Home » Cosmetic (Page 40)

Category Archives: Cosmetic

The Oceans’s Only Got Water, You Never Know Where You Stand!

December 23, 2019 5:14 am

It may well be absurd to believe that some poor individual has the potential to transcend a psychosis of 20 years’ standing; but if you do not have some such fools in the World, nothing new is discovered. Happiness is not a state to arrive at, but a manner of traveling. If you esteem your own reputation, associate with people of good quality, for it is better to be alone than in bad company. Various essences of good have thus been found and proposed as bases of ethical system. Thus, to be a mean between two extremes; to be recognized by a special intuitive faculty; to make the agent happy for the moment; to make others are well as another happy in the long run; to add to one’s perfection or dignity; to harm no one; to follow from reason or flow from universal law; to be in accordance with the will of God; to promote the survival of the human species on this planet—are so many tests, each of which has been maintained by somebody to constitute the essence of all good things or action so far as they are good. The goal is to seek an end to the mutilation of the fullness of truth. The course of history is nothing but the story of human’s struggles from generation to generation to find the more and more inclusive order. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

Invent some manner of realizing your own ideals which will also satisfy the alien demands—that and that only is the path of peace. Following this path, society has shaken itself into one sort of relative equilibrium after another by a series of social discoveries quite analogous to those of science. Polyandry and polygamy and slavery, private warfare and liberty to kill, judicial torture and arbitrary royal power have slowly succumbed to actually aroused complaints; and though some one’s ideals are unquestionably the worse off for each improvement, yet a vastly greater total number of them find shelter in our civilized society than in the antiquated savage ways. An experiment of the most searching kind has proved that the laws and usages of the land are what yield the maximum of satisfaction to the thinkers take all together. The presumption in cases of conflict must always be in favor of the conventionally recognized good. There is but one unconditional commandment, which is that we should seek incessantly, with fear and trembling, so to vote and to act as to bring about the very largest total Universe of good which we can see. Abstract rules indeed can help; but they help the less in proportion as out intuitions are more piercing, and our vocation is the stronger for the more life. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

One knows that one must vote always for the richer Universe, for the good which seems most organizable, most fit to enter into complex combinations, most apt to be a member of a more inclusive whole. However, which particular Universe this is one cannot know for certain in advance; one only knows that is one makes a bad mistake the cries of the wounded will soon inform one of the fact. Every sort of energy and endurance, of courage and capacity for handling life’s evils, is set free in those who have religious faith. For this reason the strenuous type of character will on the battlefield of human history always outwear the easy-going type, and religion will drive irreligion to the wall. However, a feeling itself, and not simply the way it is displayed on face and body, can be experiences as misfitting a situation in a surprising number of ways. For example, the case of a man in his thirties, who was suffering from a paranoid form of schizophrenia. He became ill in his early twenties. He has always presented a strange mixture of intelligence, wrong-headedness, and fantastic idea. He was an ordinary clerk, employed in a consulate. Evidently as a compensation for his very modest existence he was seized with megalomania and believed himself to be the Saviour (the Buffy complex). He suffered from frequent hallucinations and was at times very much disturbed. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

In quite periods the man was allowed to go unattended in the corridor of the mental facility. One day I came across him there, blinking through the window up at the Sun, and moving his head from side to side in a curious manner. He took me by the arm and said he wanted to show me something. He said I must look at the Sun with eyes half shut, and then I could see the Sun’s phallus. If I moved my head from side to side the Sun-phalls would move too, and that was the origin of the wind. In mythology, the so-called tube, is the origin of the ministering wind. For you will see hanging down from the disc of the Sun something that looks like a tube. And towards the regions westward it is as though there were an infinite east wind. However, if the other wind should prevail towards the regions of the east, you will in like manner see the vision veering in that direction. The Greek word for “tube,” means a wind-instrument, and the combination in Homer means “a thick jet of blood.” So evidently a stream of wind is blowing through the tube out of the Sun. The vision of my patient in 1906, and the Greek text first edited in 1910, should be sufficiently far apart to rule out the possibility of cryptomnesia (an implicit memory phenomenon in which people mistakenly believe that a current thought or idea if a product of their own creation when, in fact, they have encountered it previously and then forgotten it) on his side and thought-transference on mine. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

However, the obvious parallelism of the two visions cannot be disputed, though one might object that the similarity is purely fortuitous. In that case we should expect the vision to have no connection with analogous idea, nor any inner meaning. Yet, this expectation is not fulfilled, for in certain medieval paintings this tube is actually depicted as a sort of hose-pipe reaching down from Heaven under the robe of Mary. In it the Holy Ghost flies down in the form of a dove to impregnate the Virgin. As we know from the miracle of Pentecost, the Holy Ghost was originally conceived as a mighty rushing wind, “the wind that bloweth where is listeth.” In a Latin text we read: “Animo descenes per orbem solis tribuitur” (They say that the spirit descends through the disc of the Sun). This conception is common to the whole of late classical and medieval philosophy. I cannot, therefore, discover anything fortuitous in these visions, but simply the revival of possibilities of ideas that have always existed, that can be found again in the most diverse minds and in all epochs, and are therefore not to be mistake for inherited ideas. I have purposely gone into the details of this case in order to give you a concrete picture of that deeper psychic activity which I called the collective unconscious. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

We must distinguish three psychic levels: conscious. The personal unconscious, and the collective unconscious. The personal unconscious consists firstly of all those contents that became unconscious either because they lost their intensity and were forgotten or because consciousness was withdrawn from the (repression), and secondly of contents, some of them sense-impressions, which never had sufficient intensity to reach consciousness but have somehow entered the psyche. The collective unconscious, however, as the ancestral heritage of possibilities of representation, is not individual but common to all people, and perhaps even to all beings, and is the true basis of the individual psyche. Since the collective unconscious is common to all beings, archetypal manifestations can be demonstrated in the normal as well as the insane. Still, I believe there is no determiner which a being cannot get around, under, through, or over in order to pursue goals and values that have challenged one or that one has chosen to fulfill. Human’s potentials for survival, for adaptation, for rehabilitation, for recovery from infirmary, and for growth seems barely to be scratched. Our concepts of human’s limits have proven, century after century, to be too rigid. Humans continually exceed limits that science says are built into their tissue. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

Humans have climbed Mount Everest, they orbit the Earth, they have survived death camps and slavery, and human recovery from illnesses deemed fatal. Thus, whenever I encounter a patient who is suffering from confining and crippling effects of childhood privations and trauma and finds challenges in one’s present existence overpowering, rather than despair with one, and pursue all the roots of pathology in one, I immediately begin to wonder how it would be possible to mobilize one’s spirit or one’s capacity to transcend the present circumstances which one has let grind one down. Maybe over the years I have just become more effective at communicating my faith in their potentials to the patients themselves; or maybe I have become more effective at infecting patients with the seeds of faith in themselves. A patient will say, “You seem to have had faith in me, so I looked, and I found faith in myself.” Maybe this is the factor in iatrogenic wellness—the strength of the healer’s faith in the potentials of the sufferer to transcend the limiting conditions of one’s existence. If this is true, it raises a fascinating question: On what factors is one’s faith in the other person’s potential to transcend limiting conditions dependent? I think that question is answerable—I do not quite know how, just now; but I think as a psychologists, we are duty bound to try to figure ways to measure the strength of a person’s conviction that the other person has the capacity to transcend determining circumstances. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

