivated in intervals during the day. #RandolphHarris 1 of 6
Going to bed early and getting up early will allow the mind and body to become rested. Another definite function of sleep seems to be to give us a chance to dream. Recently, dreams have been the subject of much research, and we now know a bit more than we used to about them. When, after passing through a narrow defile, one suddenly reaches a height beyond which the ways part and a rich prospect lies outspread in different direction, it is well to stop for a moment and consider whither one shall turn next. We are in somewhat the same position after we have mastered this first interpretation of the dream. We find ourselves standing in the light of discovery. The dream is not comparable to the irregular sounds of a musical instrument, which, instead of being played by the hand of a musician, is struck by some external force; the dream is not meaningless, not absurd, does not presuppose that one part of our store of ideas is dormant while another part begins to awake. It is a perfectly valid psychic phenomenon, actually a wish-fulfillment; it may be enrolled in the continuity of the intelligible psychic activities of the waking state; it is built up by a highly complicated intellectual activity. Dreams seem to play a very important part in preserving our mental health. #RandolphHarris 2 of 6
When we are dreaming we are involved with what is called Rapid Eye Movement Sleep. REM Sleep comes right after a period of deep sleep during which no dreaming seems to take place. There may be four to six stages of REM sleep each night, lasting for only a few minutes. During this period the eye ball is actually moving underneath the closed eyelid, much as it does when it follows the ball in a tennis match. Subjects who are awakened when the recording instruments indicate they are in REM sleep report on their dreams, but they also give evidence that they are irritated by the interruption, leading dream experts to speculate that the dreaming is very important to them. Dr. Freud believe that dreams serve dynamic functions by protecting sleep and alleviating unconscious wishes. It is easy to show that the wish-fulfillment in dream is often undisguised and easy to recognize, so that one may wonder why the language of dreams has not long since been understood. There is, for example, a dream which I can evoke as often as I please, experimentally, as it were. #RandolphHarris 3 of 6
If, in the evening, I eat anchovies, olives, or other strongly salted foods, I am thirsty at night, and therefore I wake. The waking, however, is preceded by a dream, which has always the same content, namely that I am drinking. I am drinking long draughts of water; it tastes as delicious as only a cool drink can taste when one’s throat is parched; and then I wake, and find that I have an actual desire to drink. The cause of this dream is thirst, which I perceived when I wake. From this sensation arises the wish to drink, and the dream shows me this wish as fulfilled. It thereby serves a function. I sleep well, and am not accustomed to being waked by a bodily need. If I succeed in appeasing my thirst by means of the dream that I am drinking, I need not wake up in order to satisfy that this. It is thus a dream of convenience. The dream takes the place of action, as elsewhere in life. Unfortunately, the need of water to quench the thirst cannot be satisfied by a dream, as can my thirst can only be quenched if I get up and fetch a glass of water. I thus quite appropriately dreamt that my wife was giving me a drink from a vase; this vase was an Etruscan cinerary urn, which I had brought home from Italy, and had since given away. However, the water in it tasted so salt (apparently on account of the ashes) that I was forced to wake. #RandolphHarris 4 of 6
Another view holds that dreams simply express a need for some kind of cognitive activity, which is present during sleep as well as when awake. A third view suggests that dreams are more or less unimportant cognitive activities that express internal states during sleep. This would mean that intrinsic energy or tension is acted out through the symbolic content of the dream, regardless of the meaning of the content. All of these views are based on the research evidence we currently have concerning dreams. Whether we are aware of dreaming or not (and evidence suggests that we all do dream every night), sleep is an important part of our lives. We know from many studies that subjects will experience fantastic changes at all levels if they are deprived of it. Subject who have been kept awake experimentally for long periods of time report physical sensation they do not ordinarily have. Some subjects report tingling or numbness in the limbs. Some report headaches, nausea, dizzy feelings, and soreness in muscles. Others report mental confusion. A few have experienced hallucinations and delusions. All report a lowered threshold of tolerance for various stimuli. They have less patience, less ability to stand tension, less tolerance for bothersome noises. #RandolphHarris 5 of 6
Obviously, we need sleep and we need it to be relatively uninterrupted. However, since sleep is a function of both individual needs and cultural attitudes toward it, the amount needed varies with each individual. The average or the mean is generally expressed as eight hours. If the average work day is eight hors and the average sleep time is eight hours, what do we do with the remaining eight hours a day? In many cases they are more important, for the person may use them in such beneficial ways as to enhance one’s work and enable the sleep to come more readily. People who get adequate sleep receives more flashed of inspiration and insight during the day. “Cease to sleep longer than is needful; retire to thy bed early, that ye may not be weary; arise early, that your bodies and your minds may be invigorated,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 88.124. It is well to be up before day-break, for such a habit contributes to health, wealth and wisdom. Connection have also been made between keeping an early schedule and mental and emotional health. To those who feel defeated and downtrodden, look to the early hours of the day for your rescue because the World is usually a more beautiful place early in the morning. Life is so much more calm. Much more can be accomplished in a shorter amount of time. #RandolphHarris 6 of 6
I Know of Some Lonely Houses off the Road—Was that Me that Winked or a Nervous Star?
Store will be opened promptly at six a.m. and remain open until nine p.m. the year around. Store must not be opened on the Sabbath day unless absolutely necessary and then only for a few minutes. Any employee who is in the habit of smoking Spanish cigars, getting shaved at a barber shop, going to dances and other places of amusement, will most surely give his or her employer reason to suspect one’s integrity and all-around honesty. Each employee must attend Sunday school every Sunday. Men employees are given one evening a week for courting purposes, and two if they go to prayer meeting regularly. After fourteen hours of work in the store, the remaining leisure time must be spent in reading good literature. All God’s children will thrive from our growing knowledge, but to repeat this is only the beginning. We must have the courage to embrace the beauty of science in the name of the Lord. The image of God Incarnate, become Man out of fascination with His own Creation, will triumph in the Third Millennium as the supreme emblem of Divine Sacrifice and Unfathomable Love. It takes thousands of years to understand the Crucified Christ. Why, for example, did the Savior come down to live thirty-three years? Why not twenty? Why not twenty-five? You could ponder this stuff forever. #RandolphHarris 1 of 11
Why did Christ have to start as a baby? Who wants to be a baby? Was being a baby part of our salvation? And why choose that particular time in history? And such a place! Cosmic Energy is dominant and you do not possess the energy for the material World. You have the energy to pray and commune with God, and to inspire and guide others to elevate themselves so as to attain the spiritual heights and ecstasies of divine experience. Jesus was a perfect example of a soul with excessive cosmic energy (because of his evolution), which enabled him to achieve the most miraculous energy cures the World has ever seen. The spiritual path requires total renunciation. The more one treads the path, the more one is required to renounce. However, one is ready for the experience, the renunciation corresponding to the material World or emotional attachments, and the extreme discipline are not in comparison to all that is received on a higher plane. The renunciation occurs more on a mental and emotional level than on a purely physical plane. One would never be expected to renounce one’s children, for example. If one has children, they are one’s growth as one is theirs. One would not have to renounce a business if it is the only source of income for an individual and that person’s family. #RandolphHarris 2 of 11
However, many individuals will totally dedicate their lives and every possible moment to spiritual practices and disciplines, which becomes their life mission, which is demanding. Because of the impact of Christianity on the Western World the revival of the ancient schools of thought at the beginning of the modern period was not only a revival but also a transformation. It is true of the renewal of the arts, of literature, of the theories of the state, and of the philosophy of religion that the rebirth of antiquity in the modern period started to actively shape the material realm. And while in some of the ancient World there was a tragic feeling toward existence that dominated though and life, especially the attitude toward history, the Renaissance started a movement which was looking at the future and the creative and new in it. Hope conquered the feeling of tragedy, and belief in progress the resignation to circular repetition. While the ancient World valued the individual not as an individual but as a representative of something universal, e.g. a virtue, the rebirth of antiquity saw the individual as an individual a unique expression of the Universe, incomparable, irreplaceable, and of infinite significance. #RandolphHarris 3 of 11
In human beings the ontological work is elaborated. Humans have the ontological foundation of ethical existence, including the courage to be. And, ss we look into the various areas of human experience, we find a great deal that does not seem to make sense. The above statement may seem humorous or it may seem tragic. It might make a socially conscious person furious. And yet, it represents not only the limited perspective once found widespread in this country, but also some of the attitudes still prevalent in our thinking about work and religion. Theoretically, if a person sleeps eight hours a day, one has eight hours left in the day for something else. It is in this eight hours of something that we are interested here. Also theoretically, we should have no trouble with those eight free hours. Yet, the simple fact is we do. Most of us have not gotten thoroughly used to the idea that leftover time is out own! A case in point: a colleague of ours find his teaching day ends at noon of Fridays. He is a hard-working man who puts in more hours during the week than his contract calls for. He is always prepared for his classes, spends plenty of time in conferences with students, serves on my committees, takes paperwork home almost every evening. He earns his salary and then some! #RandolphHarris 4 of 11
The courage to be is an expression of the essential act of everything that participates in being, namely self-affirmation. Decisive character is manifested in the evdeavour, wherewith everything endeavours to persist in its own being, and is nothing else but the actual essence of the thing in question. The Latin word for endeavour is conatus, the striving toward something. This striving is not a contingent aspect of a thing, nor is it an element in its being along with other elements; it is its essentia actualis. The conatus makes a thing what it is, so that if it disappears the thing itself disappears. Striving toward self-preservation or toward self-affirmation makes a thing be what it is. This striving is the essence of a thing and also its power, in addition to being part of the mind it affirms and has the power to control actions. So we have the identification of actual essence, power of being, and self-affirmation. And more identifications follow. The power of being is identified with virtue, and virtue consequently, with essential nature. Virtue is the power of acting exclusively according to one’s true nature. And the degree of virtue is the degree to which somebody is striving for and able to affirm one’s own being. #RandolphHarris 5 of 11
