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I Have Dreamed, or in Other Words, I Have Seen a Vision—I Have Reason to Rejoice in the Lord!

March 26, 2020 1:32 am

We still do not know one-thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us. I can complain because the rose bush has thorns or rejoice because the thorn bush has roses. Lehi sees a vision of the tree of life—he partakes of its fruit and desires his family to do likewise—he sees a rod of iron, a strait and narrow path, and the mists of darkness that enshroud humans—Sariah, Nephi, and Sam partake of the fruit, but Laman and Lemuel refuse. About 600-529 Before Christ. “And it came to pass that we had gathered together all manner of seeds every kind, both of grain of every kind, and also of the seeds of fruit of every kind. And it came to pass that while my father tarried in the wilderness he spake unto us, saying: Behold, I have dreamed; or in other words, I have seen a vision. And behold, because of the thing which I have seen, I have reason to rejoice in the Lord because of Nephi and also of Sam; for I have reason to suppose that they, and also many of their seed, will be saved. However, behold, Leman and Lemuel, I fear exceedingly because of you; for behold, methought I saw in my dream, a dark and dreary wilderness. And it came to pass that I saw a man, and he was dressed in a white robe; and he came and stood before me. And it came to pass that he spake unto me, and bade me follow him. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

“And it came to pass that as I followed him I beheld myself that I was in a dark and dreary waste. And after I had traveled for the space of many hours in darkness, I began to pray unto the Lord that he would have mercy on me, according to the multitude of his tender mercies. And it came to pass after I have prayed unto the Lord I beheld a large and spacious field. And it came to pass that I beheld a tree, whose fruit was desirable to make one happy. And it came to pass that I did go forth and partake of the fruit thereof; and I beheld that it was most sweet, above all that I ever before tasted. Yea, and I beheld that the fruit thereof was white, to exceed all the whiteness that had ever seen. And as I partook of the fruit thereof it filled my soul with exceedingly great joy; wherefore, I began to be desirous that my family should partake of it also; for I knew that it was desirable above all other fruit. And as I cast my eyes round about, that perhaps I might discover my family also, I beheld a river of water; and it ran along, and was near the tree of which I was partaking the fruit. And I looked to behold from whence it came; and I saw the head of thereof a little way off and at the head thereof I beheld your mother Sariah, and Sam, and Nephi; and they stood as far as if they knew not wither they should go. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

“And it came to pass that I beckoned unto them; and I also did say unto them with a loud voice that they should come unto me, and partake of the fruit, which was desirable above all other fruit. And it came to pass that they did come unto me and partake of the fruit also. And it came to pass that I was desirous that Laman and Lemuel should come and partake of the fruit also; wherefore, I cast mine eyes toward the head of the river, that perhaps I might see them. And it came to pass that I saw them, but they would not come and partake of the fruit. And I beheld a rod of iron, and it extended along the bank of the river, and led to the tree by which I stood. And I also beheld a strait and narrow path, which came along by the rod of iron, even to the tree by which I stood; and it also led by the head of the fountain, unto a large and spacious field, as if it had been a World. And I saw numberless concourses of people, many of whom were pressing forward, that they might obtain the path which led unto the tree by which I stood. And it came to pass that they did come forth, and commence in the path which led to the tree. And it came to pass that there arose a mist of darkness; yea, even an exceedingly great mist of darkness, insomuch that they who had commenced in the path did lose their way, that they wandered off and were lost. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

“And it came to pass that I behold others pressing forward, and they came forth and caught hold of the end of the rod of iron; and they did press forward through the mist of darkness, clinging to the rod of iron, even until they did come forth and partake of the fruit of the tree. And after they had partaken of the fruit of the tree they did cast their eyes about as if they were ashamed. And I also cast my eyes round about, and behold, on the other side of the river of water, a great and spacious building; and it stood as it were in the air, high above the Earth. And it was filled with people, both old and young, both male and female; and their manner of dress was exceedingly fine; and they were in the attitude of mocking and pointing their fingers towards those who had come at and were partaking of the fruit. And after they had tasted of the fruit they were ashamed, because of those that were scoffing at them; and they fell away into forbidden paths and were lost,” reports 1 Nephi 8.1-28. Intelligence penetrated like an eagle’s sight beneath the World-illusion and saw it for what it is—a cosmic process of continual change which never comes to an end, a Universal movement whose first impetus and final exhaustion will never be known, a flux of absolute duration therefore unimaginable. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

And the self-actualized who attains to the knowledge of THAT which forever seems to be changing but forever paradoxically retains its own pure reality, for one as for the ignorant, the flux must go on. However, it will go on here on this Earth, not in the same mythical Heaven or mirage-like Hell. He will repeatedly have to take flesh, as all others will have to, so long as duration lasts, that is, forever. For one cannot sit apart like others while their compassion is too profound to waste itself in mere sentiment. It demands the profound expression of sacrificial service in motion. We live in a World which is full of misery and ignorance, and the plain duty of each and all of us is to try to make the little corner one can influence somewhat less miserable and somewhat less ignorant that it was before one entered it. The escape into Heaven for one is only the escape into the inner realization of the truth whilst alive: it is not to escape from the external cycle of rebirths and deaths. It is a change of attitude. However, that bait had to be held out to one at an earlier stage until one’s will and nerve were strong enough to endure this revelation. There is no escape except inwards. For the self-actualized is too compassionate to withdraw into proud indifferentism and too understanding to rest completely satisfied with one’s own wonderful attainment. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

The sounds of suffering of human, the ignorance that is the root of these sufferings beat ceaselessly on the tympana of one’s ears. What can one do but answer, and answer with one’s very life—which one gives in perpetual reincarnation upon the cross of flesh as a vicarious sacrifice for others. It is thus alone that one achieves eternal life in God, not by fleeing forever as one could if one willed—into the Great Unconsciousness, but by the suffering forever the pains and pangs of perpetual rebirth that one may help or guide one’s own. The mystic arrives at treating all people alike through the emotion of love; the illuminate arrives at it through the knowledge of reason. The first is likely to be changeable, the last permanent because emotion is variable, reason firm. People forget how fast you did a job—but they remember how well you did it. The present is the point at which time touches eternity. Well, obviously, none of this had been unimpeachable to the critics over the years. “Words like “irrationality,” “Illusion,” “willful and heroic dedication”—these rub many people the wrong way. They have hardly helped make our World any better, especially in modern times. We must be animated about the demonic crisis of the times, and be wary of life-enhancing illusions. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

It is precisely at this point that the science of humans comes in. We know that Nazism was a viable hero system that lived the illusion of the defeat of evil on Earth. We know the terrifying dynamic of victimage and scapegoating all across history, and we know what it means—the offering of the other’s body in order to buy off one’s own death, the sadistic formula par excellence: break the bones and spill the blood of the victim in the service of some “higher truth” that the sacrificers alone possess. To treat the body with the same scorn that God seems to treat it is to draw close to Him. Well, we know these things only too well in our time. The problem is what to do with them. People cannot abandon the heroic. If we say that the irrational or mythical is part of the human groping for transcendence, we do not give it any blanket of approval. However, groups f men can do what they have always done—argue about heroism, assess the cost of it, show that it is self-defeating, a fantasy, a dangerous illusion and not one that is life-enhancing and ennobling. The great question is: If illusions are needed, how can we have those that are capable of correction, and how can we have those that will not deteriorate into delusions? #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

If humans live in myths and not absolutes, there is nothing we can do or say about that. However, we can argue for nondestructive myths; this is the task of what would be a general science of society. This admission of the need for guiding heroic myths, and at the same time the plea to be wary of their costs, reconciles a long-standing argument in social theory. Reason is a guide in social life. I have argued elsewhere that one very graphic way of looking at mental illness is to see it as the laying onto others of one’s own hyperfears of life and death. From this perspective we can also see that leaders of nations, citizens of so-called democracies, normal people are also doing the very same thing all the time: laying their power-expiation immunity trip onto everyone else. Today the whole World is already becoming uncomfortable with the repeated war games and biological-weapons test by nations of power trips, test that lay their danger onto innocent and powerless neighbours. In a way it is the drama of the family and the Feifferian love affair writ large across the face of the planet, the “family” of nations. There are no particular leaders or special councils of elite to blame in all this, simply because most people identify with the symbols of power and agree to them. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

The nation offers immortality to all its members. It is wrong to argue that psychically crippled people, what some call “necrophiliac characters,” do evil thing by valuing death over life and so lay waste to life because it makes them uncomfortable. Life makes whole nations of normal people uncomfortable, and hence the serene accord and abandon with which people have defeated themselves all through history. This is the great weakness, as we have now discovered, of Enlightenment rationalism, the easy hope that by the spread of reason humans will stand up to their full size and renounce irrationality. The Enlightenment thinkers understood well the dangers of the mass mind, and they thought that by the spread of science and education all of this could change. The great Russian sociologist Nikolai Mikhailovsky had already singled out the hero as the enemy of democracy, the one who causes others to yield their wills because of the safety it offers them. The thing that had to be done was to prevent society from turning the individual into a tool for the sake of social efficiency and safety. How could the infringement of the individuality be overcome? Mikhailovsky answered in the same vein as modern humanist psychiatrists: by giving the individual the opportunity for harmonious development. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

At about the same time that other great Enlightenment man, Emerson, made his famous plea for self-reliance, for persons with full and independent insides so that they could have the stability to withstand herd enthusiasms and herd fears. This whole tradition was brought up to date by Herbert Marcuse in a brilliant essay on the ideology of death. He argued that death has always been used by leaders and elites as an ideology to get the masses to conform and to yield up their autonomy. Leaders win allegiance to the cultural causa sui project because it protects against vulnerability. The polis, the state, God—all these are symbols of infallibility in which the masses willingly embed their fearful freedoms. There we have it: the culmination of the Enlightenment in a proper focus on the fundamental dynamics of mass slavishness. On the highest level of sophistication we know in detail what people fear and how they deny that fear. Enlightenment rationalism is too easy a creed, and so we would expect to see this weakness in all its thinkers. Some believe that the ultimate cause of all anxiety is death, and this sustains unfreedom. Humans are not free as long as death has not become really one’s own, that is, as long as it has not been brought under one’s autonomy. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

Alas, the fact is that humans do not have any autonomy under which to bring things. This great and fundamental problem for the whole career of Enlightenment science states that whether the individual is at all in a position to grow beyond some kind of transference, some form of moral dependence, and to affirm and accept oneself from oneself cannot be said. Only in the creative type does this seem possible to some extent. However, it can be said that even the highest, most individuated creative type can only manage autonomy to some extent. The fact is the people cannot and do not stand on their own powers; therefore they cannot make death their own. Moral dependence—guilt—is a natural motive of the human condition and has to be absolved from something beyond oneself. One young revolutionary saw that his guilt was absorbed by submission to the revolutionary cell. The weakness of the Enlightenment, then, was that it did not understand human nature—and it apparently still does not. We must ask for the good conscience to be a coward, the uprooting of heroic sublimation. However, this is too easy: even if people admit they are cowards, they still want to be saved. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

There is no harmonious development, no child-rearing program, no self-reliance that would take away from people their need for a beyond on which the meaning of their lives. There is a fallacy in the minds of many that overlooks the depth and universality of the fear of death. The other fallacy is to fail to see the naturalness of existential guilt—and this also fails. The task of social theory is to show how society aggravates and uses natural fears, but there is no way to get rid of the fears simply by showing how leaders use them or by saying that people must take them in hand. People will still take one another’s heads because their own heads stick out and they feel exposed and guilty. The task of social theory is not to explain guilt away of to absorb it unthinkingly in still another destructive ideology, but to neutralize it and give it expression in truly creative and life-enhancing ideologies. Let me move on to some learning that I would like to share with you. I like to be heard. A number of times in my life I have felt myself bursting with insoluble problems, or going round and round in tormented circles or, during one period, overcome by feelings of worthlessness and despair. I think I have been more fortunate than most at these times individuals who have been able to hear me and thus to rescue me from the chaos of my feelings, individuals who have been able to hear my meanings a little more deeply than most I have known. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

These persons have heard me without judging me, diagnosing me, appraising me, evaluating me. They have just listened and clarified and responded to me at all the levels at which I was communicating. I can testify that when you are in psychological distress and someone really hears you without passing judgment on you, without truing to take responsibility for you, without trying to mold you, it feels darn good! At these times it has relaxed the tension in me. It has permitted me to bring out the frightening feelings, the guilts, the despair, the confusions that have been a part of my experience. When I have been listened to and what I have been heard, I am able to reperceive my World in a new way and to go on. It is astonishing how elements that seem insoluble become soluble when someone listens, how confusions that seem irremediable turn into relatively clear flowing streams when one is heard. I have deeply appreciated the times that I have experiences this sensitive, empathic, concentrated listening. I dislike it in myself when I cannot hear another, when I do not understand one. If it is only a simple failure of comprehension or a failure to focus my attention on what one is saying or a difficulty in understanding one’s words, then I feel only a very mild dissatisfaction with myself. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

However, what I really dislike in myself is not being able to hear the other person because I am so sure in advance of what one is about to say that I do not listen. It is only afterwards that I realize that I have heard what I have already decided one is saying; I have failed really to listen. Or even worse are those times when I catch myself trying to twist one’s message to make it say what I want one to say, and then only hearing that. This can be a very subtle thing, and it is surprising how skillful I can be in doing it. Just by twisting one’s words a small amount, by distorting one’s meaning just a little, I can make it appear that one is not only saying the thing I want to hear, but that one is the person I want one to be. Only when I realize through one’s protest or through my own gradual recognition that I am subtly manipulating one, do I become disgusted with myself. I know too, from being on the receiving end of this, how frustrating it is to be received for what you are not, to be heard as saying something which you have not said. This creates anger and bafflement and disillusion. When I try to express something which is deeply me, which is part of my own private, inner World, and the other person does not understand, I am terrible frustrated and shut into myself. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

When I take the gamble, the risk, or trying to share something that is very personal with another individual and it is not received and not understood, this is a very deflating and a very lonely experience. I have come to believe that such an experience makes some individuals psychotic. It causes them to give up hoping that anyone can understand them. Once they have lost that hope, then their own inner World, which becomes more and more bizarre, is the only place where they can live. They can no longer live in any shared human experience. I can sympathize with them because I know that when I try to share some feeling aspect of myself which is private, precious, and tentative, and when this communication is met by evaluation, by reassurance, by distortion of my meaning, my very strong reaction is, “Oh, what is the use!” At such a time, one knows what it is to be alone. So, as you can readily see from what I have said thus far, a creative, active, sensitive, accurate, empathic, nonjudgmental listening is for me terribly important in a relationship. It is important for me to provide it; it has been extremely important, especially at certain times in my life, to receive it. I feel that I have grown within myself when I have provided it; I am very sure that I have grown and been released and enhanced when I have received this kind of listening. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

Does adoration lead to anything else? Yes—the presentation of our bodies—our entire lives—in an ultimate act of worship. This is how Isaiah capped his great experience with God: “Here am I. Send me!” reports Isaiah 6.8. Similarly, after the great Paul sings in worshipful doxology—“For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever! Amen,” Romans 11.36, he immediately calls us to submission: “Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—which is your spiritual worship,” as reported in Romans 12.1. As thou wilt; what thou wilt; when thou wilt. Our devotion must culminate in a conscious yielding of every part of our personality, every ambition, every relationship, and every hope to Him. This done, we have reached the apex of personal devotion. As I cautioned when we began, personal devotion cannot and must not be reduced to a few principles such as meditation, confession, adoration, and submission. Neither can it be put in a logical straitjacket. Sometimes we may be called to confession and submission only. Other times, adoration may occupy an extended time, or our devotions will probably be confined to petition only. There will be times when all of it takes place in twenty minutes. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

However, one thing is certain—it will not happen without discipline. The reason many people never have an effective devotional life is, they never plan for it. They do not know what it is because they have never taken the time to find out. They do not pray because the do not set aside the time. Their character never rises to that of Christ’s because they do not expose their lives to His pure light. Their wills stay crooked because they do not tie into Him. The question for prayerless men is a very masculine one: Are we man enough to meditate? To confess? To adore? To submit? To sweat and endure? Give me, O Lord, purity of lips, clean and innocent heart, and rectitude of actions. Give me humility, patience, abstinence, chastity, prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance. Give me the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and strength, the Spirit of knowledge and Godliness, and of Thy fear. Make me ever to seek Thy face with all my heart, all my soul, all my mind; grant me to have a contrite and humbled heart in Thy presence—to prefer nothing to Thy love. Most high, eternal, and ineffable Wisdom, drive away from me the darkness of blindness and ignorance; most high and eternal Strength, deliver me. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

Most high and eternal Fortitude, assist me; most high and incomprehensible Light, illuminate me; most high and infinite Mercy, have mercy on me. God of the publican, be merciful to me a sinner; this I am by nature and practice, this Thy word proclaims me to be, this I hope I feel myself to be; yet Thou hast not left me to despair, for there is no peradventure in Thy grace; I have all the assurance I need that with thee is plenteous redemption. In spite of the number and heinousness of my sins Thou hast given me a token for good; the golden sceptre is held out, and Thou has said “Touch it to live.” May I encourage myself by a sense of Thy all-sufficiency, by faith in Thy promises, by view of the experience of others. To that dear refuge in which so many have sheltered from every storm may I repair, in that fountain always freely open for sin may I be cleansed from every defilement. Sin is that abominable thing which Thy soul hates, and this alone separates Thee and me. Thou cannot contradict the essential perfections of Thy nature; Thou cannot make me happy with Thyself, till Thou hast made me holy like Thyself. O holy God, make me such a creature as Thou cannot take pleasure in, and such a being that I can take pleasure in Thee. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

May I consent to and delight in Thy law after the inner man, never complain over the strictness of Thy demands, but mourn over my want of conformity to them; never question Thy commandments, but esteem them to be right. By Thy Spirit within me may my practice spring from principle, and my dispositions be conformable with my duty. David said in Psalm 40.8, “I desire to do your will, O my God.” Why did David have this desire? It was because, as the remainder of the verse says, “You law is within my heart.” David found a law written in his own heart corresponding to the law written in God’s word. There was an agreeableness between the spiritual nature within hum and the objective law of God external to him. It is that way with a person who is a new creation in Christ. There is a basic though imperfect correspondence between the law written in a believer’s heart and the law written in Scripture. This does not mean we can discard the law written in Scripture, because the law written in the heart is not self-directing—that is, it does not tell us what to do. It only agrees with and responds to the law written in Scripture. This instantaneous act of God by which He begins sanctification in us is just as much a gift of God’s grace as justification. God does not wait until we surrender all, make a second commitment to Christ’s lordship, or anything like that. God gives sanctification by His grace. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

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Distinguish Between Duty and Anxiety, and May our Character and Not Our Circumstance Chiefly Engage Us!