It may be that bad “witches,” or experts at producing iatrogenic illness, are the very ones who have either none of the faith that I am taking about, or the reverse faith. They may be absolutely convinced from their depths that people have no capacity for transcendence. Something is fishy when a person practices a profession and cannot be creative in it, when one continues to practice something the same way year after year. Either the person has been brainwashed, or one’s creative potentials were leached from one as one received one’s training. Let me put it in still another way. A therapist’s task is to promote wellness in another. One was trained for this task, and one begins it with a repertoire of techniques. One has learned to listen; that is very good. One has learned to make reflections of feeling and content. One has learned the art of relevant interpretation. This is one’s “bag of tricks,” the kit of tools one utilizes in hope that they will invite a patient into growing. About 60 percent of a therapist’s patents will accept one’s invitation to wellness, as one presents it. However, what about the 40 percent of the case load that decline? It used to be that when my techniques (invitations) did not work, I would simply repeat them. I would reflect feeling more vigorously and interpret more incisively. Nothing happened. I was being most noncreative. I was showing a kind of character disorder, by persisting in behavior that was not effective. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

By using repetitive methods, I was like the auto science engineer who knew how to do only three things—tighten nuts, turn screw, and connect wires. When someone brought in a car that would not run, one would turn every screw, tighten every nut, and connect every wire. The car still would not work. So one would find some more screws to turn, more nut to tighten, and more wires to connect. At the least, we would want the mechanic to try something else or to return our money. One wants responsible creativity from a practitioner. What is it about our methods of training therapists that seems so marvelously effective in drying up trainees; courage to be resourceful and creative in the arena of their commitment? Consider the ministry. Ministers seek to move people from a hellish existence to Heaven on Earth, to love their brothers and sisters and to end sinning. However, clergymen use few means to embody their commitment and their invitations. Maybe this is a good thing, that they seek to invite people to wholeness and goodness solely through sermons, home visits, pastoral counseling, and hospital visits. However, surely there are more ways than this that could be dreamed up. I will raise this question: Where are the creative potentials in the ministerial profession? What other ways might a minister employ to carry out one’s vocation—since, clearly, one’s present ways have not been very effective at humanizing beings. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

We need to examine our training to see how it prevents us from being creative in carrying out our commitments. I think our training expresses a commitment, not to healing, but to loyal membership in a cult or elite. If we were trained for commitment to fostering wellness, then we could not help but become creative, because the knowhow built into us in our training would carry us only to the point of the first therapeutic impasse. Here, at the therapeutic impasse, is where commitment is tested: is the therapist committed to one’s “school’s” techniques—or to the patient’s growth? If to the latter, then one will be creative and inventive; one will display and embody the intentionality. If to the former, one will function like a cracked phonograph record, uttering the same invitation over and over, oblivious to the fact that it has been declined. People choose a mode of being as a response to others’ invitations or threats. They choose schizophrenic, or hysterical, or obsessional, or depressed being—for their parents, their spouse, or their friends. Part o this sick being is phoniness itself and part of the sick being is the organism’s response to a long career of inauthentic being. We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work that is worth doing. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

Consciousness, instead of being the watchman over a dangerous and unpredictable lot of impulses, of which few can be permitted to see the light of day, becomes the comfortable inhabitant of a richly varied society of impulses and feelings and thoughts, which prove to be very satisfactorily self-governed when not fearfully or authoritatively guarded. Involved in the process of become oneself is a profound experience of personal choice. One realizes that one can choose to continue to hide behind a façade, or that one can take the risks involved in being oneself; that one is a free agent who has it within one’s power to destroy another, or oneself, and also the power to enhance oneself and others. Faced with this unobstructed eye of reality of decision, one chooses to move in the direction of being oneself. However, being oneself does not solve problems. It simply opens up a new way of living in which there is more depth and more height in the experience of one’s feelings; more depth and more range. One feels more unique and hence more alone, but one is so much more real that one’s relationships with others lose their artificial quality, become deeper, more satisfying, and draw more of the realness of the other person into the relationship. Another manner of understanding these learnings is that they are belated attempts to match symbols with meanings in the World of feelings, an undertaking long since achieved in cognitive realm. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

Intellectually, we match carefully the symbol we select with the meaning which an experience has for us. Thus I say something happened “gradually,” having quickly (and largely unconsciously) reviewed such terms as “slowly, “imperceptibly,” “step-by-step,” and so forth, and rejected them as not carrying the precise shade of meaning of the experience. However, in the realm of feelings, we have never learned to attach symbols to experience with any accuracy of meaning. This something which I feel well up in myself, in the safety of an acceptant relationship—what is it? It is sadness, is it anger, is it regret, is it sorrow for myself, is it anger at lost opportunities—I stumble around trying out a wide range of symbols, until one “fits,” “feels right,” seems really to match the organismic experience. In doing this type of thing the client discovers that one has to learn the language of feeling and emotion as if one were an infant learning to speak; often even worse, one finds one must unlearn a false language before learning the true one. Let us try still one more way of defining this type of learning, this time by describing what it is not. It is a type of learning which cannot be taught. The essence of it is the aspect of self-discovery. With “knowledge” as we are accustomed to think of it, one person can teach it to another, providing each has adequate motivation and ability. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

However, in the significant learning which takes place in therapy, one person cannot teach another. The teaching would destroy the learning. Thus I might teach a client that it is safe for one to be oneself, that freely to realize one’s feelings is not dangerous and so forth. The more one learned this, the less one would have learned it in the significant, experiential, self-appropriating way. This latter type of learning is true subjectivity, and there can be no valid communication of it, or even about it. The most that one person can do to further it in another, is o create certain conditions which make this type of learning possible. It cannot be compelled. A final way of trying to describe this learning is that the client gradually learns to symbolize a total and unified state, in which the state of the organism, in experience, feeling, and cognition may all be described in one unified way. To make the matter even more vague and unsatisfactory, it seems quite unnecessary that this symbolization should be expressed. It usually does occur, because the client wishes to communicate at least a portion of oneself to the therapist, but it is probably no essential. The only necessary aspect is the inward realization of the total, unified, immediate, at-this-instant, state of the organism which is me. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

For example, to realize fully that at this moment the oneness in me is simply that “I am deeply frightened at the possibility at becoming something different is of the essence of therapy. The client who realizes this will be quite certain to recognize and realize this state of being when it recurs in somewhat similar form. One will also, in all probability, recognize and realize more fully some of the other existential feelings which occur in one. Thus one will be moving toward a state in which one is more truly oneself. One will be, in more unified fashion, that one organismically is, and this seems to be the essence of therapy. Modern American culture is largely secular, most people have little or no understanding of a Christian way of seeing the World, nor is a Christian Worldview an important participant in the way we as a society frame and debate issues in the public square. Three of the major centers of influence in our culture—the university, the media, and the government—are largely devoid of serious religious discussion. In fact, it is not unfair to say that university, media, and governmental leaders are often illiterate about how Christians see the World and why. This is evident, for example, in those rare cases when the major television news media try to feature a Christian perspective on abortion, the state, or anything else. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