Because of his upbringing (presumably under the Work-Sin Ethic) this teacher has a difficult time when Friday noon comes around and he finds an entire afternoon at his disposal. He confesses that he often feels like volunteering for some assignment that would full up his Friday afternoon. He invites students to confer with him after 12 o’clock on Friday, but those who are finished with their classes at 12 head for the beach or the billiard parlor or home. They are not troubled by any such deep guilt at finding free hours. The person who rigidly works a schedule eight hours a day for five or six days a week probably does not sympathize with our colleague. I remember hearing a bishop eloquently, and in his case sincerely, telling less affluent audience in England that he worked at least sixteen hours a day and asked for nothing better. “If I were a bishop, I would work sixteen hours a day, too, but eight hours of my work a day is quite enough for anybody” declared one workshop foreman in the audience. The assumption here, more prevalent than most people might suspect, is that people who do not punch time clocks do not work. This assumption is irrational and, individual variations on work habits to the contrary, simply invalid! The dictates of individual, corporate, discipline and/or social circumstances support an infinite number of work-habit variations. #RandolphHarris 6 of 11
Nine-to-five-ism may be the lot of the majority, but this is just one more example of why occasionally majority does not rule, although it might like to. Our colleagues, who may work odd hors by a laborer’s standards and erratic hours by most people’s habitual, routinized system, does one’s job, earns one’s salary, and in comparison with many people far exceeds what is expected of him or her. By these modern-day standards alone, one deserves every moment of leisure one can come by. (Granted one’s compulsion is more complex; we hope to have people straightened very soon!) It is impossible to conceive of any virtue as prior to the striving to preserve one’s own being. Self-affirmation is, so to speak, virtue altogether. However, self-affirmation is affirmation of one’s essential being, and the knowledge of one’s essential being is mediated through reason, the power of the soul to have adequate ideas. Therefore to act unconditionally out of virtue is the same as to act under the guidance of reason, to affirm one’s essential being or true nature. Very well, we are attempting to make a strong case for a life of balance. The puritan attitude of Work or Sin should be euthanized, allowed or helped to reach oblivion. It is an ethic that denies humanness and makes workhorses or machines out of all organisms that have the potential for being replaced. #RandolphHarris 7 of 11
People have a strength of the soul and power to be what they essentially are. Animositas, derived from anima, soul, is the courage in the sense of a total act of the person. By courage I mean the desire [cupiditas] whereby every person strives to preserve one’s own being in accordance solely with the dictates of reason. There is also a desire to join other people in friendship and support. This duality of an all-embracing and limited concept of courage corresponds with the whole development of the idea of courage to which we have referred. In a systematic philosophy of the strictness and consistency of this remarkable fact, we see the two cognitive motives which always determine the doctrine of courage: the universally ontological and the specifically moral. This has a very significant consequence for one of the most difficult ethical problems, the relation of self-affirmation and love toward others. Since virtue and the power of self-affirmation are identical, and since generosity is the act of going out toward others in a benevolent affect, no conflict between self-affirmation and love can be thought of. This of course presupposes that self-affirmation is not only distinguished from but precisely the opposite of selfishness in the sense of a negative moral quality. Self-affirmation is the ontological opposite of the reduction of being by such affects as contradict one’s essential nature. #RandolphHarris 8 of 11
The right self-love and the right love of others are interdependent, and selfishness and the abuse of others are equally interdependent. Self-affirmation is participation in the divine self-affirmation. The power whereby each particular thing, and consequently human beings, preserves one being is the power of God. The participation of the soul in the divine power is described in terms of both knowledge and love. If the soul recognizes its sub aeternitatis specie, it recognizes its being in God. And this knowledge of God and of its being in God is the cause of perfect beatitude and consequently of a perfect love toward the cause of this beatitude. This love is spiritual (intellectualis) because it is eternal and therefore an affect, not subject to the passions which are connected with bodily existence. It is the participation in the infinite spiritual love with which God contemplates and loves oneself, and by loving oneself also loves what belongs to him, human beings. From the existence of God comes the existence of other contingent beings. God possesses objectively a supreme degree of reality because it is the idea of a Perfect Being; here its cause must possess formally a similar degree of reality. Therefore, God is indeed a perfect being. #RandolphHarris 9 of 11
God’s excellence is not merely indefinitely, but infinitely, great. This explains why self-affirmation is the essential nature of every being and as such its highest good. Perfect self-affirmation is not an isolated act which originating power in every individual act. In this idea the ontology of courage has reached its fundamental expression. “Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that ye should obey it in the lusts thereof,” Romans 6.12. In time, addictions enslave both the body and the spirit. Full repentance from addiction is best accomplished in this life, while we still have a mortal body to help us. As children of God, we should not let anything enter the body that might defile it. To allow sensors of sight, touch, or hearing to supple the brain with unclean memories is a sacrilege. We will cherish our chastity and avoid foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown us in destruction and perdition. We will flee these things; and follow after righteousness, Godliness, faith, love, patience, and meekness—traits that edify the whole souls. An affect can be conquered only by affect, and the only affect which can overcome the affects of passion is the affect of the mind, the spiritual or intellectual love of the soul for its own eternal ground. Who are we? We are children of God. When your heart runs deeper than a ghost town gold mine, you just know you are bound to find that mother load. #RandolphHarris 10 of 11
The omnipotence of God requires that he should be able to do even what we would understand as being logically impossible, and thus that the eternal truths are dependent on God’s will. God could have brought it about that two and two did not equal four; although, since God has not chosen that this should be so, it must be beyond our finite comprehension how it might have been so. God is an efficient cause himself. Our potential is unlimited. Our inheritance is sacred. This affect is an expression of the participation of the soul in the divine self-love. The courage to be is possible because it is participation in the self-affirmation of being-itself. However, why is it that the way of salvation (salus) which God has shown us in the Bible being neglected by almost every? Because it is difficult and therefore rare, like everything sublime. Our inheritance is sacred. May we always honor that heritage—in every thought and deed. The stronger the foundation of our identity is rooted in being a child of God, the stronger our self-worthy becomes. The stronger our sense of self-worth becomes, the less insecure, defensive, and fearful we are. If we are willing to shed our less important identities and place our divine origins at the very forefront of our self-perception, we can be more confident, happy, and content human beings. “And now may God grant unto these, my people, that they may sit down in the Kingdom of God,” reports Alma 29.17. #RandolphHarris 11 of 11
As Stars that Drop Anonymous from an Abundant Sky that Sense was Breaking through
I cannot believe this girl is still breathing, it is some kind of miracle. Courage is an ethical reality, but it is based in the whole breadth of human existence and ultimately in the structure of being itself. Therefore, to be understood ethically, it must be considered ontologically. Virtue is knowledge, and ignorance about what courage is makes any action in accordance with the true nature of courage impossible. The lack of courage is a basic problem of human existence. The understanding of courage presupposed an understanding of humanity and of the World, its structures and values. Only one who knows this knows what to affirm and what to negate. Courage can show us what being is, and being can show us what courage is. “Yea, come unto Christ, and be perfected in him, and deny yourselves of all ungodliness; and ye shall deny yourselves of all ungodliness, and love God with all your might, mind and strength, then is his grace sufficient for you, that by his grace ye may be perfected in Christ; and if by the grace of God ye are perfect in Christ, ye can in nowise deny the power of God,” reports Moroni 10.32. Courage as the universal and essential self-affirmation of one’s being is an ontological concept. The courage to be is the ethical act in which a person affirms one own being in spite of those elements of one’s existence which conflict with one’s essential self-affirmation. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14
Courage is relayed to the element of the soul and it possess the intellectual and sensual elements on human beings. It is the unreflective striving toward what is noble. As such it has a central position in the structure of the soul, it bridges the cleavage between reason and desire. “And again, if ye by the grace of God are perfect in Christ, and deny not his power, then are ye sanctified in Christ by the grace of God, through the shedding of the blood of Christ, which is in the covenant of the Father unto the remission of our sins, that we become holy, without spot,” reports Moroni 10.33. This is how we represent what is noble and graceful because it is impossible for us to have living and vital intercessions unless we are perfectly and completely sure of God. Out of our assurance arise wisdom, and then this wisdom is fortified by our courage. “Praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit,” reports Ephesians 6.18. A beautiful noble deed is a deed to be praised. Courage does what is to be praised and rejects what is to be despised. One praised that in which a being fulfills its potentialities or actualizes its perfections. Courage is the affirmation of one’s essential nature, one’s inner aim or entelechy, but it is an affirmation which has in itself the character of in spite of. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14
Courage includes the possible and, in some cases, the unavoidable sacrifice of elements which also belong to one’s being but which, if not sacrificed, would prevent us from reaching our actual fulfillment. And the greatest destroyer of that confident relationship to God is our own personal sympathy and preconceived bias. Thus, this sacrifice may include pleasure and happiness and for some people there very existence. In any case it is praiseworthy, because in the act of courage the most essential part of our being prevails against the less essential. It is the beauty and goodness of courage that the good and the beautiful are actualized in it. “Behold, I have come unto the World to bring redemption unto the World, to save the World from sin,” reports 3 Nephi 9.21. Therefore it is noble. Perfection is realized in degrees, natural, personal, and social; and courage as the affirmation of one’s essential being is more conspicuous in some of these degrees than in others. Since the greatest test of courage is the readiness to make the greatest sacrifice, the sacrifice of one’s life, and since the soldier is required by his or her profession to always be ready for this sacrifice, the soldier’s courage is and somehow remains the outstanding example of courage. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14
