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Better is a Dinner of Herbs Where Love is, than a Stalled Ox and Hatred therewith!

ImageEvery morning I get up and look through the Forbes list of the richest people in America. If I am not there, I go to work. “With God all things are possible,” reports St. Matthew 19.26. The sciences which deal with behaviour are in an infant state. This cluster of scientific disciplines is usually thought of as including psychology, psychiatry, sociology, social psychology, anthropology, and biology, though sometimes the other social sciences such as economics and political science are included, and mathematics and statistics are very much involved as instrumental disciplines. Though they are all at work trying to understand the behaviour of beings, and though research in these fields is growing by leaps and bounds, it is still an area in which there is undoubtedly more confusion than solid knowledge. Thoughtful workers in these fields tend to stress the enormity of our scientific ignorance regarding behaviour, and the paucity of general laws which have been discovered. They tend to compare the state of this field of scientific endeavour with that of physics, and seeing the relative precision of measurement accuracy of prediction, and elegance and simplicity of the discovered lawfulness in this latter field, are vividly aware of the newness, the infancy, the immaturity, of the behavioural science field. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

ImageWithout in any way denying the truthfulness of this picture, I believe it is sometimes stressed to the point where the general public may fail to recognize the other side of the coin. Behavioural science, even though in its infancy, has made mighty strides towards becoming an “if—then” science. By this I mean that it has made striking progress in discerning and discovering lawful relationships such that is certain conditions exist, then certain behaviours will predictably follow. I believe that too few people are aware of the extent, the breadth, and the dept of the advances which have still been made in recent decades in the behavioural sciences. Still fewer seem to be aware of the profound social, educational, political, economic, ethical, and philosophical problems posed by these advances. Each general statement I shall makes is supported by reasonably adequate research, though like all scientific findings each statement is an expression of a given degree of probability, not of some absolute truth. Furthermore each statement is open to modification and correction or even refutation through more exact or more imaginative studies of the future. In behavioural sciences there is an element of prediction which is prominent. The pattern of each of these can be generalized as follows: If an individual possesses measurable characteristics a, b, and c, then we can predict that there is a high probability that one will exhibit behaviours x, y, and z. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

ImageThus, we know how to predict, with considerable accuracy, which individuals will be successful college students, successful industrial executives, successful insurance agents, and the like. I will not attempt to document this statement, simply because the documentation would be so extensive. He whole field of aptitude testing of vocation testing, of personnel selection is involved. Although the specialists in these fields are rightly concerned with the degree of inaccuracy in their predictions, the fact remains that here is a wide area in which the work of the behavioural sciences is accepted by multitudes of hardheaded industries, universities and other organizations. We have come to accept the fact that out of an unknown group the behavioural scientist can select (with a certain margin of error) those persons who will be successful typists, practice teachers, filing clerks, or physicists. This field is continually expanding. Efforts are being made to determine the characteristics of the creative chemist, for example, as over against the merely successful chemist, and, though without outstanding success, efforts have been and are being made to determine the characteristics which will identify the potentially successful psychiatrist and clinical psychologist. Science is moving steadily forward in its ability to say whether or not you possess the measurable characteristics which are associated with a certain type of occupational activity. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

ImageWe know how to predict success in schools for military officer candidates, and in combat performance. To select one study in this field, Williams and Leavitt (31) found that they could make satisfactory predictions regarding a Marine’s probably success in Officer Candidates School (OCS) and in later combat performance by obtaining ratings from one’s “buddies.” They also found that in this instance the human’s fellow soldiers were better psychological instruments than were the objective tests they used. There is illustrated here not only the use of certain measures to predict behaviour, but a willingness to use those measures, whether conventional or unconventional, which are demonstrated to have predictive power. We can predict how radical or conservative a potential business executive will be. Whyte (30), in his recent book cites this as one of many examples of tests that are in regular use in industrial corporations. Thus in a group of young executives up for promotion, top management can select those who will exhibit (within a margin of error) whatever degree of conservatism or radicalism is calculated to be for the best welfare of the company. They can also base their selection on knowledge of the degree to which each person has a latent hostility to society, or latent homosexuality, or psychotic tendencies. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

ImageTesting giving (or purporting to give) such measures are in use by many corporations both for screening purposes in selection of new management personnel, and also for purposes of evaluation of beings already in management position, in order to choose those who will be given greater responsibilities. We know how to predict which members of an organization will be troublemakers and/or delinquent. A promising young psychologist (10) has devised a short, simple pencil and paper test which has shown a high degree of accuracy in predicting which of the employees hired by a department store will be unreliable, dishonest, or otherwise difficult. He states that it is quite possible to identify, with considerable precision, the potential troublemakers in any organized group. This ability to identify those who will make trouble is, so far as the technical issues are concerned, simply an extension of the knowledge we have of prediction in other fields. From the scientific point of view it is no different from predicting who will be a good typesetter. We know that a competent clerical worker, using a combination of test scores and actuarial tables, can give a better predictive picture of a person’s personality and behaviour, than can an experienced clinician. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

ImagePaul Meehl (18) has shown that we are sufficiently advanced in our development of personality tests, and in information accumulated through these tests, that intuitive skill and broad knowledge, experience, and training, are quite unnecessary in producing accurate personality descriptions. He has shown that in many situations in which personality diagnoses are being made—mental hygiene clinics, veteran’s hospitals, psychiatric hospitals, and the like, it is wasteful to use well-trained professional personnel to make personality diagnoses through the giving of tests, interviewing the person and the like. He has shown that a clerk can do it better, with only a minimum and impersonal contact with the patient. First a number of tests would be administered and scored. Then the profile of scores would be looked up in actuarial tables prepared on the basis of those measurement, appraisal and evaluation of human characteristics, and the prediction of certain behaviour patterns on the basis of those measurements. Indeed, there is no reason why Meehl’s clerk could not also be eliminated. With proper coded instruction there is no reason why an electronic computer could not score the tests, analyze the profiles and come up with an even more accurate picture of the person and his predicted behaviour than a human clerk. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

ImageWe have all seen it—and perhaps done it! The father walks in the door after a pressured day, preoccupied, with brow furrowed. His three-year-old comes running to him, but Dad is busy unburdening himself to his wife. “Just a moment, Leo.” Leo tugs at his father’s britches—no response. He tugs again! His father explodes, picks him up, and taps his little legs for being “rude.” The Lord knows how many children “lose heart” because their fathers have “hard days.” Life is sometimes like the cartoon where the boss is grouchy toward a worker; his employee, in turn, comes home and is irritable with the children; his son then kicks the dog; the dog runs down the street and bites the first person he sees—the boss! We fathers must never let our pressures drive us into this unhappy cycle. The costs are too high. Some say you treat your fellow humans on the level. However, when you are home with the wife and kids, are you as mean as the Devil? Your kids know. “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves,” reports St. Matthew 7.15. Few things will exasperate a child more than inconsistency. Pity the horse that has a rider who gives it mixed signals, digging his heels into its side and pulling the reins at the same time. Pity the child even more who has the rules changed by a capricious father, and who is always exasperated because of the conflicting messages one receives. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

ImageFathers, you may forgive yourself by saying, “I am so busy…Memory is not my thing…I am just a spontaneous person!” However, your children will not. Be consistent. Never ever make a promise to your children you do not keep! Do any unfulfilled promises come to mind? Horseback riding that never happened? Trips to the Baskin-Robbins ice cream shop, Winchell’s Donut, New Lai Wah Chinese food, of Giant Burgers, or to watch a Golden State Warrior’s Game on an A’s baseball game? You may forget, but you have a little boy or a girl who will remember it eighty years from now. One of the most exasperating and damning sins a father can commit against his children is favourtism. I say this despite being the last one who would suggest you should treat all your children alike. Some children need more discipline, some need more independence. Some need more structure, some need less. Some need more holding than others. Some need more encouragement. However, no child should be favoured over another. Favouritism was the damning sin of Isaac, who favoured Esau over Jacob. Ironically, it was also the damning sin of Jacob, who favoured Joseph over his brothers. Like favouring father, like rejected son! How crushing, how disheartening to know that you are less favoured—less loved. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

ImageMen, the great “do not” of fatherhood is, “Do not exasperate your children”—and life tells us what the resulting “do nots” of this are: Do not be critical, do not be over strict, do not be irritable, do not be inconsistent, do not show favouritism. God has created our children with their hearts turned toward ours. Our power is awesome! We must take God’s Word to heart. We can select those persons who are easily persuaded, who will conform to group pressures, or those who will not yield. Two separate but compatible studies (15, 16) show that individuals who exhibit certain dependency themes in their responses to the pictures of the Thematic Apperception Test, or who, on another test, show evidence of feelings of social inadequacy, inhibition of aggression, and depressive tendencies, will be easily persuaded, or will yield to group pressures. These small studies are by no means definitive, but there is every reason to suppose that their basic hypothesis is correct and that these or other more refined measures will accurately predict which member of a group will be easily persuaded, and which will be unyielding even to fairly strong group pressures. We can predict, from the way individual perceive the movement of a spot of light in a dark room, whether they tend to be prejudiced or unprejudiced. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

ImageThere has been much study of ethnocentrism, the tendency toward a pervasive and rigid distinction between ingroups and outgroups, with hostility toward outgroups, and a submissive attitude toward, and belief in the rightness of, ingroups. One of the theories which has developed is that the more ethnocentric person is unable to tolerate ambiguity or uncertainty in a situation. Operating on this theory Block and Block (5) has subjects report on the degree of movement they perceived in a dim spot of light in a completely dark room. (Actually no movement occurs, but almost all individuals perceive movement in this situation.) They also gave these same subjects a test of ethnocentrism. It was found, as predicted, that those who, in successive trials, quickly established a norm or the amount of movement they perceived, tended to e more ethnocentric than those whose estimates of movement continued to show variety. This study was repeated, with slight variation, in Australia (28), and the findings were confirmed and enlarged. It was found that the more ethnocentric individuals were less able to tolerate ambiguity, and saw less movement than the unprejudiced. They also were more dependent on others and when making their estimates in the company of another person, tended to conform to the judgment of that person. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

ImageHence it is not too much to ay that by studying the way the individual perceives the movement of a dim light in a dark room, we can tell a good deal about the degree to which one is a rigid, prejudiced, ethnocentric person. This hodgepodge of illustrations of the ability of the behavioural sciences to predict behaviour,and hence to select individuals who will exhibit certain behaviours, may be seen simply as the burgeoning applications of a growing field of science. However, what these illustrations suggest can also cause a cold chill of apprehension. The thoughtful person cannot help but recognize that these developments I have described are but the beginning. One cannot fail to see that if more highly developed tools were in the hands of an individual or group, together with the power to use them, the social and philosophical implications are awesome. One can begin to see why a scientist like von Bertalanffy warns, “Besides the menace of physical technology, the dangers of psychological technology are often overlooked.” Why then do we not experience more of this endless supply of God’s grace? Why do we do often seem to live in spiritual poverty instead of experiencing life to the full as Jesus promised (John 10.10)? #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

ImageThere are several reasons that may or may not apply to a particular believer, but for the purposes of our study on grace, I would like to look at two that probably apply to most of us. First, is our frequent misperception of God as the divine equivalent of Ebeneezer Scrooge; the God who demands the last ounce of work out of His people and then pays them poorly. That may sound like an overstatement of our perception of God, but I believe it is a fairly accurate representation of how many Christians think. Consider the following words from one of John Newton’s hymns: Come, my soul, thy suit prepare: Jesus loves to answer prayer; he himself has bid thee pray, therefore will not say thee nay. Thou art coming to a King, Large petitions with thee bring; for his grace and power are such, none can ever ask too much. How many Christians really believe those words? How many of us really believe Jesus loves to answer prayer? How many of us believe His grace and power are such that we can never ask too much? Rather, we tend in the direction of believing God is reluctant to answer prayers and His grace and power are not sufficient to fulfill our needs, let along our requests. We should not forget that Satan’s very first temptation of humankind was based on questioning the goodness and generosity of God (see Genesis 3.1-5). #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

ImageAnd this vicious attack on the patriarch Job was designed to cause Job to question God’s goodness so that he would then curse God (see Job 1.16-11). Satan has not changed his strategy today. This perception of God as the reluctant giver comes right from Satan and must be resisted by us if we are to experience the fullness of God grace. “Remember this. Talk to God. No matter how you are feeling, no matter what you are facing, no matter what happens to hurt you or disappoint you or confuse you. Talk to God. And never stop talking to Him. You understand me? Talk to Him. Realize that because things go bad in this World, because they go well, because they come easy or they come with difficulty, well, it does not mean that He is not here. I do not mean here in this chapel. I mean here everywhere. Talk to Him. No mater how many years pass, no matter what happens, always talk to Him. Would you try to remember to do that? Anytime you want. You start now with or without words, and you just keep talking and you never never let anything come between you and talking to God,” Page 27, Of Love and Evil by Anne Rice. Many believers do not comprehend the superabundance of God’s grace and generosity, we ask Him for paltry blessings, when we could be drawing on the abundance of His riches. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

Image The apostle Paul told us that God “has blessed us in the Heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ,” and “[He] will meet all your needs according to his glorious riches in Christ Jesus” reports Ephesians 1.3, Philippians 4.19. Within the scope of these two scriptures, God promises to meet every one of our needs, both spiritual and temporal. The God who was gracious to Adam and Eve both before and after the Fall, who rejoiced in doing good to the Jewish nation in captivity, who was the “God of all grace” to Peter, is the same gracious and generous God today. Grace is part of the very nature of God, and He cannot change. He is indeed the generous landowner of the parable, continually going to the marketplace of life to find those in need of “a day’s wages” so that He can bring them into His vineyard and then reward them out of all proportion to their labors. Perhaps the larger reason why we do not experience more of God’s grace is our misconception that, having been saved by grace, we must now, at least to some degree, “pay our own way” and earn God’s blessings in our daily lives. An accepted maxim among people today, “there is no such thing as a free lunch” (which may be true in our society), is carried by us into our relationship with God. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

ImageIn fact this misconception that we must pay our own way is more than a mistaken theological notion. It actually springs from the perverse disposition of our hearts—the disposition of pride. Perhaps the most difficult task for us to perform is to rely on God’s grace and God’s grace alone for our salvation. It is difficult for our pride to rest on grace. Grace is for other people—for beggars. We do not want to live by a Heavenly welfare system. We want to earn our own way and atone for our sins. We like to think that we will go to heaven because we deserve to be there. When considering the subject of the grace of God in salvation, the problem of pride described is applicable to living the Christian life. Not only do we think we must pay our own way, at least to some degree, we subtly insist on paying our own way. Grace is for other people—for beggars, but not for us. Let me illustrate from my own experience. After the death of my first wife, Eleanor, God very soon brought into my life another charming and Godly lady whom Eleanor and I had known for a number of years. Just over a year Eleanor’s death, Jane and I were married. A few months later I began to realize I was experiencing a vague sense of guilt despite confidence that God had guided in our marriage. One day I realized my sense of guilt was due to the feeling that I had not “paid my dues” in long months of grief and loneliness unlike some of my friends who have lost their spouses. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

ImageI felt I did not “deserve” such a tremendous blessing from God so soon after Eleanor’s death. In fact, I discovered I was unconsciously not allowing myself to enjoy the full riches of the blessing God had so obviously given me. I had lapsed into the World’s way of thinking that we somehow must earn God’s blessings through our suffering or sacrifice or hard work. It can be humbling, sometimes humiliating, to realize we have not paid our own way. Think of the workers in the parable who worked only one hour. How did they feel when they realized they had received as much pay as those who had worked twelve long hours through the heat of the day? Did they feel grateful for the generous gift they had received, or guilty that they had not earned their pay? If they were living by a philosophy of works as we so often do, they would have felt guilty. They would have experienced the gracious generosity of the landowner, but they would not have enjoyed it. You and I actually experience the grace of God in our lives far more than we realize. However, all too often we do not enjoy His grace because we are trying to live by merit, not by grace. In looking for our own goodness by which we hope to earn the blessing of God, we fail to see the superabundance of the goodness and grace of God in our lives. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
ImageO God, Who wast pleased to send Thy disciples the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, in the burning fire of Thy love, grant to Thy people to be fervent in the unity of faith; that evermore abiding in Thee, they may be found both stedfast in faith and active in work; through Jesus Christ our Lord. May the Spirit, the Paraclete, O Lord, Who proceedeth from Thee, illuminate our minds, and, as Thy Son hath promised, lead us into all truth; through the same our Lord Jesus Christ. May the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, O Lord, cleanse our hearts, and make them fruitful with its plenteous dew; through our Lord Jesus Christ. “And God also declared unto prophets, by his own mouth, that Christ should come. And behold, there were divers ways that he did manifest things unto the children of humans, which were good; and al things which are good cometh of Christ; otherwise humans were fallen, and there could no good thing come unto them. Wherefore, by the ministering of Angels, and by every word which proceeded forth out of the mouth of God, humans began to exercise faith in Christ; and thus by faith, they did lay hold upon every good thing; and thus it was until the coming of Christ,” reports Moroni 7.23-25. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

ImageBlessed Lord Jesus, before thy cross I kneel and see the heinousness of my sin, my iniquity that caused thee to be “made a curse,” the evil that excites the severity of divine wrath. Show me the enormity of my guilt by the crowns of thorns, the pierced hands and feet, the bruised body, the dying cries. Thy blood is the blood of incarnate God, its worth infinite, its value beyond all thought. Infinite must be the evil and guilt that demands such a price. Sin is my malady, my monster, my foe, my viper, born in my birth, alive in my life, strong in my character, dominating my faculties, following me as a shadow, intermingling with my every thought, my chain that holds me captive in the empire of my soul. Sinner that I am, why should the Sun give me light, the air supply breath, the Earth bear my tread, its fruits nourish me, its creatures subserve my ends? Yet thy compassions yearn over me, thy heart hastens to my rescue, thy love endured my curse, thy mercy bore my deserved stripes. Let me walk humbly in the lowest depths of humiliation, bathed in thy blood, tender of conscience, triumphing gloriously as an heir of salvation. “And after that he came humans also were saved by faith in his name; and by faith, they become the sons of God. And as surely as Christ liveth he spake these words unto our fathers, saying: Whatsoever thing ye shall ask the Father in my name, which is good, in faith believing that ye shall receive, behold, it shall be done unto you,” reports Moroni 7.26. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

ImageThe readiness with which one once plunged into other people’s affairs to help the, as one believed, will dissolve and disappears. One knows now that their real troubles remain unaffected by this surface acid, that meddling in their problems is not the right way. One is surrounded by an aura which makes one a crowd of fawning disciples and flattering admirers. However, one could not accept such a role because one knows that they will refuse to let one be oneself and will expect one to be different from what one really is. One does not care to face an attitude which is hostile or indifferent; one does not even need to talk to beings who begin by disbelieving one. No self-actualized person looks down on others from one’s pedestal, but that does not alter the distancer that extends from their ignorance to one’s knowledge. One does not require idolatrous homage from them and indeed shrinks from it. One unaffected nature renders one desirous of being treated no better than others. One passes among others a hidden existence, a secret inner life. The conventional World is so tied to, and therefore so deceived by appearances, that it is only a tiny handful of people who meet such a being with the understanding and sympathy one deserves. It is not personal desire which makes one refrain from communicating oneself to others, but public circumstances. In this one obeys the Greek verse, “When to be wise is all in vain, be not wise at all.” Why should one communicate the oracles of Heaven to those whose minds run only to trivialities? #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

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Watch and Pray that Ye Enter Not into Temptation: that Spirit Indeed is Willing, but the Flesh is Weak!

ImagePlots, true are false are necessary things, to raise up commonwealths, and ruin kings. One’s power of keeping one’s knowledge a secret from those who are unready for or uninterested in it is perfect. Nothing in one’s words or manner may lead them to think that the self-actualized knows immensely more than one tells them. One knows how to protect one’s status well. In the presence of sceptics and scoffers, or the unevolved and unready, neither one’s outward manner nor one’s uttered talk will give any hint of it. With all one’s reclusive habits, the self-actualized is compassionate in temperament, benevolent in personality. Even when one avoids people, one does not hate them. They feel tense, uneasy, and unsure in the presence of a superior class of beings. This one knows by experience and this is one reason why one keeps apart and alone; yet paradoxically it is also why one is kinder to them than a situation calls for, why one then behaves as if one were an equal and not on a different level. In one sense, the self-actualized consciousness is insulated by its own superior quality from that of others, but in another sense it fleetingly registers or lengthily holds their states through one’s compassion, sympathy, or understanding. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

ImageThe self-actualized has no intention of meddling in other people’s personal lives, no conceit that one’s duty is to change them, no willingness to take on responsibility for them. One commits them to God and commends them to it. However this it done, if intuitively or rationally one is led to suggest a purpose or remind them of a truth or point to a beneficial course or utter a warning, one will bey the leading—but always in response to their approach. If fate will let the self-actualized being, one is happier to move through this World incognito, than celebrated. Most people are always more impressed by outward show than by inner worth. However, when the show is philanthropic service and benevolent activity dramatically performed, they are even more impressed. The recognition and appreciation are immediate. The being whose inner stillness admit spiritual forces into one’s surroundings remains unnoticed. Nor is the people’s judgment always true; the most may err as grossly as the few. Beware the fury of a patient person. Experience is something you do not get until just after you need it. I maintain that there is a desperate social need for the creative behavior of creative individuals. It is this which justifies the setting forth of a tentative theory of creativity—the nature of the creative act, the conditions under which it occurs, and the manner in which it may constructively be fostered. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

ImageSuch a theory of creativity may serve as a stimulus and guide to research studies in this field of therapy.  Many of the serious criticisms of our culture and its trend may best be formulated in terms of a dearth of creativity. Let us state some of these briefly: In education we tend to turn out conformists, stereotypes, individuals whose educations is “completed,” rather than freely creative and original thinkers. In our leisure time activities, passive entertainment and regimented group action are overwhelmingly predominant while creative activities are much less in evidence. In the sciences, there is an ample supply of technicians, but the number who can creatively formulate fruitful hypotheses and theories is small indeed. In industry, creation is reserved for the few—the manager, the designer, the head of the research department—while for the many life is devoid of original or creative endeavor. In individual and family life the same picture holds true. In the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the books we read, and the idea we hold, there is a strong tendency toward conformity, toward stereotypy. To be original, or different, is felt to be “dangerous.” Why be concerned over this? If, as a people, we enjoy conformity rather than creativity, shall we not be permitted this choice? In my estimation such a choice would be entirely reasonable were it not for one great shadow which hangs over all of us. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

ImageIn a time when knowledge, constructive and destructive, is advancing by the most incredible leaps and bounds into a fantastic atomic age, genuinely creative adaptation seems to represent the only possibility that beings can keep abreast of the kaleidoscopic change in the World. With scientific discovery and invention proceeding, we are told, at the rate of geometric progression, a generally passive and culture-bound people cannot cope with the multiplying issues and problems. Unless individuals, groups, and nations can imagine, construct, and creatively revise new ways of relating to these complex changes, the lights will go out. Unless beings can make new and original adaptations to one’s environments as rapidly as one’s science can change the environment, our culture will perish. Not only individual maladjustment and group tensions, but international annihilation will be the price we pay for a lack of creativity. Consequently it would seem to me that investigations of the process of creativity, the conditions under which this process occurs, and the ways in which it may be facilitated, are of the utmost importance. It is in the hope of suggestion a conceptual structure under which such investigations might go forward will help facilitate necessary changes. “Be watchful, stand firm in your faith, be courageous, be strong. Let all that you do be done in love,” reports 1 Corinthians 16.13-14. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