Usually, Christians watching the program feel misrepresented and misunderstood. More often than not, however, Christian perspectives are simply ignored and not covered at all. If a Martian were watching television before coming to Earth, he or she would get the idea that Americans are irreligious. Secularists tolerate religion as long as it remains a privatized perspective relative to a subgroup in society and as long as Christians do not assert that their views are objectively true and defend them accurately. The church is safe from vicious persecution at the hands of the secularist, as educated people have finished with stake-burning circuses and torture racks. No martyr’s blood is shed in the secular west. So long as the church knows her pace and remains quietly at peace on her modern reservation. Let the babes pray and sing and read their Bibles, continuing steadfastly in their intellectual retardation; the church’s extinction will not become by sword or pillory, but by the quiet death of irrelevance. However, let the church step off the reservation, let her penetrate once more the culture of the day and the face of secularism will change from benign smile to a savage snarl. God may lead one to seek and find another being who shall be His intermediary with one: His representative to one, His image for one. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

A knowledge worth understanding is not less important than a teacher worth seeking. If a seeker believes that one has achieved a certain extent of self-preparation and self-purification, if one is convinced of the desperate need of a master, and if one does not succeed in finding a worthy one, then let one pray for help in the matter. It is not enough to try to follow the counsel given by prophets, mystics, and sages, to look within. It is necessary also to look deep enough and long enough to get really worthwhile results. This applies just as much to the search for help as to the search for truth. Sometimes people under the Christian umbrella simply do not but into the idea of purity. They consider such teaching to be Victorian and puritanical. Victorian is not. Puritanical it gloriously is—for it is supremely Biblical. “It is God’s will that you should be holy; that you should avoid sexual immorality; that each of you should learn to control one’s own body in a way that is holy and honorable, not in passionate lust like the heathen, who do not know God; and that in this matter no one should wrong one’s brother or sister or take advantage of one. The Lord will punish beings for all such sins, as we have already told you and warned you. For God did not call us to be impure, but to live a holy life. Therefore, one who rejects this instruction does not reject humans but God, who gives you his Holy Spirit,” reports 1 Thessalonians 4.3-8. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

If you are not convinced enough concerning the Biblical ethic, we must understand that it is based on Leviticus 19.2, where God says, “Be holy because I, the Lord your God, am holy”—a command which is given in the context of warnings against sexual deviation. I also want to point out that in 1 Thessalonians we are called to avoid sexual immorality and are three times called to be “holy.” To reject this is to sin against the Holy Spirit—the living presence of God—as the Thessalonians passage makes so clear. The human who carries on an act of impurity is not simply breaking a human code, nor even sinning against the God who at some time in the past gave one the gift of the Spirit. One is sinning against God who is present at that moment, against One who continually gives the Spirit. The impure act is an act of despite against God’s gift at the very moment it is being proffered. This sin is seen in its true light only when it is seen as a preference for impurity rather than a Spirit who is holy. Therefore, for a professed Christian to reject this teaching regarding sexual purity is to reject God, and this may indicate a false faith! Grace is not a matter of God’s making up the difference, but of God’s providing all the cost of salvation through His Son, Jesus Christ. Most people are trying to earn their way to Heaven an, despite earnest effort, some are falling short of bridging the awful chasm of sin separating them from God. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

The body is the focal point of our presence in the physical and social World. In union with it we come into existence, and we become the person we shall forever be. It is our primary energy source or strength—our personalized power pack—a place where we can even stand in defiance of God, at least for a while. And it is the point through which we are stimulated by the World beyond ourselves and where find and are found by others. Human personal relations cannot be separated from the body; and, on the other hand, the body cannot be understood apart from human relations. It is essentially social. Therefore our bodies are forever a part of our identities as persons. My body came from God through my parents, and they provided a social and spiritual context that, more than anything else, makes me that person I am. Thou Who didst bring home the lost sheep to the fold on Thy shoulders, Who wast appeased by the prayers and confession of the publican, do Thou, O Lord, be favourable also to Thy servants, do Thou graciously attend to their prayers. May Thy mercy, O Lord, we beseech Thee, be beforehand with Thy servants, and all their iniquities be blotted out by Thy seedy pardon; through Jesus Christ our Lord. “And the Lord said unto hum: Write these things and seal them up; and I will show them in mine own due time unto the children of men,” reports Ether 3.27. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

O God Whose will conquers all, there is no comfort in anything apart from enjoying thee and being engaged in thy service; Thou art All in all, and all enjoyments are what to me thou makest them, and no more. I am well pleased with thy will, whatever it is, or should be in all respects, and if thou bidst me decide for myself in any affair, I would choose to refer al to thee, for thou art infinitely wise and cannot do amiss as I am in danger of doing. I rejoice to think that all things are at thy disposal, and it delights me to leave them there. Then prayer turns wholly into praise, and all I can do is to adore and bless thee. What shall I give thee for all thy benefits? I am in a strait betwixt two, knowing not what to do; I long to make some return, but having nothing to offer, and can only rejoice that thou doest all, that none in Heaven or on Earth shares thy honour; I can of myself do nothing to glorify thy blessed name, but I can though grace cheerfully surrender soul and body to thee, I know that thou art the author and finisher of faith, that the whole work of redemption is thine alone, that every good work or thought found in me is the effect of thy power and grace, that thy sole motive in working in me to will and to do is for thy good pleasure. O God, it is amazing that being can talk so much about human’s creaturely power and goodness, when if thou didst not hold back every moment, we should be devils incarnate. This, by bitter experience, thou hast taught me concerning myself. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

MILLS STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH

Rancho Cordova, CA |

Now Selling!

What can beat the charm of a Home in Cresleigh Ranch? An open floor plan, with lots of natural light from the windows and sliding glass door provide an extra measure of livability to the living room and dining room. A liberal amount of work space is available in the efficient kitchen, with its island and built-in kitchen table. Mills 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 Mission, Mid-Century Modern, California Modern, and Contemporary Farmhouse.

The features of this Cresleigh home creates an enchanting manor. 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/mills-station/residence-4/

There is Always a Moment in Life When the Doors Open and Lets the Future in!