Courage is a universal knowledge of what is good and evil, wisdom and courage converge and it became again characteristic of nobility. The knight is one who represents courage as a soldier and as a nobleperson. They possess the high, noble and courageous spirit. In Germany, even in the past, soldiers were looked at as being firm, weighty, important and powerful. They were seen as members of the upper strata of feudal society. Never sympathize with someone who find it difficult to get to God; God is not to blame. It is not for us to figure out the reason for the difficulty; but only to present the truth of God so that the Spirit of God will reveal what is wrong. When the truth is preached, the Spirit of God bring each person face-to-face with God himself. Courage is the strength of mind, capable of conquering whatever threatens the attainment of the highest good. It is untied with wisdom, the virtue which represents the unity of the four cardinal virtues (the other two being justice and temperance). “For it is time for judgment to begin with the family of God; and if it beings with us, what will the outcome be for those who do not obey the gospel of God? And, if it is hard for the righteous to be saved, what will become of the ungodly and the sinner?” reports 1 Peter 9.17-18. Courage, untied with wisdom, includes temperance in relation to oneself as well as justice in relation to others. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14
The question then is whether courage or wisdom is the more comprehensive virtue. The answer is dependent on the outcome of the famous discussion about the priority of intellect or will in the essence of being, and consequently, in the human personality. Under the dominance of wisdom courage is essential the strength of mind which makes obedience to the dictates of reason (or revelation) possible, while venturing courage participates in the creation of wisdom. “For it is God’s will that by doing good one should silence the ignorant talk of foolish people. Live as free people, but do not use your freedom as a cover-up for evil; live as servants of God. Show proper respect to everyone: Love the fellowship of believers, fear God, honor the king,” reports 1 Peter 2.16-17. Perfect courage is a gift of the Divine Spirit. And if we ourselves are free with the liberty of Christ, others will be brought into that same liberty—the liberty that comes from realizing the absolute control and authority of Jesus Christ. Through the Spiritual natural strength of mind is elevated to its supernatural perfection. This however means that it is untied with the specifically Christian virtues, faith, hope, and love. Thus a development is visible in which the ontological side of courage is take into faith (including hope), while the ethical side of courage is taken into love or the principles of ethics. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14
The reception of courage into faith, especially insofar as it implies hope, as courage listens to reason and carries out the intention of the mind. It is the strength of the soul to win victory in ultimate danger, like those martyrs of the Old Testament who are enumerated in Hebrews 11. Courage gives consolation, patience, and experience and becomes indistinguishable from faith and hope. In the light of this development we can see that every attempt to define courage is confronted with these alternatives: either to use courage as the name for one virtue among others, blending the larger meaning of the word into faith and hope; or to preserve the larger meaning and interpret faith through an analysis of courage. “Behold, I am coming soon! Blessed is one who keeps the words of prophecy in this book,” reports Revelation 22.7. Creativity is the ability or power to produce originality of thought and expression. In terms of human behavior, creative refers to being innovative, coming up with new or novel ideas, actions, or constructions. A person is creative when one can take the already existing elements, ideas, thoughts, experiences one finds in or around one and put them together in new and different ways. Inventors and artist are usually mentioned as good examples of creative people. However, they are far from being the only ones. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14
A person is creative when one discovers a new way of getting to work that may save one time or money or energy, or one that merely enables one to experience different things along the route. A mother may be extremely creative in finding new ways to get her housework done or in enlisting the help of her children. A student who tries out several student techniques and finds one that works well for him or her—even though one may not have invented it—is creative. In fact, it would be a rare person who has never engaged in some creative act and produced something new and valuable for at least one other individual. What then is creativity? Is it a quality of a circumstance? It is something you are born with or which you can develop? It is a gift or a curse? The answers are still in process, but the results of some of the studies can be used as guide lines. One study, for instance, shows us that creativity is much more a matter of potentials being unfolded or developed than being an inborn trait of gift. This study found that certain person displayed higher than ordinary amounts of originality, adaptiveness, and realization, the ability to bring an original insight to full elaboration and development. Some of the noblest figures in later antiquity and their followers in modern times have answered the problem of existence and conquered the anxieties of fate and death by being creative. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14
A person who is defined by oneself and by others using rating scales as being creative shows several interesting traits. One is: an effective leader, takes an ascendant role in one’s relations with others. Is persuasive; tends to win other people over to one’s point of view. It turned to for advice and reassurance. Id efficient, capable, able to mobilize resources easily and effectively. A creative person is also active and vigorous. Is an expressive, ebullient person. Seeks and enjoys aesthetic and sensuous impressions. Is natural; free from pretense, unaffected. Is self-reliant, independent in judgment; able to think for oneself. This is but one of the many lists of traits that have a high beneficial correlation with creative productivity. If all people can develop creativity, and this seems to be the case, how do we foster it? What are the environmental conditions that nurture it? How it is stifled? Creative people generally were given many opportunities for self-fulfillment as children. They were encouraged to explore, not only their physical surroundings, but their own ideas and feelings. They were given guidance and instruction when it was requested, but the initiative was seldom taken away from them except when they were in danger. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14
Perseverance means more than endurance, more than simply holding on until the end. Entrust yourself to God’s hands. For instance, one parent of an exceptionally creative and self-reliant child declares that when the boy was learning to walk, they encouraged him, helped him t stand up, set up all the conditions necessary for a successful effort, and let him go. When he started to totter or fall, neither parent rushed in to catch him. They knew he would fall on a soft carpet, that there were no hard object for him to hit, that he would learn from falling. In the process, he also learned that he was loved and paid attention to, that his right to try was freely given, and his right to fail also. H knew that he was loved for himself, not for succeeding or in spite of failing. The same kinds of learning occurred in most tasks that he undertook. The only people our Lord will use in his building enterprises are those who love him personally, passionately, and with great devotion—those who have a love for him that goes beyond any of the closet relationships on Earth. When God inspects us with his searching and refining fire, will he detect that we have built enterprises of our own on the foundation of Jesus? #RandolphHarris 9 of 14
Creativity, then, seems to have a lot to do with autonomy and faith and self-reliance. Many studies confirm this. It also as much to do with a certain degree of nonconformity. Self-actualizing nonconformity is not adolescent rebellion or stubborn resistance to what is asked of a person. It is more a matter of willingness to try a different approach, deviate from the usual, easy, or traditional way of doing things. It calls for living experimentally, a willingness to run the risk of failure, of being rejected, of alienating others, and of losing one’s direction. However, the person may be willing to run these risks—for what in life is not risky?—because intrinsically one has self-confidence, one has known much love and acceptance, one values freedom and expression, and one respect oneself and therefore has courage to be. What of those people who do not have the Emotional Bank Account upon which to write checks for experimental living? Some can use what they do not have and hope that it will get them by. Other can profit from education and example: patterning behavior on that of others and by identification and experiencing small success adding to the bank balance. Some will require professional help. Sensitivity training is one avenue. Encounter groups in school, church, business, or privately can be a source of great help. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14
Psychotherapy, from simple counseling by a clergyperson or school counselor to intensive ongoing psychoanalysis, may be the most effective approach. Whatever the method, the journey is long and hard. It takes a lot of courage. After all, it took many years to damage or kill that creative spirit, that curiosity manifested by all healthy youngsters. However, to revitalize it is well worth the effort spent. More and more people are discovering that it is not an entirely lonely quest, that their lives were empty and meaningless before the attempt. That knowledge gives them the courage and incentive to continue trying. This sounds very much like what was said earlier about the difficulty of the search for significance. It is. Significance as a human being includes all of these things. As different as they all are, creativity, emotional richness, self-realization, courage, and meaningful experimental living are all aspects of living fully that are present in each of us in the potential sense. They are readily undercovered and developed in a few people, but in the large group they have been discouraged, neglected, deprecated, put down, crippled, or badly damaged. Parents often unwittingly stifle the creative impulse by the way they communicate, by the way they try to teach and instill values and skills. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14
Never allowing a child to experiment or do it oneself is one of the ways that parents stifle creativity and courage in children. Often unconsciously, parents perceive danger where danger is only remotely probable, or they attach important to actions that from a child’s viewpoint or of no consequence. Similarly, behavior that is socially unacceptable for an adult is discouraged in the young, even though that behavior (for example, playing with power tools) is totally outside the social realm in early childhood. The advocated, even necessary, parental attitudes are nearly impossible to achieve, for they involve, as sensitive educators and psychologists will maintain, perceiving as a child perceives. About the best we can do is to strike a balance. Nobody is going to advocate putting a child into a dangerous situation unnecessarily. However, sometimes a stubborn, pertinacious child can be taught the meaning of hot by guiding (and controlling) his or her hand toward a hot oven or iron (NOT recommend as it could be dangerous). A slight but memorable burn is often excellent protection against more dangerously free actions. Somehow, to strike the balance, parents must be watchful, objective, and permissive—but all to a point. Parenthood is probably the most difficult function and individual ever faces. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14