ImageOut of this well-known passage, I chose two word on which I want you to center your attention in this hour—be strong! They are surrounded in our text by other qualities that makes strength possible—watchfulness, faith, courage, love. All together, they describe the strong Christian personality. How can we attain strength? This is a question asked in all ages of a being’s life and in all periods of human history. It is a question asked with passion and despair in our time, and most impatiently by those who are no longer children and not yet adults. In our texts Paul uses the word “be” several times: “be strong,” he says to the Corinthians. We easily slip over it. However, it should arrest our attention as fully as, and perhaps even more than, the main words of our text. Fore the word “be” contains in its two letters the whole riddle of the relation of beings to God. Paul does not ask of the Christians in Corinth something that is strange to them. He asks them to be what they are, Christian personalities. All the imperatives he uses are descriptions of something that is, before they are demands for what ought to be. Be what you are—that is the only thing one can ask of any being. One cannot ask of a being to be something it was not before. It is as if life in all its forms desires to be asked, to receive demands. However, no life can receive demands for something which it is not. It wants to be asked to become what it is and nothing else. This seems surprising, but a little thought shows us that it is true. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

ImageWe know that one cannot ask fruits from thorns, or grain from weeds, or water from a dry fountain, or love from a cold heart, or courage from a cowardly mind, or strength from a weak life. If we ask such things from beings who do not have them, we are foolish; and either they will laugh at us or condemn us as unjust and hostile towards them. We can ask of anything or anyone only to bring forth what one has, to become what one is. Out of what is given to us, we can act. Receiving precedes acting. “Be strong,” says Paul. He says it to those who have received strength as he himself received strength when the power of a new reality grasped him. Now some of us will ask—“what about us who feel that we have not received, and that we do not have faith and courage and strength and love? We are wanting in all these, so the commanding ‘be’ of Paul is not said to us. Or if it is said to us we remain unconcerned or become hostile towards one who says it. We are not strong, so nobody should ask us to be strong! We are weak. Shall we remain weak? Shall we fall into resignation, and become cynical about your demands? They may be for others. They are not for us.” I hear many people, more than we imagine, saying this. I hear whole classes of young people speaking thus. I hear many individuals in older generation repeating these words. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

ImageAnd I do not find any consolation in the Bible There is the parable of the different soils on which the seed of the divine message falls and of which only one brings fruit. There is the word of the many who are called and few who are elected. There is the terrifying, realistic statement of Jesus that those whom much is given will receive more, and that from those who little is given, even this will be taken away. There is the contrast between those who are born of light and have become its children and those who are born out of darkness and have become its children. There is the parable of the man as clay which cannot revolt against God the potter, no matter what the potter does to the clay. We would like to revolt, when we hear this. However, if we look around us into the lives of beings we are forced to say—“So it is, the Bible is right!” We would like to say in a god democratic phrasing—“Everyone has a God-given chance to reach fulfillment, but not everybody uses it. Some do, some do not. Both have their ultimate destiny in their own hands.” We would like that to be so. However, we cannot escape the truth that it is not so. The changes are not even. There is only a limited number of human beings to whom we can say—“Be strong,” because they are strong already. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

Image And the only honest thing I could say to the others, to whom many of us belong, is—“Accept that you are weak. Do not pretend that you are strong. And perhaps if you dare to be what you are, your weakness will become your strength. Accept that you are weak”—that is what we should say to those who are weak. “Accept that you are a coward”—that is what we should say to those who are cowardly. “Accept that you are wavering in the faith—that is what we should say to those who are not firm in it. And to those who do not love, we should say—“Accept that you are not able to love.” This sounds strange! However, everyone who knows the human soul, and knows one’s own soul above all, will understand what is meant. One will understand that the first step in becoming strong is to acknowledge and accept one’s weakness. One who does so will cease to deceive oneself by saying to oneself—“I have at least something of what the apostle demands. One can demand it from me, for somehow I have it.” There are people who could rightly speak so to themselves. Yet there are others for whom such a judgment would be a self-deception. To them we must say—“Accept that you are weak; be honest towards yourselves.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

ImageLet me say to those who are responsible for others, as parents, teachers, ministers, counselors, friends: do not say the demanding “be” to anybody without fear and hesitation. If you use it, you approach the mystery of the divine election and you may destroy a life by demanding something of a person that one is not! There are various ways of defining creativity. In order to make more clear the meaning of what is to follow, let me present the elements which, for me, are part of the creative process, and then attempt a definition. In the first place, for me as a scientist, there must be something observable, some product of creation. Though my fantasies may be extremely novel, they cannot usefully be defined as creative unless they eventuate in some observable product—unless they are symbolized in words, or written in a poem, or translated into a work of art, or fashioned into an invention. These products must be novel constructions. This novelty grows out of the unique qualities of the individual in one’s interaction with the materials of experience. Creativity always has the stamp of the individual upon its product, but the product is not the individual, nor one’s materials, but partakes of the relationship between the two. Creativity is not, in my judgment, restricted to some particular content. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

ImageI am assuming that there is no fundamental difference in the creative process as it is evidenced in painting a picture, composing a symphony, devising new instruments of killing, developing a scientific theory, discovering new procedures in human relationships, or creating new formings of one’s own personality at in psychotherapy. (Indeed it is my experience in this last field, rather than in one of the arts, which has given me special interest in creativity and its facilitation. Intimate knowledge of the way in which the individual remolds oneself in the therapeutic relationship, with originality and effective skill, gives one confidence in the creative potential of all individuals.) My definition, then, of the creative process is that it is the emergence in action of a novel relational product, growing out of the uniqueness of the individual on the one hand, and the materials, events, people, or circumstances of one’s life on the other. Let me append some negative footnotes to this definition. It makes no distinction between “good” and “bad” creativity. One being may be discovering a way of relieving pain, while another is devising a new and more subtle form of torture for political prisoners. Both these actions seem to me creative, even though their social value is very different. Though I shall comment on these social valuations later, I have avoided putting them in my definition because they are so fluctuating. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

ImageGalileo and Copernicus made creative discoveries which in their own day were evaluated as blasphemous and wicked, and in our day as basic and constructive. We do no want to cloud our definition with terms which rest in subjectivity. Another way of looking at this same issue is to note that to be regarded historically as representing creativity, the product must be acceptable to some group at some point of time. This fact is not helpful to our definition, however, both because of the fluctuating valuations already mentioned, and also because many creative products have undoubtedly never been socially noticed, but have disappeared without ever having been evaluated. So this concept of group acceptance is also omitted from our definition. In addition, it should be pointed out that our definition makes no distinction regarding the degree of creativity, since this too is a value judgment extremely variable in nature. The action of the child inventing a new game with one’s playmates; Einstein formulating a theory of relativity; the housewife devising a new sauce for the meat; a young author writing one’s first novel; all of these are, in terms of our definition, creative, and there is no attempt to set them in some order of more or less creative. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

ImageThe motivation for creativity—the mainspring of creativity appears to be the same tendency which we discover so deeply as the curative force in psychotherapy –human’s tendency to actualize oneself, to become one’s potentialities. By this I mean the directional trend which is evident in all organic and human life—the urge to expand, extend, develop, mature—the tendency to express and activate all the capacities of the organism, or the self. This tendency may become deeply buried under layer after layer of encrusted psychological defenses; it may be hidden behind elaborate facades which deny its existence; it is my belief however, based on my experience, that it exists in every individual, and waits only the proper conditions to be released and expressed. It is this tendency which is the primary motivation for creativity as the organism forms new relationships to the environment in its endeavour most fully to be itself. Let us now attempt to deal directly with this puzzling issue of the social value of a creative act. Presumably few of us are interested in facilitating creativity which is socially destructive. We do not wish, knowingly, to lend our efforts to developing individuals whose creative genius works itself out in new and better ways of robbing, exploiting, torturing, killing, other individuals. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

ImageNor do we wish to lend our efforts to developing individuals whose forms of political organization or art forms which lead humanity into paths of physical or psychological self-destruction. Yet how is it possible to make the necessary discriminations such that we may encourage a constructive creativity and not a destructive? The distinction cannot be made by examining the product. The very essence of the creative is its novelty, and hence we have no standard by which to judge it. Indeed history points up the fact that the more original the product, and the more far-reaching its implications, the more likely it is to be judged by contemporaries as evil. The genuinely significant creation, whether an idea, or a work of art, or a scientific discovery, is more likely to be seen at first as erroneous, bad, or foolish. Later it may be seen as obvious, something self-evident to all. Only still later does it receive its final evaluation as a creative contribution. It seems clear that no contemporary mortal can satisfactorily evaluate a creative product at the time that it is formed, and this statement is increasingly true the greater the novelty of the creation. Nor is it of any help to examine the purposes of the individual participating in the creative process. “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are the Caesar’s; and into God the things that are God’s,” reports St. Matthew 22.21. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

ImageMany, perhaps most, of the creations and discoveries which have proved to have great social value, have been motivated by purposes having more to do with personal interest than with social value, while on the other had history records a somewhat sorry outcome for many of those creations (various Utopias, Prohibitions, and so forth) which has as their avowed purpose the achievement of the social good. No, we must face the fact that the individual creates primarily because it is satisfying to one, because this behavior is felt to be self-actualizing, and we get nowhere by trying to differentiate “good” and “bad” purposes in the creative process. Must we then give over any attempt to discriminate between creativity which is potentially constructive, and that which is potentially destructive? I do not believe this pessimistic conclusion is justified. It is here that recent clinical findings from the field of psychotherapy give us hope. It has been found that when the individual is “open” to all of one’s experience (a phrase which will be defined more fully), then one’s behavior will be creative, and one’s creativity may be trusted to be essentially constructive. The differentiation may be put very briefly as follows. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

Image To the extent that the individual is denying to awareness (or repressing, if you prefer the term) large areas of one’s experience, then one’s creative formings may be pathological, or socially evil, or both. To the degree that the individual is open to all aspects of one’s experience, and has available to one’s awareness all the varied sensings and perceivings which are going on within one’s organism, then the novel products of one’s interaction with one’s environment will tend to be constructive both for oneself and others. To illustrate, an individual with paranoid tendencies may creatively develop a most novel theory of the relationship between oneself and one’s environment, seeing evidence for one’s theory in all sorts of minute clues. One’s theory has little social value, perhaps because there is an enormous range of experience which this individual cannot permit in one’s awareness. Sokrates, on developed novel ideas which have proven to be socially constructive. Very possibly this was because he was notably nondefensive and open to one’s experience. The reasoning behind this will perhaps become more clear in the remaining sections of this paper. Primarily however it is based upon the discovery in psychotherapy, that as the individual becomes more open to, more aware of, all aspects of one’s experience, one is increasingly likely to act in a manner we would term socialized. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

ImageIf one can be aware of one’s hostile impulses, but also of one’s desire for friendship and acceptance; aware of the expectations of one’s culture, but equally aware of one’s own purposes; aware of one’s selfish desires, but also aware of one’s tender and sensitive concern for another; then one behaves in a fashion which is harmonious, integrated, constructive. The more one is open to one’s experience, the more one’s behavior makes it evident that the nature of the human species tends in the direction of constructively social living. The eros quality of love is in a polar way related to what could be called the philia quality of love. While eros represents the transpersonal pole, philia represents the personal pole. Neither of them is possible without the other. There is eros quality in philia. And there is philia quality in eros. They are in a polar way interdependent. This implies that without the radical separation of the self-centered self neither the creative nor the religious eros is possible. Beings without a personal centre are without eros, although they are not without epithymia. One cannot relate oneself as an “I” to a “thou” cannot relate oneself to the true and the good and to the ground being in which they are rooted. One who cannot love the friend cannot love the artistic expression of ultimate reality. Stages of the aesthetical and the ethical and the religious are not stages but qualities which appear in structural interdependence. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

ImageConversely, philia is dependent on eros. Concepts like participation and communion point to the eros quality in every philia relation. It is the desire to unite with a power of being which is both most separated and mist understandable and which radiates possibilities and realities of good and the true in the manifestation of its incomparable individuality. However, eros and philia are not only united in the individual relation. They are also united in the communion of social groups. In families, and national groups, the desire for participation is directed towards the power of being which is embodied in the group, even if special relations of the philia type are lacking. The very fact that such groups consist of individual with whom an I-thou relation is potentially given, distinguishes the eros within a group from the eros which is effective, for instance, in artistic creations. Love as a philia presupposes some amount of familiarity with the object of love. For this reason Aristotle asserted that philia is possible only between equals. This is true if “equal” is defined in a sufficiently large way and not in terms of an esoteric group. “For behold, the Spirit of Christ is given to every being, that one may know good from evil; wherefore, I show unto you the way to judge; for every thing which inviteth to do good, and to persuade to believe in Christ, is sent forth by the power and gift of Christ; wherefore ye may know with a perfect knowledge of it is of God,” reports Moroni 7.16. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

ImageBe present, O Lord, to our supplications; that as we trust that the Saviour of humankind is seated with Thee in Thy Majesty, so we may feel that, according to His promise, He abideth with us unto the end of the World; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Almighty and everlasting God vouchsafe unto us, by the gift of this day’s festival, that the aims of Thy children may thither be directed, where our substance, in Thine Only-begotten Son, is with Thee; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Thou blessed spirit, author of all grace and comfort, come, work repentance in my soul; represent sin to me in its odious colours that I may hate it; melt my heart by the majesty and mercy of God; show me my ruined self and the help there is in Him; teach me to behold my Creator, His ability to save, His arms outstretched, His heart big for me. May I confide in His power and love, commit my soul to Him without reserve, bear His image, observe His laws, pursue His service, and be through time and eternity a monument to the efficacy of His grace, a trophy of His victory. Make me willing to be saved in His way, perceiving nothing in myself, but all in Jesus: Help me not only to receive Him but to walk in Him, depend upon Him, commune with Him, be conformed to Him, follow Him, imperfect, but still pressing forward, not complaining of labour, but valuing rest, not murmuring under trials, but thankful for my state. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

ImageGive me that faith which is the means of salvation, and the principle and medium of all Godliness; may I be saved by grace through faith, live by faith, feel the joy of faith, do the work of faith. Perceiving nothing in myself, my I find in Christ wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, redemption. Hear us, O merciful God, and grant our minds to be lifted up, whither our Redeemer hath ascended; that at the second coming of the Mediator we may receive from Thy manifested bounty what we now venture to hope for as promised gift; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Grant, we beseech Thee, Almighty God, that the faithful members of Thy Son may tither follow, whither our Head and Chief has gone before, Who with Thee, we shall be blessed with eternal life and everlasting grace. O God, Who, to show forth the wonders of Thy Majesty, didst after Thy Resurrection from the dead ascend this day into Heaven, in the presence of Thine Apostles, grant us the assistance of Thy loving kindness; that according to Thy promise Thou mayest ever dwell with us on Earth, and we with Thee in Heaven; where with the Father, we shall live in his mansions and have an abundance of blessings. “Though I speak with the tongues of humans and of Angles, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal,” Reports 1 Corinthians 13.1. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19Image

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Each Person is an Architect of One’s Own Fate!

EN5MisFU0AIvjUkI am as sober as a judge. Some folks rail against other folks, because other folks have what some folks would be glad of. Societies of beings are just like individuals, in that both at any given moment offer ambiguous potentialities of development. Whether a young man enters business or the ministry may depend on a decision which has to be made before a certain day. He takes the place offered in the counting-house, and is committed. Little by little, the habits, the knowledges, of the other career, which once lay so near, cease to be reckoned even among his possibilities. At first, he may sometimes doubt whether the self he murdered in that decisive hour might not have been the better of the two; but with the years such questions themselves expire, and the old alternative ego, once so vivid, fades into something less substantial than a dream. It is no otherwise with nations. They may be committed by kinds and ministers to peace or war, by generals to victory or defeat, by prophets to this religion or to that, by various geniuses to fame in art, science, or industry. A war is a true point of bifurcation of future possibilities. Whether it fail or succeed, its declaration must be the starting-point of new policies. Just so does a revolution, or any great civic precedent, become a deflecting influence, whose operations widen with the course of time. Communities obey their ideals; and an accidental success fixes an ideal, as an accidental failure blights it. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

ImageThe fermentative influences of geniuses must be admitted as, at any rate, one factor in the changes that constitute social evolution. The community may evolve in many ways. The accidental presence of this or that ferment decides in which way it shall evolve. Why the very birds of the forest, the parrot, the mino, have the power of human speech, but never develop it of themselves; some one must be there to teach them. So with us individuals. Rembrandt must teach us to enjoy the struggle of light with darkness, Wagner to enjoy the peculiar musical effects; Dickens gives a twist to our sentimentality, Artemus Ward to our humor; Emerson kindles a new moral light within us. But it is like Columbus’s egg. “All can raise the flowers now, for all have got the seed.” But if this be true of the individuals in the community, how can it be false of the community as a whole? If shown a certain way, a community may take it; if not, it will never find it. And the ways are to a large extent indeterminate in advance. A nation may obey either of many alternative impulses given by different people of genius, and still live and be prosperous, just as a being may enter either of many businesses. Only, the prosperities may differ in their type. Sometimes when you think about all the bad things that you read in the newspaper and then you walk inside a classroom and see this you realize that there are so many good things in the World. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

ImageFew, if any, of us ever realize the far-reaching effects of our existence. The consequences of our choices and actions spread out into the World like ripples of water, affecting many people in ways we could never imagine. Your influence is etched in the lives of those who have been fortunate to be in your presence. Therefore, never discourage anyone who continually makes progress, no matter how slow. A community is a living thing. It is the peculiarity of living things not merely that they change under the influence of surrounding circumstances, but that any change which takes place in them is not lost but retained, and as it were built into the organism to serve as the foundation for future actions. If you cause any distortion in the growth of a tree and make it crooked, whatever you may do afterwards to make the tree straight the mark of your distortion is there; it is absolutely indelible; it has become part of the tree’s nature…Suppose, however, that you take a lump of gold, melt it, and let it cool…No one can tell by examining a piece of gold how often it has been melted and cooled in geologic ages, or even in the last year by the hand of beings. Any one who cuts down an oak can tell by the rings in its trunk how may times Winter have frozen it into widowhood, and how many times Summer has warmed it into life. A living being must always contain within itself the history, not merely of its own existence, but of all its ancestors. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

ImageEducation makes people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern but impossible to enslave. The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community. Many wonder, where do we find great people? The question has two conceivable answers: one’s origin is supernatural, or it is natural. Is one’s origin supernatural? Then one is a deputy god, and we have theocracy once removed—or, rather, not removed at all…Is this an unacceptable solution? Before one can remake one’s society, one’s society must make one. All those changes of which one is the proximate initiator have their chief causes in the generations one descended from. Of there is to be anything like a real explanation of those changes, it must be sought in that aggregate of conditions out of which both one and they have arisen. If anything is humanly certain it is that the great person’s society, properly so called, does not make one before one can remake it. Physiological forces, with which the social, political, geographical, and to a great extent anthropological conditions have just as much and just as little to do as the condition of the crater of Vesuvius has to do with the flickering of this gas by which I write, and what make one. Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better. Do your duty, and leave the rest to the gods. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

ImageThe differences between one nation and another, whether in intellect, commerce, art, morals, or general temperament, ultimately depend, not upon any mysterious properties of race, nationality, or any other unknown and unintelligible abstractions, but simply and solely upon the physical circumstances to which they are exposed. No geographical environment can produce a given type of mind. It can only foster and further certain types fortuitously produced, and thwart and frustrate others. Once again, its function is simply selective, and determines what shall actually be only by destroying what is absolutely incompatible. An Arctic environment is incompatible with improvident habits in its denizens; but whether the inhabitants of such a region shall unite with their thrift the peacefulness of the Eskimo or pugnacity of the Norseman is, so far as the climate is concerned, an accident. Evolutionists should not forget that we all have five fingers not because four or six would not do just as well, but merely because the first vertebrate above the fishes happened to have that number. One owed one’s prodigious success in founding a life of descent to some entirely other quality—we know not which—but the inessential five fingers were taken in tow and preserved to the present day. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

ImageSo of most social peculiarities. Which of them shall be taken in tow by the few qualities which the environment necessarily exacts is matter of what physiological accident shall happen among individuals. The illiterate of the future will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. Simply because no individuals were born there with patriotism and ability enough to inflame their country’s people with national pride, ambition, and thirst for independent life does not mean that patriotism cannot appeal or inspire one’s mental attitude of faith in devotion towards their nation. Some people gain this devotion towards their country, together with obedience to their nation by drawing inner help and inspiration telepathically from others. Thus they create for themselves a mental relationship which, to that extent, is not different from what would have come into being as part of the regular instruction that their ancestors received. Youth need also to be reminded that even after instruction on why national pride is import, they must also be sufficiently sensitive to have the capacity to feel this patriotism within themselves and display that power in the things they produce, and always engage in the work of self-improvement. The best wood-pile will not blaze till a torch is applied, and the appropriate torches seem to have been wanting. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

ImageSporadic great people come everywhere. However, for a community to get vibrating through and through with intensely active life, many geniuses coming together and in rapid succession are required. This is why great epochs are so rare—why the sudden bloom of Egypt, Greece, an early Rome, a Renaissance, Victorian America, is such a mystery. Blow must follow blow so fast that no cooling can occur in the intervals. Then the mass of the nation grows incandescent, and many continue to glow by pure inertia long after the originators of its internal movement have passed away. We often hear surprise expressed that in these high tides of human affairs not only the people should be filled with stronger life, but that individual geniuses should seem to exceptionally abundant. This mystery is just about as deep as the time-honored conundrum as to why great rivers flow by great towns. All mental progress must result from a series of adaptive changes, in the sense already defined of that word. We know what a vast part of our mental furniture consists of purely remembered, not reasoned, experience. It is one of the tritest of truisms that human intelligences of a simple order are very literal. Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probable reason why so few engage in it. People have to live with themselves, and they should see to it that they always have good company. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

ImageMany are slaves of habit, doing what they have been taught without variation; dry, prosaic, and matter-of-fact in their remarks; devoid of humor, except of coarse physical kind which rejoices in practical joke; taking the World for granted; and possessing in their faithfulness and honesty the single gift by which they are sometimes able to warm us into admiration. However, even this faithfulness seems to have a sort of inorganic ring, and to remind us more of the immutable properties of a piece of inanimate matter than of the steadfastness of a human will capable of alternative choice. When we descend to the brutes, all these peculiarities are intensified. And every notice of their ways must receive a deep impression of the fatally literal character of the few, simple, and treadmill-like operations of their minds. However, turn to the highest order of minds, and what a change! Instead of thoughts of concrete things patiently following one another in a beaten track of habitual suggestion, we have the most abrupt cross-cuts and transitions from one idea to another, the most rarefied abstractions and discriminations, the most unheard of combinations of elements, the subtlest associations of analogy; in a word, we seem suddenly introduced into a seething caldron of ideas, where everything is fizzling and bobbing about in a state of bewildering activity, where partnerships can be joined or loosened in an instant, treadmill routine in unknown, and the unexpected seems the only law. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

ImageAlways do right. That will gratify some people and astonish the rest. We are drowning in information and starving for knowledge. Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another. According to the idiosyncrasy of the individual, the scintillations will have one character or another. They will be sallies of wit and humor; they will be flashes of poetry and eloquence; they will be constructions of dramatic fiction or of mechanical device, logical or philosophic abstractions, business projects, or scientific hypotheses, with trains of experimental consequences based thereon; they will be musical sounds, or images of plastic beauty or picturesqueness, or visions of moral harmony. However, whatever their differences may be, they will all agree in this—that their genesis is sudden and, as it were, spontaneous. That is to say, the same premises would not, in the mind of another individual, have engendered just that conclusion; although, when the conclusion is offered to the other individual, one may thoroughly accept and enjoy it, and envy the brilliancy of one to whom it first occurred. Genius flashes out of one brain, and no other, because the instability of that brain is such as to tip and upset itself in just that particular direction. However, the important thing to notice is that the good flashes and the bad flashes, the triumphant hypotheses and the absurd conceits, are on an exact equality in respect of their origin. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