December 21, 2019 3:05 am

Each second we live is a new and unique moment of the Universe, a moment that never was before and will never be again. And what do we teach our children in school? We teach them that two and two make four and that Paris is the capitol of France. When will we also teach them what they are? We should say to them: Do you know what you are? You are a marvel. You are unique. In all of the World there is no other being exactly like you. In the millions of years that have passed there has never been another being like you. Even your physical form is a wonder! You make become a Shakespeare, a Michelangelo, a Beethoven, a Reese Witherspoon, an Aaliyah, a Beyonce, an Oprah. You have the capacity for anything. Yes, you are a marvel. And when you grow up, can you then harm another who is, like you, a marvel? You must cherish one another. You must work; we al must work to make this World worthy of its population. The love of one’s country is a natural thing, but why should love stop at the border? We are all leaves of a tree and the tree is humanity. Our youth are the people who are going to carry on what we have started. They are going to move in and take over our church, schools, universities, and corporations. The fate of humanity is in their hands. There is always a moment in life when the doors open and lets the future in. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

Humanity needs more models than critics. While generalizations can be misleading, it is safe to safe to say that from the arrival of the Pilgrims to the middle of the nineteenth century, American believers prized the intellectual life for its contributions to the Christian journey. The Puritans were highly educated people (the literacy rate for men in early Massachusetts and Connecticut was between 89 and 95 percent) who founded colleges, taught their children to read and write before the age of sic, and studied art, science, philosophy, and other fields as a way of loving God with the mind. Christians must rely on the Holy Spirit in their intellectual pursuits, but this does not mean they should expend no mental sweat of their own in defending faith. Faith is a power or skill to act in accordance with the nature of the kingdom of God, a trust in what we have reason to believe is true. Understood in this way, we see that faith is built on reason. Before we dedicate ourselves completely to it, we should have good reason for thinking that Christianity is true. We should have solid evidence that our understanding of a biblical passage is correct before we go on to apply it. And so on. For many, religion is identified with subjective feelings, sincere motives, personal piety, and blind faith. When you ask someone how they know God lives, they will tell you God lives in their heart. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

Many people can give you concrete proof that God lives because of the things they have learned in the Bible about miracles and divine intervention, and people have set snares and placed traps in their path and even poisoned some, and by the grace of God, individuals can testify that they have overcome these hardship because of God. Therefore, our private experiences are proof that God exists. People might try to tell you that you are cursed because you are experiencing hardships, bullies want to make you hopeless, but you know for a fact that you are blessed and it is by the grace of God that you have been saved and have overcome many trials and tribulations and that is something you can testify to. In our hearts and intellectual life, the Lord must be glorified. In many cases where an individual’s stigmatization is associated with one’s admission to a custodial institution such as a correctional facility, sanatorium, below market rate housing, or an orphanage, much of what one learns about one’s stigma will be transmitted to one during prolonged intimate contact with those in the process of being transformed into one’s fellow-sufferers. As already suggested, when the individual first learns who it is that one must now accept as one’s own, one is likely, at the very least, to feel some ambivalence; for these others will not only be patently stigmatized, and thus not like the normal person one knows oneself to be, but may also have other attributes with which one finds it difficult to associate oneself. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

A girl with a new visual impairment describes her experience in a facility for the blind. “My questions about a guide dog were politely turned aside. Another sighted worker took me in tow to show me around. We visited the Braille library; the classrooms; the clubrooms where the blind members of the music and dramatic groups meet; the recreation hall where on festive occasion the blind dance with the blind; the bowling alleys where the blind play together; the cafeteria, where all the blind gather to eat together; the huge workshops where the blind earn a subsistence income by making mops and brooms, weaving rugs, caning chairs. As we moved from room to room, I could hear the shuffling of feet, the muted voices, the tap-tap-tapping of canes. Here was the safe, segregated World of the sightless—a completely different World, I was assured by the social worker, from the one I had just left. I was expected to join this World. To give up my profession and to earn my living making mops. The Lighthouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired would be happy to teach me how to make mops. I was to spend the rest of my life making mops with other blind people, eating with other blind people, dancing with other blind people. I became nauseated with fear, as the picture grew in my mind. Never had I come upon such destructive segregation.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

Given the ambivalence built into the individual’s attachment to one’s stigmatized category, it is understandable that oscillations may occur in one’s support of, identification with, and participation among one’s own. There will be “affiliation cycles” through which one comes to accept the special opportunities for in-group participation or comes to reject them after having accepting them before. There will be corresponding oscillation in belief about the nature of own group and the nature of normal. For example, adolescence (and the high school peer group) can bring a marked decline in own-group identification and a marked increase in identification with normal. The later phases of the individual’s moral career are to be found in these shifts of participation and belief. The relationship of the stigmatized individual to the informal community and formal organizations of one’s own kind is, then, crucial. This relationship will, for example, mark a great difference between those whose differentness provides them very little of a new “we,” and those, such as marginalized group members as someone who should take pride in one’s infirmary and not seek to get well. In any case, whether the stigmatized group is an established one or not, it is largely in relation to this own-group that it is possible to discuss the natural history and the moral career of the stigmatized individual. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

Our youth need our presence more than they need our presents. With even the most reluctant individual there is a small part of them that desperately want to learn and be accepted. The strength of the desire is determined by our acceptance and belief in him or her. Life affords no greater responsibility, no greater privilege than the raising of the next generation. Every one needs tenderness for what they are, and respect for what they may become for the greatest natural resource that any nation can have is its people. Therefore, we must learn to foster greater love for each other so that society may grow. The withdrawal of the corporate body of Christ from the public sphere of ideas is mirrored by our understanding of what is required to produce an individual disciple. However, spiritual life of faith, it is our heart, it is how we operate. What is more important for our youth is that they stay pure in college and, perhaps, witness, have a quiet time, and pray regularly. Obviously, these are important because the purpose of college is not just to get a job, but rather, it is to discover vocation, to identify a field of study in and through which one can serve Christ and Lord. And one way to serve God in this way is to learn to think in a Christian manner about our major. A person’s Christianity does not begin at a dorm Bible study, when class is over; it permeates all of one’s life, including how one thinks about the ideas in one’s college major. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

Training the mind is an essential responsibility of the home, the church, and the school. Unless evangelicals prod young people to disciplined thinking, they waste—even undermine of Christianity’s most precious resources. However, if faith and reason are polar opposites, and if discipleship is private and sacred but college studies are public and secular, then training the intellect will not be valued as a part of the youth’s mentoring. That is why our discipleship materials often leave Christian young people vulnerable to atheistic college professors with an agenda to mislead the youth. I must be frank with you: the greatest danger confronting American evangelical Christianity is the danger of anti-intellectualism. The mind in its greatest and deepest reaches is not cared for enough. This withdrawal and marginalization of the church has had devastating consequences for our attempt to produce vibrant, confident disciples and to penetrate our culture with a Christian Worldview and the gospel of Christ. These consequences are very evident. We should train business people to develop a Christian understanding of economic theory, capitalism, business ethics, or moral issues in the employer/employee relationship. The mystery of the future and the mystery of the past are untied in the mystery of the present. Our time, the time we have, is the time in which we have “presence.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

However, how can we have “presence”? When we think of it, is not the present moment gone? Is not the present the ever-moving boundary line between past and future? However, a moving boundary is not a place to stand upon. If nothing were given to us expect the “no more” of the past and the “not yet” of the future, we would not have anything. We could not speak of the time that is our time; we would not have “presence.” The mystery is that we have a present; and even more, that we have our future also, because we remember it in the present. In the present our future and our past are ours. However, if we think of the never-ending flux of time, there is no “present.” The riddle of the present is the deepest of all the riddles of time. Again, there is no answer except from that which comprises all time and lies beyond it—the eternal. Whenever we say “now” or “today,” we stop the flux of times for us. We accept the present and do not care that it is gone in the moment we accept it. We live in it and it is renewed for us in every new “present.” This is possible because every moment of time reaches into the eternal. It is the eternal that stops the flux of time for us. It is the eternal “now” which provides for us a temporal “now.” We live so long a “it is still today”—in the words of the letter to the Hebrews. Not everybody, and nobody all the time, is aware of this “eternal now” in the temporal “now.” However, sometimes it breaks powerfully into our consciousness and gives us the certainty of the eternal, of a dimension of time which cuts into time and gives us our time. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