Creativity is fostered by encouraging the child to try oneself out in a variety of tasks. Success in the task may add to the child’s self-esteem and also provide the child with a monument of one’s own selfhood. However, failure need not be a mark of worthlessness; it can be a chance to discover where self-resources were lacking or in error. The experienced artist does not worry about messing up one’s canvas, since one knows both the one can correct the mess and that is shows one something about one’s technique. Schooling provides the actualizing student with opportunities to try oneself out in a number of different situations. One can interact creatively with the instructor, who hopefully responds to this kind of interchange, by the kinds of questions and answers one makes, by the kinds of projects one undertakes, by the kinds of papers one turns in, and by the sort of roles one plays in class. One can interact creatively with the subject matter by the way one studies, by the kinds of sources utilizes, and by the openness with which one views the subject area. One can interact creatively with one’s peers, one’s classmates and others one lives and works with on the campus. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14
The commercial work scene is changing slowly to permit more people to experience a creative part in their jobs. Suggestion boxes did not begin the process, but they are a small part of the program. Conferences between employees, middle management, and employers are increasing, enabling all participants in the life of the corporation to give and take openly. Employers are also finding new vitality and creativity arising from employee participation in encounter and sensitivity group experiences. Creativity is a valuable part of the life of not only the individual but the entire society. Creative people, those who act courageously to explore new ideas and ways of doing things, build a society that can meet changing conditions and become what it is capable of becoming. Metaphysical truth is found in the conformity between our ideas and those in the mind of God; logical truth, in the conformity between our ideas and the things of which they are ideas. We cannot apprehend the former kind of truth; but since the latter involves knowing the unknowable, logical truth is reduced to consistency. The satisfaction we feel at certain consequences, and the pain we suffer at others, are ordained by God and are signs that we are already under his government. Thus, a consideration of his nature alone shows that we must acknowledge the place of God in our lives. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14
Age Don’t Mean a thing—Your Talent is a Gift from God!
When we think of work, whether schooling, employment, hobbies, or any kind of goal-oriented behavior, we are faced with the concept of productivity—output, results, consequences. The industrial World has some fine measures of worker productivity, usually mathematically grounded, which can point at a glance to the number of units or hours or cases dealt with by the workers. Our economic system makes these kinds of figures important, for profit and loss sheets are based upon them. However, what of the individual and his or her own personal productivity? When utilizing self-actualization theory, rather than judge a person’s adequacy or worth in number-units of production, it is more fair, more humane, to consider the person as adequate or valuable first of all as a person. We do not and cannot see our World as a theater of conflict between supernatural powers, the demonic seeking to possess and destroy us, and God intervening to secure our salvation. Moreover, miracle stories lie at the very heart of New Testament belief: “If Christ be not raised, your faith is in vain” (I Corinthians 15.17). The value of the soul in the eyes of God, the accounts of the cross and the resurrection makes available a distinctly authentic and free mode of existence to all humanity. #RandolphHarris 1 of 7
When the person is acknowledged as valuable, then the outcome or productivity of one’s personhood follows easily. In other words, giving acknowledgment to a person of one’s selfhood encourages one o stretch oneself, not to prove it, but to demonstrate it. One will find work or tasks or situations that give one a chance to become more of what one potentially can be. This contains a reference to God that cannot be eliminated. “I can do everything through him who gives me strength,” reports Philippians 4.13. The student who wanted to be an auto science engineer will demonstrate more of oneself in automotive science, because it is an area of one’s own competence and intertest as well as one of pleasure to that individual. Many young workers today are insisting that their work be pleasurable in order to be productive. If this young man had followed his parents’ wishes and gone on to finish his degree, it is possible that he still could have done something of value for himself, but he might also have felt strongly that he was doing what his parent felt important, not what he himself valued. His resentment, no matter how rationalized, could have interfered with his personal effectiveness and satisfaction. It could have limited the pleasure he got from his work, and this could have stifled his productivity. “Whatever you do, work at it will all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters,” report Colossians 3.23. #RandolphHarris 2 of 7
Most disabled people want to work because they want to be productive members of society, be well socialized, and want the ability to afford the things they need and desire, instead of feeling like life is slipping by them and as inflation rises, their dreams of owning a home become more fleeting than in the past. Disabled people have fewer opportunities to develop skills, face barriers and obstacles than many could not imagine and face negative attitudes from employers. For one who has special needs, employment is not always about what you want to do, but what can you do. Robert Finley, 64 years of age, from Bernice, Louisiana USA was born and raised in Winnsboro and is a sharecropper’s son. From when he was old enough to remember, he started playing music. And when he joined the military, Robert was the leader of the Army band when they were stationed in Germany. However, later in life he found that making a living play music was more difficult then he could have dreamed of. Therefore, in the 1970s, Robert Finely abandoned his dreams of becoming a rock star and became a carpenter like his father. However, in 2015, Robert Finely started to lose his eye sight and would make costly mistakes and had to retire. “May the favor of the Lord our God rest on us; establish the work of our hands for us,” reports Psalm 90.17. #RandolphHarris 3 of 7
After retirement, American blues and soul singer-songwriter and guitarist Robert Finely went back to playing music. He started enriching our culture through street performing in Helena, Arkansas. Like a blessing from God, that same year Robert retired, in 2015, he was discovered and recording with Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys. The Black keys is a major band, consisting of Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney, who won a Grammy Award in 2011 for their sounds Tighten Up, and four other Grammys in following years. After being discovered by Dan Auerbach, Robert Finely now opens for some of the biggest names in music such as Nathaniel Rateliff and The Night Sweats and currently is booked for several tours in the United States, Norway, Netherlands, United Kingdom, Belgium, Germany, and France. After his first successful album Age Don’t Mean a Thing, Robert is working on his second album Goin’ Platinum. And as you can see age does not limit one’s ability and that even people with disabilities can hone their talents and eventually turn them into money making opportunities. “I will show unto you that the tender mercies of the Lord are over all those whom he hath chosen, because of their faith, to make them mighty even unto the power of deliverance,” reports 1 Nephi 1.20. One of the interesting things we find in surveying vocational attitudes is that people who feel their work limits them (either because they did not pick that job or because they had other competing interests) tend not to find as much satisfaction. #RandolphHarris 4 of 7
Resentment at the limitations of work too often creates physical problems. The following is a case in point: A young marketing major went to his physician because he could not seem to sleep nights. The physician found no organic problems, so he had the boy tell him about his work and schooling. The boy wanted to do well in marketing, so he studied hard and out in long hours on a part-time retail sales job. The boy’s father was a construction laborer who was semi-retired because of a work accident. The boy admitted that he did not want to get stuck in his father’s bag, because it was a dead-end street. He admitted that he was somewhat ashamed of his father’s lack of education and physical debility, and he compared himself unfavorably with friends whose fathers were all successful businessmen. The boy was motivated, in other words, to succeed in business more out of a need to prove something, or to exceed his father and a brother who was currently working in the same construction firm that had employed his father. The doctors asked the boy if marketing was really his interest. The boy said he really enjoyed history and wanted to teach it, but there was not enough money in teaching. He needed to succeed in a field more down to Earth than teaching because his father was skeptical of academics. So he had shelved his interest in history. #RandolphHarris 5 of 7
His underlying feeling that he was cheating himself, that he was doing something out of a need to prove himself, to excel his father and brother, made him tremendously anxious. His anxiety was reduced by medication prescribed by the physician, who also referred him to a psychologist for counseling. The young man remained in marketing, but he came to see that his motivations were not as pure as they might be. He learned to accept this conflict and to do something about it. He took courses in areas he enjoyed more and at one point even considered changing his major, but his student deferment would not permit it, so he stayed in marketing. At present he is doing well in school, has more open and honest relationship with his father, enjoys his side course, and has reduced his anxiety level to the point where insomnia is nearly gone. Would not this young man be better off going into history? Not necessarily. He knows he has an aptitude for it, but he also knows and appreciates his aptitude for marketing. He does not think he wants to teach as much as to be in business, so for him history is going to offer only avocational benefits. He still has the economic motivation that will be better met by the business World than by teaching. “Those who work their land will have abundant food, but those who chase fantasies have no sense,” reports Proverbs 12. 11. #RandolphHarris 6 of 7
The young man’s output will be affected by the considerations about benefits and economic motivation of his career choice. He is less anxious and more accepting of himself, has a better relationship with the significant people in his life, and probably will do better in business than he would in teaching history. People with high productivity and creative levels are often self-actualizing people. They tend to be involved in work that demands much from them, like leadership, education, literature, and art. Because they feel so much better about themselves than the average deficiency-motivated person does, they get much more done, show much more for their efforts. However, with people who have physical limitations, and want to exceed in life, they have to find something that they can do and work at it everyday, until they are discovered or successful and given a chance to excel in life. So, while other people get to take breaks and are paid, everyday can be tough for someone who is highly motivated, but still have not reached the panicle of success because technically all they do is work, do not make much money, and some of the opportunities that they are given actually just end up exploiting them from profit and giving nothing back. However, if you keep your faith, keep your trust, keep a good and determined attitude, if you are grateful, you will see God open up new opportunities for you. #RandolphHarris 7 of 7
How the Old Mountains Drip with Sunset and the Hemlocks are Tipped in Tinsel by the Wizard Sun!