ImageAristotle’s absurd Physics and his immortal Logic flow from one source: the forces that produce the one produce the other. When walking along the street, thinking of the blue sky or the fine spring weather, I may either smile at some grotesque whim which occurs to me, or I may suddenly catch an intuition of the solution of a long-unsolved problem, which at that moment was far from my thoughts. Both notions are shaken out of the same reservoir—the reservoir of a brain in which the reproduction of images in the relations of their outward persistence or frequency has long ceased to be the dominant law. However, to the thought, when it is once engendered, the consecration of agreement with outward relations may come. The conceit perishes in a moment, and is forgotten. The scientific hypothesis arouses in me a fever of desire for verification. I read, write, experiment, consult experts. Everything corroborates my notion, which being then published in a book spreads from review to review and from mouth to mouth, till at last there is no doubt I am enshrined in the Pantheon of great diviners of nature’s ways. The environment preserves the conception which it was unable to produce in any brain less idiosyncratic than my own. Originally, machines, instruments, preservative power of the social environment and all other institutions were flashes of genius in an individual head, of which the outer environment showed no sign. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

ImageAdopted by the race and become its heritage, they then supply instigations to new geniuses whom they environ to make new inventions and discoveries; and so the ball of progress rolls. However, take out the geniuses, or alter their idiosyncrasies, and what increasing uniformities will increasing uniformities will the environment show? Over and over again the Bible portrays God as gracious and generous, blessing His people freely without regard to their demerits, rather than because of their merits. (I use the word gracious not in its commonly accepted meaning of kindness and courtesy, but in the biblical sense of one disposed to deal with others on the basis of grace.) We see God’s gracious disposition even before the Fall in the Garden of Eden when as yet there were no merits or demerits. The Scripture says, “And the LORD God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food,” reports Genesis 2.9. It was not just the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that was good for food and pleasing to the eye (see 3.6). God did not place only one desirable tree in the garden with a “look but do not eat,” sign hung on it just to tempt Adam and Eve. Rather He placed all kinds of trees in the garden that were delightful to see and to eat from. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

ImageI enjoy fresh fruit, and I like to go to the supermarket in the Summer when all the peaches, plums, pears, strawberries, and cantaloupes are on display. I am dazzled. I want some of all of them. Think what it must have been like for Adam to have all kinds of trees that not only produced delectable food but were also beautiful to behold. If I am dazzled today, think of what Adam’s reaction must have been. However, God did still more for Adam. God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him,” report Genesis 2.18. God knew Adam needed a companion, and He graciously met that need, because it is His disposition to be generous. God anticipated and provided for every need Adam could possibly have. Then Adam sinned. What would happen now to the gracious and generous disposition of God? Would God cease to be gracious? Would God say, “I was generous to you, giving you everything you needed, and yet you disobeyed Me. From now on you are on your own. Fend for yourself”? God did not say that. Instead He dealt mercifully and graciously with Adam and Eve. Yes, today we are still living with the eternally cataclysmic consequences that came out of the Fall; God did judge Adam as He has said He would. However, in the midst of all that God did one more thing: “The LORD God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them,” reports Genesis 3.21. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

ImageRight in the midst of fulfilling His role as Judge, God took note of Adam and Eve’s need for clothes, and for a little while, He assumed the role of a tailor. Why, in the midst of all the weighty and eternal issues, did God take time to make clothes for two people who had just flagrantly disobeyed Him, and who through that had brought sin and misery upon the whole human race? God did it because it is His nature to be gracious and to meet our needs without regard to our deserts. Neither Adam’s innocence nor his sin were the cause of God’s grace. God was gracious because it is part of His eternal nature to be so. Fear of God, however, is the beginning of wisdom. Although not the end or outcome of wisdom, to be sure, it is the indispensable beginning, I believe, and the principle part. One begins to get smart when he or she fears being crosswise of God: fear of not doing what one wants and not being as one requires. Fear is the anticipation of harm. The intelligent person recognizes that his or her well-being is possessed in being in harmony with God and what God is doing in the Kingdom. God is not mean, but he is dangerous. It is the same with other great forces he has placed in reality. Electricity and nuclear power, for example, are not mean, but they are dangerous. One who does no, in a certain sense, “worry” about God, simply is not smart. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

ImageMeditation does not mean surrender. Nor does it mean building walls where bridges are needed. My growing inclination toward the old Church and her solutions of the problems of God and the World, state and Church, were nourished by the overwhelming impression made upon me by early Christian art in Italy. What no amount of study of Church history has brought about was accomplished by the mosaics in ancient Roman basilicas. What was once the life-substance and inheritance of us all and what we have lost, and a deep yearning awakens in us for the departed youth of our culture. The result of this tension was either a decision against the one or the other side, or a general scepticism or a split-consciousness which drove one to attempt to overcome the conflict constructively. The latter way, the way of synthesis, was my own way. Nevertheless, I was and I am a theologian, because the existential question of our ultimate concern and the existential answer of the Christian message are and always have been predominant in my spiritual life. We beseech Thee, O Lord, be pleased by the Paschal remedies to grant unto us that we may learn to scorn Earthly desires, and to long after things Heavenly; though Jesus Christ our Lord. Grant, O merciful God, that in the Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ we may indeed have our portion; through the same our Lord who will remove all obstructions and bless us with eternal life. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

ImageLord Jesus Christ, fill me with thy Spirit that I may be occupied with hid presence. I am blind—send him to make me see; dark—let him say, “Let there be light!” May God give me faith to behold my name engraven in thy hand, my soul and body redeemed by thy blood, my sinfulness covered by the life of pure obedience. Replenish me by his revealing grace, that I may realise my indissoluble union with thee; that I may know thou hast espoused me to thyself for ever, in righteousness, love, mercy, faithfulness; that I am one with thee, as a branch with its stock, as a building with its foundation. May his comforts cheer me in my sorrows, his strength sustain me in my trails, his blessings revive me in my weariness, his presence render me a fruitful tree of holiness, his might establish me and peace and joy, his incitements make me ceaseless in prayer, his animation kindle un me undying devotion. Send him as the searcher of my heart, to show me more of my corruptions and helplessness that I may flee to thee, cling to thee, rest on thee, as the beginning and end of my salvation. May I never vex him by my indifference and waywardness, grieve him by my cold welcome, resist him by my hard rebellion. Answer my prayers, O Lord, for thy great name’s sake. “I remember the word of God which saith by their works ye shall know them; for if their works be good, then they are good also,” reports Moroni 7.5. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15Image

 

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Rancho Cordova, CA |

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

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And Grace Always Gives Far More than We Have “Earned.”

ImageTraveling is almost like talking with people of other centuries. There are strings in the human heart that had better not be vibrated. Things turn out best for the people who make the best out of the way things turn out! Our great weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time. It is quite noticeable that our clients tend in the direction of permitting each member of the family to have one’s own feelings and to be a separate person. This may seem like a strange statement, but it is actually a most radical step. Many of us are perhaps unaware of the tremendous pressure we tend to put on our wives, our husbands, our children, to have the same feelings we do. It is often as we said, “If you want me to love you, then you must have the same feelings I do. If I feel your behavior is bad, you must feel so too. If I feel a certain goal is desirable, you must feel so too.” Now the tendency which we see in our clients is the opposite of this. There is a willingness for the other person to have different feelings, different values, differ goals. In short, there is a willingness for one to be a separate person. It is my belief that this tendency develops as the person discovers that one can trust one’s own feelings and reactions—that one’s own deep impulses are not destructive or catastrophic, and that one need not be guarded, but can meet life on a real basis. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21

ImageAs one learns that one can trust oneself, with one’s own uniqueness, one becomes more able to trust one’s wife, or one’s child, and to accept the unique feelings and values which exist in this other person. One woman wrote a letter explaining something she had experienced in her family. “I realized that I had not sown my 14-year-old son Phil any real love in a long time, because I was so resentful of standards that I have always thought were important. Since I have stopped taking most of the responsibility for his goals, and responded to him as a person, as I always have to Sarah, for instance, it is surprising what changes have appeared in his attitudes. Not Earth-shaking—but a heartwarming beginning. We no longer heckle him about his school work, and the other day he volunteered that he had gotten an S—satisfactory grade on Mrs. Swanson’s trigonometry exam the first time this year.” A few months later I heard from her husband. “You would not recognize Phil….While he is hardly garrulous, he is not nearly the sphinx that he was, and he is doing much better in school, although we do not expect him to be graduated cum laude. You should take a great deal of credit for his improvement, because he began to blossom when I finally began to trust him to be himself, and ceased trying to mold him into the glorified image of his father at a similar age. Oh to undo our past errors!” #RandolphHarris 2 of 21

ImageThis concept of trusting the individual to be oneself has some to have a great deal of meaning to me. I sometimes fantasy about what it would mean if a child were treated in this fashion from the first. Suppose a child were permitted to have one’s own unique feelings—supposed one never had to disown one’s feelings in order to be loved. Suppose one’s parents were free to have and express their own unique feelings, which often would be different from one’s, and often would be different between themselves. I like to think of all the meanings that such an experience would have. It would mean that a child would grow up respect oneself as a unique person. It would mean that even when one’s behavior had to be thwarted, one could remain open “ownership” of one’s feelings. It would mean that one’s behavior would be a realistic balance, taking into account one’s own feelings and the known and open feelings of others. One would, I believe, be a responsible and self-directing individual, who would never need to conceal one’s feelings from oneself, who would never need to live behind a façade. One would be relatively free of the maladjustments which cripple so many of us. If I have been able correctly to discern the trends in the experience of our clients, then client-centered therapy seems to have a number of implications for family life. Let me attempt to restate these in somewhat more general form. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21

ImageIt appears that an individual finds it satisfying in the long run to express any strong or persistent emotional attitudes in the situation in which they arise, to the person with whom they are concerned, and to the depth to which they exist. This is more satisfying than refusing to admit that such feelings exist, or permitting them to pile up to an explosive degree, or directing them toward some situation other than the one in which they arose. It seems that the individual discovers that it is more satisfying in the long run to live a given family relationship on the basis of the real interpersonal feelings which exist, rather than living the relationship on the basis of pretense. A part of this discovery is that the fear that the relationship will be destroyed if the true feelings are admitted, is usually unfounded, particularly when the feelings are expressed as belonging to oneself, not as stating something about the other person. Our clients find that as they express themselves more freely, as the surface character of the relationship matches more closely the fluctuating attitudes which underlie it, they can lay aside dome of their defenses and truly listen to the other person. Often for the first time they begin to understand how the other person feels, and why one feels that way. Thus mutual understanding begins to pervade the interpersonal interactions. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21

ImageFinally, there is an increasing willingness for the other person to be oneself. As I am more willing to be myself, I find I am more ready to permit you to be yourself, with all that implies. This means that the family circle tends in the direction of becoming a number of separate and unique persons with individual goals and values, but bound together by the real feelings—beneficial and disadvantageous—which exist between them, and by the satisfying bond of mutual understandings of at least portion of each other’s private Worlds. It is in these ways, I believe, that therapy which results in the individual becoming more fully and more deeply oneself, results also in one’s finding greater satisfaction in realistic family relationships which likewise promote the same end—that of facilitating each member of the family in the process of discovering, and becoming, oneself. If we could sell our experiences for what they cost us, we would all be millionaires. Next is the discipline of communication. Recently the readers of a popular women’s magazine were asked the question, “If you could change your husband, what would you change?” The overwhelming consensus was they would like them to communicate better. They indicated that even more, they would like their husbands to listen. All that can be said is that, the two people happened to hit on the same thought—and Shakespeare made use of it first, that is all. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21

Image The stereotype is the husband buried in the morning newspaper at breakfast, preferring to read a news agency report of the latest scandal in a European government, the scores of yesterday’s athletic contests, and the opinions of a couple of columnists whom one will never meet rather than listen to the voice of the person who has just shared his bed, poured his coffee, and fried his eggs, even though listening to that live voice promises love and hope, emotional depth and intellectual exploration far in excess of what he can gather informationally from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Christian Science Monitor put together. Men, the discipline of communication demands that you set aside regular time to talk—and that you really do talk, and that you communicate more than facts, that you communicate feelings—that you learn to talk in metaphors and similes with phrases that begin, “I feel like…” And it means that you listen. It is recommended that 65 percent of an executive’s time should be spent listening. How much more so the wise husband. The Biblical, prophetic illumination of the human soul in its lostness is empathic, starkly clear, and repeated over and over, from Moses and Samuel to Jesus, Paul, and John. The only path of spiritual transformation today is still possessed through this illumination. It must be gratefully and humbly accepted and applied, to oneself above all. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21

ImageWhen the prophet Jeremiah, for example, says, “The heart is more deceitful than all these and is desperately sick: Who wan understand it?” we have to recognize from our heart that we are the ones spoken of, that, indeed, I am the one described. Only then is a foundation laid for spiritual formation into Christlikeness. The initial move toward Christlikeness cannot be toward self-esteem, because of confusion about what self-esteem means, and because, realistically, I am not okay and you are not okay. We are all in serious trouble. That must be our starting point. Self-esteem in such a situation will only breed self-deception and frustration—as is now increasingly recognized, by the way. For the realities of our soul will still be what they are and will still have the consequences for evil that they naturally do—regardless of what we or others may say to “pump ourselves up” and really, to conceal and deny who we ae. A high opinion of ourselves will only make those consequences more difficult to deal with. Denial—usually in some form of rationalization—is the primary device that humans use to deal with their own wrongness. It was the first thing out of the mouths of Adam and Eve after they sinned, and it continues up to the latest edition of the newspaper. The prophetic witness from God must throw itself against the massive weight of group and individual denial, often institutionalized and subtly built into our customary ways of speaking and interacting. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21

ImageJesus addressed leaders of his day in language that may see harsh and pitiless to us, but that was the only possible way he could be of help to them, strongly self-defended as they were; and perhaps the same is true of us as well. “You Pharisees clean the outside of the dish, but your insides are full of greed and filth. How foolish of you! Is not God as interested in your insides as your outside?” reports Luke 11.39. And, “If you wash a dish well on the inside, will not the outside come clean in the process?” reports Matthew 23.26. Jesus proceeds to point out how they love and vie for public recognition of “approval” (Luke 11.43) and how in doing so they are like graves, all nice prettied up on the outside, but full of disgusting rot inside (verse 44; compare Matthew 23.27-28). They were unable to believe in Jesus because they sought to be honored by each other (John 5.44). They desired to be exalted. Spiritual transformation does not lie in this direction, for them or for us. In the financial World, an investment that doubles itself in a few years is considered an excellent investment. Yet that is only a hundred percent gain. Jesus promises us not one hundred but ten thousand percent return. Why does Jesus use such an astonishing amount as ten thousand percent? He is telling us that God’s reward is out of all proportion to our service and sacrifice. He is telling us that in the Kingdom of Heaven God’s reward system is based not on merit but on grace. And grace always gives far more than we have “earned.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 21

ImageThe generosity and the magnanimity of God are so great that he accepts nothing from us without rewarding it beyond all computation. The vast disproportion existing between our work and God’s reward of it already displays his boundless grace, to say nothing of the gift of salvation which is made before we have even begun to do any work. God calls us to service Him, not because He needs us, but because we need Him. Then His reward for our service is always for our service is always out of proportion to our efforts—as Jesus said to Peter, “a hundred times as much,” reports Matthew 19.29. The ontology of love leads to the basic assertion that love is one. This contradicts the main trend in the recent discussions of the nature of love. They were useful in so far as they directed the attention to the different qualities of love. However, they were and are misleading in so far as they consider the differences of qualities as differences of types. The error was not that one distinguished the qualities of love—on the contrary, more distinctions should have been made in what was often comprehended under the name eros. The error was that one did not start with an understanding of love as one. Such an understanding, of course, would have led to an ontological analysis. For only the relation of love to being as such can reveal its fundamental character. If love in all its forms is the drive towards the reunion of the separated, the different qualities of the one nature of love become understandable. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21

ImageTraditionally epithymia (desire) is considered the lowest quality of love. It is identified with the desire to sensual self-fulfillment. There is a strong interest on the part of philosophical and theological moralists in establishing a complete gap between this quality and those which are supposed to be higher and essentially different. On the other hand, there is a tendency on the naturalist side to reduce all the other qualities of love to the epithymia quality. A solution of this problem is only possible in the light of the ontological interpretation of love. First of all it must be said that libido—to use the Latin word—is misunderstood if it is defined as the desire for pleasure. This hedonistic definition is, like hedonism generally, based on a wrong psychology which itself is the consequence of a wrong ontology. Humans strive to reunite themselves with that to which they belong and from which one is separated. And this is true not only of humans but of all living beings. They desire food, movement, growth, participation in group, intimacy, and so forth. The fulfilment of these desires is accompanied by pleasure. However, it is not the pleasure such which is desired, but the union with that which fulfils the desire. Certainly, fulfilled desire is pleasure, and unfulfilled desire is pain. However, if one derives from these facts the pain-pleasure principle in the sense that life essentially consists of feeling from pain and striving for pleasure, it is a distortion of the actual process of life. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21

ImageWhenever this happens life is corrupted. Only a perverted life follows the pain-pleasure principle. Unperverted life strives for that of which it is in want, it strives for union with that which is separated from it, though it belongs to it. This analysis should remove the prejudice towards libido, and it can give criteria for the partial acceptance, partial rejection of Dr. Freud’s libido theory. In so far as Dr. Freud descries libido as the desire of the individual to get rid of his tensions, he has described the perverted form of libido. And he has acknowledged this implicitly (though not intentionally) be deriving the death-instinct from the infinite, never fulfilled libido. Dr. Freud describes human’s libido in its perverted, self-estranged stage. However, his description, in which he joins many Puritans (old and new ones who would be embarrassed by this alliance) mises the meaning of libido as the normal drive towards vital self-fulfillment. In the light of this analysis it is justified to say that epithymia is a quality which is not lacking in any love relation. To this extent the naturalists are right. However, they are wrong if they interpret libido or epithymia as the striving for pleasure for the sake of pleasure. The attempts to establish an absolute contrast between agape and eros usually presuppose an identification of eros and epithymia. Certainly, there is epithymia in every eros. However, eros transcends epithymmia. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21

ImageEros strives for a union with that which is a bearer of values because of the values it embodies. This refers to the beauty we find in nature, to the beautiful and the true in culture, and to the mystical union with that which is the source of the beautiful and the true. Love drives towards union with the forms of nature and culture and with the divine sources of both. This eros is untied with epithymia if epithymia is the desire for vital self-fulfillment and not for the pleasure resulting from this union. This valuation of eros is attacked from two sides. Love as eros is depreciated by those theologians who depreciate culture and by those who deny a mystical element in human’s relation to God. However, it is a rather self-defying attitude if somebody depreciates culture and does it in terms of culture, if one, for instances, uses millennia of linguistic culture in order to express one’s rejection of culture. Without eros towards truth, theology would not exist, and without the eros towards the beautiful no ritual expression would exist. Even more serious is the rejection of the eros quality of love with respect to God. The consequence of this rejection is that love towards God becomes an impossible concept to be replaced by obedience to God. However, obedience is not love. It can be the opposite of love. Without the desire of humans to be reunited with their origin, the love towards God becomes a meaningless word. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21

ImageIt is important to look at history, but at the same time look beyond history to the ultimate power and meaning and majesty of being. There are two orders of being: the human, political, historical order, and the divine, eternal order. If we know these two orders, we can speak, moving continually between the depth of human nothingness and the great height of divine creativity. The human order, the order of history, is primarily the order of growing and dying. “Surely the people is grass.” Human’s experience of melancholy, awakened by fading and perishing nature, is symbolic of their transitoriness. Generations after generations grow up, struggle, suffer, enjoy and disappear. Should we talk all this seriously? Should we take it more seriously than the growing and fading of the grass? The prophet, when one was asked to speak to one’s nations raised the questions: Why speak to them? They are grass. We could continue: Why write and work and struggle for them? They are grass. What matter, when after a few years all those for who we wrote and spoke and struggled will have vanished? They were grass, the grass withered, the flowers faded. That is the order of history. However, the other order appears at the horizon: The word of God shall stand forever! #RandolphHarris 13 of 21

ImageSecond, the order of history is an order of sin and punishment. The exile, following the destruction of Jerusalem, was, as all the prophets said, the punishment of the people for their sins. We do not like words such as sin and punishment. They seem to us archaic, barbaric, and invalid in the light of modern psychology. However, whenever I have met exiles of high moral standards and insights, I have discovered that they feel responsible for what has happened within their own countries. And very often I have met citizens of democratic countries, citizens of this country, who have expressed a feeling of guilt for the situation of the World today. They were right, and the exiles were right: they are responsible, as are you and I. Whether or not we call it sin, whether or nor we call it punishment, we are beaten by the consequences of our own failures. That is the order of history. However, at the horizon the other order appears, saying that our struggles are not in vain, that our iniquity is pardoned. There is a third element in the order of history, uniting finiteness and sin: the tragic law which controls the historical process, the law which ordains that human greatness utterly fall. There is human greatness in history. There are great and conquering nations empires; there are even nations and empress which manifest a certain righteousness. There are princes and even good princes; there are judges and even just judges. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21

ImageThere are states and constitutions and even states and constitutions which provide a certain amount of freedom; there are social orders and even some which provide a certain amount of equality. There are creative spirits and even some which have the power of knowledge and understanding. However, just in being great and powerful and righteous they touch the divine sphere, and they become arrogant, and they are brought to nothing. They are without roots; they wither; the divine storm blows over them, and they vanish. That is the subject of Greek tragedy. That is the message of the prophet to the nations of the World. They are all subject to the law of tragic self-destruction—the bad and the good, individuals and nations, the weak and the heroic. And again the other order, the order beyond history and tragedy, appears at the horizon: He gives power to the faint and their strength is renewed, so that they shall mount up with wings as eagles. The order beyond the order of history is the divine order. And it is paradoxical: humans are like grass, but the word of God spoken to them shall stand forever. Humans stand under the law of sin and punishment, but the divine order breaks through it and brings forgiveness. Humans faint, falling from the height of their moral goodness and youthful power, and just when they have fallen and are weakest, they run without weariness and rise up with wings as eagles. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21

ImageGod acts beyond all human assumptions and valuations. He acts surprisingly, unexpectedly, paradoxically. The negative character of the historical order is the absolute order of the divine order. The weak and despairing, the sinful and tragic in the historical order are the strong and victorious in the divine order. The prophet also speaks of the paradoxical destiny of the servant, the elected nation. Described as a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief, it is despised and rejected in the human order. Who does not think, hearing these words, of the exiles not only of Israel but of all nations of the World? However, the divine order appears. The exiled nation, or (as the Christians later, historically wrong, spiritually right, interpreted it) the Man on the Cross, represents another order, an order in which the weakest is the strongest, the most humiliated, the most victorious. This historical, human order is overcome by the suffering servant, the crucified Saviour. If we doubt this paradox, if we despair about our situation, if our exile is without hope or meaning for us, the prophet should fill us with shame for the arrogance of our rationalism and the narrowness of our moralism. He points to the creation of the World, of humankind, of history. He asks, “Who has directed the Spirit of God? With whom took He counsel and who instructed Him and taught Him the path of justice?” #RandolphHarris 16 of 21