People who are never aware of this dimension lose the possibility of resting in the present. As the letter to the Hebrews describes it, they never enter into the divine rest. They are held by the past and cannot separate themselves from it, or they escape toward the future, unable to rest in the present. They have not entered the eternal rest which stops the flux of time and gives us the blessing of the present. Perhaps this is the most conspicuous characteristic of our period, especially in the New World and particularly in this country. It lacks the courage to accept “presence” because it has lost the dimensions of the eternal. “I am the beginning and the end.” This is said to us who live in the bondage of time, who need a present to stand upon. Each of the modes of time has its peculiar mystery, each of them carries its peculiar anxiety. Each of time drives us to an ultimate question. There is one answer to these questions –the eternal. There is one power that surpasses the all-consuming power of time—the eternal: He Who was and is and is to come, the beginning and the end. He gives us forgiveness for what has passed. He gives us courage for what is to come. He is God and God gives us rest in His eternal Presence. The activity of the senses discloses their chief function: they are reporters. As is true of all motion, sensory action is in response to the stimulus of surrounding things. The reports consist of information from sources external to the organ and they are made available to the mind of beings. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

Indeed, it is from the sense that all knowledge in nature must be sought, unless humans mean to go mad. Thus the sense, sound, sight, touch, taste, and smell provide for human’s guidance the materials of knowledge and counsel with which the understanding, reason, and imagination must work. Among the reporters, the sense of sight had the chief office in giving information. Volition, or choice, is the exercise of will, the capacity of the person to originate things and events that would not otherwise be or occur. By “originate” where we mean to include two of the things most prized in human life: freedom and creativity. When properly understood, these are really two aspects of the same thing, which is power to do what is good—or evil. The power in question belongs to individuals alone. Nothing makes them originate the good (or evil) they do. It is possible for them to not do it. Or to do it. Although a free action has many conditions, those conditions do not an action make. If it is our act, there must be added to those conditions the inner and always unforced “yes” or “no” by which the person responds to the situation. This response is our unique contribution to reality. It is ours, it is us, as nothing else is. Without the inner “yes” there is no sin, for only that “yes” (or “no”) is just us. The thought of sin is not sin and is not even temptation. Temptation is the thought plus the inclination to sin—possibly manifested by linger overt the thought or seeking it out. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

However, sin itself is when we inwardly say “yes” to the temptation, when we would do the deed, even though we do not actually do it. Similar distinction must be drawn with reference to doing what is good and right. These distinctions with reference to volition or choice will turn out to be very important later in our discussion. Now we need to be very clear on this point: the capacity for volition, and the acts of wiling in which it is exercised, from the spirit in beings. In this narrow and focused sense, the spiritual is not just the nonphysical, but it is the central core of the nonphysical part in beings. In us there is much that is not physical that also is not spirit—that is, not of the will. There is, then, a spirit in beings—a spirit that is one’s spirit. It is this that is the human spirit. And if we are to understand spiritual formation, we must understand what the spirit of the human being is. Spirit is, in general, that which is self-initiating and self-sustaining. Only God is purely spiritual, pure creative will and character. Only God can truly say, “I am that I am,” reports Exodus 3.14. God is, in his fundamental and overall nature, unbodily, personal power. Human beings have only some small element of spirit—unbodily, personal power—right at the center of who they are and who they become. It is, above all, this spirit (or will) that must be reached, cared for, and transformed in spiritual formation. The human will is primarily what must be given a Godly nature and must then proceed to expand its Godly governance over the entire personality. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

Thus will or spirit is also the heart in the human system: the core of its being. That is why we have the biblical teaching that human good and evil are matters of the heart. It is the heart and spirit that God looks at in relating to humankind, and in allowing us to relate to him. When we are able to free the individual from defensiveness, so that one is open to the wide range of one’s own needs, as well as the wide rage of environmental and social demands, one’s actions may be trusted to be beneficial, forward-moving, constructive. We do no need to ask who will socialize one, for one of one’s own deepest needs is for affiliation and communication with others. As one become more fully oneself, one will become more realistically socialized. We do not need to ask who will control one’s aggressive impulses; for as one becomes more open to all of one’s impulses, one’s need to be liked by others and one’s tendency to give affection will be as strong as one’s impulses to strike out or to seize for oneself. One will be aggressive in situations in which aggression is realistically appropriate, but there will be no runaway need for aggression. One’s total behavior, in these and other areas, as one moves toward being open to all one’s experience, will be more balanced and realistic, behavior which is appropriate to the survival and enhancement of highly social terrestrial beings. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

I have little sympathy with the rather prevalent concept that beings are basically irrational, and that one’s impulses, if not controlled, will lead to destruction of others and self. Human’s behavior is exquisitely rational, moving with subtle and ordered complexity toward the goals of one’s organism is endeavoring to achieve. The tragedy for most of us is that our defenses keep us from being aware of this rationality, so that consciously we are moving in one direction, while organismically we are moving in another. However, in our person who is living the process of the good like, there would be a decreasing number of such barriers, and one would be increasingly a participant in the rationality of one’s organism. The only control of impulses which would exist, or which would prove necessary, is the natural and internal balancing of one need against another, and the discovery of behaviors which follow the vector most closely approximating the satisfaction of all needs. The experience of extreme satisfaction of one need (for aggression, or pleasures of the flesh, and so forth) in such a way as to do violence to the satisfaction of other needs (for companionship, tender relationship, and so forth)—an experience very common in the defensively organized person—would be greatly decreased. One would participate in the vastly complex self-regulatory activities of one’s organism—the psychological as well as physiological thermostatic controls—in such a fashion as to live in increasing satisfaction and harmony in society. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

In this process of living the good life, it also involves a wider range, a greater richness, than the constricted living in which most of us find ourselves. To be part of this process means that one is involved in the frequently and frightening satisfying experience of a more sensitive living, with greater range, greater variety, greater richness. It seems to me that clients who have moved significantly in therapy live more intimately with their feelings of pain, but also more vividly with their feelings of ecstasy; that anger is more clearly felt, but so also is love; that fear is an experience they know more deeply, but so is courage. And the reason they can thus live fully in a wider range is that they have this underlying confidence in themselves as trustworthy instruments for encountering life. I believe it will have become evident why, for me, adjectives such as happy, contented, blissful, enjoyable, do not seem quite appropriate to any general description of this process I have called the good life, even through the person in this process would experience each one of these feelings at appropriate times. However, the adjectives which seem more generally fitting are adjectives such as enriching, exciting, rewarding, challenging, meaningful. This process of the good life is not, I am convinced, a life for the faint-hearted. It involves the stretching and growing of becoming more and more of one’s potentialities. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

Living the good life also involves the courage to be. It means launching oneself fully into the stream of life. Yet the deeply exciting thing about human beings is that when the individual is inwardly free, one chooses as the good life this process of becoming. Even when we were fill of transgression, because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ. It is by grace we have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the Heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. Jesus Christ has already paid for every blessing you and I will ever receive from God the Father. God’s salvation for Christ’s sake carries with it all the provisions we need, not only for eternity but for all this life as well. “Train yourself to be Godly. For physical training is of some value, but Godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come,” reports 1 Timothy 4.7-8. Whether or not we have disciplined ourselves will make a huge difference in this life. We are all members of one another, and we are each either elevated or depressed by the inner lives of one another. Some of us affect others like a joyous tide, lifting them upward, but some of us are like undertows to the Body of Christ. Spiritual discipline holds huge promise for this present life. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