I thought of God Incarnate, with whom I had spoken. I thought of all my doubts that any of it had been real, of all my suspicious that I was the mere pawn of spirits in some elaborate game. We do have myths. We have a goodness. However, now is not the time for all those things. You need not believe all I have seen. What I do have to give you is a vision. I think a vision is stronger than an illusion. And the vision is that we can exist as powerful beings without hurting anyone who is good and kind. We do possess the World, the World we wanted when we were crazed kids, daydreaming on our long restless walks over Rocklin Trails. Human intelligence is a biological mystery. Humans’ power-hungry brains use up around a quarter of their body’s oxygen supply, and being smart is more of a mixed blessing than many imagine. The increased intelligence of Homo sapiens was originally a result of gene mutations. Curiosity has its own reason for existence. One cannot help but be in awe when one contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. “Whatever principle of intelligence we attain unto this life, it will rise with us in the resurrection. And if a person gains more knowledge and intelligence in this life through one’s diligence and obedience than another, one will have so much the advantage in the World to come,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 130.19. #RandolphHarris 1 of 10
Most of the readers are involved in an important phase of work, gaining academic and proficiency skills for future employment and creativity. Schooling is work. Schooling is often our first significant work experience. There are few dissenters from this viewpoint. In addition to its often being just plain drudgery, like the carrying of buckets of water from a well and the digging of a ditch, it qualifies as work in the sense that love is made visible. This definition is possible only if you accept our concepts dealing with love as being a relationship of mutual regard, involving the giving and taking of aspects of selfhood, without any consequent loss of individual integrity or identity. In our opinion, school qualifies as love made visible under certain ideal conditions. Schooling is not only preparation for work; it is work. It is important to work hard in school because it is the one thing that can overcome poverty. The student who marked bravely off to kindergarten on that first big day of one’s school career may not recall it later, but it took a great deal of courage, determination, self-confidence (and often a push from parents) to take that first step. The child who stays with it, who is nurtured and nourished by it, who finds fulfillment of the developing aspects of one’s selfhood, and who in turn puts much back into the schooling is a small but far from insignificant, percentage of the total. #RandolphHarris 2 of 10
Some people grew up knowing nothing but abandonment, starvation, and poverty. They do not receive much formal schooling, but they still know the value of education and its power to change lives, and one thing that is clear to many people is how education can help escape poverty. Many children are discovering their schooling to be more a place to stretch and grow than a place of drudgery as it was in years past. And improvements are still being made in the educational system in order to encourage this kind of attitude in all children. The opportunity to get an education is very important and whatever happens, one must never give up the school because it is the only thing that will improve the quality of life. For many people school represents an identity of community shared by members of an educational institution. It is a place were people are given facts, given a chance to exercise those facts through workbook or given examination, and promoted on to challenge a larger, more complex body of facts. The process may be called schooling or anything you wish; but it is not education. Education comes from a Latin word, educare, meaning to draw out. Your draw little out of a person by cramming something in. It is God’s plan for the youth to integrate his truth into their lives. “Seek not for riches, but for wisdom,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 6.7. #RandolphHarris 3 of 10
Far too many students schooling consist of a program of assimilating or acquiring stated and strongly reinforced viewpoints. The proper term of this, of course, is indoctrination. Very little of the individual’s self-expression comes to the surface when one is bombarded with the single viewpoint of a particular instructor or text or orientation. Some people defend parochial instruction on the grounds that conflicting or confusing viewpoints are not presented and the child has a simpler time assimilating the facts. This is emphasizing hygiene or maintenance factors at the expense of motivator factors. Schooling, if it is going to be effective in exposing individuals to the various kinds of information available, has to take into account many more needs than simply the basic biological ones, through it must not forget them. As living beings we do need food, shelter, clothing, transportation, and other satisfactions of our physical needs, and consequently we need to acquire the necessary skills and insights to seek gainful employment. However, as human beings we also need to seek the motivator factors, to find ways of stimulating our growth and selfhood. “Glory of God is intelligence, or light and truth,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 93.36. #RandolphHarris 4 of 10
Schooling needs to include information but also illumination, the means for gaining insight into selfhood and casting a brighter light on latent potentials. Schooling can and mist provide illumination for the pupil and within one. Schooling should emphasize respect for others, regardless of their beliefs, race, or social status. In our diverse society, children need an understanding of other principal religions and other World views. In teaching about the beliefs and traditions of other people, the subject promotes discernment and enables pupils to combat prejudice. Such tolerance is vital in a World that is increasingly fraught with extremism, division, in strong intolerance. Schooling is about intellectual enlightenment, concern with opening minds, not closing them. Far from being self-regarding, segregated institutions that deepen division, schooling encourages openness to others, and emphasizes that the thing we all have in common is our humanity, which is of infinite value. Faith schools also allow children to discuss challenging questions about the ultimate meaning and purpose of life, and what it is to be human, about death, and why people believe in God, and the real difference between right and wrong. “Learn wisdom in the youth,” reports Alma 37.35. #RandolphHarris 5 of 10
It is primarily when people have grappled with these enormous questions about life, they can begin to make sense of what they themselves believe and think. And, if young people are encouraged to recognize their own uniqueness and value, they will flourish both and individuals and as citizens in a pluralistic society and global community. To the three R’s of readin’, ‘ritin’, and ‘rithmetic, which are very important, we could add the R’s of Reality, Realization, Reaching-out, Re-creation, Response, and Readiness to enjoy. Education for living ought to be the name of the game of public instruction. Not only would it then include courses that really prepared people for the World outside of school, it would include methods, situations, and experiences of reality and realization that would enable the child to test oneself out on the World within the relatively protected atmosphere of the school. A good example is in the area of vocational choice Many children are asked in the junior high school to select a career or college major so that they can be programmed into a series of courses appropriate to their vocational choice. Nothing we know o in the development of psychology gives us confidence that children of 12 to 15 are emotionally, mentally, physically, or experientially ready to choose such important things as their life’s work. “Let every person learn their duty,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 107.99. #RandolphHarris 6 of 10
It takes a few more years of experience with age-appropriate tasks (like fighting acne, choosing clothes, settling disputes with friends, learning to dance, discovering what type of music you like, and so on) before adolescents gain the kind of confidence in selfhood needed to select a vocation. Our experience in teaching and counseling has shown us that many students are not ready for final vocational selection until well into their college life. Nor is this particularly bad or tragic when it happens. The choice of a life’s work (if it need be for life) demands much more personal experience than the typical 13-year-old had had, particularly in the area of reassessing one’s capabilities. Possibly the person who arrives at graduation from college with a major one’s only been into for a year or two has a better idea who one is and where one is going than the one who has been in a pattern for so long one may have forgotten to assess whether or not one is still interested in one’s original work choice. A job choice needs to be made on the basis of knowing pretty well who you are. A vocation will bring more satisfaction and happiness if it represents an honest reflection of personal identity. “It is impossible for a person to be saved in ignorance,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 131.6. #RandolphHarris 7 of 10