March 7, 2020 3:43 am

Get up every morning know that time is moving forward and God is manifesting your dreams. I do not want to get to the end of my life and find that I just lived the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well. Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. It comes to us at midnight very clean. When it arrives, it is perfect, and it puts itself in our hands and hopes we have learned something from yesterday. A result of human’s vulnerability to death and one’s symbolic consciousness of it is the struggle to get power to fortify oneself. Other beings must simply use those powers that nature provided them with and the neural circuits that animate those powers. However, humans can invent and imagine powers, and they can invent ways to protect power. This means that all the moral categories are power categories; they are not about virtue in any abstract sense. Purity, goodness, rightness—these are ways of keeping power in tact so as to cheat death; the striving for protection is a way of qualifying for extra special immunity not only in this World but in others to come. Hence all categories of dirt, filth, imperfection, and error are vulnerability categories, power problems. For young children Band-Aids are already an obsessive religion that sets the whole tone of it: cleanliness is safety. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

So we see that as an organism humans are fated to perpetuate oneself and as a conscious organism one is fated to identify evil as the threat to that perpetuation. In the same way, one is driven to individuate oneself as an organism, to develop one’s own peculiar talents and personality. An what, then, would be the highest development and use of those talents? To contribute to the struggle against evil, of course. In other words, humans are fated to consider this Earth as a theater for heroism, and one’s life as a vehicle for heroic acts which aim precisely to transcend evil. Each person wants to have one’s life make a difference in the life of humankind, contribute in some way toward securing and furthering that life, make it in some ways less vulnerable, more durable. To be a true hero is to triumph over diseases and things like the Coronavirus, want, death. If it has been able to being real benefits to life of human kind, one knows that one’s life has gad vital human meaning. And so people have always honoured their heroes, especially in religion, medicine, science, diplomacy, and way. Here is where heroism has been most easily identifiable. From Constantine and Christ to Harriet Tubman and De Gaulle, people have called their heroes “saviours” in the literal sense: those who have delivered them from the evil of the termination of life, either of their own immediate lives or of the duration of their people. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

Even more, by one’s own death the hero secures the lives of others, and so the greatest heroic sacrifice is the sacrifice of the god for one’s people. We see this in Columbus, Christ, Robert E. Lee, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr. The giants died to secure humankind; by their blood we are saved. It is almost pathetically logical how humans, the supremely vulnerable beings, developed the cult of logic. However, if we add together the logic of the heroic with the necessary fetishization of evil, we get a formula that is no longer pathetic but terrifying. It explains almost all by itself why humans, of all beings, have caused the most devastation on Earth—the most real evil. Humans struggle extra hard to be immune to death because they alone are conscious of it, as far as we know; but by being able to identify and isolate evil arbitrarily, they are capable of lashing out in all directions against imagined dangers of this World. This means that in order to live one is capable of bringing a large part of the World down around their shoulders. History is just such a testimonial to the frightening costs of heroism. The hero is the one who can go out and get added powers by killing an enemy and taking one’s talismans or one’s scalp or eating one’s heart. Humans become a walking repository of accrued powers. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

Animals can only take in food for power; humans can literally take in the trinkets and bodies of one’s whole World, like we saw in the film Neon Demon. Furthermore, the hero proves one’s power by winning in battle; one shows that one is also favoured by the gods. Also, one can appease the gods by offering to them the sacrifice of the stranger. The hero is, then, the one who accrues power by one’s acts, and who placates invisible powers by one’s expiations. One terminates those who threaten their group, one incorporates their powers to further protect one’s group, one sacrifices others to gain immunity for one’s group. In a word, one becomes a saviour through blood. From the head-hunting and charm-hunting of the primitives to the holocaust of Adolf Hitler, the dynamic is the same: the heroic victory over evil by a traffic in pure power. And the aim is the same: purity, goodness, righteousness—immunity. Hitler Youth were recruited on the basis of idealism; the nice boy next door is the one who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima; the idealistic communist is the one who sided with Stalin against one’s former comrades: terminate to protect the heroic revolution, to assure the victory over evil. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

The ending of a life is sometimes distasteful, but the distaste is swallowed if it is necessary to true heroism: as one of the revolutionaries asked Pyotr Verhovensky in The Possessed, when they were about to end the life of one of their number, “Are other groups also doing this?” In other words, is it the socially heroic thing to do, or are we being arbitrary about identifying evil? Each person wants one’s life to be a marker for goo as one’s group defines it. Humans work their programs of heroism according to the standard of cultural scenarios, from Pontius Pilate through Eichmann and Calley. People cause evil out of good intentions, not out of wicked ones. People cause evil by wanting heroically to triumph over it, because humans are a frightened being who tries to triumph, a being who will not admit one’s own insignificance, that one cannot perpetuate oneself and one’s group forever, that no one is invulnerable no matter how much of the blood of others is spilled to try to demonstrate it. Another way of summing up this whole matter is to contrast evil out of good intentions, but the idea that evil is as a fatality for humans, forever locked in the human heart and soul. This is what gives some psychiatrists, such as Dr. Freud, such a dim view of the future of humans. Many eyes looked to a man of his greatness for a prophecy on human possibilities, but he refused to pose as the magician-seer and give people the false prediction. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

And it is possible that some people do have evil locked in their souls and hearts, and they like to torture and end the life of those who are beautiful and kind because it reduces the competition and it is fun to them see others suffer. As Dr. Freud reported in a late writing: “I have not the courage to rise up before my fellow-humans as a prophet, and I bow to their reproach that I can offer them no consolation.” This is a heavy confession by one of history’s greatest students of humans; but I am citing it not for its honesty or humility, but because of the reason for its pathos. The future of humans was problematic for Dr. Freud because of the instincts that have drive humans and will supposedly always drive them. As he put it, right after the above admission and at the very end of his book: “The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent [it] will succeed in mastering the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction.” The most that humans can seem to do is to put a veneer of civilization and reason over this instinct; but the problem of evil is “born afresh with every child,” as Dr. Freud wrote three years earlier, in 1927, and it takes the form of precise instinctual wishes—incest, lust for ending the life of another, cannibalism. This was human’s repugnant heritage, a heritage that one seems forever destined to work upon the World. From crooked wood of which humans are made, nothing quite straight can be built. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

Yet today we know that Dr. Freud was wrong about evil. Humans are a crooked wood all right, but not in the way that Dr. Freud thought. This is a crucial difference because it means that we do not have to follow Dr. Freud on the exact grounds of his feelings for the problematic of the human future. If, instead, we follow Rank and the general science of humans, we get quite different picture of the oldest “instinctual wishes.” Incents is an immortality motive, it symbolizes the idea of self-fertilization—the defeat of biology and the fatality of species propagation. For the child in the family it may be an identity motive, a way of immediately becoming an individual and stepping out of the collective role of obedient child by breaking up the family ideology. Historically, the brother-sister marriage of ancient kings like the Pharaohs must have been a way of preserving and increasing the precious mana power that the king possessed. Cannibalism, it is true, has often been motivated by sheer appetite for meat, the pleasures of incorporation of a purely sensual kind, quite free of any spiritual overtones. However, as just noted, much of the time the motive is one of mana power. Which largely explains why cannibalism becomes uniformly repugnant to humans when the spirit-power beliefs that sustained it are left behind; if it were a matter of instinctual appetite, it would be more tenacious. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

And as for the lust for ending a life, this too, we now know, is largely a psychological problem; it is not primarily a matter of the satisfaction of vicious animal aggression. We know that people often end life of others with appetite and excitement, as well as real dedication, but this is only logical for animals who are born hunters and who enjoy the feeling of maximizing their organismic powers at the expense of a rapped and helpless prey. If a covenant be made, wherein neither of the parties perform presently, but trust one another; in the condition of mere nature, (which is a condition of war of every person against every person,) upon any reasonable suspicion, it is void; but if there be a common power set over them both, with right and force sufficient to compel performance; it is not void. For one that performs first, has no assurance the other will perform after; because the bonds of words are too weak to bridle means ambition, avarice, anger, and other passions, without the fear of some coercive power; which in the condition of mere nature, where all people are equal, and judges of the justness of their own fears cannot possibly be supposed. And therefore one which performs first, does but betray oneself to one’s enemy; contrary to the right (one can never abandon) of defending one’s life, and means living. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

However, in a civil estate, where there is a power set up to constrain those that would otherwise violate their faith, that fear is no more reasonable; and for that cause, one which by the covenant is to perform first, is obliged so to do. The cause of fear, which makes such a covenant invalid, must be always something arising after the covenant made; as some new fact, or other sign of the will not to perform; else it cannot make the covenant void. For that which could not hinder a person from promising, ought not to be admitted as a hindrance of performing. One that transfers any right, transfers the means of enjoying it, as far as posses in one’s power. As one that sells land, is understood to transfer the herbage, and whatsoever grows upon it; nor can one that sells a mill turn away the stream that drives it. And they that give to a being The Right of government in Sovereignty, are understood to give one the right of levying money to maintain soldiers; and of appointing magistrates for the administration of justice. To make a covenant with bruit beats, is impossible; because not understanding our speech, they understand not, nor accept of any translation of right; nor can translate any right to another; and without mutual acceptation, there is no covenant. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

Love does not harm to anyone. However, suppose that were all we knew about love. Suppose we did not have the Ten Commandments, from which Paul quoted in verse 9: “’Do not commit adultery,’ ‘Do not murder,’ ‘Do not steal,’ ‘Do not covet.’” If we did not have those specific directions, how would be know what it means to harm one’s neighbour? Most of us are familiar to some degree with the classic description of love given by Paul in 1 Corinthians 13.4-7: Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trust, always hopes, always perseveres. Paul did not give a dictionary definition of love; instead, he described it in terms of specific attitudes and actions toward one another. What are these attitudes and actions? They are nothing more than various expressions of the moral law of God. However, no doubt the later Paul who wrote these words was very sure that whatever spiritual formation in Christlikeness he had received might be overwhelmed. There remained in him a spark of evil that could be fanned into a flame were he not watchful or if God did not continuously direct and uphold him in every dimension of his nature. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

Paul knew he was running a race, as you and I are. That race will not be over until we pass into God’s full World. No doubt he had in his lifetime seen many falter and fail, many who would not be able to say at the end, as he did, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith,” reports 2 Timothy 4.7. The image of the athlete was strong and ever-present in Paul’s World and in his own mind. He knew that you had to keep yourself in spiritual shape to finish and finish well. In 1 Corinthians 9 he discussed how he therefore conducted himself in his course of life, how he exercised and treated his body severely, making it his slave (not he its slave), “lest possibly, after I have preached to others, I myself should be disqualified,” reports 1 Corinthians 9.27. The valid point in “miserable sinner” Christianity is correctly expressed in these well-chosen words by St. Augustine: If anyone supposes that with humans, living, as one still does, in this mortal life, it may be possible for him to dispel and clear off every obscurity induced by corporeal and carnal fancies, and to attain to the serenest light of immutable truth, and to cleave constantly and unswervingly to this with a mind wholly estranged from the course of this present life, that humans understand neither what one asks, nor who one is that is putting such a supposition. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

If ever the soul is helped to reach beyond the cloud by which all the Earth is covered, that is to say, beyond this carnal darkness with which the whole terrestrial life is covered, it is simply as if he were touched with a swift coruscation, only to sink back into his natural infirmity, the desire surviving by which one may again be raised to the heights, but one purity being insufficient to establish one there. The more, however, anyone can do this, the greater is one; while the less one can do so the less one is. In the spiritual life one never rests on one’s laurels. It is a sure recipe for falling. Attainments are like the manna given to the Israelites in the desert, good only for the day (Exodus 16.4,20). Past attainments not place us in a position of merit that permits us to let up in the hot pursuit of God for today, for now. Paul knew that, and he knew that others missed it or forgot it to their great harm. We deserve nothing before God, no matter how far we have advanced, and we are never out of danger. As long as we are “at home in the body,” as reported in 2 Corinthians 5.6, we still just recovering sinners. And in these respects, though only in these respects, do we remain as wicked as anyone else—Mother Teresa as Adolf Hitler. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

However, to distort this important truth into a claim that we can never really change, and especially in our hearts, is to substitute a glaring and harmful falsehood for liberating and life-blessing truth. And that distortion, which sometimes is a true expression of genuine humility, can also be done by those who wish to take themselves off he hook, to enjoy remaining the same in their inner life. It is not easy to really want to be different. As my personal understanding of the interior life has developed, I have learned that apart from the well-known Scriptural calls to prayer, there are two great human reasons we ought to pray. The first is because of what prayer does to our character. Prayer is like a time exposure to God. Our souls function like photographic plates, and Christ’s shining image is the light. The more we expose our lives to the white-hot Sun of His righteous life (for, say, five, ten, fifteen, thirty minutes, or an hour a day), the more His truth, His integrity, His humility. As we have seen, this was true of General William Harrison, who maintained a disciplined devotional life for over seventy years. People say his presence brought a distinct sense of Christ. The second corresponding reason is that prayer bends our wills to God’s will. If I throw out the anchor to my yacht, and catch hold of the shore and pull, do I pull the shore to me, or do I pull myself to the shore. Prayer is not pulling God to my will, but the aligning of my will to the will of God. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

What tantalizing personal benefits are offered by time spent in the presence of God in prayer! Herein is possessed the spiritual desolation of our days. The open secret of many Christian Bible-believing churches is that a vanishing small percentage of those talking about prayer are actually doing that they actually talking about. Leviticus 19 is basically an amplification of the Ten Commandments as originally set forth in Exodus 20. Let us consider verses 11-18 of Leviticus 19: “Do not steal. Do not lie. Do not deceive one another. Do no swear falsely by my name and so profane the name of your God. I am the LORD. Do not defraud your neighbour or rob him or her. Do not hold back the wages of a hired being overnight. Do not curse the deaf or put a stumbling block in front of the blind, but fear your God. I am the LORD. Do not pervert justice; do not show partiality to the poor or favouritisim to the great, but judge your neighbour fairly. Do not go about spreading slander among your people. Do not do anything that endangers your neighbour’s life. I am the LORD. Do not hate your brother in your heart. Rebuke your neighbour frankly so you will not share in one’s guilt. Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against one of your people, but love your neighbour as yourself. I am the LORD.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

Now, let us paraphrase those verses using the format “Love does not,” which Paul used in 1 Corinthians 13. When we do this, the passage from Leviticus 19 reads as follows: Love does not steal, it does not lie, it does not deceive. Love does not profane God’s name. It does not defraud nor rob its neighbour. It does not hold the wages of a hired being overnight. Love does not curse the deaf, nor put a stumbling block in front of the blind. Loves does not pervert justice, nor show partiality to the poor or favouritism to the great. Instead, it judges is neighbour fairly. Loves does not slander another, nor do anything that endangers one’s life. Loved does not hate its brother, nor seek revenge, nor bear a grudge, but rather treats its neighbour as itself. We can see from the paraphrase that the various expression of God’s moral law, wherever they occur in Scripture, are simply a description of love in action. Leviticus 19 also helps us understand who our neighbour is. One is the hired person, the def, the blind, the less affluent, the great, the person whom we are tempted to lie to, or steal from, or slander. One is the person who has wronged us and against whom we are tempted to hold a grudge. Our neighbour is even the person whose life we might endanger by reckless behaviour. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

We can easily say our neigbour is anyone with whom we come in contact. However, because of our human frailty and our tendency to have moral blind spots, it is helpful to think in terms of specific situations. He principle of love is not a higher principle over God’s moral law. Rather, it provides the motive and the motivation for obedience, while the law provides the direction for the biblical expression of love. If they were not motivated by love for both God and our neighbour, the actions prescribed by God’s law would be hollow indeed. I would much rather do business with someone who wanted to treat me fairly because one loved me than someone who deals fairly only because “it is good for business.” I would also want one’s love to be guided by the moral and ethical principles of the Christian Bible. Some people fail to attend church and read less because they are not spiritually sensitive and as open as others. Also, many people are dominated by the time crunching production ethic of the marketplace, which makes them feel lightyears away from deep prayer and reading of the Christian Bible. However, most fail because they simply do not know how to go about cultivating the disciplines of the interior spiritual life. One’s prayer and devotional life cannot be reduced to a few simple rules. These areas of spiritual experience are far too dynamic and personal for simplistic reduction. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

We must also be cautioned against imagining from the outline we are using (deep prayer, confession, adoration, submission, petition) that there is a prescribed order for devotion, for there is not and never has been. Life’s rhythms sometimes demand that we launch directly, for example, into petition with “Lord, help me!” Other times will be spent almost entirely in confession, or meditation, or adoration. God’s Word is essential to developing a Christian mind. All Christians and Catholics, no matter what denomination or faith should be systematically reading through the Bible, once a year if possible, so that our minds are being perpetually programmed by the data of Scripture. This understood, there is yet another step: intersession—which is like a marathon of prayer, where you bare your entire soul to God, all your concerns, praise, and dreams for the future and personalizing and internalizing the Word of the Lord. “And now I, Nephi, do not make a fully account of the things which my father hath written, for he hath written many things which he saw in visions and in dreams; and he also hath written many things which he prophesied and spake unto his children, of which I shall not make a full account. But I shall make an account of my proceedings in my days. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