As for the life to come, spiritual discipline builds the enduring architecture of one’s soul on the foundation of Christ—gold, silver, and precious stones which will survive the fires of judgment and remain a monument to Christ for eternity. Some many minimize the importance of spiritual discipline now, but it is part of living the good life. Godliness has value for all things! The disciplined Christian gives and gets the best of both Worlds—the World now and the World to come. The word discipline may raise the feeling of stultifying constraint in some minds—suggesting a claustrophobic, restricted life. Nothing could be farther from the truth! The obsessive, almost manic discipline of Mike Singletary liberated him to play like a wild man on the football field. Hemingway’s angst over the right word freed him to leave a mark on the English language second only to Shakespeare. The billion sketched of the Renaissance great set Michelangelo free to create the skies of the Sistine Chapel. Churchill’s painstaking preparation freed him to give great impromptu speeches and brilliant ripostes. The disciplined drudgery of the musical greats like Armin van Burren and Ruben de Ronde released their genius. And, brothers and sisters in Christ, spiritual discipline frees us from the gravity of this present age and allows us to soar with the saints and Angels. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

This doctrine of faith is especially based upon statements from authority, inasmuch as its principles are obtained by revelation: thus we ought to believe on the authority of those whom the revelation has been made. Nor does this take away from the dignity of this doctrine, for although the argument from authority based on human reason is the weakest, yet the argument from authority based on divine revelation is the strongest. However, sacred doctrine makes use even of human reason, not, indeed, to prove faith (for thereby the merit of faith would come to an end), but to make clear other things that are put forward in this doctrine. Since therefore grace does not destroy nature but perfects it, natural reason should minister to faith as the natural bent of the will ministers to charity. Hence the Apostles says: “Bringing into captivity every understanding unto the obedience of Christ,” reports 2 Corinthians 10.5. Grant, we beseech Thee, O Lord, Eternal King of all, that being purified by the sacred fast, we may come with sincere minds to partake of Thy holy things; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Grant, we beseech Thee, O Lord, that renewing our sacred observations with annual devotion, we may please Thee both in body and soul; through Jesus Christ our Lord. We beseech Thee, O Lord, that our earnest devotion may become fruitful through Thy grace; for then shall our fast be profitable to us, if it is well-pleasing to Thy loving-kindness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

Lord, high and holy, meek and lovely, Thou hast brought me to the valley of vision, where I live in the depths but see thee in the heights; hemmed in by mountains of sin I behold thy glory. Let me learn by paradox that the way down is the way up, that to be low is to be high, that the broken heart is the healed heart, that the contrite spirit is the rejoicing spirit, that the repenting soul is the victorious soul, that to have nothing is to possess all, that to bear the cross is to wear the crown, that to give is to receive, that the valley is the place of vision. Lord, in the daytime stars can be seen from deepest wells, and the deeper the wells the brighter thy stars shine; let me find thy light in my darkness, thy life in my death, thy joy in my sorrow, thy grace in my sin, thy riches in my poverty, thy glory in my valley. “And when he had said these words, behold, the Lord showed himself unto him, and said: Because thou knowest these things ye are redeemed from the fall; therefore ye are brought back into my presence; therefore I show myself unto you. Behold I am he who was prepared from the foundation of the World to redeem my people. Behold, I am Jesus Christ. I am the Father and the So. In me shall all humankind have life, and that eternally, even they who shall believe on my name; and they shall become my sons and daughters,” reports Ether 3.13-14. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

Character is ultimately who we are expressed in action, in how we live, in what we do, and so the children around us know: they absorb and take stock of what they observe, namely us—we adults living and doing things in a certain spirit, getting along with one another in various ways. Our children add up, imitate, file away what they have observed and so very often later fall in line with the particular moral counsel we wittingly or quite unself-consciously have offered them.

EJN0elGVUAM6FQQ The charming homes in Cresleigh Ranch, offer graceful designs, with open floor plans for those who enjoy a casual lifestyle. The kitchen, breakfast area, and cozy keeping area with fireplace (optional) are all one large room. The home hub is such a versatile space. Make it an office, a studio a playroom—the choice is yours when you live at Cresleigh Ranch. Some plans also have a first-floor master suite with walk-in closet, which offers both convenience and quiet seclusion, which allows parents to have control over the first floor of the house. The upstairs, which comes with additional bedrooms, bathroom(s), and loft can be a retreat for the youth. https://cresleigh.com/find-a-home/

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

December 18, 2019 2:11 am

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

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

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

How do beings, how do you, react to this image of the future with its hope and threat and inescapable end? Probably most of us react by looking at the immediate future, anticipating it, working for it, hoping for it, being anxious about it, while cutting off from our awareness the future which is farther away, and above all, by cutting off from our consciousness the end, the last moment of our future. Perhaps we could not live without doing so most of our time. However, perhaps we will not be able to die if we always do so. And if one is not able to die, is one really about to live? How do we react if we become aware of the inescapable end contained in our future? Are we able to bear it, to take its anxiety into a courage that faces ultimate darkness? Or are we thrown into utter hopelessness? Do we hope against hope, or do we repress our awareness of the end because we cannot stand it? Repressing the consciousness of our end expresses itself in several ways. Many try to do so by putting the expectation of a long life between now and the end. For them it is decisive that the end be delayed. Even old people who are near the end do this, for they cannot endure the fact that the end will not be delayed much longer. Many people realize this deception and hope for a continuation of this life after death. They expect an endless future in which they may achieve or possess what has been denied them in this life. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

This attitude that we will achieve our hearts desires in the after life is a prevalent attitude about the future, and also a very simple one. It denies that there is an end. It refuses to accept that we are creatures, that we come from the eternal ground of time and return to the eternal ground of time and have received a limited span of time as our time. It replaces eternity by endless future. However, endless future is without a final aim; it repeats itself and could well be described as an image of hell. This is not the Christian way of dealing with the end. The Christian message says the eternal stands above past and future. “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.” The Christian message acknowledges that time runs towards an end, and that we move towards the end of that time which is our time. Many people—but not the Bible—speak loosely of the “hereafter” or the “life after death.” Even in our liturgies eternity is translated by “World without end.” However, the World, by its very nature, is that which comes to an end. If we want to speak in truth without foolish, wishful thinking, we should speak about the eternal that is neither timelessness nor endless time. The mystery of the future is answered in the eternal of which we may speak in images taken from time. However, if we forget that the images are images, we fall into absurdities and self-deceptions. There is no time after time, but there is eternity above time. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CRESLEIGH MEADOWS AT PLUMAS RANCH

Plumas Lake, CA | from the mid $300’s

Coming Soon!

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

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

#CresleighHomes

If I Would be What I Feel like Being, You Mean that Would Be All Right?