May we prepare to worthily receive saving ordinances drop by drop and keep the associated covenants wholeheartedly. In all situations where choices must be made, an individual can select those courses that are easier, reduce stress, are most comfortable, and bring in the best money fastest. These choices fit into the concept of hygiene seeking. However, they are part of the tendencies that produce deficiency-motivation, wherein the individual is prompted or stirred primarily to acquire what one does not have or two be what is not. In contrast are those who make choices that challenge their potential, that give them something to reach or stretch out for. Such choices are not always painless (nor are they always painful), nor do they guarantee salary increments or more comfortable working conditions. They are based more upon the person’s desire to express something about oneself, to check oneself out in a new situation, to seek growth and personal achievement of one’s own goals. This is called motivator seeking, being-motivation, or growth-motivation. Personal worthiness is an essential requirement to enjoy the blessings of the temple of God. Worthy character is best forged from a life of consistent, correct choices centered in the teachings of God. “Ye shall grow in the knowledge of the glory of God,” reports Mosiah 4.12. #RandolphHarris 8 of 10
To be consistent is to be steady, constant, and dependable. What a great description of the principle of worthiness. A person can develop an idealistic and general set of attitudes about oneself that will spill over into many other areas of life, but especially into the two the even Dr. Freud recognized as most sensitive in terms of self-expression: love and work. He defined mental health roughly as being able to demonstrate a harmonious balance among ego, id, and superego through activities of loving and working. We believe this is an important insight. In no other areas are we called upon to be more, to be more authentic, to give more, and to show more output and benefit. The school years if the longest period of time some people will ever spend on the same job. In our culture we assume that maturing process take until about 21 years of age. We set up laws in mist states to keep children from 6 to 16 years old in school, where they are to grow physically, mentally, emotionally, and to develop the necessary skills for social interaction and some kind of career or work training. No child is ready by the time one enters school at 5, 6, or 7 to pick out one’s life career work. However, any child who has come from a home situation where one is loved and respected, appreciated, and involved in the life of the home is ready by this time to express some of the selfhood one has developed. #RandolphHarris 9 of 10
In a warm, accepting, integrated home, where each member is loved for oneself intrinsically, where each person gives and takes according to what one is capable of, the emphasis is on the full and free development of people who are the fullest, most real, happiest people they become. And as we prepare our homes to be places where the Spirit is welcome, we will be prepared to feel more at home when we enter the house of the Lord. As we prepare ourselves to worthily enter the temple and are faithful to temple covenants, the Lord will bestow a multiplicity of blessings upon us. “You shall therefore impress these words of mine on your heart and on your soul. And you shall teach them to your children, talking of them when you sit in your house and when you walk along the road and when you lie down and when you rise up,” reports Deuteronomy 11.18-19. By entrusting your children to educators who share your values, you will have more time for ball games and bike rides and meaningful conversations. Instead of debriefing your children, you will be getting to know them. “When they are learned they think they are wise,” reports 2 Nephi 9.28. I want you take you through an apprenticeship that is flawless. #RandolphHarris 10 of 10
A Wider Sunrise in the Dawn and a Deeper Twilight on the Lawn Keep the Faith and You Have Won!
We may work that we may keep pace with the Earth and the soul of the Earth. Always we have been told that work is a curse and a labour a misfortune. However, I say to you that when we work we fulfill a part of the Earth’s furthest dream, assigned to us when that dream was born. Work is love made visible. And if we cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that we should leave our work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy. “Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business and to work with your hands, just as we told you, so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody,” reports 1 Thessalonians 4.11. Work, productivity, labor, creativity, and blood, sweat, and tears—it is basically our responsibility. There are conflicting views being bandied about these days concerning work and labor. As human beings in the process of finding out the most about ourselves and acting on that insight, we have a definite obligation to understand this important area of human experience. #RandolphHarris 1 of 12
The principle of work has been taught from the foundation of the World. It is the bottom line of any forward motion of success. More than 6,000 years ago, Father Adam received the commandment, “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,” reports Genesis 3.19. Many people believe that people work from the cradle to the grave and that a real person is one that does his or her work and does it well. This viewpoint is in keeping with the Protestant (or Puritan) Ethic. Work is far more than just a system devised by economists or managers to keep things going. It is a part of the very nature of things, just as the Earth turns. Too often we find work to be a chore, a burden, an unpleasant thing to be avoided and it is frightening how the disappearance of work as a part of our basic ethic is becoming acceptable. We constantly hear the statements, “It is too hard, give me something easier to do,” “I cannot wait that long,” coming from our young people. The ugly disease of nothing to do is growing in epidemic proportions among us. It undermines the basic fabric of our nations. “See that ye have faith, hope, and charity, then ye will abound in good work,” Alma 7.24. #RandolphHarris 2 of 12
We are what we are as a people because our ancestors were not afraid of honest, hard work. Our forefathers understood the necessity of it; sheer survival demanded it. A common ingredient among all successful people is an understanding of what constitutes paying the price of success. A common ingredient among all successful people is an understanding of what constitutes paying the price of success. Basic in that formula of paying the price is an inner gift of determination that “I will do whatever it takes. I will work hard, with integrity, to achieve my goal.” It I as natural for us to take part in the responsibilities of life as it is to breathe. Hard work is a blessing of God. It involves going after it with all our heart, might, mind, and strength. That alone is the difference between the average and the excellent. However, why is it that often we find ourselves unable to appreciate the beauty and glory of work? Why is it that even the most glamorous and stimulating work can at times seem like drudgery? It is because humans are basically lazy? It is because people consider work to be foreign to one’s nature, foreign to one’s desire to seek pleasure and avoid pain? #RandolphHarris 3 of 12
We believe that leftover vestiges of the Work-Sin Ethic and the loss of personal significance resulting from increased technology are responsible for human’s increasingly negative attitudes toward work. The system of thought and action called the Work-Sin Ethic is the underlying philosophy of the capitalistic economy of the United States and most nations in Western civilization because victory is brought to pass by one’s personal diligence and commitment to hard work, and it deserves some attention. The view of a champion, and the glory that surrounds one, must never be overshadowed by the long process of becoming one. Oddly enough, a cursory exploration of this system takes us into the realm of theology and Christian Church history. One of the ultimate strivings is the search for perfection. Based on the Old Testament account of the fall of man (“In Adam’s Fall we sinned all” says a colonial proverb), a strong notion grew up in medieval times that people should seek salvation and thus restore oneself to Adam and Eve’s original perfection. By the fifteenth century, secular affairs—economics, wars, feudal estates, monarchies, art—had become heavily entrenched in European life and the Church found itself no longer the monolithic leader in the lives of people. #RandolphHarris 4 of 12