“Behold, I make an abridgment of the record of my father (Lehi), upon plates which I have made with mine own hands; wherefore, after I have abridged the record of my Father then will I make an account of my own life. Therefore, I would that ye should know, that after the Lord had shown so many marvelous things unto my father, Lehi, yea, concerning the destruction of Jerusalem, behold he went forth among the people, and began to prophesy and to declare unto them concerning the things which he had both seen and heard. And it came to pass that the Jews did mock him because of he things which he testified of them; for he truly testified of their wickedness and their abominations; and he testified that the things which he saw and heard, and also the things which he read in the book, manifested plainly of the coming of a Messiah, and also the redemption of the World. And when the Jews heard these things they were angry with him; yes, even as with the prophets of old, whom they had cast out, and stoned, and slain; and they might take it away. However, behold, I, Nephi, will show unto you that the tender mercies of the Lord are over all those whom he hath chosen, because of their faith, to make the mighty even unto the power of deliverance,” reports 1 Nephi 1.16-20. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

Grant, O Lord, that Thy family, devoted to Thy service, and confiding in Thy protection, may obtain the blessing which they humbly implore; that being at rest under Thy defense, they may not be left destitute of assistance for this life, and may be prepared for the good things which are eternal; through Jesus Christ our Lord. O Thou Most High, it becomes me to be low in thy presence. I am nothing compared with thee; I possess not the rank and power of Angels, but Thou hast made me what I am, and placed me where I am; help me to acquiesce in thy sovereign pleasure. I thank thee that in the embryo state of my endless being I am capable by grace of improvement; that I can bear thy image, not by submissiveness, but by design, and can work with thee and advance thy cause and glory. But, alas, the crown has fallen from my head: I have sinned; I am alien to thee; my head is deceitful and wicked, my mind an enemy of Thy law. Yet, in my lostness Thou hast laid help in the mighty one and one comes between to put one’s hands on us both, my umpire, daysman, mediator, whose blood is my peace, whose righteousness is my strength, whose condemnation is my freedom, whose Spirit is my power, whose Heaven is my heritage. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

Grant that I may feel more the strength of Thy grace in subduing the evil of my nature, in loosing me from the present evil World, in supporting me under the trials of life, in enabling me to abide with thee in my valleys, in exercising me to have conscience void of offense before thee and before humans. In my affairs may I distinguish between duty and anxiety, and may my character and not my circumstance chiefly engage me. “I would be very happy to oblige you, if my passes were respected. But the fact is, sir, I have, within he last two years, given passes to two hundred and fifty thousand men to go to Richmond, and not one had got there yet.” (President Lincoln’s answer to man who asked for a safe conduct to Richmond, 1863.) I distrust the legends which are told about most gurus by the disciples. They exaggerate because they have stopped seeking truth. When a person turns belief in the superior knowledge of the guide into belief in the virtual omniscience of the guide, it is dangerous. After having charted all the merits and capacities of the enlightened person, one’s devotees and disciples easily fall into exaggerations and forgets one’s limitations, or ignore the simple fact that one remains a human among humans. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

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Values are the foundation of our character and of our confidence. A person who does not know what one stands for or what one should stand for will never enjoy true happiness and success. More important than being successful is being significant. Significance means making a contribution to others.
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Release Your Faith in Uncommon Ways and You Will See God do Uncommon things!

February 26, 2020 1:29 am

It is impossible, indeed, to separate works from faith, just as it is impossible to separate heat and light from the fire. There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Nature hath made people so equal, in the faculties of body, and mind; as that though there bee found one person sometimes manifestly stronger in body, or of quicker mind than another; yet when all is reckoned together, the difference between being, and being, is not so considerable, as that one being can thereupon claim to oneself any benefit, to which another may not pretend, as well as one. For as the strength of body, the weakest has strength enough to mute the strongest, either by secret machination, or by confederacy with others, that are in the same sanger with oneself. And as to the faculties of the mind, (setting aside the arts grounded upon words, and especially that skill of proceeding upon general, and infallible rules, called Science; which very few have, and but in few things; as being not a native faculty, born with us; nor attained, (as Prudence,) while we look after somewhat else,) I find yet a greater equality amongst people, than that of strength. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

For Prudence, is but Experience; which equal time, equally bestowes on all beings, in those things they equally apply themselves unto. That which may perhaps makes such equality incredible, is but a vain conceit of one’s own wisdom, which almost all beings think they have in a greater degree, than the Vulgar; that is, than all beings but themselves, and a few others, whom by Fame, or for concurring with themselves, they approve. For such is the nature of people, that however they may acknowledge many others to be more witty, or more eloquent, or more learned; yet they will hardly believe there be many so wise as themselves: for they see their own wit at hand, and other people’s at a distance. However, the proveth rather than people are in that point equal, than unequal. For there is not ordinarily a greater sign of the equal distribution of anything, than that every person is contented with one’s share. Also, parents have to teach their kids and make them responsible. One has to tell their children what is expected of them and that there is no way around it. Children must be held responsible for getting an education and learning how to behave. The television is very interesting, but those TV programs will always be there. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

It is far more for children to get an education than to watch TV. And when your child is in junior high school, that is the time to start talking to them about college and letting them explore college campuses and speak with guidance counselors at the college so they will know what is expected of them, and so the child can form a vision of what they want to do after high school. So many children are solely focused on just getting out of high school, and then in the last semester of high school this idea of college and dumped on them and many of them have no idea what to do because they never even considered it. Therefore, it is important to make sure your child knows that they need to have a career vision, something they can do for the rest of their lives to make money to be able to support themselves, and their wife and child. Furthermore, it is important that children learn that if they make a mistake and break something, they need to pay for it. It may require them to get a Summer job, but it is important for them to learn responsibility as youths so they become good adults. The great masters who taught people truth or gave them supreme works of art or lifted their feelings deserve a large gratitude for such benedictions. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

It is those who create ways and means for others to follow in the search for spiritual fulfilment, the teachers and awakeners, who deserve our best honours. Such a person is a focal-point for all that is noble. A nature sensitive to the serenity, benevolence, and wisdom radiating from such a being will gladly give its homage to one. It is a grave mistake made by uneducated persons or by proud ones to fail in holding such a being in deep veneration. God keeps a vacant seat for one in the high places, while simple men and women throw unseen roses of appreciation when one enters their orbit. We should listen to the plain statements of such a being as the ancient Greeks listened to the enigmatic utterances of their oracles. Sokrates tried to awaken the Greeks, Jesus tried to awaken Christians. Their failure was followed by consequences to their people which can be traced in history. If the higher power takes the trouble to send a messenger, it is better to tremble, listen, and obey than to sneer, reject, and suffer. The comments made by the self-actualized upon the varied situations in human life are worth far fare more than the commentaries written by pundits on the sacred or philosophic texts. The former are very much in a minority. What one is testifies to THAT WHICH IS. Where lesser humans have to shout their opinions, one’s silence is eloquent and, to the receptive, an initiation in itself. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

There is no such act as a one-sided self-giving. Karma brings us back our due. One who spends one’s life in the dedicated service of philosophic enlightenment may reject the merely material rewards that this service could bring one, but one cannot reject the beneficent thoughts, the loving remembrances, the sincere veneration which those who have benefited sometimes send one. Such invisible rewards help one to atone more peacefully and less painfully for the strategic errors one has made, the tactical shortcomings one has manifested. Life is an arduous struggle for most people, but much more so for such a one who is always a hated target for the unseen powers of darkness. Do not hesitate to send one your silent humble blessing, therefore, and remember that Nature will not waste it. The enemies you are now struggling against within yourself one has already conquered, but the enemies one is now struggling against are beyond your present experience. One has won the right to sit by a hearth of peace. If one has made the greatest renunciation and does not do so, it is for your sake and for the sake of those others like you. Education is about discovering the special skills and talents of students and guiding their learning according to high standards. Education is also about teaching our children and young people basic Southern values and uncorking that World-renowned American ingenuity that has characterized our country. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

Respect for God demands that the face, the hands, and the feet be washed once a day. The wise person indulges oneself not in gossip with women, not even his own wife. Leave the “kitchen table talk” for the women. Men should talk about cars, sports, or the economics. For America to move forward and continue as a World leader, and for all our communities to become prosperous and strong, more individuals need to become involved in improving our schools and colleges. We also need to take time for self-care, reflection, and affirmation. We have a choice. We can allow the stress of the job to crush our ability to be the kind of inspirational leaders we want to be, or we can energetically and enthusiastically demonstrate that we are the absolute climate creators at our school. Our challenge is that every day we need to rekindle the passion and get in touch with the joy in our job. Joy is an essential ingredient if inspirational leadership. Leadership is being visible when things are going awry and invisible when they are working well. From this equality of ability, ariseth equality of hope in the attaining of our Ends. And therefore if any two beings desire the same thing, which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies; and in the way to their End, (which is principally their own conservation, and sometimes their delectation only,) endeavour to destroy, or subdue one another. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

And from hence it comes to pass, that where an Invader hath no more to fear, than another being’s single power; if one plant, sow, build, or possess a convenient Seat, others may probably be expected to come prepared with forces untied, to dispossess, and deprive one, not only of the fruit (product) of one’s labour, but also of one’s life, or liberty And the Invader again is in the like danger of another. And from this diffidence of another, there is no way for any individual to secure oneself, so reasonable, as anticipation; that is, by force, or wiles, to master the persons of all people one can, so long, till one see no other power great enough to endanger one: and this is no more than one’s own conservation requireth, and is generally allowed. Also because there be some, that taking pleasure in contemplating their own power in the acts of conquest, which they pursue father than their security requires; if others, that otherwise would be glad to be at ease within modest bounds, should not by invasion increase their power, they would not be able, long time, by standing only on their defence, to subsist. And by consequence, such augmentation of dominion over people, being necessary to a human’s conservation, it ought to be allowed one. Again, people have no pleasure, (but on the contrary a great deal of grief) in keeping company, where there is no power able to over-awe them all. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

For every human looketh that one’s companion should value one, at the same rate one sets upon oneself: And upon all signs of contempt, or undervaluing, naturally endeavours, as far as one dares (which amongst them that have no common power, to keep them in quiet, is far enough to make them destroy each other,) to extort a greater value from one’s contemners, by dommage; and from others, by the example. So that in the nature of humans, we find three principal causes of quarrel. First, Competition; Secondly, Diffidence; Thirdly, Glory. The first, maketh people invade for Gain, the second, for Safety; and the third, for Reputation. The first use Violence, to make themselves Masters f other people’s persons, wives, children, cattle, and ultimate driving machines; the second, to defend them; the third, for trifles, as a word, a smile, a different opinion, and any other sign of undervalue, either direct in their Persons, or by reflexion in the Kindred, their Friends, their Nation, their Profession, or their Name. Leaderships is a people process. It calls for the application of knowledge, skills, and attitudes that allow each of us to successfully influence and inspire others towards doing the right things. Leadership deals with effectiveness. On the other hand, management is a coordinating process we carry out to make sure the work functions and tasks get done well and in a timely way. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

Over the years, Dr. Freudian analysts have softened their views of the politics of therapy. Along with Gestalt therapists, Jungians, rational emotive therapists, advocates of transactional analysis, and many other new therapies, they now take a middle-of-the-road view. The expert is at times definitely the authority (as in the Gestalt therapist dealing with the person in the “hot seat”), but there is also a recognition of the right of the individual to be responsible for oneself. There has been no attempt to rationalize these contradictions. These therapists take a paternalistic stance, or follow the medical model, believing that at times control is best vested in the therapist, at other times (to be decided by the therapist) control and responsibility are best placed in the client’s, or patient’s hands. One approach which has been very definite in the politics of relationships is behaviourism. Its clear purpose is outlined in Skinner’s famous Walden II. For the good of the person (individually or collectively), an elitist technocracy of behaviourists sets the goals that will make the person happy and productive. It then shapes one’s behaviour by operant conditioning (with out without the “subject’s” knowledge) to achieve those goals. The environmental model, based on learning theory, assumes that behaviour that is in some way rewarded or reinforced tends to be repeated, while nonrewarded or punished behaviour tends not to be repeated. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

So most of the behaviour problems we have seen (except those problems having a directly organize root, or perhaps some of the more stubborn psychotic reactions) are viewed, not as unconscious conflicts or illnesses, but as dysfunctional learning: bad habits. Since these problems were learned through conditioning, the behaviour modifiers believe that they can be unlearned, or deconditioned; and more effective or functional behaviour can be relearned, or reconditioned. Whereas analytic approaches sees no value in this. In fact, such past-oriented emphasis is seen as further rewarding the dysfunctional behaviour—giving the person beneficial stokes for their problems. If you want children to stop throwing temper tantrums (which have been reinforced by the attention of parents), do not give them further reinforcement by yelling at them or spanking them. Since those kinds of responses are actually rewards by some quirk of reasoning (“negative strokes are better than no strokes at all”), the answer is to stop responding to—and hence reinforcing—the tantrums. No attention at all is one way of withholding reinforcers. Ignore the behaviour, and after awhile its payoff value to the child is gone. To complete the conditioning process, give the child a lot of optimistic attention and affection for doing those things you want the child to do. This is how operant conditioning techniques work. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

When using operant conditioning, much success has been reported in the treatment of weight management, smoking, and conduct disorder and other similar issues. Not all behaviour problems respond to such treatment, but the results are encouraging. Much use has been made of one of the behaviour modification techniques in working with people who have intellectual disabilities and some psychotic patients in hospitals. It is called the “token economy” program. Patients are trained to do simple tasks by reinforcement of each step of the task with poker chips or other tokens which can be cashed in at the end of the session or the day for candy, gum, juice, and other goodies. Also, these techniques can work with students. If you want them to preform better or tests or increase their attendance, one has to reward the class with something like a pizza party at the end of the semester, but also keep in mind that it will be important to also provide extra guidance for the students so they do not get harassed by others for failing to meet the standards and holding the class back. Another issue is to make sure there is a realistic budget for the party. Most students will problem want about three slices of pizza. Domino’s Pizza always has some kind of deal like the large three topping pizza for $7.99 or the Mix and Match pizza for $5.99 when you order two or more. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

The behavioural modifiers believe that tangible rewards used in the early stages of any behaviour change process should later be replaces with praise, hugs, pats on the back, or compliments if that kind of thing is acceptable in your family and community. Secondary reinforcers are substituted for primary reinforcers. Later, inner reinforcers—pride, sense of achievement, realization of goals—can be substituted for the secondary reinforcers. After all, most of us do not spend our lives behaving well in order to win chips or M&Ms! One’s behaviour is, after all, completely determined by environment for the planners so that their completely determined behaviour causes them to operate as such a wise and good elite is a question always deftly avoided. Nevertheless it is assumed that their goals will be constructively social, and the shaping of behaviour will be for the good person as well as society. Yet at times, when applied to the aberrant behaviour, this approach seems a little startling. We would assume that a demerit was clear evidence that the individual had somehow acquired a full-blown social neurosis and needed to be cured, not punished. We would send him or her to a rehabilitation center where one would undergo absolute brainwashing or reeducation until we were quite sure one had become a law-abiding citizen who would not again commit an antisocial act. We would probably have to restructure one’s entire personality. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

However, this means that we are completely oblivious to the political implications of what we are doing. Clearly a psychologist who believes brainwashing or reeducating people in detention would be the first to be subsidized and employed by a dictator, who would be very happy to have them “cure” various “demerits” that threatened the state, which could be labeled as, for example, things like race, skin colour, hair texture, profession, medical history, political party, age, number of children, socioeconomic status, and so on. In fairness to behaviorists it should be said that many of them have come to adopt a greatly changed view of the politics of relationships. In the commune Twin Oaks, patterned initially after Walden II, the residents often choose for themselves which behaviors they wish to change, and select the rewards which will be most reinforcing. Clearly this is completely opposed to the politics of the strict behavourist, since it is self-evaluated change. It is not the environment shaping the individual’s behaviour, but the individual choosing to shape the environment for one’s own personal development. Some behavioursists have gone even further. Rather than controlling the individual, they are helping the person learn to achieve one’s own betterment. In its politics this is the reverse of strict behaviourism. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

However, there will come a time in the experience of the apprentice of Jesus where it is appropriate to speak of our being muted to the self. There is no one way this comes to us, I think, and the language here must be handled carefully. It has been the source of much understanding in and harm in the past. However, the fact that it represents is a fundamental, indispensable element in the renovation of the heart, soul, and life. Being muted to self is the condition where the mere fact that I do not get what I want does not surprise or offend me and has no control over me. Faithful servants of God know the secret, and man have left their testimony. They day when some have muted themselves, they report their opinions, preferences, tastes and will; was muted to the World, its approval or censure; muted to the approval or blame even of one’s brethren or friends, and since that point on, individuals will study only to show oneself “approved unto God.” We often speak of those who sleep soundly as “sleeping like a baby.” By that we mean that what is happening around them does not disturb them, that they are unconscious f it and are doing nothing with reference to it. There is an important lesson here, though not a precise parallel. The one who is muted to self will certainly not even notice some things that others would—for example, things such as social slights, verbal put downs and innuendos, or physical discomforts. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

However, many other rebuffs to “the dear self,” will be noticed still, often quite clearly. However, if we are muted to self to any significant degree, these rebuffs will not take control of us, not even to the point of disturbing our feelings or peace of mind. We will wear the World like it is a precious gift from God. Does this mean that the person who is muted to self is without feeling? Does Christ commend the famous “apathy” of the Stoic or the Buddhist elimination of desire? Far from it. The issue is not just feeling or desire, but right feeling or desire, or being controlled by feeling and desire. Apprentices of Jesus will be deeply disturbed about many things and will passionately desire many things, but they will be largely indifferent to the fulfillment of their own desires as such. Merely getting their way has no significance for them, does not disturb them. They know that “God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those are called according to His purpose,” reports Romans 8.28. They do not have to look after things that concern them, but they do not worry about outcomes that merely affect adversely their own desires and feelings. They are free to focus their efforts on the service of God and others and the furthering of good generally, and to be as passionate about such things as may be appropriate to such efforts. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