ImageWe always wish to teach God the path of justice. We tell God that He must punish the bad and reward the good, especially in relation to ourselves. However, God accepts no counsel concerning the course of history, as He took no counsel concerning the structure of the World, with all its natural destruction, cruelty, and transitoriness. The divine order cannot be judged according to the measures of the historical order, the measures of human comfort and morality, democracy and civilization. That was the answer Job received from God when he struggled with Him about the unintelligible injustice of his historical fate. God did not justify Himself in moral categories; He triumphantly pointed to the unexplorable greatness of nature which cannot be measures according to the measure of human righteousness. However, if the divine order and the historical order have nothing to do with each other, how can the divine order concern us at all? How can eternity and forgiveness and divine help concern us if we are in the other order, the historical order, standing under the law of finiteness and weakness and punishment? How can the divine order comfort us in our misery? How can we listen to the words of the prophets which tell us of the end of our warfare? There are three answers to this question. First, the divine order is not the historical order; and we should not confuse these two orders. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21

ImageNo life is able to overcome finiteness, sin, and tragedy. The illusions of our period have been that modern civilization and conquer then, and that we can achieve security in our own existence. Progress seemed to have conquered tragedy; the divine order seemed to be embodied in the progressive, historical order. However, for nearly six decades our generation has received blow after blow, destroying that illusion, and driving to despair and cynicism those who wanted to transform, and thought they could transform, the historical order into a divine order. Let us learn from the catastrophe of our time at least the fact that no life and no period are able to overcome finiteness, sin, and tragedy. The second answer is that there is another order to which we, as human beings, belong, an order which makes humans always dissatisfied with what is given to one. Humans transcend everything in the historical order, all the heights and depths of one’s own existence. They pass, as no other being is able to pass, beyond the limits of their given World. Humans participates in something infinite, in an order which is not transitory, not self-destructive, not tragic, but eternal, holy, and blessed. Therefore, when one listens to the prophetic word, when one hears of the everlasting God and of the greatness of His power and the mystery of His acts, a response is awakened in the depth of the human soul; the infinite within one is touched. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21

ImageEvery being knows, that in some depth of their soul that greatness of God is true. Our despair itself, our inability to escape ourselves in life and in death, witnesses to our infinity. The third answer is that the two orders, the historical and the eternal, although they can never become the same, are within each other. The historical order is not separated from the eternal order. What is new in the prophets and in Christianity, beyond all paganism, old and new, is that the eternal order reveals itself in the historical order. The suffering servant of God and the enemies because of whim one suffers, the Man on the Cross and those who fainted under the Cross, the exiled and persecuted in all periods of history, have all transformed history. The strong in history fall; the strength of each of us is take from us. However, those who seem weak in history finally shape history, because they are bound to the eternal order. We are not a lost generation because we are a suffering, destroyed generation. Each of us belongs to the eternal order, and the prophet speaks to all of us: Comfort ye, comfort yet, my people! “And they were strict to observe that there should be no iniquity among them; and whoso was found to commit iniquity, and three witnesses of the church did condemn them before the elders, and if they repented not, and confessed not, their names were blotted out, and they were not numbered among the people of Christ. However, as they oft as they repented and sought forgiveness, with real intent, they were forgiven,” report Moroni 6. 7-8. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21

ImageThe time has come that we have longed for; what greater or better work can be found than to proclaim that might of our Risen Lord? Bursting open the doors of the grave, He has displayed to us the glorious banner of His Resurrection. Through Him the sons of light are born to life eternal; the courts of the kingdom of Heaven are opened to believers; and by the law of a blessed intercourse, Earthly and Heavenly things are interchanged. For by the Cross of Christ we have all been redeemed from death, and by His Resurrection the life of us all has risen again. While He has assume our mortal nature, we acknowledge Him as the God of majesty; and in the glory of the Godhead we confess Him God and Man: Who by dying destroyed our death, and by rising again restored out life—even Jesus Christ our Lord. O Son of God and Son of Man, Thou wast incarnate, didst suffer, rise, ascend for my sake; Thy departure was not a token of separation but a pledge of return; Thy word, promises, sacraments, show thy death until thou come again. That day is no horror to me, for thy death has redeemed me, thy Spirit fills me, thy word governs me. I have trusted thee and thou hast not betrayed my trust; waited for thee, and not waited in vain. Thou wilt come to raise my body from the dust, and re-unite it to my soul, by a wonderful work of infinite power and love, greater than that which bounds the oceans’ waters, ebbs and flows the tides, keep the stars in their courses, and gives life to all creatures. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21

ImageThis corruptible shall put on incorruption, this moral, immortality, this natural body, a spiritual body, this dishonoured body, a glorious body, this weak body, a body of power. I triumph now in thy promises as I shall do in their performance, for the head cannot live if the members are dead; beyond the grace is resurrection, judgment, acquittal, domination. Every event and circumstance of my life will be dealt with—the sins of my youth, my secret sins, the sins of abusing thee, of disobeying thy words, the sins of neglecting ministers’ admonitions, the sins of violating my conscience—all will be judged; and after judgment, peace and rest, life and service, employment and enjoyment, for thine elect. O God, keep me in this faith, and ever looking for Christ’s return. I hold that if the Almighty had ever made a set of people that should do all the eating and none of the work, He would have made them with mouths only and no hands. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. Would that there were an award for people who come to understand the concept of enough. Good enough. Successful enough. Thin enough. Rich enough. Socially responsible enough. When you have self-respect, you have enough. You are today where your thoughts have brought you; you will be tomorrow where your thoughts take you. Anything we can conceive, through God we can achieve. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21Image

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Tell Me that I Will Always be the One that You Want, Do Not Know What I Would do if I Ever Lose You!

EN5MisFU0AIvjUkWell, now, there is a remedy for everything except death. Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to stay in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that! It is not what name others call you that matters, but name you respond to that truly determines who you are.  If asked in a poll, although most people would say they believe in God, and though church attendance still remains high and confessions of atheism are relatively rare, it is still perfectly clear that the crisis in modern society has also had a negative effect on religion. Theologians themselves have realized this and have spoken quite openly about the anguish religion as we know it is currently going through. The development began centuries ago, but the closer we come to the present, the greater its rate of acceleration has been. Because religion fulfills a double function, its collapse leaves us with a double loss. Our religion, based primarily on the Judeo-Christian tradition, provides us with both an explanation of the natural World and moral principles—an ethic. Those two functions have nothing to do with each other, for how you explain the natural World is one thing, and what moral principles and values you have is quite another. However, the two functions were not originally separated, and there are a number of reasons why not. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

ImageFirst of all, the idea that the World was created by a God who incorporated in Himself the highest intelligence, wisdom, and power was a plausible, indeed, a rational hypothesis. And even if you are a convinced Darwinist who sees the development of the World and of humans as a consequence of natural selection or mutation, you may still feel that the population of God the Creator is much easier to understand and accept than the rather complex alternative; for evolutionary theory claims that humans in their present form are the product of certain principles that went into effect hundreds of millions of years ago and that are to some degree subject to pure chance or, at best, to the laws of natural selection. Dr. Darwin’s explanation of the natural World seems altogether logical and plausible, but despite that it remains alien to our minds. Here is a story illustrating the profound corruption of the soul. It is a story about a church that would generally be regarded as successful or prosperous. Whether real or imagined, I leave you to ponder. In actuality you will find many churches that are a close fit to this description. The church in question was founded out of conflict in another church. It called its first pastor, and things seemed to be going well until that pastor committed adultery, and used to church funds to buy a brand new Mercedes Benz because one of the young women in the church had the most expensive Mercedes-Benz. The pastor also committed various other improper financial acts. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

ImageThe congregation dismissed the pastor, and a second pastor was appointed. He was very popular and the church grew, but he resigned after four years from stress, or an episode of neurosis, depending on whom you believed. A third pastor came and was quite popular. Again, the church grew, but after a while he started giving himself salary raises, which the congregation did not knowingly approve. After ten years he left, started another church within ten miles of his former church, and took three hundred members with him. A fourth pastor was called. Everything seemed fine. Then he has an affair involving pleasures of the flesh with another man, which he eventually disclosed to his board and staff, after being caught in the church bathroom with his britches down around his ankles in the throes of passion, and he expected them to cover it up. In the midst of much lying and discord in the board and staff, the church seemed to go on as before. Of course the people in the community came to know about the affair anyway. A year or so later the pastor received a call from a larger church a two-hour drive away. He took the position, leaving behind a congregation, board, and staff full of strife and anger. This all happened in cone congregation over a period of thirty-six years. I use this story because, in the language of Peter, “judgment must begin at the house of God.” It is there we see soul ruin at its greatest. If we cannot simply do what is right there, where can we? #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

ImageThe story is also illustrative of the extent to which sin, in a form everyone plainly recognizes as such, undermines even the efforts of Christ’s own people to be his people. That is its power. Although the degree and details differ, the story of this church is—in spite of come very fine exceptions—all too common. (Leading Christian magazines now feature regular sections where the sad story is told month by month.) I have also chosen the story as an illustration because a major part of the response by Christians to manifest sin, in this case, was to cover it up. This is not uncommon. No doubt it was “for the sake of the ministry,” as is usually said. The “confessions” of various pastors were often half-truths or less and were clearly matters of a formality which would, supposedly, allow the pastors and staff members to “get on with God’s business.” The exist of the last pastor left the church board and staff bitterly divided over the issues of loyalty to the former pastor and over whether or not the truth of what had happened should be publicly stated. A long period followed in which almost every meeting was filled with anger and tension and in which people retreated into their various camps, hardly speaking to each other. The words of James ring true: “Where you have envy and selfish ambition, there you find disorder and every evil practice,” reports James 3.16. Most Christians have never been in an intimate fellowship where the corrupted condition of the human soul did not in fact prevail—that is, in a fellowship in which they could assume that everyone would do what everyone knew to be right. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

ImageAnd many people in our culture have, on the basis of their experiences, simply given up on the church—many of them in the name of God and righteousness. However, it is still a known fact that you have had church members who have tried to kill others by poisoning them and stating that they have a right to do so. What kind of God are those type of people serving? Satan. In a period of a few weeks, some years back, three nationally known pastors in California were publicly exposed for sins involving pleasures of the flesh. That is wat is now called “news.” However, pleasures of the flesh are far from being the only problem. The presence of vanity, egotism, hostility, fear, indifference, racism, homophobia, class discrimination, and down right meanness can be counted on among professing Christians. Maybe the need artificial sweetener in their sweet tea to add a little more Southern charm and pleasantness to their personality? Their opposites cannot be counted on or simply assumed in the “standard” Christian group; and the rare individual who exemplified them—genuine purity and humility, death to selfishness, freedom from rage and depression, and so on—will stand out in the group with all the obtrusiveness of a sore thumb. He or she will be a constant hinderance in the group process and will be personally conflicted by those processes, for he or she will not be living on the same terms as the others. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

ImageNow for the rest of the verse from Peter: “If judgment first begins at the house of God, what shall be the outcome for those who give no heed to the gospel of God? And if it is difficult for the righteous to be saved, what will happen to the Godless and rebellious,” reports 1 Peter 4.17. It really may be about the same outside as within. The daily news, courts, law offices, community, family, and educational and penal institutions provide a constant outpouring of wrongness and wrongdoing that wells up from the malformed human spirit, mind, soul, body, and social context. Diogenes, the ancient Greek, lit a lantern and walked the streets of Athens at noonday looking for an honest man. He never found one, it is said. However, as in the church, so in life generally, a few ready to deal with the realities of the deeper self, in themselves or in others. And those few are not exactly welcomed by others. Sokrates tried to deal with the realities of the soul Athens and was killed for it. This is the customary fate of the “prophet.” Jesus was not crucified for saying, “Behold the lilies of the field, how they toil not, neither do they spin,” but for saying, “Behold the Pharisees, how they steal.” Humans have always had a need, even in their earliest, most primitive stages, to form a picture of the World and of its creation. One version of the creation that goes back in time claims that human beings were made out of blood that flowed from someone who had been killed. Not everyone was made of that blood, however. Only the brave were. Cowards and women were made from the flesh of the two legs. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

ImageThat is an ancient version of the theory that Konrad Lorenz has put forward, namely, that human beings have n inborn instinct to kill, a blood lust. It was nice, of course, of the people who believed in the myth to exempt women from that blood lust, but it was not so nice of them then to throw women in with the cowards. Things have not changed much even today. According to the prejudices of modern society, women have less conscience, are more vain and cowardly, and are less realistic than men. Now all those claims are notoriously false. In many cases the shoe could easily be put on the other foot. Most women know what a pathetic figure a man can cut when he is unwell. He is much more given to self-pity and much less secure than a woman, in some cases. However, no one admits that for fear of destroying the myth. We see the same thing happening here that we see in racial stereotypes. What men say about women has no more basis in fact that what democrats say about republicans. Even Dr. Freud claimed that women have less conscience than men. Now I find it hard to imagine how anybody could have less conscience than men. What those claims, are, of course, is nothing more than propaganda about the inferiority of an enemy, which is a tactic the main stream media uses against anyone they do not like these days. The news should actually be called the propaganda department, much of what they report is sleezy gossip and malicious lies. The meteorologist used to be considered the biggest liars and unreliable, now it is the anchors and field reporters who are consider liars and incompetent. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

ImageThat kind of propaganda turns up whenever one group dominates another and discourages rebellion by holding the self-confidence of the dominated group down to an absolute minimum. That is by way of a little footnote to one of the functions of religion I mentioned above, to wit, an explanation of the natural World. Everything went along just fine until sin and dysfunction became acceptable. Dr. Darwin taught us that if we looked at creation of the World and of humans from a rational and scientific point of view we could dispense with the idea of God and explain those phenomena by the laws of evolution. It is easier for the average person to grasp the idea of God, but for science after Dr. Darwin the creation was no longer a mystery. In the light of the theory of evolution, “God” was reduced to a working hypothesis and the story of the creation of the World and of humans to a myth, a poem, a symbol, which clearly expressed something but could no longer be regarded as scientific truth. We have rejected the attempt to restrict love to its emotional element. However, there is no love without the emotional element, and it would be a poor analysis of love which did not take this element into consideration. The question is only how to relate it to the ontological definition of love. One can say that love as an emotion is the anticipation of the reunion which takes place in every love-relation. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

ImageLove, like all emotions, is an expression of the total participation of the being which is in an emotional state. In the moment in which one is in the fulfillment of the desire for reunion is anticipated and the happiness of this reunion is experienced in imagination. This means that the emotional element in love does no precede the others ontologically but that the ontologically founded movement to the other one expressed itself in emotional ways. Love is a passion: this assertion implies that there is a passive element in love, namely the state of being driven towards reunion. Infinite passion for God, no less then the passion of the flesh, a consequence of the objective situation, namely of the state of separation of those who belong together and are drive towards each other in love. The ontology of love is tested by the experience of love fulfilled. There is a profound ambiguity about this experience. Fulfilled love is, at the same time, extreme happiness and the end of happiness. The separation is overcome. However, without the separation there is no love and no life. It is the superiority of the person-to-person relationship that it preserves the separation of the self-centered self, and nevertheless actualizes their reunion in love. The highest form of love and that form of it which distinguishes the Old World and the New World cultures is the love which preserves the individual who is both the subject and the object of love. In the loving person-to-person relationship Christianity manifests its superiority to any other religious tradition. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

ImageTo be everywhere primarily and absolutely, is proper to God. Now to be everywhere primarily is said of that which in its whole self is everywhere; for if a thing were everywhere according to its parts in different places, it would not be primarily; thus if a being has white teeth, whiteness belongs primarily not to the man but to his teeth. However, a thing is everywhere absolutely when it does not belong to it to be everywhere accidentally, that is, merely on some supposition; as a grain of millet would be everywhere, supposing that no other body existed. It belongs therefore to a thing to be everywhere absolutely when, on any supposition, it must be everywhere and this properly belongs to God alone. For whatever number of places be supposed, even if an infinite number be supposed besides what already exist, it would be necessary that God should be in all of them; for nothing can exist except by Him. Therefore to be everywhere primarily and absolutely belongs to God and is proper to Him: because whatever number of places be supposed to exist, God must be in all of them, not as to a part of Him, by as to His very self. The universal, and also primary matter are indeed everywhere; but not according to the same mode of existence. Number, since it is an accident, does not, of itself, exist in place, but accidentally; neither is the whole but only part of it in each of things numbered; hence it does not follow that it is primarily and absolutely everywhere. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

ImageThe whole body of the Universe is everywhere, but not primarily; forasmuch as it is not wholly in each place, but according to its parts; nor again is it everywhere absolutely, because, supposing that other places existed besides itself, it would not be in them. If an infinite body existed, it would be everywhere; but according to its parts. Were there one animal only, its soul would be everywhere primarily indeed, but only accidentally. When it is said that the soul sees anywhere, this can be taken in two senses. In one sense the adverb “anywhere” determines the act of seeing on the part of the object; and in this sense it is true that while it sees the Heavens, it sees in the Heavens; and in the same way I feels in the Heavens; but it does not follow that it lives or exists in the Heavens, because to live and to exist do not import an act passing to an exterior object. In another sense it can be understood according as the adverb determines the act of the seer, as proceeding from the seer; and thus it is true that where the soul feels and sees, there it is, and there it lives according to this mode of speaking; and thus it does not follow that it is everywhere. Once the religious explanation of the natural World lost its power to convince, religion lost some authority. All that remained for it to stand on was the propagation of moral postulates. “Love thy neighbor,” the Old Testament says. “Love the stranger.” The New Testament says, “Love your enemies.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

ImageHow can anyone who takes those instructions seriously be successful in modern society? Anyone who follows those precepts is a fool. One will fall behind, not get ahead. We preach the moral precepts of the Bible but do not practice them. We run on two separate tracks. Altruism is praised; we are supposed to have love for our neighbors. However, at the same time the pressure to succeed keeps us from practicing these virtues. In my opinion it is altogether possible in our society to be a good Christian or a good Jew, that is, a loving human being, without starving to death. What matters is your level of competence and the courage needed to adhere to the truth and persist in love rather than give yourself up for the sake of your career. However, all that notwithstanding, it remains a fact that Christian or Jewish morality maybe incompatible with the morality of success, of ruthlessness, of selfishness, of not giving, of not sharing. Since that point will be obvious to anyone who reflects on it, I need not dwell on it here. Anyway, this double standard in our morality has been described and criticized often. To sum up, then, the ethic that dominates in modern capitalism has amputated religion’s others foundation of authority. Religion no longer functions as a promulgator of values, for people no longer trust it in that role either. God has abdicated both as the creator of the World and as the spokesperson for values like love of neighbor and the overcoming of greed. However, humanity does not seem either willing or able to do without religion entirely. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

ImageHumans do not live by bread alone. One has to have a vision, a faith, that awakens one’s interest and elevates one above mere animal existence. A regression to earlier heathenism and worship of idols holds no attraction for modern humans, but I think we can say that our century is developing a new religion, one I would like to call the religion of technology. There are two particular aspects of this religion I would like to mention here. One is the promise the Trump Tower, the dream of unlimited and instant gratification. New needs are being produced every minute; there is no end to them; and humankind, like an eternal suckling babe, waits with an open heart, expecting to receive consideration and concern and unconditional love, and expecting to be fed more and more delicious food and sweet, nourishing nectar. This is a paradise of total gratification, a paradise of superfluity that makes us lazy and passive. Technology’s goal becomes the elimination of effort. The other aspect of this religion is more complex. Ever since the Renaissance, humanity has concentrated its intellectual efforts on penetrating and understanding nature’s secrets. However, nature’s secrete were, at least to some extent, also the secrets of nature’s creator. For four hundred years humans have invested their energies in plumbing nature’s mysteries so that one will be able to control nature. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

ImageOne’s most deep-seated motive was to cease being a mere spectator of the natural World and to become able to create that World oneself. It is difficult to express precisely what I want to say here, but if I were to state what I mean in its most radical form, I would have to say: Humans wanted to become God. What God was able to do, humans wanted to be able to do, too. I think the spectacle and the enthusiasm we witnessed when the astronauts first set foot on the Moon had the quality of a pagan religious ceremony. That moments represented the human’s first step on the way to overcoming one’s human limitations and becoming God. Even Christian newspapers were saying that the conquest of the Moon was the greatest thing to happen since the creation of the Universe. Now it is a bit imprudent of Christians to say that—after the creation itself—there is another event more important tan the Incarnation. However, that was all forgotten in the moment when people were themselves witness to the fact of human’s stepping outside the laws that hard limited one before, overcoming the force of gravity, and setting on a path to infinity. It is God making the impossible possible, much like he may one day allow humans to discover the secrete to resurrection and immortality. I mean, in the 1970s, liver transplants where not possible, in the 1800s, humans could not fly into space and now they can. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

ImageTechnology emerging as a new God, perhaps an extension of God’s power. That is why scientists have to coverup what they are doing and humans rationalize their advancements because there are things most people do not have the mental ability to recreate. Technology is becoming the Great Mother who will feed all her children and satisfy all their demands. Technological capability has become a moral obligation, and has become the very source of our morality. If God is dead, then anything would be permitted, but then the World He created would also cease to exist. If people no longer believe in God, if God was no longer a reality that forms their thoughts and actions, then we have a good reason to ask whether they will not become totally immortal, whether they will not stop looking to any kind of moral principles for guidance. That is a question we have to take seriously, and if we are feeling pessimistic, we may conclude that it is exactly what has happened and that our morality is continuing to decline all the time. There are significant differences between now and earlier times. In 1914, for example, the warning nations adhered to two internationally accepted rules. Civilians were not killed, and no one was tortured. Today it is taken for granted that civilians will be killed in the course of any and all hostilities, because warring parties no longer accept any limitations on their use of forces. Then, too, technology cannot make allowances for that kind of differentiation. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

ImageTechnology kills anonymously, like Agent Orange, which was manufactured by Dole, the same people you buy fruits and vegetables from. And if you did not know, Agent Orange not only killed people, but it caused cancer and alter army’s DNA and some of them passed on birth defects to their children. Leaders kill these days with sprays or by pressing a button, and unlike people impacted by 9/11 or other weed killer, Dole has never had to compensate their victims.  Because people do not see their opponent of their fighter supporting them, they are not moved by sympathy or compassion. Some people actually find it funny to tease people who have cancer or who have been injured because of war, because it makes them feel better about their pathetic lives, unattractiveness and lack of success. And torture is the rule today, not the exception. Everyone tries to deny that, but it is generally known fact. The use of torture to obtain information is widespread and even used by politics like Jerry Brown, Kevin Johnson, Gavin Newsom and Darrel Steinberg. We would be astonished to know in how many counties, cities, states, and countries of the World torture is used. Perhaps we need not say that cruelty is on the increase, but it would be hard to deny that humanity and the moral prohibitions that go with it are declining. That has brought about a great change in the World, but on the other hand we can see that new moral principles are coming to the fore; we find them in the younger generation, for example, in their struggle for peace, for life, against destruction and war. They are not just mouthing empty phrases. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

ImageMany people and not just young ones are insisting that we learn to live in a World of law and order, kindness and fairness, love and harmony. They are reestablishing their allegiance to God. Billions of people have become sensitive to the destruction of life on so many fronts, to inhumane wars in which there is not even a pretense of self-defense. We see a new mortality of love taking shape, too, in opposition to the consumer society. The new morality may have its flaws, but it remains impressive in its protest against empty forms and words. We see evidence of a new morality, too, in the self-sacrifices made in the political realm, in the numerous struggles for liberation and self-determination that are going on today. Those are encouraging developments. God and other religions like Buddhism provide us with a glowing example of how come cultures develop moral principles. Those principles are rooted and flourish in humane soil. Human beings cannot live and be happy without God because when they do not acknowledge His authority, they seem to lose sight of what is good and righteous. We cannot, however, force God on people, he granted them free will. To be of God is something that has to emerge from them. People have to be deeply rooted in need to act morally. Immortality cases them to lose their inner harmony and balance. And it is immortality going under the guise of mortality if people are told that they have to kill, that they have to obey, that they should pursue only their own selfish interests, that sympathy will be a hindrance to them, and so forth. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