December 15, 2019 2:48 am

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. From these great writings, one will receive impulses of spiritual renewal. From these strong paragraphs and lovely words, one will receive incitement to make oneself better than one is. Their every page will carry a message to one; indeed, they will seem to be written for one. Every book which stimulates aspiration and widens reflection does spiritual service and acts as a teacher. Humankind owes to the child the best it has to give. The greatest gifts you can give your children are the roots of responsibility and the wings of independence. I find that this desire to be all of oneself in each moment—all the richness and complexity, with nothing hidden from oneself, and nothing feared in oneself—this is a common desire in those who have seemed to show much movement in therapy. To be that self which one truly is involves still other components. One which has perhaps been implied already is that the individual moves toward living in an open, friendly, close relationship to one’s own experience. This does not occur easily. Often as the individual sense some new facet of oneself, one initially rejects it. Only as one experiences such a hitherto denied aspect of oneself in an acceptant climate can one tentatively accept it as a part of oneself. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

As developed nations, so many people have the desire to suppress the feelings with a glass of wine or some other substance, but that will only do more damage. Wine and other things should be enjoyed for pleasure, not to suppress feelings. We are human beings, and not robot, we need to feel our feelings or else we would not have them. Pain means that some kind of behavior modification is needed or we need to change or situation. By feeling pain, and handling it responsible and through prayer, God will direct us in new ways to change our experience for the better. However, as we open ourselves to internal feelings which are clearly not new to one, but which up to this time, one has never been able to fully experience, once we can permit ourselves to experiencing them one will find them less terrible and one will be able to live closer to one’s own experience. Gradually one will learn that experiencing is a friendly resource, not a frightening enemy. No longer is one so fearful of what one may find. One comes to realize that one’s own inner reactions and experiences, the messages of one’s senses and one’s viscera, are friendly. One comes to want to be close to one’s inner sources of information rather than closing them off. This is what we call self-actualizing. Their ease of penetration to reality, their closer approach to a terrestrial or child-like acceptance and spontaneity imply a superior awareness of their own impulses, their own desires, opinions, and subjective reactions in general. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

Jack’s Favorite Steak Sandwich, Charbroiled United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) choice Harris Ranch 10 ounce New York Steak, served open-faced on grilled sourdough bread with shredded lettuce, tomato, and red onion.

This greater openness to what goes on within is associated with a similar openness to experiences of external reality. Self-actualized people have a wonderful capacity to appreciate again and again, freshly and naively, the basic goods of life with awe, pleasure, wonder, and even ecstasy, however stale these experiences may be for other people. Although an enlightened individual is ever at peace within oneself, one does not necessarily care to advertise this fact to the World by wearing a perpetual smile. For such a being all actions become ritual ones, all places sacred. Even if a negative reaction to some untoward event were to enter one’s mind, one would efface it instantly. The adept is capable of immense power on the occasions when one unleashes it. The illuminate is more likely to shun fame than to seek it. One’s humbleness is shown by the way one seeks anonymity. The exquisite peace and serene passionlessness of one’s days have been fully earned, the power to withdraw from one’s senses from objects whose pursuit wastes the lives of most beings has been gained in long meditations, the insights which reveals the presence of God in al things has been born out of one’s many self-denials and self-surrenders. Where other beings see nothing, sense noting, revere nothing, one does all these things. For one the Empty is the Full. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

The life of such a being compares with the dead movement of a fixed spindle. While one sits calm within oneself, one’s hands and feet and brain work actively amidst the World. The self-actualized is not tainted by calculations of gain or loss for one is egoless in one’s reckonings. The quality of this being is utterly different from that of most beings. Such is the impression a sensitive observer must feel. If one talks out of one’s personal experience of the Spirit, it will not be an arrogant boast but a quiet statement of simple fact. Peace trails in the wake of such a being as foam behind a yacht. Closely related to this openness to inner and outer experience in general is an openness to and an acceptance of other individuals. As one moves to being able to accept one’s own experience, one also moves toward the acceptance of the experience of others. One values and appreciates both one’s experience and that of others for what it is. One does not complain about water because it is wet, nor about rocks because they are hard. As the child looks out upon the World with wide, uncritical and innocent eyes, simply noting and observing what is the case, without either arguing the matter or demanding that it be otherwise, so does the self-actualizing person look upon human nature both in oneself and in others. This acceptant attitudes toward that which exists, I find developing in clients in therapy. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

Still another way of describing this pattern which I see in each client is to say that increasingly one trusts and values the process which is oneself. Watching my clients, I have come to a much better understanding of creative people. El Greco, for example, must have realized as he looked at some of his early work, that god artists do not paint like that. However somehow he trusted his own experiencing of life, the process of himself, sufficiently that he could go on expressing his own unique perceptions. It was as though he could say, “Good artists do not paint like this, but I paint like this.” Or to mov to another field, Ernest Hemingway was surely aware that good writers do not write like this. However, fortunately he moved toward being Hemingway, being himself, rather than toward someone else’s conception of a good writer. Einstein seems to have been unusually oblivious to the fact that good physicists did not think his kind of thoughts. Rather than drawing because of his inadequate academic preparation in physics, he simply moved toward being Einstein, toward thinking his own thoughts, toward being as truly and deeply himself as he could. This is not a phenomenon which occurs only in the artist or the genius. Time and again in my clients, I have seen simple people become significant and creative in their own spheres, as they have developed more trust of the process going on withing themselves, and have dared to feel their own feelings, live by values which they discover within, and express themselves in their own unique ways. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

One is no more capable of reviling other beings, let alone hating them. Such evil thinking cannot even begin to enter one’s mind but must die stillborn. No ugly qualities are left on one, no vicious remnants of the beast that became human. What one feels within oneself irradiated what one sees outside oneself. The inner strength that one has received enables one to endure adverse circumstances in a manner that truly makes the best of them in the best sense. The genuine illuminate will discourage all attempts at deification or oneself whereas the pseudo-illuminate glorifies in it. One’s eyes seem passionless to our own agitated ones. One’s mind seems impenetrable to our own easily read ones. Even if the ego still lives in one, it lives thoroughly purified and utterly checked. One’s principle trends of thought and conduct proceed from a level beyond it. One’s manner always imperturbable to the point of emotional aloofness, one’s views always impartial to the point of stepping aside from one’s own self-interest, one’s love of truth never deserts one. The simple knowledge of one’s own status has no personal pride in it; therefore, no need exists to hide it behind a false modesty. One may carry no outward credentials of one’s status yet there will be an inward presence of silent authority all about one, which not even one’s humility, one’s utter self-abasement can hide. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

One is not outwardly too different from the rest of humankind. One is not cold, unfeeling marble statue nor entirely remote from human interests. It is easy to mistake one’s habitual reserve for cold disdain. However, it springs from a wish to refrain from interfering with others. If other beings irritate one, if problems beset one, one will not complain. This peace which one has found is unfaltering. Yet it is still important to understand what is meant by neurotic detachment. Certainly it is not the mere fact of wanting occasional solitude. Everyone who takes oneself and life seriously wants to be alone at times. Our civilization has so engulfed us in the externals of living that we have little understanding of this need, but its possibilities for personal fulfillment have been stressed by philosophies and religions of all times. A desire for meaningful solitude is by no means neurotic; on the contrary most neurotics shrink from their own inner depths, and an incapacity for constructive solitude is itself a sign of neurosis. Only if there is intolerable strain in associating with people and solitude becomes primarily a means of avoiding it is the wish to be alone an indication of neurotic detachment. Certain of the highly detached person’s peculiarities are so characteristic of one that psychiatrists are inclined to think of them as belonging exclusively to the detached type. The most obvious of these is a general estrangement from people. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