People who truly understand the grace of God, not just intellectually but in very core of their being, will not abuse grace by living irresponsibly. “Blessed are they whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered. Blessed is the person whose sin the Lord will never count against one,” reports Romans 4.7-8. When I read, “Blessed is the person whose sin the Lord will never count against one,” I was overcome with joy and gratitude. What a fantastic encouragement that God will never judge me for any of my sins. I know I have as wicked a sinful nature as anyone else, and apart from the sanctifying influence of the Holy Spirit in my life, I am fully capable of the so-called gross sins of immortality, drunkenness, stealing, and the like. However, those are not the sins that trouble me at this time. Rather, I struggle with what I called “refined” sins: selfishness, pride, impatience, a critical attitude, and a judgmental spirit. Despite my calling those areas “refined” sins, they are nevertheless very real sins. They are sins for which I would not want to give account at the judgment bar of God. They are sins that, apart from the atoning death of Christ for me, would send me to eternal Hell. And, if God operated on the basis of merit instead of grace in this life, they are sins that would forfeit all blessings from Him. In short those “refined” sins are very troublesome. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

So when I read that God will never count against me my selfishness, my pride, my impatience, and so on, I wept for joy. I stopped reading and uttered a prayer of deep, heartful thanksgiving to God for His gracious forgiveness. Then what did I do? I asked God to purge those sinful traits from my character. I asked Him to enable me to become more and more aware of specific instances when I was committing those sins so that I could, by His Spirit, put them to death as Paul tells us to do in Romans 8.13. I was compelled by His love to seek to put away those sins. “Finally, people, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things,” reports Philippians 4.8. The true, the noble, the right, the pure, the lovely, the admirable all defy negative exposition. Each ingredient was, and is, a matter of personal choice—and our choices make all the difference in the World. We all can choose a thought program which will produce a Christian mind. “And except ye have charity ye can in nowise be saved in the kingdom of God; neither can ye be saved in the Kingdom of God if ye have not faith; neither can ye if ye have no hope. And if ye have no hope ye must needs be in despair; and despair cometh because of iniquity. And Christ truly said unto our fathers: if ye have faith ye can do all things which are expedient unto me,” reports Moroni 10.21-23. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

Lord God Almighty, Christ the King of glory, Who art our true Peace, and Love eternal; enlighten our souls with the brightness of Thy peace, and purify our consciences with the sweetness of Thy love, that we may with peaceful hearts wait for the Author of peace, and in the adversities of this World may ever have Thee for our Guardian and Protector; and so being fenced about by Thy care, may heartily give ourselves to the love of Thy peace. Searcher of Hearts, it is a good day to me when Thou givest me a glimpse of myself; sin is my greatest evil, but Thou art my greatest good; I have causes to loathe myself, and not to seek self-honour, for no one desires to commend one’s own dunghill. My country, family, church fare worse because of my sins, for sinners bring judgment in thinking sins are small or that God is not angry with them. Let me not take other good people as my example, and think I am good because I am like them, for all good people are not so good as thou desirest, are not always consistent, do not always follow holiness, do not feel eternal good in sore affliction. Show me how to know when a thing is evil which I think is right and good, how to know when what is lawful comes from an evil principle, as desire for reputation ow wealthy by usury. “And now I speak unto all the ends of the Earth—that is the day cometh that the power and gifts of God shall be done away among you, it shall be because of unbelief,” reports Moroni 10.24. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

Give me grace to recall my needs, my lack of knowing thy will in Scripture, of wisdom to guide others, of daily repentance, want of which keeps thee at bay, of the spirit of prayer, having words without love, of zeal for thy glory, seeking my own ends, of joy in thee and thy will, of love to others. And let me not lay my pipe too short of the fountain, never touching the eternal spring, never drawing water from above. O God, Who of Thy great love to this World, didst reconcile Earth to Heaven through Thine Only-begotten Son; grant that we who, by the darkness of our sins, are turned aside from brotherly love, may be Thy light shed forth in our souls be filled with Thine own sweetness, and embrace our friends in Thee, and our enemies for Thy sake, in a bound of mutual affection. O God, Who art Peace everlasting, Whose chosen reward is the gift of peace, and Who hast taught us that the peace-makers are Thy children, pour Thy sweet peace into our souls, that everything discordant may utterly vanish, and all that makes for peace be sweet to us forever. Almighty and everlasting God, mercifully grant unto Thy Church, that deadly pleasures may be cast aside, and that it may rather rejoice in the gladness of Thine eternal salvation; through Jesus Christ our Lord. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

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If we are going to seize the promise of our times and educate our children so they can keep their dreams alive, we must all work together. Not government alone, not individuals alone, but as parents and children, as employers and employees, teachers and students, community leaders and community members, as government and citizens. We must renew our schools so every American child has the opportunity to get the best possible education for the twenty-first century.

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Believe Me, if All those Endearing Young Charms, which I Gaze on so Fondly To-day!

February 10, 2020 3:44 am

There is not a soul in the World whom Heaven does not regard in particular fashion. There is not a signor a word that Heaven fails to hear. People create these extravagant habitats because they have vision, love of beauty, hopes and dreams. If the line of reasoning I have been presenting is valid, then it opens new doors to us. If we frankly face the fact that science takes off from subjectively chose set of values, then we are free to select the values we wish to pursue. We are not limited to such stultifying goals as producing a controlled state of happiness, productivity, and the like. I would like to suggest a radically different alternative. Suppose we start with a set of ends, values, purposes, quite different from the type of goals we have been considering. Suppose we do this quite openly, setting them forth as a possible value choice to be accepted or rejected. Suppose we select a set of values which focuses on fluid elements of process, rather than static attributes. We might then value: Humans as a process of becoming; as a process of achieving worth and dignity through the development of one’s potentialities; the individual human being as a self-actualizing process, moving on to more challenging and enriching experiences; the process by which the individual creatively adapts to an ever new and changing World. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

We may also value the process by which knowledge transcends itself, as for example the theory of relativity transcended Newtonian physics, itself to be transcended in some future day by a new perception. If we select values such as these we turn to our science and technology of behaviour with a very different set of questions. We will want to now such things as these: Can science assist us in the discovery of new modes of richly rewarding living? More meaningful and satisfying modes of interpersonal relationships? Can science inform us as to how the human race can become a more intelligent participant in its own evolution—its physical, psychological and social evolution? Can science inform us as to ways of releasing the creative capacity of individuals, which seem so necessary if we are to survive in this fantastically expanding atomic age? Dr. Oppenheimer has pointed out that knowledge, which used to double in millenia or centuries, now doubles in a generation or a decade. If we are to be able to adapt effectively, it appears that we will need to discover the utmost in release of creativity. Can science discover the methods by which humans can most readily become a continually developing and self-transcending process, in one’s behaviours, one’s thinking, one’s knowledge? Can science predict and release an essentially “unpredictable” freedom? #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

It is one of the virtues of science as a method that it is as able to advance and implement goals and purposes of this sort as it is to serve static values such as states of being well-informed, happy, obedient. Indeed we have some evidence of this. Psychotherapy can be one of the most subtle tools for the control of one person by another. The therapist can surely mold individuals in imitation of oneself. One can cause and individual to become a submissive and conforming being. When certain therapeutic principles are used in extreme fashion, we call it brain washing, an instance of the disintegration of the personality and a reformulation of the person along lines desired by the controlling individual. So the principles of therapy can be used as a most effective means of external control of human personality and behaviour. Can psychotherapy be anything else? Here I find the developments going on in client-centered psychotherapy an exciting hint of what a behavioural science can do in achieving the kinds of values I have stated. Quite aside from being somewhat new orientation in psychotherapy, this development has important implications regarding the relation of a behavioural science to the control of human behaviour. Let me describe our experience as it relates to the issues of the present discussion. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

In client-centered therapy, we are deeply engaged in the prediction and influencing behaviour. As therapists we institute certain attitudinal conditions, and the client has relatively little voice in the establishment of these conditions. Very briefly we have found that the therapist is most effective if one is: genuine, integrated, transparently real in relationships; be acceptant of the client as a separate, different, person, and acceptant of each fluctuating aspect of the client as it comes to expression; and sensitively empathic in one’s understanding, seeing the World through the client’s eyes. Our research permits us to predict that if these attitudinal conditions are instituted or established, certain behavioural consequences will ensue. Putting it this way sounds as if we are again back in the familiar groove of being able to predict behavioural consequences as these: that the client will become more self-directing, less rigid, more open to the evidence of one’s senses, better organized and integrated, more similar to the ideal which one chosen for oneself. In other words we have established by external control conditions which we predict will be followed by internal control by the individual, in pursuit of internally chosen goals. We have set the conditions which predict various classes of behaviours—self-directing behavious, sensitivity to realities within and without, flexible adaptiveness –which are by their very nature unpredictable in their specifics. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

The conditions we have established predict behaviour which is essentially “free.” Our recent research indicates that our predictions are to a significant degree corroborated, and our commitment to the scientific method causes us to believe that more effective means of achieving these goals may be realized. Research exists in other fields—industry, education, group dynamics—which seems to support our own findings. I believe it may be conservatively stated that scientific progress has been made in identifying those conditions in an interpersonal relations which, if they exist in B, are followed in A by greater maturity in behaviour, less dependence upon others, an increase in expressiveness as a person, an increase in variability, flexibility and effectiveness of adaptation, an increase in self-responsibility and self-direction. And quite in contrast to the concern expressed by some we do not find that the creatively adaptive behaviour which results from such self-directed variability of expression is too chaotic or too fluid. Rather, the individual who is open to one’s experience, and self-directing, is harmonious, not chaotic, ingenious rather than random, as one orders one’s responses imaginatively toward the achievement of one’s own purposes. One’s creative actions are no more a chaotic accident than was Einstein’s development of the theory of relativity. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

Thus we find ourselves in fundamental agreement with the statement that “Science has made its way by releasing, not by suppressing, the elements of variation, of invention and innovation, of novel creation in individuals. We have come to believe that progress in personal life and in group living is made in the same way, by releasing variation, freedom, creativity. There has been an interesting development in suburban architecture. Long gone are the days when homes all had verandas, with easy access to the front door, enabling one to become quickly acquainted with other in the neighbourhood. In 2020 we have architecture which speaks more directly to our current values. The most prominent part of a houses used to be the porch, but now the homes are getting larger. Inside are huge spa like bathrooms, plenty of room for delightful diversions—large living areas with fireplaces afford grand lounging; a dining room, cozy interludes. A fully functional kitchen, powder room, utility room, and even a master bedroom on the first floor. The second floor provides well-arranged sleeping quarters—with another large master bedroom—and two full bathrooms, walk-in closets larger than bedrooms some people grew up in. Do not forget the interesting mud room, the home hub and butler’s pantry. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

Modern architecture provides for privacy and entertainment as those are a priority today. The old adage that “a person’s house is one’s castle” is coming true today. One’s castle’s moat is one’s front lawn, the drawbridge is one’s driveway, and the portcullis one’s automatic garage door through which one passes with electronic heraldry. Once inside, one removes one’s armour and attends to house and hearth until daybreak, when one assumes one’s executive armament and, briefcase in hand, mounts one’s steed—perhaps a BMW i8 or a BMW X7—presses the button, and rides off to the wars. Today’s home reflects our modern values of individualism, isolation, and privatization. There is this cure in the air behind my body that nobody is going to touch a cloister, a silence closing around a blossom of fire. It is no longer usual to not even know the families immediately surrounding one’s own house! People do not want to get to know their neighbour’s intimately because they may not share the same values and want to stay on good terms with them. Even when the job does not force it, the average American family moves four times. People move from house to house looking for the elusive “something.” We lack roots, continuity, and community—all of which is to say that friendship, especially deep friendship, has fallen on hard times. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

America’s leading psychologist and therapists estimate that only 10 percent of all men have any real friends. The decade-long research of 5,000 men and women by Michael McGill, published in 1985, corroborates this. He reports: “To say that men have no intimate friends seems on the surface too harsh. However, the data indicates that it is not far from the truth. Even the most intimate of friendships (of which there are few) rarely approach the dept of disclosure a woman commonly has with many other women. Men do not value friendship.” Why is this? we wonder. We all know that men, by nature, are not as relational as women. Men’s friendships typically center around activities, while women’s revolve around sharing. Men do not reveal their feelings or weaknesses as readily as women. They gear themselves for the marketplace, and typically understand friendships as acquaintances made along the way, rather than as relationships. Also, if they have an obviously close friendship with another man, men fear being suspected of deviant behaviour. And, of course, there are some who suffer from the Hank Voight, from Chicago PD, delusion that “real men do not need other people.” Tragically, those who think this way rob themselves, their wives, their children, and the Church because they will never be all God wants them to be. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

Such thinking ignores the wisdom of both Scripture and life. Soon after Adam’s creation, God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone,” reports Genesis 2.18. While this relates directly to the creation of Eve, it is also a primary ontological statement about the nature man, who is, whether he admits it or not, a relational being. His growth and significance are worked out in relationships. Christ is our example. His ministry was centered in deep friendships with the Twelve, whom He repeatedly called “friends” (John 15.13-15), and there was also the inner circle of three with whom He formed an even deeper friendship and to whom He bared His heart. Being a Christian is a relationship with the Triune God through Christ and with His Body, the Church. God becomes our Father; we become eternal brothers and sisters. Relationships! The warning to not “give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing” (Hebrews 10.15) was, and is, a call to relationships and friendships with other believers. Friendship is not optional. Men, if you are married, your wife must be your most intimate friend, but to say, “my wife is my best friend” can be a cop-out. You also need Christian male friends who have same-sex understanding of the serpentine passages of your heart, who will not only offer counsel and pray for you, but will also hold you accountable to your commitments and responsibilities when necessary. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

It is quite clear that the point of view I am expressing is in sharp contrast to the unusual conception of the relationship of the behavioural sciences to the control of human behaviour, previously mentioned. In order to make this contrast even more blunt, I will state this possibility in a form parallel to the steps which I described before. It is possible for us to choose to value a being as a self-actualizing process of becoming; to value creativity, and the process by which knowledge becomes self-transcending. We can proceed, by the methods of science, to discover the conditions which necessarily precede these processes, and through continuing experimentation, to discover better means of achieving these purposes. It is possible for individuals or groups to set these conditions, with a minimum of power or control. According to present knowledge, the only authority necessary is the authority to establish certain qualities of interpersonal relationship. Exposed to these conditions, present knowledge suggests that individuals become more self-responsible, make process in self-actualization, become more flexible, more unique and varied, more creatively adaptive. Thus such an initial choice would inaugurate the beginnings of a social system or subsystem in which values, knowledge, adaptive skills, and even the concept of science would be continually changing and self-transcending. The emphasis would be upon humans as a process of becoming. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

I believe it is clear that such a view as I have been describing does not lead to any definable Utopia. It would be impossible to predict its final outcome. It involves a step by step development, based upon a continuing subjective choice of purposes, which are implemented by the behavioural sciences. It is in the direction of the “open society,” as that term has been defined, where individual carry responsibility for personal decisions. It is at the opposite pole from the concept of a closed society, of which Walden Two would be an example. I trust it is also evident that the whole emphasis is upon process, not upon end states of being. I am suggesting that it is by choosing to value certain qualitative elements of the process of becoming, that we can find a pathway toward the open society. It is my hope that I have helped to clarify the range of choice which is possessed before us and our children in regard to the behavioural sciences. We can choose to use our growing knowledge to enslave people in ways never dreamed of before, depersonalizing them, controlling them by means so carefully selected that they will perhaps never be aware of their loss of personhood. We can choose to utilize our scientific knowledge to make people necessarily happy, well-behaved, and productive. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

We can, if we wish, choose to make men submissive, conforming, docile, Or at the other end of the spectrum of choice we can choose to use the behavioural sciences in ways which will free, not control; which will bring about constructive variability, not conformity; which will develop creativity, not contentment; which will facilitate each person in one’s self-directed process of becoming; which will assist individuals, groups, and even the concept of science, to become self-transcending in freshly adaptive ways of meeting life and its problems. The choice is up to us, and the human race being what it is, we are likely to stumble about, making at times some nearly disastrous value choices, and at other times highly constructive ones. If we choose to utilize our scientific knowledge to free people, then it will demand that we live openly and frankly with the great paradox of the behavioural sciences. We will recognize that behaviour, when examined scientifically, is surely best understood as determined by prior causation. This is the great fact of science. However, responsible personal choice, which is the most essential element in being a person, which is the core experience in psychotherapy, which exists prior to any scientific endeavour, is an equally prominent fact in our lives. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

We will have to live with the realization that to deny the reality of experience of responsible persona choice is as stultifying, as closed-minded, as to deny the possibility of a behavioural science. That these two important elements of our experience appear to be in contradiction has perhaps the same significance as the contradiction between the wave theory and the corpuscular theory of light, both of which can be shown to be true, even though incompatible. We cannot profitably deny our subjective life, any more than we can deny the objective description of that life. It is my contention that science cannot come into being without a personal choice of the values we wish to achieve. And these values we choose to implement will forever lie outside of the science which implements them; the goal we select, the purposes we wish to follow, must always be outside of the science which achieves them. To me this has the encouraging meaning that the human person, with one’s capacity of subjective choice, can and will always exist, separate from and prior to any of one’s scientific undertakings. Unless as individuals and groups we choose to relinquish our capacity of subjective choice, we will always remain free persons, not simply pawns of a self-created behavioural science. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

And the fact that God does not owe us anything, where does that leave us? It leaves us in the blessed position of being eleventh hour workers in God’s Kingdom. It leaves us going home at the end of the day from God’s vineyard profoundly grateful, knowing that the gracious landowner has been generous beyond all measure. In a word it leaves us content, and “Godliness with contentment is great gain,” reports 1 Timothy 6.6. Contentment with what we have—whether it is possessions, or station in life, or mental or physical abilities—is worth far, far more than all the things we do not have. A multimillionaire reportedly was once asked how much money was enough, to which he replied, “One dollar more.” The person who is living on the basis of merit is like the multimillionaire. One is never content. One day one thinks one is not being rewarded fairly by God; the next day one is afraid one has forfeited all hope for any reward. Far better to adopt the biblical attitude that grace does not depend on merit at all, but on the infinite goodness of God and His sovereign purpose for my life (a purpose God has already declared to be for my good) than rely on all the merit points I could ever possibly accumulate. We need to remember God has already been shown to be the exceedingly gracious and generous landowner. To realize that grace, all we must do is acknowledge we are no more than eleventh-hour workers. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