ImageIf voices of that kind grow too loud they can drown out a person’s own inner voice, the voice of one’s humanistic conscience. That it why so many people are turning the news and radio off. It is evil mixed in with entertainment. Otherwise they will get the idea that God is dead, politicians are their only hope, and everything is permitted. “And the church did meet together off, to fast and to pray, and to speak one with another concerning the welfare of their souls. And they did meet together oft to partake in nourishment in remembrance of the Lord Jesus,” reports Moroni 6.5-6. It is very meet and right, with all powers if heart and mind, and with the service of the lips, to praise the invisible God, the Father Almighty, and His Only-begotten Son our Lord Jesus Christ, Who paid the debt of Adam for us to the eternal Father, and effaced the bond of the ancient guilt by the Blood poured forth in loving-kindness. For this is the Paschal festival in which that true Lamb is slain, and the door-posts hallowed by His Blood: in which first Thou didst bring our fathers, the children of Israel, out of Egypt, and madest them to pass over the Red Sea dry-shod. This then is the night which cleared away the darkness of sin by a pillar of radiance. This is the night which now throughout the World restores to grace and unties to holiness believers in Christ, separated from Worldly vices and from the gloom of sin. This is the night in which Christ broke the bonds of death, and ascended a Conqueror from the grave. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

ImageFor to be born had been no blessing to us, unless we could have been redeemed. O the wonderous condescension of Thy loving-kindness towards us! O the inestimable tenderness of Thy love! To redeem the servant, Thou gavest up the Son. This holy night, then, puts to flight offences, washes away sins, and restores innocence to the fallen, and joyousness to the sad. O truly blessed night which spoiled the Egyptians and enriched the Hebrews—the night in which Heaven and Earth are reconciled! We pray Thee therefore, O Lord, that Thou wouldest preserve Thy servants in the peaceful enjoyment of this Eternal happiness, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Lord Jesus, if I love thee my soul shall seek thee, but can I seek thee unless my love to three is kept alive to this end? Do I love thee because thou art good, and canst alone do me good? It is fitting thou shouldest not regard me, for I am vile and selfish; yet I seek thee, and when I find thee there is no wrath to devour me, but only sweet love. Thou dost stand as a rock between the scorching Sun and my soul, and I live under the cool lee-side as one elect. When my mind acts without thee it spins nothing but deceit and delusion; when in my affections act without thee noting is seen but dead works. O how I need thee to abide in me, for I have no natural eyes to see thee, but I live by faith in one whose face to me is bright than a thousand Suns! #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

ImageWhen I see that all sin is in me, all shame belongs to me; let me know that all good is in thee, all glory is thine. Keep me from the error of thinking thou dost appear gloriously when some strange light fills my heart, as if that were the glorious activity of grace, but let me see that the truest revelation of thyself is when thou dost eclipse all my personal glory and all the honour, pleasure and good of this World. The Son breaks out in glory when he shows himself as one who outshines all creation, makes people poor in spirit, and helps them to find their good in one. Grant that I may distrust myself, to see my all in thee. It is my experience of World-wandering that those who most know truth are themselves the least known among people. This is partly because so few seek that kind of truth which is theirs—the highest—partly because it is their own wish to remain inaccessible to all except these few seekers, and partly because their completely ego-free character is utterly without any ambition to put themselves forward in public under any pretext whatsoever, whether to gain the benefits and advantages of such a position or to practise so-called service. However, eager a Master may be to reveal truth, one is forced, by indifference and miscomprehension of the World, to conceal it. It is not an isolation due to arrogance, to too high a notion of one’s own status. It is the others who are really apart, by their animalism or egotism. One is not alien to humanity but only alien to what is low and bestial in humanity. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20Image

 

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How would you style your #CresleighRanch home? We 💚 this sea foam green and textured curtains! 🐚

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We have multiple floor plans available in our Cresleigh Ranch neighborhoods. Check out our website for options! Link in bio.

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Something Very Strange and Mystic Happened to Me, Something Realistic and as Weird as Can be!

ImageTo give and not to count the cost; to fight and not to heed the wounds; to toil and not to seek for rest; to labor and not ask for any reward, save that of know that we do Thy will. Do not lower your expectations to meet your performance. Raise your level of performance to meet your expectations. Expect the best of yourself, and then do what is necessary to make it a reality. Life is not a destination, it is a journey. It is not a series of goals, it is a series of steps, of events unfolding as you make your way. If a person is accepted, fully accepted, and in this acceptance there is no judgment, only compassion and sympathy, the individual is able to come to grips with oneself, to develop the courage to give up one’s defenses and face one’s true self. However, this is not a perfect World and there is evidence of hostility as members differ. Somehow, in a setting where people are interested in being normal, civil, and peaceful every blow is softened, as if the sharp edges have been removed; if undeserved, people will go off on something else; and the blow is somehow lost. In my own case, even those people who originally irritate me, with further acquaintance I begin to accept and respect; and the thought occurred to me as I tried to understand what was happening: Once you come close to a person, perceive one’s thoughts, one’s emotions, one’s feelings, one become not only understandable but good and desirable. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

ImageSome of the more aggressive ones speak more than they should, more than their right share, but the group itself, by its own being, not by setting rules, eventually made its authority felt; and unless a person is very sick or insensitive, members more or less, in this respect, conform to what is expected of them. The problem-the hostile, the dominant, the neurotic—is not too acute; and yet if measured in a formal way, with a stop watch, at no time is a session free from aimless talk and waste of time. However, as one watches the process, the idea may persist that perhaps this waste of time may be necessary; it may very well be that that way a person learns best; for certainly, as I look back at the whole experience, I am fairly certain that it would have been impossible to earn as much or as well or as thoroughly in the traditional classroom setting. What a better way can a person learn than by becoming involved with one’s whole self, one’s very person, one’s root drives, emotions, attitudes and values? No series of facts or argument, no matter how logically or brilliantly arranged, can even faintly compare with that sort of thing. In the course of this process, I saw hard, inflexible, strict and rigid persons, in the brief period of several weeks, change in front of my eyes and become sympathetic, understanding and to a marked degree non-judgmental. I saw neurotic, compulsive persons ease up and become more accepting of themselves and others. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

ImageIn one instance, a student who particularly impressed me by his change, told me when I mentioned this: “It is true. I feel less rigid, more open to the World. And I like myself better for it. I do not believe I ever learned so much anywhere.” I saw shy persons become less shy and aggressive persons more sensitive and moderate. One might say that this appears to be essentially an emotional process. However, that I believe would be altogether inaccurate in describing it. There was a great deal of intellectual content, but the intellectual content was meaningful and crucial to the person, in a sense that it meant a great deal to one as a person. In fact, one student brought up this very question. “Should we be concerned,” he asked, “only with the emotions? Has the intellect no play?” It was my turn to ask, “Is there any student who has read as much or thought as much for any other course?” The answer was obvious. We had spent hours and hours reading; the room reserved for us had occupants until 10 o’clock at night, and then many left only because the university guards wanted to close the building. Students listened to recordings; they saw motion pictures; but best of all, they talked and talked and talked. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

Image In the traditional course, the instructor lectures and indicates what is to be read and learned; students dutifully record all this in their notebooks, take an examination and feel good or bad, depending on the outcome; but in nearly all cases it is a complete experience, with a sense of finality; the laws of forgetting begin to operate rapidly and inexorably. When people read and think inside and outside the class; it was they who chose from this reading and thinking what was meaningful to them, not the instructor. This non-directive kind of teaching, I should point out, was not 100 percent successful. There were three or four students who found the whole idea distasteful. Even at the end of the course, although nearly all became enthusiastic, one student to my knowledge, was intensely negative in his feelings; another was highly critical. These wanted the instructor to provide them with a rounded-out intellectual piece of merchandise which they could commit to memory and then give back on an examination. They would then have the assurance that they had learned what they should. As one said, “If I had to make a report as to what I learned in this course, what could I say?” Admittedly, it would be much more difficult than in a traditional course, if not impossible. The desperateness with which detachment is defended has a further explanation. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

ImageThe threat to detachment, “smashing the wall,” often means more then temporary panic. What may result is a kind of disintegration of personality in psychotic episodes. If in analysis detachment beings to crumble, the patient not only becomes diffusely apprehensive but directly and indirectly express definite fears. There may be, for instance a fear of becoming submerged in the amorphous mass of human beings, a fear, primarily, of losing one’s uniqueness. There is also a fear of being helplessly exposed to the coercion and exploitation of aggressive persons—a result of one’s utter defenselessness. However, there is still a third fear, that of going insane, which may emerge so vividly that the patient wants absolute reassurance against such a possibility. Going insane in this context does not mean going berserk, nor is it a reaction to an emerging wish for irresponsibility. It is a straight expression of the specific fear of being split right open, often expressed in dreams and associations. This would suggest that relinquishing one’s detachment would bring one face to face with one’s own conflicts; that one would not be able to survive it but would be split like a tree struck by lightning, to use an image that occurred to a patient. This assumption is confirmed by other observations. Highly detached persons have an almost insurmountable aversion to the idea of inner conflicts. Later will tell the analyst that they simply did not know what one was talking about when one spoke of conflicts. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

ImageWhenever the analyst succeeds in showing them a conflict operating within themselves, they will imperceptibly and with amazing unconscious skill veer away from the subject. If, inadvertently, before they are ready to admit it, they recognize a conflict in a momentary flash, they are seized with acute panic. When later they approach the recognition of conflicts on a more secure basis, a greater wave of detachment follows. Thus we arrive at a conclusion that at first glance would have been bewildering. Detachment is an intrinsic part of the basic conflict, but it is also a protection against it. The puzzle resolves itself, however, if we are more specific. It is a protection against the two more active partners in the basic conflict. Here we must reiterate the statement that the predominance of one of the basic attitudes does not prevent the other contradictory ones from existing and operating. We can see this play of forces in the detached personality even more clearly than in the other two groups described. To begin with, the contradictory strivings often show in the life history. Before one has clearly accepted one’s detachment a person of this type will often have gone though episodes of compliance and dependence as well as through periods of aggressive and ruthless rebellion. In contrast to the clearly defined values of the other two types, one’s sets of values are most contradictory. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

ImageIn addition to one’s permanent high evaluation of what one regards as freedom and independence, one may at some time in the analysis express an extreme appreciation for human goodness, sympathy, generosity, self-effacing sacrifice, and at another time swing to a complete jungle philosophy of callous self-interest. One may feel puzzled by these contradictions, but with some rationalization or other one will try to deny their conflicting character. If one has no clean perspective of the whole structure, the analyst will easily become confused. One may try to follow one path or the other without getting very far in either direction because again and again the patient takes refuge in one’s detachment, thereby shutting all the gateways as one would shut the watertight bulkheads of a ship. There is a perfect and simple logic underlying the special resistance of the detached person. One does not want to relate oneself to the analyst or to take cognizance of one as a human being. One does not really want to analyze one’s human relationships at all. One does not want to face one’s conflicts. And if we understand one’s premise, we see that one cannot even be interested in analyzing any of these factors. One’s premise is the conscious conviction that one need not bother about one’s relations with others so long as one keeps at a safe distance from them; that a disturbance in these relations will not upset one if only one keeps away from others. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

ImageAnd even the conflicts of which the analysts speaks can and should be left formant because they will only bother one; and that there is no need to straighten things out because one will not budge from one’s detachment anyway. As we have said, this unconscious reasoning is logically correct—up to a point. What one leaves out and for a long time refuses to recognize is that one cannot possibly grow and develop in a vacuum. The all-important function of neurotic detachment, then, is to keep major conflicts out of operation. It is the most radical and most effective of the defenses erected against them. One of the many neurotic ways of creating an artificial harmony, it is an attempt at solution through evasion. However, it is no true solution because the compulsive cravings for closeness as well as for aggressive domination, exploitation, and excelling remain, and they keep harassing is not paralyzing their carrier. Finally, no real inner peace of freedom can ever be attained as long as the contradictory set of values continue to exist. Let us meditate on the mystery of time. Augustine points to the depth of this mystery, when he says, “If nobody asks me about it, I know. If I want to explain it to somebody who asks me about it, I do not know.” There is something unspeakable about time, but this has not prevented the most profound religious minds from thinking and speaking about it. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

ImageIt is not vain speculation when the writer of the first part of the 90th Psalm confronts the eternity of God with the transitoriness of human existence. The melancholy experience of human finiteness drives one to utter the tremendous words of the psalm. It is not empty curiosity when Augustine tries, in his most personal book, the Confessions, to penetrate the ground of our temporality. We are not making an abstract statement but are rater expressing a profound religious feeling, when we sing, “Time like an ever-rolling stream bears all its sons away.” It is not mere philosophy, but a tragic feeling of life, which impels the earliest Greek philosopher to say that all things must return to their origin, suffering punishment, “according to the order of time.” It is not merely in the interest of systematic theory that the Fourth Gospel uses again and again the phrase “eternal life” as the expression of the highest good, which is ever present in Christ. It was a religious event when Meister Eckhardt pointed to the “eternal now” within the flux of time, and when Soren Kierkegaard pointed to the infinite significance of every moment as the now of decision. Time is as inexhaustible as the ground. Even the greatest minds have each discovered only one aspect. However, everyone, even the most simple mind, apprehends the meaning of time—namely, one’s own temporality. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

ImageOne may not be able to express one’s knowledge about time, but one is never separated from its mystery. One’s life, and the life of each of us, is permeated in every moment, in every experience, and in every expression, by the mystery of time. Time is our destiny. Time is our hope. Time is our despair. And time is the mirror in which we see eternity. Let me point to three of the many mysteries of time: its power to devour everything within its sphere; its power to receive eternity within itself; and its power to drive toward an ultimate end, a new creation. Humankind has always realized that there is something fearful about the flux of time, a riddle which we cannot solve, and the solution of which we could not stand. We come from a past which is no more; we go into a future which is not yet; ours is the present. The past is ours only in so far as we have it still present. The past is ours only in so far as we have it still present; and the future is ours only in so far as we have it already present. We possess the past by memory, and the future by anticipation. However, what is the nature of the present itself? If we look at it closely, we must say: it is a point without extension, the point in which the future becomes the past; when we say to ourselves, “This is the present,” the moment has already been swallowed by the past. The present cannot be caught; it is always gone. So it seems that we have nothing real—neither the past nor the future, nor even the present. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

ImageTherefore, there is a dreaming character about our existence, which the psalmist indicates, and which religious visionaries have described in so many ways. Time, however, could not even give us a place on which to stand, if it were not characterized by that second mystery, its power to receive eternity. There is no present in the mere stream of time; but the present is real, as our experience witnesses. And it is real because eternity breaks into time and gives it a real present. We could not even say “now,” if eternity did not elevate that moment above the ever-passing time. Eternity is always present; and its presence is the cause of our having the present at all. When the psalmist looks at God, for Whom a thousand years are like one day, he is looking at that eternity which alone gives him a place on which he can stand, a “now” which has infinite reality and infinite significance. In every moment that we say “now,” something temporal and something eternal are united. Whenever a human being says, “Now I am living; now I am really present,” resisting the stream which drives the future into the past, eternity is. In each such “now,” eternity is made manifest; in every real “now,” eternity is present. Let us think for a moment of the way in which we are living our lives in our period of history. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

ImageHave we not lost a real present by always being driven forward, by our constant running, in our indefatigable activism, toward the future? We suppose the future to be better than any present; but there is always another future beyond the next future, again and again without a present, that is to say, without eternity. According to the Fourth Gospel eternal life is present gift: one, who listens to Christ, has eternity already. He is no longer subject to the driving of time. In him the “now” becomes a “now eternal.” We have lost the real “now,” the “now eternal;” we have, I am afraid, lost eternal life in so far as it creates the real present. There is another element in time, its third mystery, which makes us look at the future; for time does not return, nor repeat itself: it runs forward; it is always unique; it ever creates the new. There is within it a drive toward an end, unknown, never to be reached in time itself, always intended and ever fleeing. Time runs toward the “future eternal.” This is the greatest of all the mysteries of times. It is the mystery of which the prophets, Christ, and the Apostles have spoken. The eternal is the solution of the riddle of time. Time does not drive toward an endless self-repetition, nor to an empty return to its beginning. Time is not meaningless. It has a hidden meaning—salvation. It has a hidden goal—the Kingdom of God. It brings about a hidden reality—the new creation. The infinite significance of every moment of time is this: in it we decide, and are decided about, with respect to our eternal future. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

ImageLife is not a destination, it is a journey. It is not a series of goals, it is a series of steps, of events unfolding as you make your way. The purpose of life is not to be happy. The purpose of life is to matter, to be productive, to have it make a difference that you lived at all. “Time is nothing. I shall wait for another to come who is as strong as you are. Humans are changing. Their dreams are filled with the forecast of these changes. Mortals dream ceaselessly of immortality, as their lives grow longer. They dream of unimpeded flight,” page 884 of The Witching Hour by Anne Rice. Be careful of what you focus on. There are forces in this World that are billions of years old. “It is sufficient to say not that he is Precambrian and self-sufficient, and if not immortal, his life span could be billions of years. It is conceivable that he absorbed consciousness from mankind, that is consciousness gives off a palpable energy, he had fed upon this energy and a mutation has created his mind. He continues to feed upon the consciousness of the Mayfair Witches and their associates, and from this springs his learning, and his personality, and his will,” page 886 of The Witching Hour by Anne Rice. This is why the King James Bible says, “Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you,” reports James 4.8. And it is also where the idea of the law of attraction comes from. You attract what you focus on. You give that power in your life, and it will have the ability to manifest. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

ImageThe law of attraction is also why some Christians do not seek revenge. They believe God will act in the favour and take care of all that needs to be handled. God says he will never give us more than we can bear and through our faith, we have to consent to that truth. Speak to our hearts, O Christ our Overseer; say to us, “Hail, be strong and of good courage.” Thou who didst this of old, canst Thou not do the same now? Thou canst, Thou canst indeed! For Thou art Almighty. Thou canst, O most Loving, Thou canst do what we cannot conceive; for nothing is impossible to Thee, Almighty God! Truly, O Saviour, for us Thy Body is red with Blood; Thou has “washed Thy garment in wine, and Thy clothes in the blood of grapes;” for Thou art God alone, crucified for us, whom the old transgression gave over unto death; by Thy wound have been healed the countless wounds of our sins. And now, O loving and crucified Christ, redeem us with Thine own; save us, O loving Goodness, O God, Who reignest with the Father and the Holy Spirit, One God for ever, throughout all ages. Hear us, O Lord, Father Almighty, through the New Adam; that being buried with Jesus Thy Son, and raised up again by His life, we may in this ensuing night of His holy Resurrection, by the grace that attends the great solemnity, by His gift and Thy blessing, and the counsel and mysterious working of the Holy Spirit, obtain absolution through Him, Who with Thee we will have World peace and overcome all obstructions and bondage. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

ImageGod by mode is in all things by His presence, power and substance; still He is said to be present more familiarly in some by grace. God is said to be in a thing in two ways; in one way after the manner of an efficient cause; and thus He is in all things created by Him; in another way he is in things as the object of operation is in the operator; and this is proper to the operations of the soul, according as the things know is in the one who knows; and the thing desired in the one desiring. In this second way God is especially in the rational creature which knows and loves Him actually or habitually. And because the rational creature possessed this prerogative by grace. He is said to be thus in the saints by grace. However, God is in other things created by Him, may be considered from human affairs. A king, for example, is said to be in the whole kingdom by his power, although he is not everywhere present. Again a thing is said to be by its presence in other things which are subject to its inspection; as things in a house are said to be by its present to anyone, who nevertheless may not be in substance in every part of the house. Lastly, a thing is said to be by way of substance or essence in that place in which its substance may be. Now there were some (the Manichees) who said that spiritual and incorporeal things were subject to the divine power; but that visible and corporeal things were subject to the power of a contrary principle. Therefore against these it is necessary to say that God is in all things by His power. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

ImageO God, Thy main plan, and the end of thy will is to make Christ glorious and beloved in Heaven where he is now ascended, where one day all the elect will behold his glory and love and glorify him for ever. Though here I love him but little, may this be my portion at last. In this World thou hast given me a beginning, one day it will be perfected in the realm above. Thou hast helped me to see and know Christ, though obscurely, to take him, receive him, to possess him, love him, to bless him in my heart, mouth, life. Let me study and stand for discipline, and all the ways of worship, out of the love for Christ; and to show my thankfulness; to seek and know his will from love, to hold it in love, and daily to care for and keep this state of heart. Thou hast led me to place all my nature and happiness in oneness with Christ, in having heart and mind centered only om him, in being like him in communicating good to others; this is my Heaven on Earth, but I need the force, energy, impulses of thy Spirit to carry me on the way to my Jerusalem. Here, it is my duty to be as Christ in this World, to do what he would do, to live as he would live, to walk in love and meekness; then would he be known, then would I have peace in death. “And I, Moroni, will not deny the Christ; wherefore, I wander withersoever I can for the safety of mine own life,” reports Moroni 1.3. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

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But I Never Forget Dear Your Sweet Memory—If You Really Love Me be Honest with Me!