The Renaissance opened people’s minds to the idea that they might be not just animals but fallen Angels. They also possessed abilities and could enjoy the products of achievement. The Protestant Reformation, usually credited to Martin Luther in 1517, added to the disunity of the Catholic World. Not only were secular affairs interfering with the spiritual strivings, but nationalistic power plays broke up the one World that had been led by the Church of Rome since the fifth century. Further, Martin Luther told people that no amount of good works would save their souls; it required only a simple faith in God. One of those directly influenced by Martin Luther was a Swiss reformer by the name of John Calvin. The Evangelical, Reformed, Dutch Reformed, and Presbyterian Churches are all direct-line heirs of John Calvin; American and European capitalism owes much of its widespread development to Calvinist theology. John Calvin had a unique theological system. It insisted that the paternal God of Martin Luther was unrealistic. The tern, autocratic God of the Old Testament was more true. This God had determined—predestined—before the beginning of time just who would be saved and who would be damned. Working out salvation by Catholic means and believing it by Lutheran faith were both futile. Only the Grace of God was involved; nothing done by humans. So, there were the elect and the damned. #RandolphHarris 5 of 12
Calvin met the desperate queries of his followers by saying that the elect knew intuitively of their foreordained salvation, just as the damned knew of their lostness. Furthermore, declared Calvin, the elect must participate in the affairs of this World. Thus, he gave the concept of Work as a vocation a theological base Vocation comes from a Latin word meaning calling, and the term is still used when Roman Catholic clergy speak of their work as their Vocation. In Calvin’s thought, conscience, as a subjective mode of revelation, was closely related to the sense of divinity. Conscience too, he said, is part of the native endowment of all people, written upon the hearts of all. Typically he spoke of it as a sort of knowledge whose object is God’s will; or, equivalently, the difference between good and evil, the law of God, or the law of nature. Thus it is by virtue of conscience the people are aware of their responsibility—aware of the moral demands to which one is subject with respect to God and humans. Inward law, written, even engraved, upon the hearts of all, in a sense asserts the very same things that are to be learned from the [Decalogue]; and what the Decalogue requires is perfect love of God and of our neighbor. #RandolphHarris 6 of 12
The belief system of vocation being one’s true calling assisted the economic system in Switzerland and, as it spread into Germany, did much to reinforce economic forces there. Calvin had told people that one sign of a person was one of the elects of God was one’s success in this life. Calvin also taught by reflecting on the structure of the external World and the pattern of history. “God has not only sowed in people’s minds that seed of religion of which we have spoken but revealed oneself and daily discloses himself in the whole workmanship of the Universe. As a consequence, people cannot open their eyes without being compelled to see him,” declared John Calvin. God’s attributes—preeminently for the display of his goodness to us but also of his glory, wisdom, power, and justice. And supposedly, the damned were the failures on Earth. In fairness, the economists and historians do not blame Calvin himself for this interpretation so much as they do his secular followers. Economic success, then, came to be viewed as direct evidence of the hard work, sacrifice and self-denial found among good servants of God. O LORD, be gracious to us; we long for you. Be our strength every morning, our salvation in time of distress,” reports Isaiah 33.2. #RandolphHarris 7 of 12
The Calvinist theology found its way into the lives of the people we call Puritans. The takeovers of Puritanism in Europe is a bleak, cold period of history, where art, literature, decoration and beauty were sacrificed to the harsh dictates of the stern religious teachings. The Puritan emphasized sacrifice, hard work, ambition in work and social position, temperance, and worship. The puritans made their way to the New World, and the colonial period of American history is a continual study in the gray, harsh, rigid life pattern we still refer to as Puritanism. It was in this period that children were taught that the Devil finds work for idle hands. Play was not only a luxury, but a sin. Work was human’s highest virtue, and the person who got up before the Sun and worked until one dropped, having little or no time for relaxation, creative avocations, play, or leisure-time pursuits, was the hero of colonial times. Even children were included. From the time she could hold a needle, a young colonial girl had to sew. She learned her lessons and her morality by stitching the samplers many people today collect as cherished relics and antiques. “By their work ye shall know them,” reports Moroni 7.5. #RandolphHarris 8 of 12
Carving out a new Europe in the hostile, forbidding colonies was considered by many to be a new Crusade. Setting up churches and converting the pagan aborigines was God’s will, the colonial theology insisted. Only incidentally were the economic exploitations acknowledged. They were justified, when someone brought them up, on evangelical grounds. Colonialism was conceived (and has been interpreted by historians ever since) as part of a God-inspired program for proving the hardihood of his elect, for enlarging his churches’ membership, and as The Great Adventure. During this time the concept of work grew into an enlarged version of the theological notion of Vocation. Work became the privilege of the elect, since it provided opportunities to demonstrate salvation through economic success and achievement. Even for those who were not too sure they were elected, there were the examples and lessons of the successful for them to follow. Workers were told not to despair if success eluded them; it was sure to be right around the corner. The Lord has commanded us not to be idle. #RandolphHarris 9 of 12
Developing the capacity to work helps us contribute to the World in which we life. It brings an increased sense of self-worthy. It blesses us and our families, both now and in the future. However, even those who drifted away from the religious teachings of the Puritan leaders—and to do so too dramatically was to court the charge of witchcraft and heresy—the divinity of work persisted in their thinking. Work was considered noble and Godly. The morality of the times developed alongside this perception. Good people worked hard and steadily and bad people were idle or unemployed. Many of the so-called Blue Laws, still on the law books in many Eastern states, made it a crime to engage in any kind of recreation or frivolity on Sunday. Sunday for the religious was the day for worship, not just for an hour in the morning, but by Bible reading during the afternoon and church attendance in the evening. Sunday for the less religious was a day of rest, derserved by the hardworking, and given some biblical justification by the verse in Genesis telling how God had rested on the seventh day after six days of hard work creating the World. However, for Seventh Day Adventists, Saturday is the Sabbath and the day of rest and followers are not supposed to use any kind of electronic device. They are supposed to only read the Bible and go to church and pray. #RandolphHarris 10 of 12
We are heirs to this puritan tradition called the Protestant or Puritan Ethic by historians and economists. It gibes all virtue to hard work, ambition, thrift, temperance, and personal piety. Since many of those who follow this philosophy are in no way connected with puritan religions, we prefer the newer labeling, the Work-Sin Ethic. What role has work played in your life? How has it blessed you and your family, both temporally and spiritually? “Thou shalt not idle away thy time, neither shalt thou bury they talent,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 60.13. Work is honorable. Developing the capacity to work will help us contribute to the World in which we live. It will bring us an increased sense of self-worthy. It will bless us and our family, both now and in the future. Learning to work begins in the home. Help your family by willingly participating in the work necessary to maintain a house. Learn early to handle your money wisely and live within your means. Follow the teachings of the prophets by paying your tithing, avoiding dent, and saving for the future. Set high gals for yourself, and be willing to work hard to achieve them. Develop self-discipline, and be dependable because if human life is to be renewed and our natural gifts are to be healed and God’s supernatural gifts restored, sin must be overcome. #RandolphHarris 11 of 12
Implanted on the hearts of all and clarified in the Scriptures is the affairs of a civil society. Partly due to its religious background and partly due to its traditionally being practiced, it has taken firm hold in American life: humans must work to demonstrate their humanity and their productivity and justify their being on Earth. Not to work is to be a parasite. The analogy of a large rowboat is frequently used. Each citizen is part of the crew of this Ship of State, and each one must pull one’s own oar if the vessel, USS John F. Kennedy CV-67, is not to founder. The choice was between working and being baggage, between being a good person and being a sinful person. Today, we see this attitude not only in older people who were chronologically to puritan times, but in their children and grandchildren. We find attitudes toward work that approach a worshipful level. This ethic has, of course, resulted in a tremendous vitality and upsurge in economic productivity in this nation. It has also resulted in feelings of worthlessness and guilt in people who could not keep up with the pace, who could not produce, or who had to retired before they were finished feeling productive. #RandolphHarris 12 of 12
The Brain is Wider than the Sky and Deeper than the Sea–It is the Love of God!