With this emphasis on contentment, I am not suggesting we should always be satisfied with the status quo in every area of our lives and not pray for or seek improvement. Remember, God by His nature is graciously disposed to give us all good things (Romans 8.32). However, for all of us, there are certain things that simply are not going to change. In those areas, we must learn to be content, always accepting the fact that God does not owe us something different. Frankly, I have had to struggle to learn this myself. God has given me a physical body that, in a number of ways, is less than average. He has given me spiritual gifts that are possessed largely outside the mainstream ministry of the organization He called me to serve with. Neither of these circumstances is going to change, so I have had to learn to be content with what God has given me. I have learned this by focusing on two facts; God does not own me anything, and what He has given me was given by His grace alone. “And now, I speak unto you concerning that which grieveth me exceedingly; for it grieveth me that there should disputations rise among you. For, if I heave learned the truth, there have been disputations among you concerning the baptism of your little children. And now, I desire that ye should labour diligently, that this gross error should be removed from among you; for, for this intent I have written this epistle,” reports Moroni 8.4-6. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

O Lord our God, Whose compassion is the first cause of our fearing and loving Thy Name, mercifully pour (Thy grace) into our hearts, that we, casting away what displeases Thee, may be untied to Thee with an honest will; through Jesus Christ our Lord. O God, the Comforter of the humble, and the Strength of the faithful, be merciful to Thy suppliants; that human weakness, which by itself is prone to fall, may be evermore supported by Thee to stand upright; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Almighty God, I am loved with everlasting love, clothed in eternal righteousness, my peace flowing like a river, my comforts many and large, my joy and triumph unutterable, my soul lively with a knowledge of salvation, my sense of justification unclouded. I have scarce anything to pray for; Jesus smiles upon my soul as a ray of Heaven and my supplications are swallowed up in praise. How sweet is the glorious doctrine of election when based upon thy word and wrought inwardly within the soul! I bless thee that thou wilt keep the sinner thou hast loved, and hast engaged that one will not forsake thee, else I would never get to Heaven. I wrong the work of grace in my heart if I deny my new nature and my eternal life. If Jesus were not my righteousness and redemption, I would sink into nethermost hell by my misdoings, shortcomings, unbelief, unlove; if Jesus were not by the power of his Spirit my sanctification there is no sin I should not commit. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

O when shall I have this mind! When shall I be conformed to his image? All the good things of life are less than nothing when compared with his love, and with one glimpse of thy electing favour. All the treasures of a million Worlds could not make me richer, happier, more contented, for one’s unsearchable riches are mine. One moment of communion with him, one view of his grace, is ineffable, inestimable. But O God, I could not long after thy presence if I did not know the sweetness of it; and such I could not know except by the Spirit in my heart, nor love thee at all unless thou didst elect me, call me, adopt me, save me. I bless thee for the covenant of grace. O God, the Bestower of peace and the Lover of charity, grant to Thy servants a true agreement with Thy will, that we may be delivered from all the temptations which attack us; through Jesus Christ our Lord. “For immediately after I had learned these things of you I inquired of the Lord concerning the matter. And the word of the Lord came to me by the power of the Holy Ghost, saying: Listen to the words of Christ, your Redeemer, your Lord and your God. Behold, I came into the World not to call the righteous but sinners to repentance; the whole need no physician, but they that are sick; wherefore, little children are whole, for they are not capable of committing sin; wherefore the curse of Adam is taken from them in me, that it hath no power over them; and the law of circumcision is done away in me,” reports Moroni 8.7-8. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17

CRESLEIGH MEADOWS AT PLUMAS RANCH

Plumas Lake, CA | from the mid $300’s

Now Selling!

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. These news homes have all the most up-to-date features expected in luxury home. The designs offer something for the whole family. https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-meadows-at-plumas-ranch/residence-4/

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

January 20, 2020 3:41 am

I 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

The 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

Few, 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

Education 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

The 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

So 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

Sporadic 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

Many 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

Always 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

Aristotle’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

Adopted 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

I 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

Right 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

Meditation 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

Lord 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 15

BRIGHTON STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH

Rancho Cordova, CA |

Now Selling!

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

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

Live Life with Love and Trust that Love Will Come Down to Earth and Save Us All Because Love is All I Got!

January 17, 2020 2:47 am

The person of life upright, whose guiltless heart is free from all dishonest deeds or thought of vanity has balanced their greatly increased sensitivity. It is not through any conceited sense of personal superiority that they keep apart from others. They are entitled to an environment which least opposes them, least emits discords at every thought, and most harmonizes with their nature and habits. They must themselves create such an environment: the World cannot always offer it. Thus the paradox arises that because they have entered into secret unity with all beings, the adepts must stand aloof from all beings. The custodians of this knowledge may have the appearance of living aloof from the human race, but it is appearance only When one is among those who do not understand, nothing will shake one’s reserve on these truths. What else can such a being do but give only the surface of oneself, only a part of one’s knowledge to them? If they are too insensitive to feel the subtle presence that one feels, and too self-enclosed to be interested in it, one can at least keep it from being profaned by sceptical remarks or sneering criticisms. The humble, who are not developed enough to understand but are willing to give their faith, may share one’s treasure to a limited extent; but the arrogant, who are too educated or too Earthy to understand, may not. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

The self-actualized is not hiding behind a mask—for one can still be sincere in all one’s talk or traffic with others—rather, one is keeping back one’s deepest self from full free expression. The people who can save society are those whom it knows least and disdains most. They are people who have found out its shallowness and meanness and turned their faces toward Truth. They live aside and are not to be found in the ranks we may expect them to be in, as a rule, for some are only acting as pillars in society and propping up society’s crumbling edifice in order to save their jobs. However, the beings who have uncovered life, who can provide society with insight and foresight, make no attempt to press upon the public attention. When the World wants them, it will search for them. They can afford to bide their time for they know food is only for the hungry. Even in the outer life, one and one’s kind must be reserved and withdrawn; it cannot be helped. One cannot descend any more to the residence of inwardly shabby, the intuitionally destitute. Although self-actualized people identify themselves with society’s true welfare, they manage to keep themselves detached from their personal affairs. We humans are a race of walking and working somnambulist. Only the illuminate is really awake. One finds the mass of humanity goes on as complacently unaware of its spiritual need as ever. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

Most of society does not want the truth the self-actualized has, but only truth that suits, comforts, and preserves its narcissism. The masses of society want a label of being enlightened when they are unwilling or unable to do the work it takes to become self-actualized. The more original one’s presentation of the truth, the deeper the source from which one draws it, the less do most people, with their mass-conditioned minds, want it. It is not the prophet oneself who is conscious of one’s place in history but those in the circle around one, those who follow long after one is dead, and those who write about one. For the sense of mission, the relationship with past and future generations, the work to be done in the present epoch—all these things belong to the ego’s thoughts about itself, to the concern with self. One is satisfied to let oneself be used by God, to abandon all care about them into God’s hands, to go where one is bidden and to do what one is urged to do. The thirst for fame and the striving of ambition are totally absent from such a being. How can one crimp and cramp one’s private sense of truth within the narrow limits of some being’s opinion? The strange infinitude of mind overpowers one, the mystic reaches of the Unknown haunt one continually; how then is one to walk into some mental prison and keep company with the spiritual captives of one’s time? #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

The self-actualized stands outside all this drama and watches it as a spectator, sometimes with a slight smile of pleasure, sometimes with a mild frown of distress, never with a hard cold attitude but always with a settled resignation to the decree of God’s grace and the will of God. If, now and then, one suggests a moment, a change or a view-expanding idea to one of the actors, it is not to be regarded as an act of interference but as itself part of the person’s own spiritual understanding, or the higher will’s grace. One is neither unduly uncommunicative nor the reverse. One understands the need of respecting evolutionary need, rejects the theory of universal equality, and pracitses the discipline of speech. However, one’s compassion is always active, one’s willingness to share truth and give blessings never absent. If in the presence of God one realizes the futility of human speech about it, in the presence of groping, seeking, suffering beings one hold back no word which will comfort, guide, or inspire. If the self-actualized gives inner help which people need, one does so with no desire and no expectation of reward, as a physician might reasonably expect. One gives out of the fullness of one’s heart, out of one’s extraordinary capacity for sympathy through self-identification with others. However, this may not often be understood, first, because one will not desert one’s habitual calm to put on an emotional display at the bidding of convention, and second, because one consults with wisdom as to what one shall do, which is not always what people want one to do. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

The self-actualized who works for the good of humanity must respect one’s own definition of good and one’s own knowledge of the best way to work. Otherwise, one would be no better than the social reformer, the state’s people and the clergy, and the moralist—one would have only an intellectual or emotional understanding of life, and not a mystical and integral one. Do not reproach one for one’s reserve. One is ready to share and share generously. However, it must be done in one’s way, at one’s time, and according to one’s circumstances. For one’s perception is unclouded by the ego, and yours may not be. For when some people make their demands on the self-actualized, remember that there are many others making a similar demand. The enlightened try to live as to acquit oneself honourably before God rather than before humans. One has lived long enough to hear many who once praised one, now abuse one. Hence one has lived long enough to know that unless one remains uniformly serene and inwardly detached from the World’s opinion, there can be no true happiness for one. One has been taught by God to stand unmoved by the disloyalties of so-called friends and the defections of short-sighted followers. One is too wise and experienced to expect either real justice or correct understanding from them. It will not be possible for them to understand one or one’s point of view or one’s logic by a mere exchange of words, so one refrains from attempting what is so useless. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

Suffice that one replies with silence. If people cannot read that silence, cannot understand who and what one is from inner being alone, then they must go to the gossips, the critics, the enemies, and misunderstanders of one for an interpretation of one’s character, motives, and record. They will then take appearances for reality, and delude themselves and others. Therefore, it is that with most of humanity one has and can have nothing to do. Occasionally one meet one who reads one with the inner sight, who speaks one’s wordless language, and then they recognize each other. For the rest, each descent from one’s solitude into society nails one to the cross. It is not only that they feel so much at odds with the World that they stand aside from it and refrain from mixing in its society. It is as much or more that they have found a way of life which seems to them the best, the truest, and the most spiritually profitable. They feel it is essential to follow this way wheresoever it leads them, and whether in or out of society. The self-actualized will not need to advertise oneself as such. People who are sensitive or discerning will come in time to recognize one’s rare inspiring quality. Others who are in vital need of the peace that emanates from one or of the truth that fills one’s words will learn, sooner or later, by some way or another, of one’s existence and beat a pat or send a letter to one’s door. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

Society is passing through a period of mental upheaval which probably has not been seen since the 15^th century and it is so intense that many people have become menaced by the collective psychosis of humanity. Part of this upheaval is connected with people’s need to develop their own, independent points of view and not allow the media to frame their beliefs for them. A period of inner uncertainty will start to be felt as people break away from news outlets. It would be no exaggeration to call it a state of disorientation. Many will or are currently feelings totally suspended in mid-air, for they have not yet found their own consciousness. Above all, they understand that it is necessary to develop a new attitude towards their families, friends, coworkers and others in the community. One must resolve for the present not to bring any theoretical premises to bear upon them, but to wait and see what they would tell of their own accord. One’s aim should be to leave things to chance, fate, destiny. The result may be that one will spontaneously report their dreams and fantasies to you, and all you have to do is ask, “What occurs to you in connection with that?” or, “How do you mean that, where does that come from, what do you think about that?” The interpretations will seem to follow of their own accord from their replies and associations. One may consider avoiding all theoretical points of view and simply helping one to understand the dream-images by themselves, without applications of rules and theories. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

No one wants to be dominated, or unable to express their perspective—it is the same concept with God and human beings. God gave us free will so we would not be forced to be good, He wants our nature to guide us in the direction which is right for us, so when we die, we are placed in the sector that best fits our nature. The nearer we approach to the middle of life, and the better we have succeeded in entrenching ourselves in our personal attitudes and social positions, the more it appears as if we have discovered the right course and the right ideals and principles of behaviour. For this reason we suppose them to be eternally valid, and make a virtue of unchangeably clinging to them. We overlook the essential fact that the social goal is attained only at the cost of a diminution of personality. Many—far too many—aspects of life which should also have been experienced are possessed in a lumber-room among dusty memories; but sometimes, too, they are glowing coals under grey ashes. Statistics show a rise in the frequency of mental depression in men about forty. We see that in this phase of life—between thirty-five and forty—an important change in the human psyche is in preparation. At first it is not a conscious and striking change; it is rather a matter of indirect signs of a change in the human psyche is in preparation. At first it is not a conscious and striking change; it is rather a matter of indirect signs of a change which seems to take its rise in the unconscious. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

Often it is something like a slow change in a person’s character; in another case certain traits may come to light which had disappeared since childhood; or again, one’s previous inclinations and interest begin to weaken and others take their place. Conversely—and this happens very frequently—one’s cherished convictions and principles, especially the moral ones, begin to harden and to grow increasingly rigid until, somewhere around the age of fifty, a period of intolerance and fanaticism is reached. It is as if the existence of these principles were endangered and it were therefore necessary to emphasize them all the more. The wine of youth does not always clear with advancing years; sometimes it grows turbid. All the phenomena mentioned above can best be seen in rather one-sided people, turning up sometimes sooner and sometimes later. Their appearance, it seems to me, is often delayed by the fact that the parents of the person in question are still alive. It is then as if the period of youth were being unduly drawn out. I have seen this especially in the case of men whose fathers were long-lived. The death of the father then has the effect of a precipitate and almost catastrophic ripening. I know of a pious man who was a churchwarden and who, from the age of forty onward, showed a growing and finally unbearable intolerance in matter of morality and religion. At the same time his moods grew visibly worse. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

At last he was nothing more than a morbid lowering pillar of the Church. In this way he got along until the age of fifty-five, when suddenly, sitting up in bed in the middle of the night, he said to his wife: “Now at last I have got it! I am just a plain rascal.” Nor did this realization remain without results. He spent his declining years in riotous living and squandered a goodly part of his fortune. Obviously quite a likeable fellow, capable of both extremes! The very frequent neurotic disturbances of adult years all have one thing in common: they want to carry the psychology of the youthful phase over the threshold of the so-called years of discretion. Who does not know those touching old gentlemen who must always warm up the dish of their student days, who can fan the flame of life only by reminiscences of their heroic youth, but who, for the rest, are stuck in a hopelessly wooden Philistinism? As a rule, to be sure, they have this one merit which it would be wrong to undervalue: they are not neurotic, but only boring and stereotyped. The neurotic is rather a person who can never have things as one would like them in the present, and who can therefore never enjoy the past either. As formerly the neurotic could not escape from childhood, so now one cannot part with his youth. He shrinks from the grey thoughts of approaching age, and, feeling the prospect before him unbearable, is always straining to look behind him. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

Just as the childish person shrinks back from the unknown in the World and in human existence, so the grown an shrinks back from the second half of life. It is as if unknown and dangerous task awaited him, or as if he were threatened with sacrifices and losses which he does not wish to accept, or as if his life up to now seemed to him so fair and precious that he could not relinquish it. Therefore, in the midst of great joy, do not promise anyone anything. In the midst of great anger, do not answer anyone’s letter. The greatest good we can do for others is not to share our riches with them, but to reveal theirs to them. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. In other words, God is worthy of being loved with every single facet of human personality, not simply with one or two aspects of our nature. Note carefully that we must also have an intellectual love for God with the mind. We get a hint at what might be included in loving God with the mind in the context preceding Jesus’s answers. In Matthew 22.23-33 a group of Sadducees (who did not believe in the resurrection of the dead) tried to trap Jesus with an intellectual argument involving a story of a woman who had successively been married to seven brothers. Whose wife will she be in she resurrection? they asked. Jesus’ options seemed to be: (1) deny the resurrection, (2) accept polygamy and adultery be affirming her marriage to all seven in Heaven, or (3) unfairly and arbitrarily limit her marriage to one brother only. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

It is interesting to note that Jesus did something His followers should emulate: He intelligently answered the Sadducees’ question! First, He addressed the surface issue by denying the necessary condition for the Sadducees’ argument to get off the ground; that is, He denied that there is marriage in Heaven. He then went for the deeper issue about the resurrection, and His strategy is instructive. He cites what on the surface appears to be a verse inadequately related to the issue of resurrection: “’I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ He is not the God of the dead but of the living.” As a young Christian, I was puzzled by Jesus’ response because I myself could have cited other verses than this one, for example, Daniel 12.2, which explicitly affirms the resurrection. Or so I thought. Jesus’s genius is revealed when we recognize that He had studied Sadducean theology and knew that they did not accept the full authority of the prophets, including Daniel. He also knew that the very passage He used was one of the very defining verses for the entire Sadducean party! His argument hinged on the tense of the Hebrew verb. Jesus does not say, “I was the God of Abraham, and so forth,” but, “I am (continue to be) the God of Abraham, et cetera,” a claim that could be truly only if Abraham and others continued to exist. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

For our purposes, two things are important about the narrative. First, Jesus revealed His intellectual skills in debate by: (1) showing His familiarity with His opponents’ point of view; (2) appealing to common ground (a text all the disputants accepted) instead of expressing a biblical text He accepted but rejected (Daniel 12.2); and (3) deftly using the laws of logic to dissect His opponents’ argument and refute it powerfully. Second, because it forms the immediately preceding context for Matthew 22.37-39, this incident may inform at least part of what it means to love God intellectually: be prepared to stand up for God’s truth and honor when they are challenged, and do so with carefully thought-out answers. The younger generation is playing a central role in the moral crisis we are currently experiencing. I am thinking in particular of the radicals among our young adults, when I say “radicals” I do not mean the ones who called themselves radicals and seem to think they can justify any and all violence by calling it “radical.” Many young people are simply childish, not radical. They are suffering from childhood diseases of Communism. However, there are large numbers of young people who are radical not just in their political demands but in another respect that is closely linked to the rejection of authoritarian morality. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

The way we live our days is the way we live our life. “For 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. For behold, God hath said a person being evil cannot do that which is good; for if one offereth a gift, or prayeth unto God, except one shall do it with real intent it profiteth one nothing,” Moroni 7.5-6. O God, Who by Thine Only-begotten Son hast overcome death, and opened unto us the gate of everlasting life; grant us, we beseech Thee, that we who celebrate the solemnities of our Lord’s Resurrection, may by the renewing of Thy Spirit arise from the death of the soul; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. O Holy Spirit, as the Sun is full of light, the ocean full of water, Heaven full of glory, so may my heart be full of thee. Vain are all divine purposes of love and the redemption wrought by Jesus except thou work within, regenerating by thy power, giving me eyes to see Jesus, showing me the realities of the unseen World. Give me thyself without measure, as an unimpaired fountain, as inexhaustible riches. I bewail my coldness, poverty, emptiness, imperfect vision, languid service, prayerless prayers, praiseless praises. Suffer me not to grieve or resist thee. Come as power, to expel every rebel lust, to reign supreme and keep me thine; come as teacher, leading me into all truth, filing me with all understanding. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

Comes as love, that I may adore the Father, and love him as my all; come as joy, to dwell in me, animate me; come as light, illuminating the Scripture, moulding me in its laws; come as sanctifer, body, soul and spirit wholly thine; come as helper, with strength to bless and keep, directing my every step; come as beautifier, brining order out of confusion, loveliness out of chaos. Magnify to me thy glory by being magnified in me, and make me redolent of thy fragrance. O Almighty God, hear Thy people, who are this day met to glorify the Resurrection of Thy Son our Lord; and guide them on from this festival to eternal gladness, from the exulting joy of this solemnity to joys that have no end. For this is the day of human’s Resurrection, the birthday of eternal life; in which we have been satisfied with Thy mercy in the morning, in which the Blessed One Who cometh in the Name of the Lord, and Who is our God, hath shone upon us. We beseech Thee, O Lord, to preserve with watchful love those whom Thou hast cleansed; that those who have been redeemed by Thy Passion may rejoice in Thy Resurrection. O God, Who hast appointed the Paschal Sacrifice for the World’s salvation, be propitious to our supplications, that our supreme High Priest, interceding for us, my reconcile us, in that He is like unto us, absolve us, in that He is equal to Thee, even Jesus Christ our Lord, Who with Thee we shall overcome obstacles and have World peace and eternal life. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15

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A Well-Written Life is Almost as Rare as a Well-Spent One!