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Leadership is a potent combination of strategy and character. However, if you must be without one, be without the strategy. Patience is a virtue that carries a lot of wait. Therefore, be bold in what you stand for and careful in what you fall for. The need for superiority in the case of he detached person has certain superiority in the case of the detached person has certain specific features. Abhorring competitive struggle, one does not want to excel realistically through consistent effort. One feels rather that the treasures withing one should be recognized without any effort on one’s part; one hidden greatness should be felt without one’s having to make a move. In one’s dreams, for instance, one may picture stores of treasure hidden away in some remote village which connoisseurs come from far to see. Like all notions of superiority this contains an element of reality. The hidden treasure symbolizes one’s intellectual and emotional life which one guards within the magic circle. Another way one’s sense of superiority express itself is in one’s feeling of one’s own uniqueness. This is a direct outgrowth of one’s wanting to feel separate and distinct from others. One may liken oneself to a tree standing alone on a hilltop, while the trees in the forest below are stunted by those about them. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21

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Where the compliant type looks at one’s fellow humans with the silent question, “Will he or she like me?”—and the aggressive type wants to know, “How strong an adversary is he or she?” or “Can one be useful to me?”—the detached person’s first concern is, “Will he or she interfere with me?” Will one want to influence me or will one leave me alone?” The scene in which Peer Gynt meets the buttonmolder is a perfect symbolic representation of the terror the detached person feels at being thrown with others. One’s own room in hell would be all right, but to be tossed into a melting pot, to be molded or adapted to others, is a horrifying thought. One feels oneself akin to a rare Persian rug, unique in its pattern and combination of colors, forever unalterable. One takes extraordinary pride in having kept free of the leveling influences of environment and is determined to keep on doing so. In cherishing one’s unchangeableness one raises the rigidity inherent in all neuroses to the dignity of a sacred principle. Willing and even eager to elaborate one’s own pattern, to give it greater purity and lucidity, one insists that nothing extrinsic be injected. In all its simplicity and inadequacy the Peer Gynt maxim stands: “To thyself be enough.” The emotional life of the detached person does not follow as strict a patter as that of the other types detached. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21

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Individual variations are greater in one’s case, chiefly because in contradistinction to the other two, whose predominant trends are directed toward beneficial goals—affection, intimacy, love in the one; survival, domination, success in the other—one’s goals are negative: one wants not to be involved, not to need anybody, not to allow others to intrude on or influence one. Hence the emotional picture would be dependent on the particular desires that have developed or been allowed to stay alive within this negative framework, and only a limited number of tendencies intrinsic to detachment as such can be formulated. There is a general tendency to suppress all feeling, even to deny its existence. I should like to quote here a passage from an unpublished novel of the poet Anna Maria Armi, because it succinctly expresses not only this tendency but also other typical attitudes of the detached person. The main character, reminiscing about one’s adolescence, says: “I could visualize a strong physical tie (as I had with my father) and a strong spiritual tie (as I had with my heroes), but I could not see where or how feeling came into it; feelings simply did not exist—people lied about that as about so many other things. B. was horrified. ‘But how do you explain sacrifice?’ she said. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21

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“For a moment I was astounded by the truth in her remark; then I decided that sacrifice was just another of lies, and when it was not a lie it was either a physical or spiritual act. I dreamed at that time of living alone, of never marrying, of becoming strong and peaceful without talking too much, without asking for help. I wanted to work on myself, to be freer and freer, to give up dreams in order to see and live clearly. I thought morals had no meaning; being good or bad made no difference as long as you were absolutely true. The great sin was to look for sympathy or to expect help. Souls seemed to me temples that had to be guarded, and inside them there were always strange ceremonies going on, known only to their priests, their custodians.” The rejection of feeling pertains primarily to feelings toward other people and applies to both love and hate. It is a logical consequence of the need to keep at an emotional distance from others, in that strong love or hate, consciously experienced, would bring one either close to others or into conflict with them. The term, distance machinery, is appropriate here. It does not necessarily follow that feeling will be suppressed in areas outside human relationships and become active in the realm of books, animals, nature, art, food, and so on. However, there is considerable danger in this. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21

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For a person capable of deep and passionate emotion it may be impossible to suppress only one sector of one’s feelings—and that the most crucial—without going the whole length of suppressing feeling altogether. This is speculative reasoning, but certainly the following is true. Artists of the detached type, who have demonstrated in their creative periods that they can not only feel deeply but also give expression to it, have often gone through periods, usually in adolescence, of either complete emotional numbness or of vigorous denial of all feeling—as in the passage quoted. The creative periods seem to occur when, following some disastrous attempts at close relationships, they have either deliberately or spontaneously adapted their lives to detachment—that is, when they have consciously or unconsciously determined to keep at a distance from others, or have become resigned to a kind of isolated living. The fact that now, at a safe distance from others, they can release and express a host of feelings not directly connected with human relationships permits the interpretation that early denial of all feelings was necessary to the achievement of their detachment. Another reason why the suppression of feeling may go beyond the sphere of human relationships has already been suggested in our discussion of self-sufficiency. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21

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Any desire, interest, or enjoyment that might make the detached person dependent upon others is viewed as treachery from within and may be checked on that account. It is as if every situation had to be carefully tested from the standpoint of a possible loss of freedom before feeling could be allowed full play. Any threat of dependence will cause one to withdraw emotionally. However, when one finds a situation quite safe in this regard one can enjoy it to the full. Profound emotional experience is possible under these conditions. The lurking fear of either becoming too attached to a pleasure or of its infringing upon one’s freedom indirectly will sometimes make one verge on the ascetic. However, it is an asceticism of its own kind—not oriented toward self-denial or self-torture. We might rather call it a self-discipline which—accepting the premises—is not lacking in wisdom. It is of great important to physic balance that there be areas accessible to spontaneous emotional experience. Creative abilities, for instance, may be a kind of salvation. If their expression has been inhibited, and if then through analysis or some other experience it is liberated, the beneficent effect upon the detached person can be so great as to make it look like a miraculous cure. Caution is in order in evaluating such cures. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21

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In the first place it would be a mistake to make any generalization about their occurrence: what may mean salvation foe a detached person will not necessarily have any such meaning for others. And even for one it is not strictly a “cure” in the sense of a radical change in neurotic fundamentals. It merely allows one a more satisfactory and less disturbed way of living. The more the emotions are checked, the more likely it is that emphasis will be placed upon intelligence. The expectation then will be that everything can be solved by sheer power of reasoning, as if mere knowledge of one’s own problems would be sufficient to cure them. Or as if reasoning alone could cure all the troubles of the World! Acceptant of the person by loving individuals as a unique being rather than as an object, the more the individual will come to perceive oneself as a person of value rather than a material object to be used. The reputation of a thousand years may be determined by the conduct of one hour. In greater matters people show themselves as they wish to be seen; in small matters, as they are. Nearly all people can stand adversity, but if you want to test a person’s character, give one power. The foundations of character are built not by lecture, but by bricks of good example, laid day by day. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21

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In reviewing one’s own moral career, the stigmatized individual may single out and retrospectively elaborate experiences which serve for one to account for one’s coming to the beliefs and practices that one now has regarding one’s own kind and normals. A life event can thus have a double bearing on moral career, first as immediate objective grounds for an actual turning point, and later (and easier to demonstrate) as a means of accounting for a position currently taken. One experience often selected for this latter purpose is that through which the newly stigmatized individual learns that full-fledged members of the group are quite like ordinary human beings. A physically disabled man provides a statement: “If I had to choose one group of experiences that finally convinced me of the importance of this problem [of self-image] and that I had to fight my own battles of identification, it would be the incidents that made me realize with my heart that people who have physical limitations can be identified with characteristics other than their physical disability. I managed to see that people who have a physical disability could be comely, charming, well-built, masculine, neatly dressed, beautiful, ugly, lovely, stupid, brilliant—just like all other people, and I discovered that I was able to hate or love someone with a physical limitation in spite of one’s disability. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21

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It may be added that in looking back to the occasion of discovering that persons with one’s stigma are human beings like everyone else, the individual may bring to bear a later occasion when one’s pre-stigma friends imputed un-humanness to those one had by then learned to see as full-fledged persons like oneself. Thus, in reviewing one’s experience as a circus worker, a young girl sees first that she had learned her fellow-workers are not freaks, and send that her pre-circus friends fear for her having to travel in a bus along with other members of the troupe. Another turning point—retrospectively if not originally—is the isolating, incapacitating experience, often a period of hospitalization, which comes later to be seen as the time when the individual was able to think through one’s problem, learn about oneself, sort out one’s situation, and arrive at a new understanding of what is important and work seeking in life. It should be added that not only are personal experiences retrospectively identified as turning points, but experiences once removed may be employed in this way. It should be added that not only are personal experiences retrospectively identified as turning points, but experiences once removed may be employed in this way. Good character is more to be praised than outstanding talent. Most talents are, to some extent, a gift. Good character, by contrast, is not given to us. We have to build it piece by piece—by thought, choice, courage, and determination. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21

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There is nothing ambiguous about “abundance” and “superfluity,” even though there is little difference in their root meanings. “Abundance” comes to us from the Latin word una (wave), which English still retains in its basic meaning in words like “undulate” and “undulant.” Abundance, too, means an “overflowing,” yet it has acquired an altogether beneficial meaning in our language. An abundant land provides us with more than just the basic necessities. It is a land of plenty what the Old Testament describes as “a land flowing with milk and honey.” Or suppose you have been to a party where there was no scarcity of refreshments. You might say, “The wine flowed in abundance,” and you would mean something beneficial by that. There was no shortage of good things, no rationing, no need to worry about overdoing today and going without tomorrow. However, if we want to suggest the negative aspects of an “overflowing,” the word that some to mind is “superfluous.” That word, like “affluent,” goes back to the Latin verb fluere, and a superfluity is therefore a “super-flowing.” Here, however, the overflow is seen in a strictly negative light. It is pointless, wasteful. If you say to someone, “Your presence here is superfluous,” you are really saying, “Why do you not go away?” You are not saying, “How nice that you are here,” which is what you do mean, more of less, if you speak of wine being present in abundance. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21

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So whenever we speak of affluence, we have to ask ourselves whether we mean a beneficial, enlivening abundance or a negative, deadening superfluity. Turning now to “ennui,” we find that its basic meaning is stronger than our current definition of boredom or a feeling of dissatisfaction and weariness. Ennui and the English word “annoy” both derive from the Latin inodiare, “to make loathsome or hateful.” We might ask ourselves now, taking our clues from these words we have just examined, whether superfluity does not lead to boredom, disgust, and hatred. If so, then we should ask ourselves some hard questions about our affluent society. By “we” I mean modern industrial society as it has developed in the United States of America, Canada, and Western Europe. Do we live in affluence? Who in our society lives in affluence, and what kind of affluence is it, an affluence of abundance or an affluence of superfluity? To put the question more simply yet: Is it good affluence or bad affluence? Does affluence necessarily produce ennui? And what would a good, abundant, ebullient kind of affluence look like, and affluence that does not produce ennui? There are two possibilities, two approaches to the psychological study of the human psyche. At the moment academic psychology studies human beings primarily from the standpoint of behaviorism. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21

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Behaviorism is limited exclusively to what can be directly seen and observed, to what is visible and what can therefore be measured and weighed, for whatever cannot be directly seen and observed cannot be measures or weighted either, at least not with sufficient precision. Depth psychology, the psychoanalytical method, proceeds differently. It has different goals. It does not limit its study of human actions and behavior solely to what can be seen. It inquires instead into the nature of behavior, into the motives underlying behavior. You can describe, for instance, a person’s smile. That is an action that can be photographed, that can be described in terms of the musculature of the face, and so on. However, you know very well, that there are differences among the smile of a salesgirl in a shop, the smile of someone who is antagonistic toward you but wants to hide one’s antagonism, and the smile of a friend who is happy to see you. You are able to distinguish among hundreds of kinds of smiles that take rise from different psychic states. They are all smiles, but the things they express can be Worlds apart. No machine can measure or even perceive those differences. Only a human being who is not a machine—you, for example—can do that. You observe not only with your mind but also, if I may be allowed such an old-fashioned expression, with your heart. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21

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Your whole being comprehends what transpires before it. You can sense what kind of smile you are seeing. And if you cannot sense things like that, then you will be in for a lot of disappointments in your life. Or take a very different kind of behavior: the way someone eats. All right, so someone eats. However, how does one eat? One person wolfs one’s food down. Another person’s manner at table reveals that one is pedantic and attaches great importance to doing things in an orderly fashion and cleaning up one’s plate. Still another eats without haste, without greediness. One enjoys one’s food. One simply eats and takes pleasure in eating. Or take still another example. Someone bellows and turns red in the face. You conclude one is angry. Surely one is angry. However, then you take a little closer look at one and ask yourself what it is the person is feeling (perhaps you know one fairly well), and suddenly you realize that he or she is afraid. One is frightened, and one’s rage is simply a reaction to one’s own fear. And then you may look even deeper still and realize that this is a human being who feels thoroughly helpless and powerless, someone who is afraid of everything, of life itself. So you have made three observations: that one is angry, that one is afraid, and that one feels a profound sense of helplessness. All three observations are correct. However, they relate to different levels of one’s psychic structure. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21

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The observation that takes on one’s sense of powerlessness is the one that registers most profoundly what is going on inside one. The observation that takes in nothing but rage is the most superficial. In other words, if you react by flying into a rage as well and see nothing but an angry person in the other individual, then you have failed to see one at all. However, if you can look being the façade of the angry person and see the frightened one, the one who feels helpless, then you will approach one differently, and it may happen that one’s anger will subside because one no longer feels threatened. From a psychoanalytical point of view, what interests us is not human behavior viewed from the outside but rather what motivates a person has, what one’s intentions are, whether one is conscious of them or not. We are interested in the quality of one’s behavior. The analyst listens with a third ear. Or, one reads between the lines. One sees not only what is offered one directly but perceives something more in what is offered and observable. One sees into the heart of the personality whose every action is merely an expression, a manifestation, yet one that is always colored by the entire personality. Every last bit of behavior is a gesture originating in one specific human individual and in no other, and that is why there are no two human actions that are identical, any more than there are two identical human beings. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21

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They may resemble each other; they may be related; but they are never the same. There are no two people who raise a hand in exactly the same way, who walk the same way, who tilt their heads in the same way. That is why you can sometimes recognize a person by one’s gait even though you have not seen one’s face. A gait can be as characteristic for a person as one’s face, sometimes even more so, for it is more difficult to alter a gait than the expression of the face. We can lie with our faces. That is a capability we have that animals do not. It is more difficult to lie with one’s body, though that too can be learned. It is not that some of us become sinful because of an unfortunate childhood environment, while others are blessed with a highly moral upbringing. Rather we are all born sinners with a corrupt nature, a natural inclination to go out own way. As David wrote, “Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me,” reports Psalm 51.5. Here is an amazing statement from David that he was sinful while still in his mother’s womb, even during the period of pregnancy when as yet he had performed no actions, either good or bad. Because of Adam’s rebellion, we are all born with a sinful perverse nature, an inclination to go our own way. Whether it is the way of the decent individual or the way of the obvious transgressor, it makes no difference. We were all born in a state of rebellion against God. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21

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The Bible says we have all sinned, and almost everyone would agree with the statement. Descriptive synonyms for sin—rebellion, despising, defying—and God takes a far more serious view of sin than the being on the street or even most Christians. Sin, in the final analysis, is rebellion against the sovereign Creator, Ruler, and Judge of the Universe. It resists the rightful prerogative of a sovereign Ruler to command obedience from His subjects. It says to an absolutely holy and righteous God that His moral laws, which are a reflection of His own nature, are not worthy of our wholehearted obedience. Sin is not only a series of actions, it is also an attitude that ignores the law of God. However, it is even more than a rebellious attitude. Sin is a state of heart, a condition of our inmost being. It is a state of corruption, of vileness, yes, even of filthiness in God’s sight. This view of sin as corrupt, vileness, and filth is symbolically when Joshua the high priest—the person holding the highest religious office in Israel is shown dressed in filthy clothes, a pictorial representation of both his sins and the sins of the people he represented as high priest. The filthiness of his garments depicts not the guilt of his sin but its pollution. Like Joshua, all of us are, in a spiritual sense, dressed in filthy clothes. We are not justly guilty before God; we are also corrupted in our natures, polluted and vile before Him. We need forgiveness and cleansing. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21

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For this reason the Bible never speaks of God’s grace as simply making up our deficiencies—as if salvation consists in so much good works (even a variable amount) plus so much of God’s grace. Rather the Bible speaks of “a God who justifies the wicked,” who is found by those who do not seek Him, who reveals Himself to those who do not ask for Him, reports Romans 4.5, 10.20. However, the seeker should resolve to appeal directly by constant aspiration and prayer to one’s own higher self, in the knowledge that it alone can help one if one is to work without a teacher. On the other hand, if one’s soul has decreed that one is to have a guide, God will bring before one the mental image or intuitive thought of the Master. If this happens, one will not need to seek out the Master’s physical person; the inner picture brings results. Cicero wrote nearly two thousand years ago that the ideally perfect person is nowhere to be found at all. Who, except wishful thinkers and pious sentimentalists, can gainsay him? Those who seek absolute perfection, whether in someone else or for themselves, seek what is unattainable in this World. It is not possible to find human perfection. Travel, contact, and experience with them reveal that not one is always infallible, not one failed to commit errors of judgment. We do not just need God’s grace to make up for our deficiencies; we need His grace to provide a remedy for our guilt, a cleansing for out pollution. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21

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We need God’s grace to provide a satisfaction of His justice, to cancel a debt we cannot pay. It may seem that I am belaboring the point of our guilt and vileness before God. However, we can never rightly understand God’s grace until we understand our plight as those who need His grace. The first and possibly most fundamental characteristic of divine grace is that it presupposes sin and guilt. Grace has meaning only when beings are seen as fallen, unworthy of salvation, and liable to eternal wrath. Grace does not contemplate sinners merely as undeserving but as ill-deserving. It is not simply that we do not deserve hell. The discipline of the mind is, of course, the greatest of challenges. And Scripture regularly presents its discipline as a discipline of the eyes. Humans, if you are a television-watching, fake news consuming couch bacon cheese burger with medium fries and a diet coke and a slice of cherry pie, it is impossible for you to maintain a pure mind. In one week you will watch more murders, adulteries, and perversions than our grandfathers read about in their entire lives. Things are getting so bad that people are even acting out scripts in their daily lives because they have become slaves to sin and inequity. “Can a human scoop fire into one’s lap without one’s clothes being burned?” reports Proverbs 6.27. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21

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This also means treating all women with dignity—looking at them respectfully. If their dress or demeanor is distracting, look them in the eyes, and nowhere else, and get away as quickly as you can! The mind also encompasses the tongue. “For out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks,” reports Matthew 12.34. “But among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immortality, or any kind of impurity, or of greed, because these are improper for God’s holy people. Nor should there be obscenity, foolish talk, or coarse joking, which are out of place, but rather thanksgiving,” reports Ephesians 5.3. There must be no sexual humor, urbane vulgarities, and coarseness, as so many Christians are so prone to do to prove they are not “slow” or “out of it.” The human self requires rootedness in others. This is primarily an ontological matter—a matter of being what we are. It is not just a moral matter, a matter of what ought to be. And the moral aspect of it grows out of the ontological. The most fundamental “other” for the human is, of course, God himself. God is the ultimate social fact for the human being. That is why people in general think more often about God than about any other thing, even pleasures of the flesh and death. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21

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However, because all are to be rooted in God—and really are, whether they want it or not—our ties to one another cannot be isolated from our shared relationship to God, nor our relationship to him from our ties to one another. Our relations to others cannot be right unless we see those others in their relation to God. Though others God comes to us and we only really find others when we see them in God. When scripture speaks of God’s arm, the literal sense is not that God has such a member, but only what is signified by this member, namely operative power. Hence, it is plain that nothing false can ever underlie the literal sense of Holy Writ. Appetite is the power of receiving and giving. The appetite that is in all things to receive and to give part of God’s plan. Things receive what is attractive and reject what is repugnant, and the preference of the receiver determines the action of the giver. Giving and receiving, furthermore, are motions the one motion affecting preservation and the other multiplication. Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom. O God, beneath Whose eyes every heart trembles, and all consciences are afraid; be merciful to the groanings of all, and heal the wounds of all; that as not one of us is free from fault, so not one may be shut out from pardon; through Jesus Christ our Lord. “He hath filled me with his love, even unto the consuming of my flesh. He hath confounded mine enemies, unto the causing of them to quake before me,” reports 2 Nephi 4.21-22. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21

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Almighty and merciful God, Who willest not the souls of sinners to perish, but their faults; restrain the anger which we deserve, and pour our upon us the clemency which we entreat, that through Thy mercy we may pass from mourning into joy; through Jesus Christ our Lord. O fountain of all good, destroy in me every lofty thought, break pride to pieces and scatter it to the winds, annihilate each clinging shred of self-righteousness, implant in me true lowliness of spirit, abase me to self-loathing and self-abhorrence, open in me a fount of penitential tears, break me, then bind me up; thus will my heart be a prepared dwelling for my God; then can the Father take up his abode in me, then can the blessed Jesus come with healing in his touch, then can the Holy Spirit descend in sanctifying grace; O Holy Trinity, three Persons and one God, inhabit me, a temple consecrated to thy glory. When thou art present, evil cannot abide; in thy fellowship is fullness of joy, beneath thy smile is peace of conscience, by thy side no fears disturb, no apprehensions banish rest of mind, with thee my heart shall bloom with fragrance; make me meet, through repentance, for thine indwelling. Nothing is too great for thee to do, nothing is too good for thee to give. Infinite is thy might, boundless thy love, limitless thy grace, glorious thy saving name. Let Angels sing for sinners repenting, prodigals restored backsliders reclaimed, Satan’s captives released, blind eyes opened, broken hearts bound up, the despondent cheered, the self-righteous stripped, the formalist driven from a refuge of lies, the ignorant enlightened, and saints built up in their holy faith. I ask great things of a great God. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21

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BRIGHTON STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH

Rancho Cordova, CA |

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Now Selling!

NOW SELLING! Brighton Station at Cresleigh Ranch is Rancho Cordova’s newest home community! This charming neighborhood offers an array of home types with eye catching architecture styles such as Mid-Century Modern, California Modern, Prairie, and Contemporary Farmhouse. Details make this modern sized Cresleigh home stand out at a glance. It is reminiscent of the Italianate style of architecture that was distinct in the 19th-century phase in the history of architecture. The captivating well-designed floor plans make it even more attractive. Notice how guests as well as family are accommodated: bathroom on first floor; gathering room, fireplace and attached formal dining room. Included is an enchanting master suite with grand bath. There are also other bedrooms, bathrooms, and a two car garage.

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

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Come to Me and You Will Find Rest in Your Souls–I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End!