You think she is keeping secrets from you. Magic secrets, secrets you have not explained to anyone. You have resented her all these years as the doctor, the mad scientist, yes, right, the mad scientist, the keeper of the keys to the magic, coming in and out of your chamber and never really telling you what was happening. I can see these words sinking down, down into your mind, and what you sense is you cannot deny and cannot retreat from all the truths. Is God giving you the power to writhe and spit with anger? Because in the Christian religion, absolution is the act of forgiving someone for something negative that they have done or thought. The love you should feel in your heart is something one cannot know in shallow wanderings. Friendship, trust, honor, respect, admiration—this whole experience is supposed to be a revelation. Once is supposed to do all they can to protect you and watch the Sunrise in your eyes. As those who have indeed entered into a sacred covenant, we must remain true to the way, the truth, and the life. Adam, the prototypical First Man, is created perfect. He is veritably the image of God. However, for reasons that differ in interpretation by as many splinter sects as they have produced, Adam committed a disobedient act, eating a piece of forbidden fruit, and was condemned by God to work and sweat and become mortal, instead of being immortal as the original plan dictated. #RandolphHarris 1 of 10
This concept has been called the doctrine of The Fall of Man, the Depravity of Man, and other similar names. It assumes that man, originally created to be perfect, fell from that state of perfection and must go through all kinds of rituals, ordeals, trials, and tests to regain some sort of tentative perfection, or, as it is often called, Salvation. However, there is nothing in the World more deleterious or harmful to the human family than hatred, prejudice, suspicion, and the attitude that some people have toward their fellows of unkindness. In matters of politics, whenever politics cause one to speak unkindly of another person, know this, that one is on dangerous ground. The great mission of the latter-day kingdom is not to be a militant church to which we belong. This is a church that holds out peace to the World. It is not our duty to go into the World and find fault with others, neither to criticize people because they do not understand. However, it is our privilege, in kindness and love, to go among others share with them the love of God. Wherever we live in the World, we have been molded as a people to be instruments of the Lord’s peace. God has called us out of darkness into his marvelous light. We cannot afford to be caught up in a World prone to give and to take offense. We must neither envy, nor be puffed up in pride. We are not easily provoked, nor do we behave unseemly. We rejoice not in iniquity, but in truth. Surely this is pure love of Jesus Christ which we represent. #RandolphHarris 2 of 10
It seems clear to even a casual reader of the words of Jesus Christ that attaining this Salvation is a matter of a rather complete change of heart, resulting in better behavior toward one’s fellow humans. “The Lord God hath given a commandment that all men (people) should have charity,” reports 2 Nephi 26.30. Needless to say, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and all the churches since have made Salvation-searching a bit more complicated! We cannot expect all our readers to agree with this, but it is a very respectable and well-studied viewpoint. Following in the wake of a difficult period, the young Christian movement became an institution. When we turn to God and by belief accept what God reveals, the miraculous atonement by the Cross of Christ instantly places us into a right relationship with God. And as a result of the supernatural miracle of God’s grace, we stand justified. The followers of Jesus became a community of believers, and with the acceptance of Christianity by the Roman Emperior, Constantine, it became the Church. With institutionalization came the exclusive right to interpret the doctrines according to Church Law. It also brought the right to publish new doctrines. One of these, with very speculative scriptural basis, is priestly celibacy. #RandolphHarris 3 of 10
The doctrine that leaders of the Church should forsake the pleasures of sexual activity and family living did more than just make the priests a special category of people. It also elevated the idea of celibacy above the more prevalent practice of enjoying sexual pleasures. This not only made ordinary people feel that their priests were superior human beings because they could follow a vow of chastity, but also made many millions of non-celibate people feel a bit inferior, since there were not forgetting their bodies and the drive built into them. Some have even felt extreme guilt for their base, primal nature. “And now, as the preaching of the word has a great tendency to lead the people to do that which was just—yea, it had had more powerful effect upon the minds of the people than the sword, or anything else, which had happened unto them—therefore Alma thought it was expedient that they should try the virtue of the word of God. And again we thank thee O God, that we are a chosen and a holy people. Amen,” reports Alma 31.5 and 18. We will never know the joy of abstaining until we surrender in every detail of our lives. Yet abstaining is the most difficult thing for us to do. However, as soon as we do totally surrender, the Holy Spirit gives us a taste of his joy. “The kingdom of God is near you,” reports Luke 10.9. There are many different levels on which one’s mind can work. #RandolphHarris 4 of 10
The systematic study of human behavior must include looking objectively at such long-held and sacred doctrines as celibacy. What do such beliefs do to human beings? Examples tumble forth: St. Anthony of Padua, under a vow of celibacy, lived alone in a cave to shut out the World and make meditation more possible Being only a man, he dreamed dreams of sexual activity that woke him from his sleep. He was disgusted and disappointed at his body’s inability to see that his soul was in charge, so he punished his body for responding so naturally. He rolled himself in briar bushes, letting the thorns rip through his flesh and tear at the so weak and fragile body in which his soul was imprisoned. St. Bernard of Clairvaux dreamed even worse dreams than did St. Anthony. His sexual dreams concerned the Virgin Mary. He punished himself for such an offense. St. Francis of Assisi was a gentle and kind little man. He was convinced of the vileness of his physical body and its drives that he tried through flagellation, whipping himself, and going on long periods of fasting to force his body to give up its demands and release his soul. Martin Luther, while still a Catholic priest, also engaged in flagellation in search for salvation for his soul, at his body’s expense. One of the foremost tenets of the Lutheran Church, founded after Luther split with Rome, was that salvation could never come through works such as flagellation and vows of good deeds; it came through simple faith. #RandolphHarris 5 of 10
The search for spiritual perfection has left many a mark on human’s history, some beneficial and some destructive. Out of Christianity’s concern for other human beings has come the development of hospitals, both physical and mental. In spite of many abuses and colonial enterprises that were exploitative, much good has been done by Christian missionaries for people who needed to acquire certain academic skills and better understanding of health measures. On the other hand, many of the most infamous acts in history are traceable, directly or eventually, to attempts at Perfection and/or Salvation. The Crusades are but one example. Others are the Holy Wars, the Holy Inquisition, and the persecution of witches in New England is Sacramento, California (Prisoners of the River). When Christian nations go to war and religious leaders in those nations proclaim that the holy war carried on in God’s or in Christ’s name, it can for some be the most offensive extensions of this search. The Lord’s people must be at peace one with another during times of trouble, regardless of what loyalties they may have to different governments or parties. God lives. Jesus Christ is the way, the truth, and the life. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind and, love your neighbor as yourself,” reports Luke 10.27. Let us daily renew in our hearts the pure love of Christ and overcome with our Master the darkness of the World. #RandolphHarris 6 of 10
A similar search, not always linked to religious belief, is the finding of perfection in the fullest development of human’s intellectual and rational capabilities. “The glory of God is intelligence, or, in other words, light and truth,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 93.36. This thrust has been called by various names (Rationalism, Age of Enlightenment, etc.), which, though differing in individual matters, all emphasized human’s search for wisdom and knowledge. The sons of the Enlightenment—Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Voltaire—were sure that through rational means people could become masters of all, lords of eternity. Noble as it was, this emphasis on intellectual and cognitive skills became the hobby of a secret elite. To have the time, energy, and ambition needed for intellectual pursuits, one needed to be wealthy or living in a monastery or the pet of some wealthy patron. The large masses of people had more basic pursuits—getting enough to feed themselves and their families, keeping a roof over their heads, and fighting off the many obstacles of less affluent existence. For the majority of the population, rationalism and intellectual activity had no survival value. However, all who are faithful will see the Lord is a promise made to people who had to devote their lives to earning a living. Do whatever it takes to improve your confidence in your creativity. #RandolphHarris 7 of 10
The idea of an Intellectual Elite is still with us. We subsidize think tanks in various parts of the nation, where highly trained and vastly experienced men and women come together to pool ideas, to explore rationally the urgent issues of our times. “And God saw these souls that they were good, and he stood in the midst of them, and he said: These I will make my rulers; for he stood among those that were spirits, and he saw that they were good,” reports Abraham 3.23. Yet, too much of this valuable brainwork goes unshared by the ordinary mortals who may be just as intelligent, but who have more immediate personal obligations and commitments. “Intelligences that were organized before the World was; and among all these there were many of the noble and great ones,” reports Abraham 3.22. The worship of intellectual power, the predisposition to believe that all problems can be rationally solved and the subsequent ignoring of other aspects of human experience like emotion, joy, and fellowship, creates an imbalance in social attitudes that is ultimately detrimental to the individual’s sense of significance. The Enlightenment period made people aware of their brains and untapped potential of human intelligence, and for this we are grateful. Solving mental games can actually raise measurable Intelligence Quotient (you will notice you get better at the capacity to learn). #RandolphHarris 8 of 10
However, because of a continuing tendency to believe the human beings need only to accumulate information, to gather knowledge, to amass wisdom, with no need for feedback into the pool of human experience, we would ask the worshippers of Knowledge to consider the question, “Knowledge for what?” Our personal intelligence is everlasting and divine. There is a dignity of the human spirit. Because of our sacred regard for each human intellect, we consider the obtaining of an education to be a religious responsibility. Yet opportunities and abilities differ. In the pursuit of education, individual desire is more influential than institution, and personal faith more forceful than faculty. God assures us that knowledge acquired on Earth with me ours forever. “Whatever principle of intelligence we attain unto in this life, it will rise with us in the resurrection. And if a person gains more knowledge and intelligence in this life through he or her diligence and obedience than another, one will have so much more advantage in the World to come,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 130.18 and 19. Our crystallized intelligence workout also facilitates our understanding of complex issues in our personal life. We are laying the ground work for other areas of growth. Your work will actually promote neurological change, which can increase the rate and depth of your growth. #RandolphHarris 9 of 10
If our mind is sharp, we will have an easier time understanding the paradoxes of spirituality, or the fundamentals of interpersonal effectiveness. Once we have reached a place where we continually challenge and enjoy our mind, we deserve to celebrate. Wisdom is one of the special virtues that humans possess. Mastering new skills, topics, and bodies of knowledge, whether on one’s own for formally is related to the strength of curiosity. Love of learning does not have to be limited to only in a school or classroom. The World is the biggest classroom ever. We can enhance this strength by going out and engaging in new skills and experiences. Wisdom is the key to improving ourselves and it helps us tackle challenges and setbacks. People with high strengths in love of learning can maintain a sense of efficacy and motivation while learning longer than those who do not. Wisdom is used for the sake oneself and others well-being. People with the strength and thirst for knowledge see things through a wider lens. In addition, perspective is all about the experiences. Perspective or wisdom can be developed through life tasks, adjustments, coming to terms with life choices, life changes, and stressful life experiences. Wisdom provides a great advantage to human beings. Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom. There are many different ways to explore and expand the mind, using it to help one decide what one wants in life and how to get it. #RandolphHarris 10 of 10
Randolph Harris II International Institute 