January 10, 2020 4:52 am

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I Used to think Love was Something I Could Take or Leave Alone but Now I Could Not do without My Supply!

January 5, 2020 4:28 am

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you should begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense. Though no one can go back and make a brand new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand new end. We should be lenient in our judgment, because often the mistakes of others would have been ours had we had the opportunity to make them. What is food to one being is bitter poison to others. Every negative development in a person is to be understood as the result of damaging influences in early childhood. This has led sometimes to irrational self-accusation on the part of parents who feel guilty for every undesirable or pathological trait that appears in a child after birth, and to a tendency of people in analysis to put the blame for all their trouble on their parents, and to avoid confronting themselves with the problem of their own responsibility. Good intentions mean noting if they cover up the unconscious intentions; “honest” dishonesty demonstrates that it is not enough to have “meant” well consciously. Forces operate in beings of which one is not aware and rationalization protects one from awareness; unconscious forces are integrated in a system to which we call character. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

Character syndromes are rooted and nourished in the particular forms of relatedness of the individual to the outside World and oneself; furthermore, inasmuch as the social group shares a common character structure (“social character”) the socioeconomic conditions shared by all members of a group mold the social character. That is where the saying, “birds of a feather flock together” comes from. Love, tenderness, sadism, masochism, ambition, curiosity, anxiety, rivalry—these and many other drives are no longer each attributed to a special instinct, but to the influence of the environment (essentially the significant persons in early childhood) via the psyche. The description given thus far suggest that character determines, the character trait, whether loving or destroying, drives a person to behave in a certain way, and the person is acting according to one’s character feels satisfied. Indeed, the character traits tells us how a person would like to behave. However, we must add an important qualification: if one could. The conflict between what we would like to do and the demands of self-interest remains crucial. We cannot always behave as we are driven to by our passions, because we have to modify our behavior to some extent in order to remain alive. The average person tries to find a compromise between what one’s character would make one want to do and what one must do in order not to suffer more or less harmful consequences. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

The degree to which a person follows the dictates of self-preservation (ego interest) varies, of course. At one extreme the weight of the ego interest is zero; this holds true for the martyr and a certain type person who targets and terminates prominent people. At the other extreme is the opportunist for who self-interest includes everything that could make one more successful, popular, or comfortable. Between these two extremes all people can be arranged, characterized by a specific blend of self-interest and character-rooted passions. How much a person represses one’s passionate desires depends not only on factors within oneself but on the situations; if the situation changes, repressed desires become conscious and are acted out. This holds true, for instance, for the person with a sadistic-masochistic character. Everybody knows the type of person who is submissive to one’s boss and sadistically domineering to one’s wife and children. Another case in point is the change that occurs in character when the total social situation changes. The sadistic character who may have posed as a meek or even friendly individual may become a fiend in a terroristic society in which sadism is valued rather than deplored. Another may suppress sadistic behavior in all visible actions, while showing it in a subtle expression of the face or in seemingly harmless and marginal remarks. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

Repression of character traits also occurs with regard to the most noble impulses. In spite of the fact that the teachings of Jesus are still part of our moral ideology, a being acting in accordance with them is generally considered a fool or a neurotic; hence many people still rationalize their generous impulses as being motivated by self-interests. These considerations show that the motivating power of character traits is influenced by self-interest in varying degrees. They imply that character constitutes the main motivation of human behavior, but restricted and modified by the demands of self-interest under varying conditions. Here is possessed the fundamental difference between behaviorism and psychoanalytic characterology. Conditioning works through its appeal to self-interest, such as the desire for food, security, praise, avoidance of pain. In animals, self-interest proves to be so strong that by repeated and optimally spaced reinforcements that interest for self-preservation proves to be stronger than other instincts like pleasures of the flesh or aggression. Humans of course also behave in accordance with one’s self-interest; but not always, and not necessarily so. One often acts according to one’s passions, one’s meanest and one’s noblest, and is often willing—and able—to risk one’s self-interest, one’s fortune, one’s freedom, and one’s life in the pursuit of love, truth, and integrity—or for hate, greed, sadism, and destructiveness. In this very difference is possessed the reason conditioning cannot be a sufficient explanation for human behavior. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

The discovery of unconscious processes and of the dynamic concept of character were radical because they went to the roots of human behavior; they were disquieting because nobody can hide any longer behind one’s good intentions; they were dangerous, because if everybody were to know what one could know about oneself and others, society would be shaken to its very foundations. Psychoanalysts is essentially a theory of unconscious strivings, of resistance, of falsification of reality according to one’s subjective needs and expectations (transference), of character, and of conflicts between passionate strivings embodied in character traits and the demands for self-preservation. Thus far, feelings of inferiority have nothing to do with any factual inferiority, but have been discussed only as the effects of a tendency to recoil from competition. Do they then have nothing to do with existing shortcomings, with a realization of actual flaws? They are in fact the result of both actual and imagined inadequacies: feelings of inferiority are a combination of anxiety-motivated belittling tendencies and a realization of existing defects. As I have emphasized several times, we cannot ultimately fool ourselves, though we may be successful in shutting certain impulses out of awareness. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

And therefore a neurotic person of the character we have been discussing will know, deep down, that one has anti-social tendencies which one must conceal, that one is far from genuine in one’s attitudes, that one’s pretenses are quite different from the undercurrents below the surface. One’s registering of all these discrepancies is an important cause for one’s feelings of inferiority, even though one never recognizes clearly the source of the discrepancies because they arise from repressed drives. Not recognizing their source, one gives to oneself reasons for feeling inferior which are rarely the real reasons, but only a renationalization. There is another reason why one feels that one’s inferiority feelings are the direct expression of an existing deficiency. On the basis of one’s ambition one has built up fantastic notions of one’s own value and importance. One cannot help measuring one’s realistic accomplishments against one’s notions of being a genius or a perfect human being, and in this comparison one’s real acts or one’s real possibilities appear inferior. The total result of all these recoiling tendencies is that the neurotic incurs real failures, or at most does not get on as well as one should, considering one’s opportunities and one’s gifts. Others who started with one get ahead of one, have better careers, greater success. This lagging behind does not concern only external success. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

The older one becomes the more one feels the discrepancy between one’s potentialities and one’s achievements. One feels keenly that one’s gifts, whatever they may be, are going to waste, that one is blocked in the development of one’s personality, that one does not mature as time goes on. The problem of persons around the age of forty is that they become blocked in their development. However, one has not recognized the conditions leading up to such a situation, and therefore has not found any satisfactory solution. And one reacts to the realization of this discrepancy with a vague discontent, a discontent which is not masochistic but real and proportionate. A discrepancy between potentialities and achievement may be due, as I have already pointed out, to external circumstances. However, the discrepancy which develops in a neurotic person, and which is a never-failing character of neuroses, is due to one’s internal conflicts. One’s actual failures and the consequent increasing discrepancy between potentialities and achievements inevitably give even greater force to one’s existing inferiority feelings. Thus one not only believes oneself to be, but actually is inferior to what one might be. The impact of this development is all the greater since it puts the inferiority feelings on a realistic basis. Meanwhile the other discrepancy which I have mentioned—that between high-flown ambitions and the comparatively poor reality—becomes so unbearable that it demands a remedy. As such a remedy fantasy offer itself. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

More and more the neurotic substitutes grandiose ideas for attainable goals. The value they have for one is obvious: they cover up one’s unendurable feelings of nothingness; they allow one to feel important without entering into any competition and thus without incurring the risk of failure or success; they allow one to build up a fiction of grandeur far beyond attainable goal. It is this blind-alley value of grandiose fantasies that makes them dangerous, because the blind alley has a definite advantage for the neurotic when compared with the straightforward road. These neurotic ideas of grandeur should be distinguished from those of the normal person and those of the psychotic. Even the normal person will at times think oneself wonderful, attribute undue importance to what one is doing, or indulge in fantasies of what one might do. However, these fantasies and ideas remain decorative arabesques and one does not take them too seriously. They psychotic person with ideas of grandeur is at the other end of the line. One is convinced that one is a genius, the Emperor of Japan, Napoleon, Christ, and will reject all evidence of reality which tends to disprove one’s conviction; one will be wholly unable to comprehend any reminder that one is actually a less affluent doorman, or patient in an asylum or the object of disrespect and ridicule. If one become aware of the discrepancy at all one will decide in favor of one’s grandiose ideas, and will believe that the others do not know any better, or that they are deliberately treating one with disrespect in order to hurt one. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

However, if therapy enables the individual to reorient one’s pattern of life and to reduce the tension and anxiety one feels regarding one’s personal problems, then the reactions of one’s automatic nervous system in, for example, a situation of stress, should also be altered. Essentially, if a change in life pattern and in internal tension occurred in therapy, this should show up in organismic changes in autonomic functioning, an area over which the individual has no conscious control. Individual who have experienced therapy develop a higher frustration threshold during their series of therapeutic contacts, and are able to recover their homeostatic balance more rapidly following frustration. After therapy, the individual is able to meet, with more tolerance and less disturbance, situations of emotional stress and frustration or stress was never considered in therapy; the more effective meeting of frustration is not a surface phenomenon but is evident in autonomic reactions which the individual cannot consciously control and of which one is completely unaware. Thus, it is predicted that if therapy enabled the individual to better handle stress at the psychological level, then this should be evident also in one’s autonomic functioning. Therefore, do not major in the minors. Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes. Remember to breathe not weak, snatched gasps, but deep riveting drafts. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

Another point in which the impossibility of the theory of addition of love and justice becomes visible is the relation of love and justice to the concrete situation. Justice is expressed in principles and laws none of which can ever reach the uniqueness of the concrete situation. Every decision which is based on the abstract formulation of justice alone is essentially and inescapably unjust. Justice can be reached only if both the demand of the universal law and the demand of the particular situation are accepted and made effective for the concrete situation. However, it is love which created participation in the concrete situation. It would be completely wrong to say that love must be added to justice if the uniqueness of the situation is to be reached. For this would mean that justice as such is impossible. Actually the situation shows that justice is just because of the love which is implicit in it. However, this can e understood fully only in the context of an ontological analysis of the root meanings of both love and justice. The weight of the problems and the dangerous character of the confusions is equally obvious when we finally confront power and justice. It is in this realm of problems that the relation of law and order to justice and of all of them to power is discussed and more often confused than illuminated. The first questions is: Who gives the law in which justice is supposed to be expressed? #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

To give a law is the basic manifestation of power. However, if a group which has power gives laws, how are they related to justice? Are they not simply the expression of the will to power of this group? The Marxist theory of the State asserts that the laws of the State are tools which give social control to a ruling group. The origin of its power may be military invasion or it may be socioeconomic stratification. In both cases justice is possible only if the State has withered away and has been replaced by an administration without political power. The justice of the ruling class is injustice and, if defended, ideology. The laws it gives preserve a social order, and as long as there is no alternative social order, the laws of the ruling classes are better than chaos. The more cynical representatives of this theory interpret justice exclusively as a function of power and in no way as its judge. They accept the Marxist analysis without the Marxist expectation, and reduce justice completely to a function of power. In reaction against this removal of justice as an ultimate principle a theory has been developed which tries to separate justice from power and completely and to establish it as a self-contained system of valid judgements. Justice is an absolute, without any relation to structures of power. The absolute law, derived from the principles of the natural or rational law, does not express wat is, but it demands what should be. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

Irrespective of power it commands and expects obedience because of its intrinsic validity. It does not express but it judges power. The contrast of these two theories about the relation of power to justice reveals the difficulty of the problem and the necessity of an ontological research into the rot meanings of power and justice. As announced before, I have led you into a jungle of problems and confusions, and, at every point, I have indicated the way out; namely, the ontological analysis of love, power, and justice. When the God we love chose to reveal Himself, He did so in creation itself and in more specific, special ways—most importantly, in the Scriptures and Jesus Christ. When we affirm that the Bible is a revelation from God, we do not simply assert that God as a person is known in and through it. We also mean that God has revealed understandable, objectively true propositions. The Lord’s Word is not only practically useful, it is also theoretically true (John 17.17). God has revealed truth to us and not just Himself. This truth is addressed to our minds and requires an intellectual grasp to understand and then apply. Because of the Bible’s nature, serious study is needed to grasp what it says. Of course, the Scripture contains easily grasped portions that are fairly straightforward. However, some of it is very difficult, intellectually speaking. In fact, Peter one said that some of Paul’s writings were intellectually challenging, hard to understand, and easily distorted (that is, uneducated in Christian theology) and unstable people (2 Peter 3.16). #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

The more a person develops the mind and the understanding of hermeneutics (the science of interpreting the Scriptures), the more one will be able to understand the meaning and significance of the Scriptures. Unfortunately, many today apparently think that hard intellectual work is not needed to understand God’s propositional revelation to us. Instead, they believe that the Holy spirit will simply make know the meaning of a text if it is implored to do so. Tragically, this represents a misunderstanding of the Spirit’s role in understanding the Scriptures. In my view, the Spirit does not help the believer understand the meaning of Scripture. Rather, He speaks to the believer’s soul, convicting, comforting, opening up applications of His truths through His promptings. On the evening Christ gave Himself up for us, John 17 tells us, He prayed in succession for Himself, for His twelve disciples, and for all of us who would later believe. When He finished praying for His future bride, He went to the cross. Then came Hos death, His resurrection, His ascension, and His enthronement at the right hand of the Father, where He constantly makes intercession for us. Thus we understand that giving ourselves for our brides involves prayerful intercession. Men, do you pray for your wives with something more than, “Bless good Meghan in all she does”? If not, you are sinning against her and against God. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

Most Christian men who claim to love their wives never offer more than a perfunctory nod to their wives’ needs before God. Men, you ought to have a list of her needs, spoken and unspoken, which you passionately hold up to God out of love for her. Praying is the material work of a Christian husband! The most basic command is, “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave up himself for her.” Men, we are divinely called to die for our brides, to take on her sufferings as our own, and to make intercession for her. You are supposed to be her ride or die man. When it is said that the readiness of the seeker determines the appearance of the master, this applies to the first fundamental initiation of one’s spiritual life. It does not mean that a master will come into one’s own town and seek one out, but that one will come into one’s life. And this may be brought about in various ways—as by the seeker oneself being led, either by Worldly circumstances or by one’s own seeking, out of one’s own town to the town or country where the master is living. The location of one’s spiritual guide will in part be the accident of one’s own geographical situation, for one will obviously be limited in one’s selection to possibilities and reputations in one’s own country or nation or race. The sheer physical and financial difficulties of traveling throughout the World—not to mention the obstacles of personal circumstance, family obligations, and ignorance of where to search and whom to approach in foreign lands, combine to set this limitation upon one’s inquiry and hence upon one’s opportunity. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

It is foolish to seek holiness geographically or holy beings in particular places. I have found that one being may live in a Himalayan abode and be a scoundrel and another being may live in a Bowery slum and be a saint. Wherever the live, people always carry their own thoughts and their own selves with them. The Soul, which is the object of our quest, is within us. The Master, who is to guide us upon our quest, will appear whenever we are ready for one and wherever we happen to live—or else we will be led to one. There are beings in the New World and the Old World, not less wise and noble than each other. If we have not met them, “the fault, Dear Brutus is…in ourselves,” primarily in our unworthiness, and secondarily in our incapacity to recognize what is beneath the surface. All speculation upon the motives and the methods of the illuminate will avail little. The light by which one works is denied to ordinary beings. We should not try to bind one down to qualities which fit only those who grope in the dark or move in twilight. We should trust where we cannot see and wait patiently for the day of revilement, when we will find all made clear and all riddle solved to our satisfaction. It is an old truism in the Old World that it takes an adept to understand an adept, but the New World will have to learn this truth by bitter experiences with pseudo-adepts. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