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We often worry about what we will be tomorrow, but do not take into account that we are somebody today. Life should be a place of learning suffused with excitement, engagement, passion, challenge, creativity, and joy. When we are in the minority, that is when the test of courage comes; when we are in the majority is when the test of acceptance comes. It is our destiny and the destiny of everything in the World that we must come to an end. Very end that we experience in nature and humankind speaks to us with a loud voice: you also will come to an end! It may reveal itself in the farewell to a place where we have lived for a long time, the separation from the fellowship of intimate associates, the death of someone near to us. Or it may become apparent to us in the failure of a work that gave meaning to us, the end of a whole period of life, the approach of old age, or even in the melancholy side of nature visible in autumn. All this tells us: you will also come to an end. Whenever we are shaken by this voice reminding us of our end, we ask anxiously—what does it mean that we have a beginning and an end, that we come from the darkness of the not yet, and rush ahead towards the darkness of the no more? When Augustine asked this question, he began his attempt to answer it with a prayer. And it is right to do so, because praying means elevating oneself to the eternal. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

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In fact, there is no other way of judging time than to see it in the light of the eternal. In order to judge something, one must be partly within it, partly out of it. If we were totally within time, we would not be able to elevate ourselves in prayer, meditation and thought, to the eternal. We would be children of time like all other creatures and could not ask the question of the meaning of time. However, as human beings we are aware of the eternal to which we belong and from which we are estranged by the bondage of time. We speak of time in three ways or modes—the past, present, and future. Every child is aware of them, but no wise being has ever penetrated their mystery. We become aware of them when we hear a voice telling us: you also will come to an end. It is the future that awakens us to the mystery of time. Time runs from the beginning to the end, but our awareness of times goes in the opposite direction. It starts with the anxious anticipation of the end. In the light of the future we see the past and present. So let us first consider our going into the future and towards the end that is the last point that we can anticipate in out future. The image of the future produces contrasting feelings in beings. The expectation of the future gives one a feeling of joy. We may even learn to recapture the will to laugh and the art of laughing at will. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

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It is a great thing to have a future in which one can actualize one’s possibilities, in which one can experience the abundance of life, in which one can create something new—be it new work, a new way of life, or the regeneration of one’s own being. Courageously one goes ahead towards the new, especially in the earlier part of one’s own life. However, this feeling struggles with other ones: the anxiety about what is hidden in the future, the ambiguity of everything it will bring us, the shortness of its duration that decreases with every year of our life and becomes shorter the nearer we come to the unavoidable end. And finally the end itself, with its impenetrable darkness and the threat that one’s whole existence in time will be judged as a failure. Therefore, it may be a good idea to think before one speaks, and read before one thinks. This may give one something to think about that we did not make up ourselves—a wise move at any age, but most especially at seventeen, when one is at the greatest danger of coming to annoying conclusions. We want to be in the pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in the pursuit of us. The goal is to fully realize the wealth of sympathy, kindness, and generosity hidden in our souls. The effort of every true education should be to unlock that treasure. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

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How do beings, how do you, react to this image of the future with its hope and threat and inescapable end? Probably most of us react by looking at the immediate future, anticipating it, working for it, hoping for it, being anxious about it, while cutting off from our awareness the future which is farther away, and above all, by cutting off from our consciousness the end, the last moment of our future. Perhaps we could not live without doing so most of our time. However, perhaps we will not be able to die if we always do so. And if one is not able to die, is one really about to live? How do we react if we become aware of the inescapable end contained in our future? Are we able to bear it, to take its anxiety into a courage that faces ultimate darkness? Or are we thrown into utter hopelessness? Do we hope against hope, or do we repress our awareness of the end because we cannot stand it? Repressing the consciousness of our end expresses itself in several ways. Many try to do so by putting the expectation of a long life between now and the end. For them it is decisive that the end be delayed. Even old people who are near the end do this, for they cannot endure the fact that the end will not be delayed much longer. Many people realize this deception and hope for a continuation of this life after death. They expect an endless future in which they may achieve or possess what has been denied them in this life. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
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This attitude that we will achieve our hearts desires in the after life is a prevalent attitude about the future, and also a very simple one. It denies that there is an end. It refuses to accept that we are creatures, that we come from the eternal ground of time and return to the eternal ground of time and have received a limited span of time as our time. It replaces eternity by endless future. However, endless future is without a final aim; it repeats itself and could well be described as an image of hell. This is not the Christian way of dealing with the end. The Christian message says the eternal stands above past and future. “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.” The Christian message acknowledges that time runs towards an end, and that we move towards the end of that time which is our time. Many people—but not the Bible—speak loosely of the “hereafter” or the “life after death.” Even in our liturgies eternity is translated by “World without end.” However, the World, by its very nature, is that which comes to an end. If we want to speak in truth without foolish, wishful thinking, we should speak about the eternal that is neither timelessness nor endless time. The mystery of the future is answered in the eternal of which we may speak in images taken from time. However, if we forget that the images are images, we fall into absurdities and self-deceptions. There is no time after time, but there is eternity above time. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

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Time is like a jigsaw puzzle. Each edge piece of a puzzle interlocks with two others to form the puzzle’s framework and give structure and support to the puzzle as a whole. Each piece has a unique design and cut that ensures just the right place to fit within the puzzle. Each morning, people from the edge pieces that interlock to create a safe environment and give support to one another and the whole. Each morning, they provide just the right place for every individual to fit safely and securely. The community members are strength and stability, and like the edge pieces, they do not stand alone in this responsibility. There are always others to support and assist, ensuring that every person has a place. The spirits temper the movements of bodily parts. Some infectious diseases are chiefly in the spirits, and not so much in the humours. We have complex and contradictory feelings toward the freedom and independence and self-determination of the individuals and countries: we desire these and are proud of the past support we have given to such tendencies, and yet we are often frightened by what they may mean. We tend to value and respect the dignity and worth of each individual, yet when we are frightened, we move away from this direction. Suppose we presented ourselves in some such fashion, openly and transparently, in our foreign relations. We would be attempting to be the nation which we truly are, in all our complexity and even contradictoriness. What would be the result? #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

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If we, as a country, were more open and transparent in our foreign relations, it seems the results would be similar to the experiences of a client when one is more truly that which he or she is. Let us look at some of the probable outcomes. We would be much more comfortable, because we would have nothing to hide. We could focus on the problem at hand, rather than spending our energies to prove that we are moral or consistent. We could use all of our creative imagination in solving the problem, rather than in defending ourselves. We could openly advance both our selfish interests, and our sympathetic concern for others, and let these conflicting desires find the balance which is acceptable to us as a people. We could freely change and grow in our leadership position, because we would not be bound by rigid concepts of what we have been, must, ought to be. We would find that we were much less feared, because others would be less inclined to suspect what lies behind the façade. We would, by our own openness, tend to bring forth openness and realism on the part of others. We would tend to work out the solutions of World problems on the basis of the real issues involved, rather than in terms of the facades being worn by the negotiating parties. In short what I am suggesting by this fantasied example is that nations and organizations might discover, as have individuals, that it is a richly rewarding experience to be what one deeply is. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

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I am suggesting that this view contains the seeds of a philosophical approach to all of life, that it is more than a trend observed in the experience of clients. Feeling rules are what guide emotion work by establishing the sense of entitlement or obligation that governs emotional exchanges. This emotion system works privately, often free of observation. It is a vital aspect of deep private bonds and also affords a way of talking about them. It is a way of describing how—as parents and children, wives and husbands, friends and lovers—we intervene in feelings in order to shape them. What are feeling rules? How do we know they exist? How do they bear on deep acting? We may address these questions by focusing on the pinch between “what I do feel” and “what I should feel,” for at this spot we get our best view of emotional convention. Now, when we take a closer look at the whole person, we find that there are six basic aspects in our lives as individual human beings—six things inseparable from every human life. These together and in interplay make up human nature. Thought (images, concepts, judgments, inferences), feeling (sensation, emotion), choice (will, decision, character), body (action, interaction with the physical World), social context (personal and structural relations to others), and soul (the factor that integrates all of the above to form one life. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

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Simply put, every human being thinks (has a thought life), feels, chooses, interacts with one’s body and its social context, and (more of less) integrates all of the foregoing as parts of one life. These are the essential factors in a human being, and nothing essential to human life falls outside of them. The ideal of the spiritual life in the Christian understanding is one where all of the essential parts of the human self are effectively organized around Go, as they are restored and sustained by him. Spiritual formation in Christ is the process leading to that ideal end, and its result is love of God with all of the hearts, soul, mind, and strength, and of the neighbor as oneself. The human self is then fully integrated under God. The salvation or deliverance of the believer in Christ is essentially holistic or whole-life. David the psalmist, speaking of his own experience but prophetically expressing the understanding of Jesus the Messiah, said, “I bless the LORD who gives me counsel; in the night also my heart instructs me. I keep the LORD always before me; because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved. Therefore my heart is glad, and my soul rejoices; my body also rests secure,” reports Psalm 16.7-9. Note how many aspects of the self are explicitly involved in this passage: the mind, the will, the feeling, the soul, and the body. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

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A major part of understanding spiritual formation in the Christian traditions is to follow closely the way the biblical writings repeatedly and emphatically focus on the various essential dimensions of the human being and their role in life as a whole. We will draw from spiritual understanding the incentive to keep on with our quest and the courage to set higher goals. To learn from God in this total-life immersion is ow we seek first His kingdom and His righteousness. The outcome is that we increasingly are able to do all things, speaking or acting, as I Christ were doing them. As apprentices of Christ we are not learning how to do some special religious activity, but how to live every moment of our live from the reality of God’s kingdom. I am learning how to live my actual life as Jesus would if He were me. No matter what my profession is, I am in full-time Christian service no less than someone who earns his or her living in a specifically religious role. Jesus stands beside me and teaches me in all I do to live in God’s World. He shows me how, in every circumstance, to reside in His word and thus be a genuine apprentice of His—His disciple indeed. This enables me to find the reality of God’s World everywhere I may be, and thereby to escape from enslavement to sin and evil. We become able to do what we know to be good and right, even when it is humanly impossible. Our lives and words become constant testimony of the reality of God. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

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When, for example, an architect facing a difficult architectural job, one must know how to integrate it into the kingdom of God as much as someone attempting to win another to Christ or preparing a lesson for a congregation. Until we are clear on this, we will have missed Jesus’ connection between life and God and will automatically exclude most of our everyday lives from the domain of faith and discipleship. Jesus lived most of His life on Earth as a blue-collar worker, someone we might describe today as an independent contractor. In His vocation He practiced everything He later taught about in life in the kingdom. It is important to move away from derogatory language against others, calling them twits, jerks, or idiots, and increasingly mesh with the respect and endearment for persons that naturally flows from God’s way. This in turn transforms all of my dealings with others into tenderness and makes the usual coldness and brutality of human relations, which lays a natural foundation for unspeakable actions, simply unthinkable. Our mind and heart will keep coming back to God’s grace. The grace of God is so inexhaustible and at times overwhelming. “Grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be glory both now and forever more! Amen,” reports 2 Peter 3.18. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

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Growing in the grace of God allows one to become acquainted with elements of our experience which have in the past been denied to awareness as too threatening, too damaging to the structure of the self. One finds one’s experiencing these feelings fully, completely, in the relationship, so that for the moment one is one’s fear, or one’s anger, or one’s tenderness, or one’s strength. And as one lives these widely varied feelings, in all their degrees of intensity, one discovers that one has experienced oneself, that one is all these feelings. One finds that one’s behavior changing in constructive fashion in accordance with one’s newly experienced self. One approaches the realization that one no longer needs to fear what experience may hold, but can welcome it freely as a part of one’s changing and developing self. However, it seems to me that the good life is not any fixed state. It is not, in my estimation, a state of virtue, or contentment, or nirvana, or happiness. It is not a condition in which the individual is adjusted, or fulfilled, or actualized. It is not a state of drive-reduction, or tension-reduction, or homeostasis. I believe that all of these terms have been used in ways which imply that if one or several of these states is achieved, then the goal of life have been achieved. Certainly, for many people happiness, or adjustment, are seen as states of being which are synonymous with the good life. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

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Social scientists have frequently spoken of the reduction of tension, or the achievement of homeostasis or equilibrium as if these states constituted the goal of the process of living. So it is with a certain amount of surprise and concern that I realize that my experience supports none of these definitions. If I focus on the experience of those individuals who seem to have evidenced the greatest degree of movement during the spiritual and therapeutic relationship, and who, in the years following this relationship, appear to have made and to be making real progress toward the good life, then it seems to me that they are not adequately described at all by any of these terms which refer to fixed states of being. I believe they would consider themselves insulted if they were described as adjusted, and they would regard it as false if they were described as happy or contented or even actualized. As I have known them I would regard it as most inaccurate to say that all their dive tensions have been reduced, or that they are in a state of homeostasis. So I am forced to ask myself whether there is any way in which I can generalize about their situation, any definition which I can give of the good life which would seem to fit the facts as I have observed them. I find this not at all easy, and what follows is stated very tentatively. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

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The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction, not a destination. The direction which constitutes the good life is that which is selected by the total organism, when there is psychological freedom to move in any direction. This organismically selected direction seems to have certain discernible general qualities which appear to be the same in a wide variety of unique individuals. The good life, from the point of view of my experience, is the process of movement in a direction which the human organism selects when it is inwardly free to move in any direction, and the general qualities of this selected direction appear to have a certain universality. Many people, however, seem to be morally bankrupt—completely devoid of any decent moral qualities. And it is just about the worst thing you can say about a person. A lot of people are also spiritually bankrupt. Spiritual bankruptcy is a most absolute state. It means we have nothing to give to God. Salvation is a gift from God; it is entirely by grace through faith—not by works. People living the good life are righteous and the process seems to involve an increasing openness to the experience. It is the polar opposite of defensiveness. Defensiveness is an organism’s response to experiences which are perceived or anticipated as threatening, as incongruent with the individual’s existing picture of oneself, or of oneself in relationship to the World. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

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These threatening experiences are temporarily rendered harmless by being distorted in awareness, or being denied to awareness. I quite literally cannot see, with accuracy, those experiences, feelings, reactions in myself which are significantly at variance with the picture of myself which I already possess. A large part of the process of therapy is the continuing discovery by the client that one is experiencing feelings and attitudes which heretofore one has not been able to be aware of, which one has not been able to own as being a part of oneself. If a person could be fully open to one’s experience, however, every stimulus—whether originating within the organism or in the environment—would be freely relayed through the nervous system without being distorted by any defensive mechanism. There would be no need of the mechanism of subception whereby the organism is forewarned of any experience threatening to the self. On the contrary, whether the stimulus was the impact of a configuration of form, color, or sound in the environment on the sensory nerves, or a memory trace from the past, or visceral sensation of fear or pleasure or disgust, the person would be living it, would have it completely available to awareness. Thus, one aspect of this process which I am naming the good life appears to be a movement away from the pole of defensiveness toward the pole of openness to experience. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

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The individual living the good life is becoming more able to listen to oneself, to experience what is going on within oneself. One is more open to one’s feelings of fear and discouragement and pain. One is also more open to one’s feelings of courage, and tenderness, and awe. One is free to live one’s feelings subjectively, as they exist in one, and also free to be aware of these feelings. One is more able fully to live the experiences of one’s organism rather than shutting them off. Almighty and everlasting God, Who hast made known the Incarnation of Thy Word by the testimony of a glorious star, which when the wise men be held, they adored Thy Majesty with gifts; grant that the star of Thy righteousness may always appear in our hearts, and our treasure consist in giving thanks to Thee; through Jesus Christ our Lord. O God, the Enlightener of all nations, grant Thy people to enjoy perpetual peace; and pour into our hearts that radiant light which Thou didst shed into the minds of the wise men; thought Jesus Christ Our Lord. “Behold, O Lord, thou hast smitten us because of our iniquity, and hast driven us forth, and for these many years we have been in the wilderness; nevertheless, thou hast been merciful unto us. O Lord, look upon me in pity, and turn away thine anger from this thy people, and suffer not that they shall go forth across this raging deep in darkness; but behold these things which I have molten out of rock,” reports Ether 3.3. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

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CRESLEIGH MEADOWS AT PLUMAS RANCH

Plumas Lake, CA | from the mid $300’s

Coming Soon!

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Cresleigh homes gives emphasis to detail and authenticity in their designs, remaining true to a style architecturally, while updating floor plans to create a modern, comfortable home. This combination of classic architectural style and easy livability add up to solid, long-lasting value. Today, there is a return to traditionalism and pure styles. People want the look and feel of an older home with the amenities and comforts of modern floor planning. Elaborate master bedroom suites, cozy country kitchens, libraries, media centers, and great rooms are all part of what makes a plan livable.

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Cresleigh Meadows is coming soon! Found just north of Feather River Boulevard, Cresleigh Meadows is home of the largest neighborhood in Plumas Ranch as well as the popular Bear River Park. With four floor plans available, ranging from approximately 2,000 – 3,500 square feet offering, three to five bedrooms, we are certain you will find the home that fits your needs and lifestyle. Popular design elements include open floor plans, large kitchen islands, and flex spaces are staples in Cresleigh homes. Multi-generational living options also available in select homes. https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-meadows-at-plumas-ranch/

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The Leaves of the Tree of Life are for the Healing of the Nations!

ImageMore full of visions than a high romance? What, but thee Sleep? Soft closers of our eyes! Low murmurer of tender lullabies! Light hover around our happy pillows! Wreather of poppy bubs, and weeping willows! Silent entangler of beauty’s tresses! Most happy listener! when the morning blesses thee for enlivening all the cheerful eyes that glance so brightly at the new Sun-rise. But what is higher beyond thought than thee? Fresher than berries of a mountain tree? More strange, more beautiful, more smooth, more regal, than wings of swans, than doves, than dim-seen eagle? What is it? And to what shall I compare it? It has a glory, and naught else can share it: The though therefore is awful, sweet, and holy, chasing away all Worldliness and folly; coming sometimes like fearful claps of thunder, or the low rumblings Earth’s regions under; and sometimes like a gentle whispering of all the secrets of some wond’rous thing that breathers about us in the vacant air; so that we look around with prying stare, perhaps to see shapes of light, aerial limning, and catch soft floating from a faint-heard hymning; to see the laurel wreath, on high suspended, that is to crown our name wen life is ended. Sometimes it gives a glory to the voice, and from the heart up-springs, rejoice! rejoice! Sounds which will reach the Framer of all things, and die away in ardent mutterings. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

ImageNo one who once the glorious Sun has seen, and all the clouds, and felt one’s bosom clean for one’s great Maker’s presence, but must know what’tis I mean, and feel one’s being glow: Therefore no insult I give one’s spirit by telling what one sees from native merit. The principal faculties of the brain use the ministry and help of this spirit; it is their vehicle. The fountain of all the spirits is in the heart. The spirit is the most universal instrument of the soul. Spirit is not only the soul’s instrument; it is the mean, a sacred band of unite, between soul and body. Spirit is a most subtle vapour, which is expressed from the blood, and the instrument of the soul, to perform all one’s actions; a common tie or medium betwixt the body and soul, as some will have it. I am sure there is a common Spirit that plays within us, yet makes no part of us: and that is the Spirit of God, the fire and scintillation of that noble and mighty Essence, which is the life and virtue of the Sun. Conceive light invisible, and that is spirit. The spirits are minute, imperceptible substances, breathlike and flamelike, quite separate from inert particles of matter. They move so much as to seem never at rest. They help to account for natural movement and change, for they come into being and pass away. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

ImageTo maintain itself, nonvital spirit feeds on adjacent particles of matter, the evidence of its activity being illustrated by rust in metals, and the shrinkage of flesh and the slowing down of bodily organs in human beings. In all animate life, the living spirit is he efficient cause and vehicle of motion. Although movements of the body that were observable and local cold be explained in part nu sensory action, the initiation and persistence of them could better be accounted for by assuming a pervasive, dynamic, spirit-substance than some mysterious force or soul. One does not go far in effect in either explaining nature or in examining her if at every point of difficulty one calls upon a vague force, invents an entity, or devises a special principle to fit the case. Rather, one looks for the simplest thing, the single principle, that will account systematically for the largest number of pehnomena. Now, we will assume a spirit and inquire by what efforts a spirit so small and tender can put in motion bodies so gross and hard. Spirit in the human being is a substance so responsive to the two sources of knowledge that it reverberates to each—to God’s revelations and to human’s observations of nature, the informations of revelation and of sense differ no doubt in matter and manner of entrance and conveyance to us; yet the human spirit is one and the same; and it is but as if different liquors were poured through different funnels into one and the same vessel. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

ImageThe human spirit responds both to divine sources of stimulation and to natural things. This is the kind of spirit human use when they exercise the faculties of one’s soul—one’s understanding, reason, imagination, memory, appetite, and will. As the instrument of human’s faculties it is both efficient cause and vehicle without which there is no human behavior. The spirit is an extremely tenuous substance continuous with itself throughout the body. It is capable of being dilated by heat and cold—these being two qualities of matter—and responds instantly to movement and caused movement. The spirit is not only endowed with power, not just of motion, but of reason, imagination, sense, memory, and desire. One will not have to think out the needed reaction, for it will flow naturally and spontaneously out of one’s inner being. The enlightened individual’s consciousness remains permanently serene and equable, at the same level whatever conditions prevail. Compassion—a quality so real and vibrant in the Italians but sensibly practical in the English and Americas, so infrequent in the French but present in the Indians—is natural, quiet, and devoid of sentimentality in the enlightened individual. One may still have one’s hygienic reactions, one’s aesthetic preferences, one’s individual tastes. One may still retain human aversions to dirty bodies, attractions to refined habits. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

ImageEnlightenment has not turned one into an indifferent robot or a frozen creature or a zombie deprived of feeling. However, one’s personal discrimination is calmly practiced: behind it there is an impersonal detachment. There is something which is always kept in reserve, a part of oneself is enclosed and which keeps other beings at a distance, however cordial is one’s outer self. This enables one to keep always calm, whatever the outer provocations may be, to hold to an intense inner stillness. One does not hope for anything nor wish for any special piece of good fortune—not because one is too pessimistic about life, but because one is so serene that one has stopped looking for something to come to one from outside that would bring happiness, stopped holding on to others, and stopped dreaming. THIS is reality; what the World can give is a dream. When the hour comes to desert the body, one will be ready for the fated event, without that desperate struggle to hold onto a form which has served its purpose seen too often in the unenlightened. Such is one’s freedom from common ego-obsession and such the stretch of one’s compassion, that one makes whomever one talks with feel that one is genuinely and deeply interested in his or her particular affairs. There is a friendliness in one’s look, goodwill in one’s face, that make acquaintance easy. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

ImageA being can take from the printed words what one is unable to hear from the spoken word. The truth-seeker will be wise to make use of such outward helps as appeal to one. They may be the written word, the printed book, the molded statuette, the pictorial representation, or the human photograph—always provided they are referable to a genuinely inspired source. One should study the words and works, the lives and examples of practising mystics, and follow in their footsteps. Good books are not to be disdained, despite contemptuous references by fanatical mystics or ill-balances ascetics. Negatively, they will warn one against misleading elements likely to cause a deviation from one’s correct course. Positively, they will guide one where no personal guide is available. However, one must beware of imaging that the pleasures one derives from spiritual reading is any sign that ne is making progress in spiritual living. It is easier to read lofty thoughts than to think them out for oneself, and to live them is the most difficult of all. Books, too, serve as guides if they are properly used, that is, if their limitations are recognized and if their authors’ limitations are acknowledged. In the first case it is the intellect’s own inability to transcend thought that stops it from realizing the truth. In the second case it is the evolutionary status of the being’s ego, and the accuracy of one’s attitudes—themselves victims or controllers of one’s emotions, passions—which matter. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

ImageFor if one’s mind cannot register the impact of truth, because of the blockage set up partially or even all around one, the author’s work will reflect one’s ignorance. One cannot teach what one does not know; one’s own mental obscurity can lead only to the reader’s obscurity. Yet such is the deceptiveness of thought, that a wrong or false idea maybe received and held in the mind under the belief that it is right or true one. The writings of these Masters help both the moral nature and the intellectual mind of the responsive and sensitive, who are excited to the same endeavour, exhilarated to the same level, and urged to realize the same ideas. These stand out from all other writings because they contain vivid inspiration and true thought. The very fine writings of philosophers and mystics of all times may bring into one’s life some emotional inspirational and intellectual guidance, even, possibly, stimulating one’s power of will. Through the lone, inavoidable years of struggle on the Quest, they can, to that extent, act the part of a teacher or guide. However, it must be remembered that some are infinitely more worthwhile than others, and it is essential for one to be able to discriminate between what is true and helpful and what is false worthless. Now let us look at quite a different form of enslavement and liberation brought about by our finitude in this World. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

ImageIn contrast to much of what has been said and much of what I myself have said against technology, I want to speak for the saving power of the technical control of nature. This is a bold statement to make in a period when such control has reached a peak and, at the same time, its injurious and destructive aspects have become more manifest than ever. Every technical invention elevates humans above their terrestrial stage, liberating one from much drudgery, conquering the narrow limits of one’s movements in time and space, saving one from innumerable smaller and greater evils to which one is subject as a part of nature, for instance, unnecessary pain and unnecessary death. These technical innovations have been broken in body and mind by being suddenly deprived of them. We know the destructive possibilities in technology; we know that it can annihilate all life on Earth and bring history to an end. We also know that it can keep human’s spirit away from salvation in a deeper and more lasting sense. We know that it can transform beings themselves into a thing and a tool. Nevertheless, in the great feat of technical control we have a break-though of the eternal into the temporal; they cannot be ignored when we speak of saving power and salvation. In the ancient World, great political leaders were called saviors. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

ImageThe reason the ancient political leaders were called saviours is because they liberated nations, and groups within them from misery, enslavement, and war. This is another kind of healing, reminiscent of the words of the last book of the Bible, which say in poetic language that the leaves of the tree of life are for the healing of the nations. How can nations be healed? One may say: They can be liberated from external conquers or internal oppressors. However, can they be healed? Can they be saved? The prophets give the answer: If there is a small minority, a group of people who represent what the nation is called to be, Nations are saved. They may be defeated, but their spirit will be a power of resistance against the evil spirits who are detrimental to the nation. The question of saving power in the nation is the question of whether there is a minority, even a small one, which is willing to resist the anxiety produced by propaganda, the conformity enforced by threat, the hatred stimulated by ignorance. The future of this country and its spiritual values is not dependent as much on atomic defense as on the influence such groups will have on the spirit in which the nation will thin and act. And this is true of humankind as a whole. Its future will be dependent on a saving group, embodied in one nation or crossing through all nations. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