There are many signs of one’s spiritual status in the dignity and composure of one’s bearing, the deliberateness and truthfulness of one’s speech, and the impressiveness of one’s tension-free face. Helter Skelter is a phrase taken from a song performed by a well-known rock music group. Charles Manson used it to characterize that state of confusion in which he kept his followers, and himself as well. In the state of helter-skelter nothing makes sense, and everything makes as much sense as anything else. Manson was able to use this ideology to brainwash his followers and make them believe they were not responsible for their actions and they were not doing anything wrong when the ended the life of an individual. He taught them they if harm came to a person by means of his follower’s hands, then it was meant to be, it was in divine order and they did no really harm the individual and the individual was still alive on a different plane of existence. Aldous Huxley, in one of his retrospective writings, commented on how, among the associates of his youth, the endless talk of meaninglessness—the meaninglessness of life and therefore of everything in it—was merely an excuse to permit them to do whatever they wanted. Their life was organized (or, more properly, disorganized) around their feelings and wayward thoughts, with their will in two. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

However, resolute action for the good requires that things make sense. You would not want someone caught up in helter-skelter to work on your lawn mower, do your gastrointestinal examination, nor work on your computer. Life makes sense only if you understand its basic components and how they interrelate to form the whole. Evil, on the other hand, thrives on confusion. God is not the author of confusion (1 Corinthians 14.33). Frankly, our visible Christian World is not too far from helter-skelter with reference to its understanding of the makeup of the person and therefore of the spiritual life and spiritual formation. We need to access the fullness of biblical teachings on these matters. We suffer far too much from the influence of a surrounding culture that thrives on confusions. (And therefore its denial that human beings have a nature.) This may seem like a harsh thing to say about our “Christian World,” and I am sorry to day it; but the issues here are too important to mince words. Accordingly, much of what we do in Christian circles with very good intentions—hoping, we say, to see steady, significant growth in Christlikeness—simply makes no sense and lead nowhere so far as substantive spiritual formation is concerned. What a brutal thing to say! However, we need to recognize this, or show why it is not the case. I hope we have taken significant first steps toward a clarity that can serve as a foundation for the effectual practice of Christian spiritual formation. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

You live longer once you realize that any time spent being unhappy is wasted. “As far as the East is from the West, so far has he removed our transgression from us,” reports Psalm 103.12. How far is the East from the West? If you start due north at any point on Earth, you would eventually cross over the North Pole and start going south, but that is not true when you go East or West. If you start West and continue in that direction you will always be going West. North and South meet at the North Pole, but East and West never meet. In a sense, they are an infinite distance apart. So when God says He removes our transgressions from us as far as the East is from the West, He is saying they have been removed an infinite distance from us. However, how can we get a handle on this rather abstract truth in such a way that it becomes meaningful in our lives? When God uses this metaphorical expression describing the extent of His forgiveness of our sin, He is saying His forgiveness is total, complete, and unconditional. God is saying He is not keeping score with regard to our sins. “He does not treat us as our sins deserve or repay us according to our iniquities,” reports Psalm 103.10. Yes, God actually says that! I know it seems too good to be true. I confess I almost hesitate to write those words because they are so foreign to our innate concepts of reward and punishment. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

However, those gracious words are right in the Bible, and they are God’s words. How can God possibly do this? How can He so completely disregard our transgressions as to say He removes them an infinite distance from us? The answer is by His grace through Jesus Christ. God laid our sins on Christ and He bore the penalty we should have borne. Because of Christ’s death in our place, God’s justice is now completely satisfied. God can now, without violating His justice or His moral law, forgive us freely, completely and absolutely. He can now extend His grace to us; He can show favor to those who, in themselves, deserve only wrath. O Loving Wisdom of the living God, O living everlasting Word and everlasting Power of God the eternal Father—for everlasting is Thy birth, Who art the everlasting Son of God the everlasting Father, and art God; without Whom is nothing, by Whom are all things; in Whom consisteth whatever is; Who art God above us, and Man for our sakes; for Thou hast willed for us to be what we are: grant us what Thou hast promised; give to us, although unworthy, what Thou hast offered to all alike; that is, that Thy Passion may be our deliverance, and Thy Death our life, and Thy cross our redemption, and Thy Wound our healing; that being crucified with Thee, we may by Thy gift be lifted up on high to Thy Father, with Whom in bliss Thou livest and reignest. “And it is by faith that my fathers have obtained the promise that these things should come unto their brethren through the Gentiles; therefore the Lord hath commanded me, yea, even Jesus Christ,” reports Ether 12.22. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

O Source of All Good, what shall I render to three for the gift of gifts, then own dear Son, begotten, not created, my redeemer, proxy, surety, substitute, his self-emptying incomprehensible, his infinity of love beyond the heart’s grasp. Herein is wonder of wonders: he came below to rise me above, was born like me that I might become like him. Herein is love; when I cannot rise to him he draws near on wings of grace, to raise me to himself. Herein is power; when Deity and humanity were infinitely apart he untied them in indissoluble unity, the uncreated and the created. Herein is wisdom; when I was undone, with no will to return to him, and no intellect to devise recovery, he came, God-incarnate, to save me to the uttermost as man to die my death, to shed satisfying blood on my behalf, to work out a perfect righteousness for me. O God, take me in spirit to the watchful shepherds, and enlarge my mind; let me hear good tidings of great joy, and hearing, believe, rejoice, praise, adore, my conscience bathed in an ocean of repose, my eyes uplifted to reconcile Father; place me with ox, mule, camel, goat, to look with them upon my redeemer’s face, and in him account myself delivered from sin; let me with Simeon clasp the new-born child to my heart, embrace him with undying faith, exulting that he is mine and I am his. In him thou hast given me so much that Heaven can give no more. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

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Oh, I Cannot Break Away I Must Have You Everyday as Regularly as Coffee or Tea!

January 4, 2020 5:40 am

When bad people combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle. Successful change requires: painstakingly laying a foundation; planning in incredible detail; tediously covering and recovering all the bases; continuously explaining and re-explaining; dealing with naysayers; playing politics; soothing egos; dispelling fears; cheerleading; troubleshooting; communicating; compromising; coaxing; cajoling; and ultimately, dragging a few stragglers kicking and screaming into the future. That is hard work. It is also leadership! And, the curious paradox is that when one accepts one’s self just as he or she is, then one has the ability to change. Many people are advocating members of society to get mental help, but no one is opening up with a testimony about their experience and what helped them. Drug therapy is not the only form of therapy. Sometimes all a person needs is someone to talk to and express what they are going through so they can feel like an accepted member of the population. Also, old theories about if you seem to have a problem with everyone, then you are likely the problem is an outdated hypothesis because tribalism and pack mentality has become a common expression for many groups in American culture. Therefore, some people are actually singled out and made to feel like misfits when nothing is actually wrong with them. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14

When the initial self-picture of someone has been in a therapeutic program is compared with those after therapy, it is found that after therapy the client sees himself or herself as changed in a number of ways. One feels one is more self-confident and self-reliant, understands oneself better, has more inner comfort, and more comfortable relationships with others. One feels less guilty, less resentful, less driven and insecure, and feels lees need for self-concealment. It is also an expectation that one will achieve greater congruence of self and ideal primary through alteration of their values, others through the alteration of self. Evidence supports this conclusion, and it appears that the concept of the self is what exhibits the greater change. Some change, however, does occur in the ideal self in the case of our client and the direction of this slight change is of interest. In other words, the self-deal has becomes less perfectly adjusted, or more attainable. It is to some degree a less punishing goal. We must always change, renew, rejuvenate ourselves; otherwise we harden. Most people are willing to adapt not because they see the light but because they feel the heat. It is better to be prepared for an opportunity and not have one than to have an opportunity and not be prepared. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14

Another finding in connection with therapy has to do with the “remembered self.” This remembered self turns out to be very different from the self-picture one gives at the time of entering therapy. Usually people need about eighteen months of therapy to see a significant change. In sorting of for the remembered self we have a crude objective measure of the reduction in defensiveness which occurs. One is usually able to give a considerably truer picture of the maladjusted and disturbed person that one was when he or she entered therapy, a picture which is confirmed by other evidence. In client-centered therapy our theory is that in the psychological safety of the therapeutic relationship the client is able to permit in one’s awareness feelings and experiences which ordinarily would be repressed, or denied to awareness. These previously denied experiences now become incorporated into the self. For example, a client who has repressed all feelings of hostility may come, during therapy, to experience one’s hostility freely. One’s concept of oneself then becomes reorganized to include this realization that one has, at times, hostile feelings towards others. One’s self-picture becomes to that degree a more accurate map or representation of the totality of one’s experience. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14

The most significant change in a person’s life is a change of attitude. Right attitudes produce right actions. All change in involves problems, and all successful change involves solving those problems. If you do not tackle problems, you might have less conflict, but you do not get anywhere in terms of change. That is why risk-taking is important. Those who are successful at implementing change do not have fewer problems. The difference is they have a problem-solving attitude and a problem solving mechanism. During and after therapy there will be an increasing congruence between the self as perceived by the client and the client as perceived by a diagnostician. The assumption is that a skilled person making a psychological diagnosis of the client is more aware of the totality of the client’s experience patterns, both conscious and unconscious, than is the client. Hence if the client assimilates into one’s own conscious self-picture many of the feelings and experiences which previously one has repressed, then one’s picture of oneself should become more similar to the picture which the diagnostician has of one. Thus we may say that the objective evidence indicates that the client has become, in one’s self-perception and in one’s total personality picture, substantially the person one wished to become when one entered therapy. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14

The individuals who will succeed and flourish will also be masters of change: adept at reorienting their own and other’s activities in untried directions to bring about higher levels of achievement. They will be able to acquire and use power to produce innovation. You may have habits that weaken you. The secret of change is to focus all your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new. Advice is like the snow. The softer it falls, the deeper it sinks into the mind. Among the many ways of thus recoiling from competition, perhaps the most important is that by which the neurotic creates in one’s imagination such a distance from one’s real or alleged competitor that any competition appears absurd, and is thereby eliminated in consciousness. This distance may be achieved either by setting the other person on a pedestal high out of reach, or by putting oneself so far below all others that any competitive thoughts or attempts seems impossible and ridiculous. The latter process is called “belittling.” Belittling oneself may be a conscious strategy, practiced merely for reasons of expediency. If the disciple of a great painter has done a good picture but has reason to fear the begrudging attitude of one’s master, one may belittle one’s work in order to allay the master’s envy. Always imitate the behavior of winners when you lose. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14

The neurotic person, however, has only the vague notion of a tendency to undervalue oneself. If one has done a good job one will seriously believe that others would have done better, or that one’s success was an accident and that one probably could not do so well again. Or, having done well, one may pick out some flaw, such as having worked too slowly, and use this to devaluate one’s entire accomplishment. A scientist may feel ignorant about questions concerning one’s own field, so that one’s friends have to remind one that one’s self has written about them. When asked a question which is unwise or unanswerable one will be inclined to react with a feeling of one’s own folly; when reading a book with which one dimly disagrees one will be inclined, instead of thinking it through critically, to infer that one is not intelligent enough to understand it. One may perhaps cherish the belief that one has managed to preserve a critical and objective attitude toward oneself. However, not only will such a person take one’s inferiority feelings at their face value; one will insist on their validity. In spite of one’s complaints about them and the sufferings they cause one, one is far from accepting any evidence to disprove them. If regarded as a highly competent worker one will maintain that one is being overvalued or that one has succeeded in bluffing others. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14

For instance, there was a girl I mentioned heretofore, who developed an inordinate ambition at school after the humiliating experience with her brother, was always the first in her class and was regarded by everyone as a brilliant student, but was still convinced in her own mind that she was stupid. Although a glance into a mirror or the attention paid by men might be enough to convince a woman that she is attractive, she may still cling with an iron conviction to the belief that she is unattractive. A person may be convinced until he is forty that he is too young to assert his opinion or take a lead, and after forty he may switch to a feeling that he is too old. A well-known scholar was continually amazed at the reverence shown him, and in his own feelings insisted on being an insignificant mediocrity. Compliments are discarded as empty flattery or as prompted by ulterior motives, and may even result in anger. Observations of this kind, which can be made almost without limit, show that inferiority feelings, perhaps the most common evil of our times, have an important function, and for that reason are maintained and defended. Their value consists in the fact that by lowering one’s self in one’s own mind and thereby putting one’s self below other people and checking one’s ambition, the anxiety connected with competitiveness is allayed. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14

For one young lady, this strange sense of cruelty and ugliness always imminent, ready to seize hold upon her, who was the exception, formed one of the deepest influences of her life. Wherever she was, a school, among friends, in the street, in the train, she instinctively abated herself, made herself smaller, feigned to be less than she was for fear that her undiscovered self should be seen, pounced upon, attacked by brutish resentment of the commonplace, the average Self. Incidentally is should not be overlooked that inferiority feelings may factually weaken one’s position for the reason that self-belittling leads to an impairment of self-confidence. A certain amount of self-confidence is a prerequisite for any achievement, whether it be in varying a standard recipe for salad-dressing, selling merchandise, defending an opinion, or making a good impression on a potential relative. A person with strong tendencies to belittle oneself may have dreams in which one’s competitors excel, or in which one is at a disadvantage. Since there is no doubt that one subconsciously wishes for a triumph over competitors such dreams might look like a contradiction of Dr. Freud’s contention that dreams represent wish fulfillments. Dr. Freud’s view must not, however, be taken too narrowly. If direct wish-fulfillment involves too much anxiety, the allaying of that anxiety will be more important than a direct fulfillment of the wish. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14

Thus when a person who is afraid of one’s ambition has dreams in which one id defeated, one’s dreams are the expression not of a wish to fail but of a preference for failure as the lesser evil. A patient of mine was scheduled to give a lecture during a period of her treatment when she was desperately fighting to defeat me. She has a dream that I was giving a successful lecture and that she was sitting in the audience humbly admiring me. Again, an ambition teacher dreamed that one’s pupil was the teacher and that he failed to know his assignment. The degree to which self-belittling serves as a check on ambitions is shown also by the fact that the capacities that are belittled are usually the ones in which the individual desires most ardently to excel. If one’s ambition is of an intellectual character, intelligence is its instrument and hence is belittled. This connection is so usual that one may guess from the focus of the self-belittling tendency where the greatest ambitions are possessed. The ambiguities in the meaning of love, power, and justice have confusing consequences and produce new problems as soon as the relation of the three concepts to each other is considered. Love and power are often contrasted in such a way that love is identified with a resignation of power and power with a denial of love. Powerless love and loveless power are contrasted. This, of course, is unavoidable if love is understood from its emotional side and power from its compulsory side. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14

However, such an understanding is error and confusion. It was this misinterpretation which induced the philosopher of the “will-to-power” to reject radically the Christian idea of love. And it is the same misinterpretation which induces Christian theologians to reject the philosophy of the “will-to-power” in the name of the Christian idea of love. In both cases an ontology of love is missing and in the second case power is identified with social compulsion. In the same period the theological school which has been created by Albrecht Ritschl dominated the field of Protestant theology. The anti-metaphysical bias of this school caused it to contrast the love of God with His power in such a way that the power actually disappeared and God became identified with love in its ethical meaning. The consequence was an ethical theism which neglected almost completely the divine mystery and majesty. God as the power of being was discarded as a pagan invasion. The trinitarian symbolism was dissolved. The kingdom of God was reduced to the ideal of an ethical community. Nature was excluded because power excluded. And power was excluded because the question of being was excluded. For if the question of being is asked and concepts like love and power are seen in the light of the ontological question, the unity of their root meanings can become visible. Yet most important are the problems in social ethics which result from the confrontation of love and power. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14

One could say that constructive social ethics are impossible as long as power is looked at with distrust and love is reduced to its emotional or ethical quality. Such a division leads to a rejection of or indifference to the political realm on the side of religion. And it leads to the separation of the political from the religious and the ethical and to the politics of mere compulsion on the political side. Constructive social ethics presuppose that one is aware of the element of love in structure of power and of the element of power without which love becomes chaotic surrender. It is the ontological analysis of love and power which must produce this awareness. The problems and confusions which characterize the discussion of love in its relation to power, characterize equally the discussion of love in its relation to justice. One does not usually contrast love with justice in the way in which one contrast love with power. However, it is commonly accepted that love adds something to justice that justice cannot do by itself. Justice, one says, demands that an inherited fortune is distributed in equal parts amongst those who have the same legal claim. However, love may induce one of the heirs to surrender one’s right to one of the other heirs. In this case one acts in a way which is not demanded by justice, but may be demanded by love. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14

Love transcends justice. This seems rather evident, but it is not! If justice is not limited to proportional distribution, the act of resignation might have been an act of non-proportional justice, or it might have been an act of injustice against oneself, as in the first act of Shakespeare’s King Lear, when Lear surrenders all his powers to his daughters. The relation of love to justice cannot be understood in terms of an addition to justice which does not change its character. Only an ontology of justice can describe the true relation of the root concepts. Another example supports this view. A man may say to another: “I know your criminal deed and, according to the demand of justice, I should bring you to trial, but because of my Christian love I let you go.” Through this leniency, which is wrongly identified with love, a person may be driven towards a thoroughly criminal career. This means that one has received neither justice nor love, but injustice, covered by sentimentality. One might have been saved by having been brought to trial after his first fall. In this case the act of being just would have been the act of love. In classical theology the tension between love and justice is symbolized in the doctrine of atonement as developed by Anselm of Canterbury. According to Anselm, God Himself must find a way to escape the consequences of His retributive justice which conflicts with His merciful love. He is subject to the law of justice which is given by Himself. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14

And this law would cause the eternal death of all beings in spite of His desire to save humans according to His love. The solution is the undeserved, substitutional death of the God-man, Jesus Christ. In spite of its theological weakness this remained the predominant doctrine in Western Christianity because of its psychological power. It implies the ontological insight, which it explicitly contradicts, that ultimately love must satisfy justice in order to be real love, and that justice must be elevated into unity with love in order to avoid the injustice of eternal destruction. However, this is not manifest in the legal form in which the doctrine is developed. O God, Who for us hast willed Thy Son to endure the gibbest of the Cross, that Thou mightiest drive away from us the power of the enemy; grant to us Thy servants to attain the grace of resurrection; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. “Our Lord, thy righteous will be done, for I know that thou workest unto the children of men accord to their faith,” reports Ether 12.29. O my God, thou fairest, greatest, first of all object, my heart admires, adores, loves thee, for my little vessel is as full as it can be, and I would pour out all that fullness before thee in ceaseless flow. When I think upon and converse with thee ten thousand delightful thoughts spring up, ten thousand sources of pleasure are unsealed, ten thousand refreshing joys spread over my heart, crowding into every moment of happiness. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14

I bless thee for the soul thou has created, for adorning it, sanctifying it, though it is fixed in barren soil; for the body thou hast given me, for preserving its strength and vigour, for providing senses to enjoy delights, for the ease and freedom of my limbs, for hands, eyes, ears that do thy bidding; for they royal bounty providing my daily support, for a full table and overflowing cup, for appetite, taste, sweetness, for social joys of relatives and friends, for ability to serve others, for a heart that feels sorrows and necessities, for a mind to care for my fellow-humans, for opportunities of spreading happiness around, for loved ones in the joys of Heaven, for my own expectations of seeing thee clearly. I love thee above the powers of language to express, for what thou art to thy beings. Increase my love, O my God, through time and eternity. O God, Who for our redemption hast received the Blood of Jesus Christ, destroy the works of the devil, and break through all the snares of sin; that those who have been created by a new birth may not be defiled by the old contagion. Lord Jesus Christ, Who didst stretch out Thine hands on the Corss, and redeem us by Thy Blood, forgive me a sinner, for none of my thoughts are hid from Thee. Pardon I ask, pardon I hope for, pardon I trust to have. Thou Who art pitiful and merciful, spare and forgive me. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14

Cresleigh Homes

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Sometimes an Angel Has to Fall to Know One Was in Heaven—Are You Living?

January 1, 2020 12:46 am

Make sustained rapid improvement a way of life. Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task. If it is in the right direction, there is nothing wrong in change. To improve is to change, so to be perfect is to have changed often. Start by doing what is necessary; then do what is possible; and suddenly you are doing this impossible. God moves in a mysterious way, his wonders to perform; God plants his foot steps in the sea, and rides upon the storm. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance. Some people think that it seems God does not exist because if one of two contraries be infinite, the other would be altogether destroyed. And the word “God” means that He is infinite goodness. They say, if God existed, there would be no evil discoverable; but there is evil in the World. Therefore, God does not exist is their thought. However, it is said in the person of God: “I am Who am,” reports Exodus 3.14. We know God exists. It is certain, and evident to our senses that in the World some things are in motion. Now whatever is in motion is put in motion by another, for nothing can be in motion except it is in potentiality to that towards which it is in motion; whereas a thing moves inasmuch as it is in act. For motion is noting else than the reduction of something in a state of actuality. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

However, nothing can be reduced from potentiality to actuality, except by something in a state of actuality. Thu that which is actually hot, as fire, makes wood, which is potentially hot, to be actually hot, and thereby moves and changes it. Now it is not possible that the same thing should be at once in actuality and potentiality in the same respect, but only in different respects. For what is actually hot cannot simultaneously be potentially hot; but it is simultaneously potentially cld. It is therefore impossible that in the same respect and in the same way a thing should be both mover and moved, exempli gratia that it should move itself. Therefore, whatever is in motion must be put in motion by another. If that by which it is put in motion be itself put in motion, then this also must needs be put in motion by another, and that by another again. However, this cannot go on to infinity, because then there would be no first mover, and, consequently, no other mover; seeing that subsequent movers move only inasmuch as they are put in motion by the first mover; as the staff moves only because it is put in motion by the hand. Therefore it is necessary to arrive at a first mover, put in motion by no other; and this everyone understands to be God. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

The second way is from the nature of the efficient cause. In the World of sense we find there is an order of efficient causes. There is no case known (neither is it, indeed, possible) in which a thing is found to be the efficient case of itself; for so it would be prior to itself, which is impossible, Now in efficient causes it is not possible to go on to infinite, because in all efficient cases following in order, the first is the cause of the intermediate cause, and the intermediate is the cause of the ultimate cause, whether the intermediate cause be several, or only one. Now to take away the cause is to take away the effect. Therefore, if there be no first cause among efficient cases, there will be no ultimate, nor any intermediate cause. However, if there be no first cause it is possible to go on to infinity, there will be no first efficient cause, neither will there be an ultimate effect, nor any intermediate efficient causes; all of which is plainly false. Therefore it is necessary to admit a first efficient cause, to which everyone gives the name Go. The third way is taken from possibility and necessity, and runs thus. We find in nature things that are possible to be and not to be, since they are found to be generated, and to corrupt, and consequently, they are possible to be and not to be. However, it is impossible for these always to exist, for that which is possible not to be at some time is not. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

Therefore, if everything is possible not to be, then at one time there could have been noting in existence. Now if this were true, even now there would be nothing in existence, because that which does not exist only begins to exist by something already existing. Therefore, if at one time nothing was in existence, it would have been impossible for anything to have begun to exist; and thus even now nothing would be in existence—which is absurd. Therefore, not all beings are merely possible, but there must exist something the existence of which is necessary. However, every necessary thing either has its necessity caused by another, or not. Now it is impossible to go out to infinite in necessary things which have their necessity caused by another, as has been already proved in regard to efficient causes. Therefore we cannot but postulate the existence of some being having of itself its own necessity, and not receiving it from another, but rather causing in other their necessity. This all beings speak of as God. The fourth way is taken from the gradation to be found in things. Among beings there are some more and some less good, true, noble and the like. But “more” and “less” are predicated of different things, according as they resemble in their different ways something in which is the maximum, as a thing is said to be hotter according as it more nearly resembles that which is uttermost being; for those things that are greatest in truth are greatest in being. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

Now the maximum in any genus is the cause of all in that genus; as fire, which is the maximum heat, is the cause of all hot things. Therefore there must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection; and this we call God. The fifth way is taken from the governance of the World. We see that things which lack intelligence, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain the best result. Hence it is plain that not fortuitously, but designedly, do they achieve their end. Now whatever lacks intelligence cannot move towards an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence; as the arrow is shot to its mark by the archer. Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God. Since God is the highest good, He would not allow any evil to exist in His works, unless His omnipotence and goodness were such as to bring good even out of evil. This is part of the infinite goodness of God, that He should allow evil to exist, and out of it to produce good. Since nature works for a determinate end under the direction of a higher agent, whatever is done by nature must needs be traced back to God, as to its first cause. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

So also whatever is done voluntarily must also be traced back to some higher cause other than human reason or will, since these can change or fail; for all things that are changeable and capable of defect must be traced back to an immovable and self-necessary first principle. The human situation is one of finiteness—all flesh is grass and the grass withereth. It is one of sin—we receive double for all our sins. It is one of vanity and pride—we are brought to nothing and fall utterly. However, in spite of one’s realistic knowledge of human nature and density, darkness and light follow each other; after the depth of sin and punishment, the prophet announces forgives and liberation. However, the wave falls, and the prophet asks himself how he could have made such an announcement, when all the goodness of mortal beings is as the flower of the field, which faces because the breath of God blows upon it. However, he does not remain in the depths of his melancholy: over against human mortality the word of God shall stand forever. There is something eternal to which we can cling: Be not afraid, the Lord God shall come with strong hand. So the wave rises, and then again it falls: the nations are as a drop of water and a piece of dust; all nations are as nothing before God, they are counted as less than nothing. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

Again the wave rises: God stands above the circle of the Earth, above all created things, above the highest and the lowest! And when once more the wave falls and the servant of God complains that he does not receive justice from God, the answer is that God acts beyond human expectation. He gives power to the faint and to one that hath no might God is increaseth strength. God acts paradoxically; He acts beyond human understanding. How shall we interpret these words? Is there a way to unite the heights and depths contrasted in this essay? Shall we understand the words of consolation and hope as vain promises, never fulfilled in the past and never to be fulfilled in any future? Shall we understand then as an escape from the realization of Human’s real situation, through mysticism and poetic elevation? If so, what about the probing realism of the prophet’s analysis of the human situation? One saw history as it is, but at the same time one looked beyond history to the ultimate power and meaning and majesty of being. One knew two orders of being: the human, political, historical order, and the divine, eternal order. Because one knew these two orders, one could speak as one did, moving continually between the depth of human nothingness and the great height of divine creativity. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

Let us look at these orders, these different natures, and their interrelation. In speaking of them we speak of ourselves, because we belong to both of them in every moment of our life and history. 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 one’s transitoriness. Generations after generations grow up, struggle, suffer, enjoy and disappear. Should we take all this seriously? Should we take it more seriously than the growing and fading of the grass? He prophet, when one was asked to speak one’s nation, raised the question: 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 whom 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 appears at the horizon: the word of God shall stand forever. Second, 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 old-fashioned, barbaric, and invalid in the light of modern psychology. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

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 who 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 not 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 and empires; there are even nations and empires which manifest a certain righteousness. There are princes and even good princes; there are judges and even just judges. There 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. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

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 f 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 bring 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 wigs as eagles. God acts beyond all human assumptions and valuations. He acts surprisingly, unexpectedly, paradoxically. The negative character of the historical order is the beneficial character 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. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

The prophet 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. The historical, human order is overcome by the suffering servant, the crucified Saviour. If we doubt this paradox, if we despair about our human 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, 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?” We always wish to teach God the path of justice. We tell Him that He must punish the bad and reward the good, especially in relation to ourselves. However, He 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. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

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 measured 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. No life is able to overcomes finiteness, sin, and tragedy. The illusions of our period have been that modern civilization can conquer them, 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. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

However, for nearly three 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 tie 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 beings always dissatisfied with what is given to one. Humans transcend everything in the historical order, all the heights and depts of one’s own existence. One passes, as no other being is able to pass, beyond the limits of one’s given World. One participates in something infinite, in an order which is not transitory, not self-destructive, not tragic, but eternal, holy, and blessed. Therefore, when one listen 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 one’s soul; the infinite within one is touched. Every being knows, in some depth of one’s soul, that is true. Our despair itself, our inability to escae 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. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

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 whom 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 taken 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 ye, my people! I have learned that there are not different types but qualifications of love, since the different qualities are presented, by efficiency or deficiency, in every act of love. This insight, however, does not make the distinction of the qualities of love less important. If, as I shall suggest, one has to distinguish the libido, the philia, the eros, the agape qualities of love we must ask: how are they related to each other? What is meant if one speaks of love without qualification? Which quality of love is adequate to the Great Commandment? Which to its emotional quality? #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

Whenever the word love is used one also speaks of self-love. How is self-love related to the qualities of love, to its ontological and to its ethical character? First of all one must ask whether self-love is a meaningful concept at all. Considering that love presupposes a separation of the loving subject, and the loved object, is there such a separation in the structure of the self-consciousness? I am very doubtful about using the term self-love, and if it is used, abut using the term self-love, and if it is used, about using in it any except a metaphorical sense. Besides this terminological question, one must ask how the different qualities of love are related to what is metaphorically called self-love, and how it is related to the ethical and to the ontological nature of love. This survey of the problems and confusion, connected with the use of the term love is equaled by a survey of the confusions and problems connected with the public discussion of the concept of power. I may tell an anecdote which has more symbolic than analytical meaning. I have been warned not to announce a lecture on “Love, Power, and Justice” in the Untied States, because power would be understood as the product of the electrical power companies, and justice as the fight against the policy of the Federal Government to provide for affordable electrical power by the regulation of rivers according to the pattern of the Tennessee Valley Authority. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

Power in the sense presupposed by this story is electrical power. In the same way the term power can be applied to all physical causes, although theoretical physics has got rid of this anthropomorphic symbol and has replaced it by mathematical equations. However, present-day physics speaks of power-fields in order to describe the basic structures of the material World. This is at least an indication of the significance the term power has even in the most abstract analysis of physical occurrences. Physicists are usually conscious of the fact that they use an anthropomorphic metaphor when they use the term power. Power is a sociological category and from there it is transferred to nature (just as is law). However, the term metaphor does not solve the problem. We must ask, how is it possible that both physics and social science use the same word, power? There must be a point of identity between the structure of the social and the structure of the physical World. And this identity must be manifest in the common use of the term power. There is, however, only one way of discovering the root meaning of power, namely to ask about its ontological foundation. And this, of course, is one of the purposes of these lectures. Within the social realm the meaning of power is burdened by another ambiguity, the relation of power and force. This duality is almost exclusively restricted to the human sphere. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

For only in humans, that is in the being whose nature is finite freedom, the distinction of power and force is meaningful. One speaks of power politics, and one often does so with moral indignations. However, this is the consequence of mere confusion. Politics and power politics are one and the same thing. There are no politics without power, neither in a democracy nor in a dictatorship. Politics and power politics point to the same reality. It does not matter which term you are using. Unfortunately, however, the term power politics is used for a special type of politics, namely that in which power is separated from justice and love, and is identified with compulsion. This confusion is possible because there is indeed a compulsory element in the actuality of power. However, this is only one element, and if power is reduced to it and loses the form of justice and the substance of love, it destroys itself and the politics based on it. Only penetration into the ontological roots of power can overcome the ambiguities in the relation of power and compulsion. If power is distinguished from compulsion the question arises whether there is a power which is neither physical nor psychological, but spiritual. Compulsion uses both physical and psychological means in order to exercise power, must conspicuously in the terror methods of dictatorships. No compulsion at all is presupposed in spiritual power. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

Nevertheless, one assumes that spiritual power is the greatest, that it is the ultimate power. One does so whenever one says that God is Spirit. It is meet and right that we should give thanks to Thee, O Lord God, through Jesus Christ Thy Son, Who, being God Eternal, was pleased to becomes Man for our salvation. O the one, peerless, manifold Mystery of our Saviour! For He, being one and the same, God mist high, and perfect Man, both supreme High priest and most scared Sacred Sacrifice, according to His Divine power created all things, according to His human condition delivered humans; by virtue of His Sacrifice He atoned for the polluted, in right of His Priesthood He reconciled the alienated. O the peerless Mystery of redemption! Wherein those ancient wounds were healed by the Lord’s new medicine, and the judgment passed before on the first human rescinded by the privileges of our Saviour. The one in self-indulgence extended one’s hands to the tree, the other patiently fitted His to the Cross; therefore deservedly did the punishment borne by innocence become the discharge of the debtor, for with good right are debts remitted to debtors when discharged on their behalf by Him Who owed nothing. “And it came to pass that they began to spread upon the face of the land, and to multiply and to till the Earth; and they did wax strong in the land,” reports Ether 6.18. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

Creator and Redeemer God, Author of all existence, source of all blessedness, I adore thee for making me capable of knowing thee, for giving me reason and conscience, for leading me to desire thee; I praise thee for the revelation of thyself in the gospel, for thy heart as a dwelling place of pity, for thy thoughts of peace towards me, for thy patience and thy graciousness, for the vastness of thy mercy. Thou hast moved my conscience to know how the guilty can be pardoned, the unholy sanctified, the poor enriched. May I be always amongst those who not only hear but know thee, who walk with and rejoice in thee, who take thee at they word and find life there. Keep me always longing for a present salvation in Holy Spirit comforts and rejoicings, for spiritual graces and blessings, for help to value my duties as well as my privileges. May I cherish simplicity and Godly sincerity of character. Help me to be in reality before thee as in appearance I am before humans, to be religious before I profess religion, to leave the World before I enter the church, to set my affections on things above, to shun forbidden follies and vanities, to be a dispenser as well as a partaker of grace, to be prepared to bear evil as well as to do good. O God, make me worthy of this calling, that the name Jesus may be glorified in me and I in him. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

BRIGHTON STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH

Rancho Cordova, CA |

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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. Dining rooms are perhaps the best evidence of the revolution that took place in society in the middle of the nineteenth century. The Industrial Revolution not only made all the furniture, dishes, and silver plate possible, but also created a new class of people to use them. Early in the nineteenth century, the existence of a dining room at all was the mark of gentry. The landed gentry of the South and the merchant shippers of the North might boast a separate room just for eating, but they represented only a very small part of the population. By the 1860s, a separate dining room was considered de rigueur (prescribed or required by fashion, etiquette, or custom) for even a cottage.

When the guest filed into a Victorian dinner in the late nineteenth century, they found small menus on the table describing what cuisine they would be served. Staff set and removed plate for every course, and no one used fingers to touch the food. There were special forks and ladles and knives for every conceivable food: oyster ladles and forks; tomato servers; fish knives and forks; cake knives and servers forks; different spoons for clear sup, for cream soup, for dessert, for fruit, for breakfast coffee, for dinner coffee, and for tea. The volume and variety of silver-plated flatware and hollowware would baffle any modern dinner. What is so amazing about Victorian table manners is how successful they were. We may no longer use all the cutlery, but we have internalized their whole system of suppressing bodily functions and being proper. Cresleigh homes residence 4 osfer a formal dining room. Have your cake and eat it with whipped cream!

Style is displayed in exquisite proportions in residence 4, of Cresleigh homes, at Brighton Station. This 3,501 square foot home has a superb floor plan, which has a cache of thoughtful amenities. The chef inspired kitchen has a huge island, and opens up to the large great room, with an optional fireplace. Notice the abundance of storage in the butler’s pantry, and walk-in pantry. There is also a cozy home management office on the first floor, along with a formal dining room, coat closet, and a master suite with its own bathroom. The first floor also boast of a powder room for guest, a mud room and a 3-car tandem garage, which easily holds a family fleet, or a portion of it that can be converted into an optional workshop.

An elegant stairway leads to the master suite on the second floor, which offers both conviences and quiet seclusion. Included are many special features: a coffee bar, bathroom with deep soaker tub, multiple vanities, and walk-in closet. There are two more bedrooms, complimented by a charming loft, which could be converted into a 5^th bedroom with only a little rearranging, and there is another full bathroom that comes standard. This come contains 3.5 bathrooms and up to five bedrooms. There is also outdoor livability with a large covered porch with an optional outdoor fireplace, and extended patio. How will you customize your home?

Randolph Harris II International Institute

Category Archives: coffee

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