ImageThere is saving power in humankind, but there is also the hidden will to self-destruction. It depends on every one of us which side will prevail. There is no divine promise that humanity will survive this or the next year. However, it may depend on the saving power effective in your or me, whether it will survive. (It my depend on the amount of healing and liberating grace which works through any of us with respect to social justice, racial equality, and political wisdom.) Unless many of us say to ourselves: Through the saving power working in me, humankind may be saved or lost—it will be lost. However, in order to be the bearers of saving power, we must be saved ourselves; the wall separating us from eternal life must be broken through. And here is one thing which strengthens the wall and keeps us sick and enslaved. It is our estrangement and guilt which are the impediments which keep us from reaching eternal life here and now. The judgment against us which we confirm in our conscience is the sickness unto death, the despair of life, from which we must be healed in order to say yes to life. Healed life is new life, delivered from the bondage of the evil one. Here the last two petitions of the Lord’s Prayer become one petition: forgive our trespasses, and deliver us from the evil one—this is one and the same thing. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

Image And if we call Jesus, the Christ, our saviour, then we mean that in him we see the power which heals up by accepting us and which there is reconciliation with ourselves, with our World, and with the divine Ground of our World and ourselves. And now the last question: Who shall be saved, liberated, healed? The fourth gospel says: The World! The reunion with the eternal from which we come, from which we are separated, to which we shall return, is promised to everything that is. We are saved not as individual, but in unity with all others and with the Universe. Our own liberation does not leave the enslaved ones alone, our own healing is a part of the great healing of the World. Therefore, two other petition of the Lord’s Prayer also ask the same: Save us from the evil one, and Thy Kingdom come! This Kingdom is His creation, liberated and healed.  When we look from time and eternity, this is what we hope for. Deliver us—heal us—that is the cry of everything that is; of each of us in unity with all humankind and in unity with the whole Universe. The divine answer is: I shall return to me what is separated from me because it belongs to me. I am liberating you today as I did before and will do in the future. Today, when you hear these words, “I am liberating you, I am healing you,” do not resist! #Randolphharris 11 of 16

ImageUnderstanding is the basis of care. What you would take care of you must first understand, whether it be a petunia or a nation. If you would care for your spiritual core—your heart or will—you must understand it. That is, you must understand your spirit. If you would form your hear in godliness or assist others in that process, you must understand what the heart is and what it does, and especially its place in the overall system of human life. Some years ago The Reader’s Digest ran, at intervals, helpful articles on the various parts of the body: the ear, the lungs, the foot, the stomach, and so forth. The aim was to put readers in better position to care for their physical healthy. The titles were always similar: “Hi, I’m Joe’s Liver” (or lung, or foot, and so on). The properties and structure of the liver or other organ would be described, and its role in the body as a whole explained. Then there would be some discussion of how to keep that particular body part in good condition and to assist it in its function. Now we might have titled this essay, “Hi, I’m Joe’s Heart”—in the spiritual sense of “heart.” Its aim is to explain the nature of the heart (spirit, or will) and its function in the person as a whole. In order to do this we will take a look at the whole person and distinguish the various aspects, including the heart. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

ImageThis is not an easy task under any circumstances, but it is made triply difficult by the fact that the nature of the person is, today, a battlefield of conflicting academic, scientific, artistic, religious, legal, and political viewpoints. In our culture, it is the academic that governs the idea systems of our World and opposes traditional views of human nature—specifically, the Judeo-Christian or biblical understanding of human life. Today, you will hear many presumably learned people say that there is no such thing as human nature, or that human beings do not have a nature. Now, there is a long historical development back of this view, which we cannot deal with here, and it is not entirely without an important point. However, that point is mis-made in the statement that human beings do not have a nature. It then becomes a part of unchecked political and moral rage against identity that characterizes modern life. This is a rage predicated upon the idea that identity restricts freedom. If ai m a human being, as opposed to, say, a brussels sprout or a zebra, that places a restriction upon what I can do, what I ought to do, or what should be done to me. Now, this embattled state of human nature tells us at least two things: First, it tells us that the issue of human nature is of great importance—to important for us to leave alone. If we are to have anything useful to say about spiritual formation and about the spiritual life that Jesus brings, we must deal with it. #RandolphHarrs 13 of 16

ImageOtherwise, what we say will have no relation to the concrete existence of real human beings, and this, unfortunately, is all too often the case in speaking of the spiritual. Second, it tells us that the confusion now publicly prevailing over the makeup of the human being may not be due to its inherent obscurity. Rather, it may be due to the fact that it is a field where strongly armed prejudices—assumptions about what must be the case, “do not bother me with facts”—prevent even well-intended people from seeing what, at least in basic outline is fairly obvious, simple, and straightforward. We especially have in mind opinions to the effect that a human being is purely physical, just a terrestrial being—basically, just as the human brain. Or the opinion that human beings are, as such, good, or not to be forced to do anything that do not want to do. Or the opinion that human beings do not actually have a nature and that all classifications of them—male/female, African/European, and so on—are social constructions with no reality apart from the judgements and motivations of social groups or cultures. At present, governmental and social institutions are heavily invested in such opinions favoring the social construction of the human being. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

Image This current state of affairs may prevent otherwise thoughtful people from seeing the value of what has traditionally been regarded as the best of common sense about life and of what has been preserved in the wisdom traditions of most cultures—especially in two of the greatest World sources of wisdom about the human self, the Judeo-Christian and the Greek, the biblical and the classical. Now, when we set aside contemporary prejudices and carefully examine these two great sources, I believe it will become clear that heart, spirit, and will (or their equivalents) are words that refer to one and the same thing, the same fundamental component of the person. However, they do so under different aspects. “Will” refers to the component’s power to initiate, to create, to bring about what did not exist before. “Spirit” refers to its fundamental nature as distinct and independent from physical reality. And “heart” refers to its position in the human being, as the center or core to which every other component of the self owes its proper functioning. However, it is the same dimension of the human being that has all these features. Merciful and most loving God, by Whose will and bounty Jesus Christ our Lord humbled Himself for this—that He might exalt the whole race of humans; and descended to the depths for the purpose of lifting up the lowly; and was born, God-Man, by the virgin, for this cause—that He might restore in humans the lost celestial image; grant that Thy people may cleave unto Thee, that as Thou hast redeemed them by Thy bounty, they may ever please Thee by devoted service. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

ImageThese spiritual subjects are becoming more widely known and more studied than they were a half century ago. There has been quite a follow of literature, original works, commentaries, and translations in our time making both mystical and philosophic ideas more available. It is not possible for most earnest seekers living in the free countries to come into possession of teaching. Be present, O Lord, to our supplications; and let Thy people, who were framed by Thy making and restore by Thy power, be also saved by Thy continual operation, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Grant, we beseech Thee, Almighty God, that as we are bathed in the new light of Thine Incarnate Word, that which shines by faith in our minds may blaze out likewise in our actions; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Grant to us, Almighty God, that as Thy Salvation, wondrous with a new and Heavenly light, went forth in this World to redeem life on Earth, so it may ever beams forth in the renewal of our hearts; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. “Remember, remember that it is upon the rock of our Redeemer, who is Christ, the Son of God, that ye must build your foundation; that when the devil shall send forth his mighty winds, yea, his shafts in the whirlwind, yea, when all his hail and his mighty storm shall beat upon you, it shall have no power over you to drag you down to the gulf of misery and endless wo, because of the rock upon which ye are built, which is a sure foundation, a foundation whereon if people build they cannot fall,” report Helaman 5.12. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16Image

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The Soul is One of the Few Places Left Where One Can be Private–The Edge of Sleep Can be Such a Precious Time!

ImageThe edge of sleep can be such a precious time. I felt that quickening again, that prodding from the depths of my soul that some great change was taking place in me, a vital change—another nagging thought that, some to do with language. What was it? One gets thrilled and frightened at the same time in the presence of the soul because it reminds one about one’s past, present, and, most, of the possibilities of future. A basic cause for sublime embarrassment about using the divine name—the doubt about God Himself. Such doubt is universally human, and God would not be God if we could possess Him like any object of our familiar World, and verify his reality like any other reality under inquiry. Unless doubt is conquered, there is no faith. Faith must overcome something; it must leap over the ordinary process that provide evidence, because its object is possesses the whole realm where scientific verification is possible. Faith is the courage that conquers doubt, not by removing it, but by taking it as an element into itself. I am convinced that the element of doubt, conquered in faith, is never completely lacking in any serious affirmation of God. It is not always on the surface; but it always gnaws at the depth of our being. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

ImageWe may know people intimately who have a seemingly primitive unshaken faith, but it is not difficult to discover the underswell of doubt that in critical moments surges up to the surface. Religious leaders tell us both directly and indirectly of the struggle in their minds between faith and unfaith. From fanatics of faith we hear beneath their unquestioning affirmations of God the shrill sound of their repressed doubt. It is repressed, but not annihilated. On the other hand, listening to the cynical denials of God that are an expression of the flight from the meaning of life, we hear the voice of a carefully covered despair, a despair that demonstrates not assurance but doubt about their negation. And in our encounter with those who assume scientific reasons to deny God, we find that they are certain of their denial only so long as they battle—and rightly so—against superstitious ideas of God. When, however, they ask the question of God Who is really God—namely, the question of the meaning of life as a whole and their own life, including their scientific work, their self-assurance tumbles for neither one who affirms nor one who denies God can be ultimately certain about one’s affirmation or one’s denial. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

ImageDoubt, and not certitude, is our human situation, whether we affirm or deny God. And perhaps the differences between them is not so great as one usually thinks. They are probably very similar in their mixture of faith and doubt. Therefore, the denial of God, if serious, should not shake us. What should trouble everyone who takes life seriously is the existence of indifferences. For one who is indifferent, when hearing the name of God, and feels, at the same time, that the meaning of one’s life is being questioned, denies one’s true humanity. It is doubt in the depth of faith that often produces sublime embarrassment. Such embarrassment can be an expression of conscious or unconscious honesty. Have we not felt how something in us sometimes makes us stop, perhaps only for a moment, when we want to say “God”? This moment of hesitation may express a deep feeling for God. It says something about one who hesitates to use it. Sometimes we hesitate to use the word “God” even without words, when we are alone; we may hesitate to speak to God even privately and voicelessly, as in prayer. It may be that doubt prevents us from praying. And beyond this we may feel that the abyss between God and us makes the use of His name impossible for us; we do not dare to speak to Him, because we feel Him standing on the other side of the abyss from us. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

ImageThis can be a profound affirmation of God. The silent embarrassment of using the divine name can protect us against violating the divine mystery. We have considered the silence of tact and the silence of honesty concerning the divine name. However, behind them both possesses something more fundamental, the silence of awe, that seems to prohibit the speaking of God altogether. However, is this the last word demanded by the divine mystery? Must we spread silence around what concerns us more than anything else—the meaning of our existence? The answer is—no! For God Himself has given humankind names for Himself in those moments when He has broken into our finitude and made Himself manifest. We can, and must use these names. For silence has power only if it is the other side of speaking, and in this way becomes itself a kind of speaking. This necessity is both our justification and our being judged, when we gather together in the name of God. We are an assembly where we speak about God. We are a church. The church is the place where the mystery of the holy should be experienced wit awe and sacred embarrassment. However, is this our experience? Are our prayers, communal or personal, a use or a misuse of the divine name? #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

ImageDo we feel the sublime embarrassment that so many people outside the churches feel? When, as ministers, we point to the Divine Presence in the sacraments, are we gripped by awe? Or, as theological interpreters of the holy, are we too sure that we can really explain God to others? When fluent Biblical quotations or quick, mechanized words of prayer pour from our mouths, is there enough sacred embarrassment in us? Do we preserve the respectful distance from the Holy-Itself, when we claim to have the truth about God, or to be at the place of His Presence or to be the administrators of His Power—the proprietors of the Christ? How much embarrassment, how much awe is alive in Saturday or Sunday devotional services all over the World? And now let me ask the church and all its members, including you and myself, a bold question. Could it be that, in order to judge the misuse of God’s name within the church, God reveals Himself from time to time by creating silence about Himself? Could it be that sometimes He prevents the use of his name in order to protect His name, that He withholds from a generation what was natural to previous generations—the use of the word God? Could it be that godlessness is not caused only by human resistance, but also by God’s paradoxical action—using beings and the forces by which they are driven to judge the assemblies that gather in His name and take His name in vain? #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

ImageWhen speaking of him, is the secular silence about God that we experience everywhere today perhaps God’s way of forcing His church back to a sacred embarrassment? It may be bold to ask such questions. Certainly there can be no answer, because we do not know the character of the divine providence. However, even without an answer, the question itself should warn all those inside the church to whom the use of His name comes too easily. The entire being, who feels all needs by turns, will take nothing as an equivalent for life but the fulness of living itself. Since the essence of things are as a matter of fact disseminated through the whole extent of time and space, it is in their spread-outness and alternation that one will enjoy them. When weary of the concrete clash and dust and pettiness, one will refresh oneself by a bath in the eternal springs, or fortify oneself by a look at the immutable natures. However, one will only be a visitor, not a dweller in the region; one will never carry the philosophic yoke upon one’s shoulders, and when tired of the gray monotony of one’s problems and insipid spaciousness of one’s result, will always escape gleefully into the teeming and dramatic richness of the concrete World. So abstract concept can be a valid substitute for a concrete reality except with reference to a particular interesting he conceiver. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

ImageThe interest of theoretic rationality, the relief of identification, is but one of a thousand human purposes. When others rear their heads, it must pack up its little bundle and retire till its turn recurs. The exaggerated dignity and value that philosophers have claimed for their solutions is this greatly reduced. The only virtue their theoretic conception need have is simplicity, and a simple conception is an equivalent for the world only so far as the World is simple,–the World meanwhile, whatever simplicity it may harbor, being also a mightily complex affair. Enough simplicity remains, however, and enough urgency in our craving to reach it, to make the theoretic function one of the most invincible of human impulses. The quest of the fewest elements of things is an ideal that some will follow, as long as there are beings to think at all. However, suppose the goal attained. Supposed that at last we have a system unified in the sense that has been explained. Our World can now be conceived simply, and our mind enjoys the relief. Our universal concept has made the concrete chaos rational. However, now I ask, Can that which is the ground of rationality in all else be itself properly called rational? It would seem at first sight that it might. One is tempted at any rate to say that, since the craving for rationality is appeased by the identification of one thing with another, a datum which left nothing else outstanding might quench that craving definitively, or be rational in se. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

ImageNo otherness being left to annoy us, we should sit down at peace. In other words, as the theoretic tranquility of the boor results from one’s spinning no further considerations about one’s chaotic Universe, so any datum whatever (provided it were simple, clear, and ultimate) ought to banish puzzle from the Universe of the philosopher and confer peace, inasmuch as there would then be for one absolutely no further considerations to spin. A difficult is solved, a mystery unriddled, when it can be shown to resemble something else; to be an example of a fact already known. Mystery is isolation, exception, or it may be apparent contradiction: the resolution of the mystery is found in assimilation, identity, fraternity. When all things are assimilated, so far as assimilation can go, so far as likeness hold, there is an end to explanation; there is an end to what the mind can do, or can intelligently desire. The path of science as exhibited in modern ages is toward generality, wider and wider, until we reach the highest, the widest laws of every department of things; there explanation is finished, mystery ends, perfect vision is gained. However, unfortunately, this first answer will not hold. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

ImageOur mind is so wedded to the process of seeing an other beside every item of its experience, that when the notion of an absolute datum is presented to it, it goes through its usual procedure and remains pointing at the void beyond, as if in that lay further matter for contemplation. In short, it spins for itself the further absolute consideration of nonentity enveloping the being of its datum; and as that leads nowhere, back recoils the thought toward its datum again. However, there is no natural bridge between nonentity and this particular datum, and the thought stands oscillating hither and tither, wondering “Why was there anything but nonentity; why just this universal datum and not another?” and finds no end, in wandering mazes lost. When the attempt to fuse the manifold into a single totality has been most successful, when the conception of the Universe as a unique fact is nearest its perfection, the carving for further explanation, the ontological wonder-sickness, arises in its extreme form. The uneasiness which keeps the never-resting clock of metaphysics in motion, is the consciousness that the non-existence of this World is just as possible as its existence. The notion of nonentity may thus be called the parent of the philosophic craving in its subtilest and profoundest sense. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

ImageAbsolute existence is absolute mystery, for its relations with the nothing remain unmediated to our understanding. One philosopher only had pretended to throw a logical bridge over this chasm. Hegel, by trying to show that nonentity and concrete being are linked together by a series of identities of a synthetic kind, binds everything conceivable into a unity, with no outlying notion to disturb the free rotary circulation of the mind within its bounds. Since such unchecked movement gives the feeling of rationality, he must be held, if he has succeeded, to have eternally and absolutely quenched all rational demands. However, for those who deem Hegel’s heroic effort to have failed, nought remains but to confess that when all things have been unified to the supreme degree, the notion of a possible other than the actual may still haunt our imagination and prey upon our system. The bottom of being I left logically opaque to us, as something which we simply come upon and find, and about which (if we wish to act) we should pause and wonder as little as possible. The philosopher’s logical tranquility is thus in essence no other than the boor’s. They differ only as to the point at which each refuses to let further considerations upset the absoluteness of the data one assumes. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

ImageThe boor does so immediately, and is liable at any moment to the ravages of many kinds of doubt. The philosopher does not do so till unity has been reached, and is warranted against the inroads of those considerations, but only practically, not essentially, secure from the blighting breath of the ultimate Why? If one cannot exorcise this question, one must ignore or blink it, and, assuming the data of one’s system as something given, and the gift as ultimate, simply proceed to a life of contemplation or of action based on it. There is no doubt that this acting on an opaque necessity is accompanied by a certain pleasure. There is an infinite significance in fact. Necessity is the last and highest point that we can reach. It is not only the interest of ultimate and definitive knowledge, but also that of the feelings, to find a last repose and an ideal equilibrium in an uttermost datum which can simply not be other than it is. Such is the attitude of ordinary beings in their theism, God’s fiat being in physics and morals such an uttermost datum. Such is also the attitude of all hard-minded analysts and Verstandesmenschen. Of experiences as a whole no account can be given. However, meditating attempts may be made. The peace of rationality may be sought through ecstasy when logic fails. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

ImageTo religious persons of every shade of doctrine moments come when the World, as it is, seems so divinely orderly, and the acceptance of it by the heart so rapturously complete, that intellectual questions vanish; nay, the intellect itself is hushed to sleep,–thought is not; enjoyment it expires. Ontological emotion so fills the soul that ontological speculation can no longer overlap it and put her girdle of interrogation-marks round existence. Even the least religious of beings must have felt when loafing on the grass on some transparent summer morning, that swiftly arose and spread round one the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the Earth. At such moments of energetic living we feel as if there were something diseased and contemptible, yea vile, in theoretic grubbing and brooding. In the eye of healthy sense the philosopher is at best a learned fool. It is a matter of complete assurance and scientific observation for the truth seeker that God exists, that beings have souls, that we are here on Earth to become untied with this soul, and that one can attain true happiness only by following good and avoiding evil. One is not a quester after saintly prestige: one will not outwardly try to present oneself as a holy person. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

ImageOne could never make a commercial business out of spiritual uplift, nor even turn it into a paid professional career. How different from those ambition leaders whose pretended motive of serving humanity is really a cover for the service of their own ego. People may think a person who is attuned to their soul exercises infinite tolerance and patience. This is because they have no standard by which to measure the qualities of one’s rhythm of consciousness. Tolerance and patience imply their opposites. People who are connected to their soul reactions conform to neither. One literally lives where they do not apply. The set of conditions which for the ordinary being gives rise to the possibility of tolerance and patience or their opposites is for one an opportunity for reflection. Such a beings has no enemies, although one may have those who regard one as their enemy. For hate cannot enter one’s heart; goodwill towards all is its fragrant atmosphere. In all relations, whether as a friend or a partner or spouse, one is possessing, but one requires in return to be unpossessed. Here, then, is the point which I see the new mission of humanity, to rise up incomparably higher than all those preceding. Up until the present, many people have been principally occupied with the material aspect of reality. From now on one must give their attention to reality as a living function. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

ImageThe soul is one of the few places left where one can be private. The soul’s existence is not persuasion, but knowledge—it is an instrument of choice, and the choice is always yours, not your elected or designated leaders. The adept has no indispensable need to know. One is being, which is one’s foundational consciousness—pure, unmixed with mental images or thoughts, and not dispersed in the existence of the five sense. One does not seek and will not accept those who are already members of any society or group which provides them with instruction, for one will not interfere between the teacher and the taught. Truth must be sought in its fullness, not as a supplement to the teaching of others. For one will not adulterate truth. The truth one has to give is not the same as that taught by one and one does not want to distort it to fit such misconceptions. One who has found one’s genuine self does not need to pose for the benefit of gushing disciples. One obtains the deepest satisfaction merely from being oneself. What other may say about one in praise cannot being one anything like pleasures which one’s own higher consciousness beings one. One’s ever-present calmness is not a mask for secretive emotions, inner conflicts, mental tensions, or explosive passions. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

ImageOne has paid a high price for this serenity. One has accepted the necessity of walking alone, the shattering of all illusions, the denudation of human desire, and the funeral of animal passion. The illuminated individual’s conduct in this World is a guided one. One’s senses tell one what is happening in the World about one, but one’s soul guides one to a proper evaluation of those sense reports. In this way one lives in the World, but is not of it. Of one alone is it true today that one’s is a spiritual life. One possesses a largeness of heart at all times, an immense tolerance towards the frailty of faulty men and women. Most of the studies throw light on the attitudes on the part of the helping person which makes a relationship growth-promoting or growth-inhibiting. A careful study of parent-child relationships denotes that parental attitudes towards children, the “acceptant-democratic” seemed most growth-facilitating. Children of these parents with their warm and equalitarian attitudes showed an accelerated intellectual development (an increasing I.Q.), more originality, more emotional security and control, less excitability than children from other types of homes. Though somewhat slow initially in social development, they were, by the time they reached school age, popular, friendly, non-aggressive leaders. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

ImageWhen parents’’ attitudes are classed as “actively rejectant” the children show a slightly decelerated intellectual development, relatively poor use of the abilities they do possess, and some lack of originality. They are emotionally unstable, rebellious, aggressive, and quarrelsome. The children of parents with other attitude syndromes tend in various respect to fall in between these extremes. I am sure that these findings do not surprise us as related to child development. I would like to suggest that they probably apply to other relationships as well, and that the counselor or physician or administrator who is warmly emotional and expressive, respectful of the individuality of oneself and of the others, and who exhibits a non-possessive caring, probably facilitates self-realization much as does a parent with these attitudes. When one has fully accomplished this passing-over, all the elements of one’s lower nature will then have been fully eliminated. The ego will be destroyed. Instead of being enslaved by its own senses and passions, blinded by its own thoughts and ignorance, one’s mind will be inspired, enlightened, and liberated by God. Yet life in the human self will not be destroyed because one has entered life in the divine God. However, neither will it continue in the old and lower way. That self will henceforth function as a perfectly obedient instrument of the soul and no longer of the animal body or intellectual nature. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

ImageNo evil thought and no animal passion can ever again take hold of one’s mind. What remains of one’s character is therefore the incorruptible part and the immortal part. Death may rob one of lesser things, but not of the thing which one cherishes most. Having already parted in one’s heart with what is perishable, one can await it without perturbation and with sublime resignation. When we comprehend what it is that must go into the making of a truth seeker, how many and how diverse the experiences through which one has passed in former days, we realize that such a being’s wisdom is part of one’s bloodstream. The free soul is a living room to an ordinary citizen, a treasury to a researcher, and a chamber of horrors to a dictator. “Thou also sayest, except we repent we shall perish. How knowest thou the thought and intent of our hearts? How knowest thou that we have cause to repent? How knowest thou that we are not a righteous people? Behold, we have built sanctuaries, and we do assemble ourselves together to worship God. We do believe that God will says all humans,” reports Alam 21.6. Not only does God supply infinite riches to our soul, but we may sit at home, and yet be in all quarters of the Earth. The eternal access to God is not a privilege, but a necessity for any free society. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17Image

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