In one, this general estrangement from people, strikes our attention because one particularly emphasizes it, but actually one’s estrangement is no greater than that of other neurotics. Some people, however, when they discover this characteristic, they are surprised and frightened because of their passionate need for closeness makes them so eager to believe that no gap between oneself and others exists. After all, estrangement from people is only an indication that human relationships are disturbed. However, this is the case in all neuroses. The extent of the estrangement depends more on the severity of the disturbance than on the particular form the neurosis takes. Another characteristic that is often regarded as peculiar to detachment is estrangement from the self, that is, a numbness to emotional experience, an uncertainty as to what one is, what one loves, hates, desires, hopes, fears, resents, believes. Such self-estrangement is again common to all neuroses. Every person, to the extent that one is neurotic, is like an airplane directed by remote control and so bound to lose touch with oneself. Detached persons can be quite like the zombies of Haitian lore—dead, but revived by witchcraft: they can function like live persons, but there is no life in them. Others, again, can have a comparatively rich emotional life. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

Since such variations exit, we cannot regard self-estrangement, either as exclusive to detachment. What all detached persons have in common is something quite different. It is their capacity to look at themselves with a kind of objective interest, as one would look at a work of art. Perhaps the best way to describe it would be to say that they have the same onlooker attitude toward themselves that they have toward life in general. They may often, therefore, be excellent observers of the process going on within them. An outstanding example of this is the uncanny understanding of dream symbols they frequently display. What is crucial is their inner need to put emotional distance between themselves and others. More accurately, it is their conscious and unconscious determination not to get emotionally involves with others in anyway, whether in love, fight, co-operation, or competition. They draw around themselves a kind of magic circle which no one may penetrate. And this is why, superficially, they may get along with other people. The compulsive character of the need shows up in their reaction of anxiety when the World intrudes on them. All the needs and qualities they acquire are directed toward this major need of not getting involved. Among the most striking is a need for self-sufficiency. Its most beneficial expression is resourcefulness. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

The aggressive type also tends to be resourceful—but the spirit is different; for one it is a prerequisite for fighting one’s way in a hostile World and for wanting to defeat others in the fray. In the detached type the spirit is like Robinson Crusoe’s: he has to be resourceful in order to live. It is the only way one can compensate for one’s isolation. A more precarious way to maintain self-sufficiently is by consciously or unconsciously restricting one’s needs. If we remember that the underlying principle here is never to become so attached to anybody or anything that one or it becomes indispensable, we shall better understand the various moves in this direction. That would jeopardize aloofness. Better to have nothing matter much. For example, a detached person maybe capable of real enjoyment, but if enjoyment depends in any way on others one prefers to forego it. One can take pleasure in an occasional evening with a few friends but dislikes general gregariousness and social functions. Similarly, one avoids competition, prestige, and success. One is inclined to restrict one’s eating, drinking, and living habits and keeps them on a scale that will not require one to spend too much time or energy in earning the money to pay for them. One may bitterly resent illness, considering it a humiliation because it forces one to depend on others. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

One may insist on acquiring one’s knowledge of any subject first hand: rather than take what others have said or written about Russia, for instance or about this country if one is a foreigner, one will want to see or hear for oneself. If it were not carried to absurd lengths, like refusing to ask for directions when in an unusual town, this attitude would make for splendid inner independence. Another pronounced need is one’s need for privacy. One is like a person in a hotel room who rarely removes the “Do-Not-Disturb” sign from one’s door. Even books may be regarded as intruders, as something from outside. Any question put to one about one’s personal life may shock one; one tends to shroud oneself in a veil of secrecy. A patient once told me that at the age of sixty-five he still resented the idea of God’s omniscience quite as much as when his mother told him that God could look through the shutters and see him biting his fingernails. This was a patient who was extremely reticent about even the most trivial details of his life. The need for justification more than anything else allows an element of subtle underground insincerity to pervade a personality, even though the person may be basically honest. It accounts also for the relentless self-righteousness which is a frequent character trend in neurotic persons, sometimes conspicuous, sometimes hidden being a complying or even self-recriminating attitude. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

This attitude of self-righteousness if often confounded with a narcissistic attitude. Factually it has nothing whatever to do with any kind of self-love; it does not even contain any element of complacency or conceit, because, contrary to appearances, there is never a real conviction of being right, but only a constant desperate need to appear justified. It is, in other words, a defensive attitude necessitated by the urge to solve certain problems which, in the last analysis, are generated by anxiety. Observation of this need for justification is probably due the super-ego demands which the neurotic submits to in reaction from one’s destructive drives. There is another aspect of the need for justification which is particularly suggestive of such an interpretation. In addition to being indispensable as a strategical means of dealing with others, justification is also in many neurotic persons a means of satisfying the necessity to appear irreproachable in their own eyes. However, people moving toward being, knowingly and acceptingly, the process which one inwardly is and actually is allows one to move away from what one is not, from being a façade. One is not trying to be more than one is, with the attendant feelings of insecurity or bombastic defensiveness. One is not trying to be less than one is, with the attendant feelings of guilt or self-deprecation. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

Self-actualizing beings are increasingly listening to the deepest recesses of one’s physiological and emotional being, and find oneself increasingly willing to be, with greater accuracy and depth, that self which one most truly is. One client, as he beings to sense the direction one is taking, asks oneself wonderingly and with incredulity in one interview, “You mean if I would really be what I feel like being, that would be alight?” His own further experience, and that to many another client, tends toward an affirmative answer. To be what he truly is, this is the path of life which he appears to value most highly, when he is free to move in any direction. It is not simply an intellectual value choice, but seems to be the best description of the groping, tentative, uncertain behaviors by which one moves exploringly to what one wants to be. From this complete independence arises part of that authority which one’s speech is filled. One practices tolerance without the weakness of humanity, and the vacillations of one’s disciples, without condoning them. One neither approves nor disapproves of anyone. One conforms to the higher laws, one’s life is based on the cosmic life, one’s thought and attitude are in harmony with the cosmic order. Under the genuine friendly cordiality there is, although subtly felt, a measured distance of manner, a holding back in reserve and healthy detachment. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

It is true that there have been historic figures among the self-actualized who conducted themselves with the tradition-bound aloofness of righteousness. However, there were others, and they were probably the majority, who were approachable in a more human way. These great elemental forces in one are purifying ones. To many people, the path of life I have been endeavoring to describe seems like a most unsatisfactory path indeed. To the degree that this involves a real difference in values, I simply respect it as a difference. However, I have found that sometimes such an attitude is due to certain misapprehension. In so far as I can I would like to clear these away. To some it appears that to be what one is, is to remain static. They see such a purpose or value as synonymous with being fixed or unchanging. Nothing could be further from the truth. To be what one is, is to enter fully into being a process. When one is willing to be what one truly is, change is facilitated, probably maximized. Indeed it is the person who is denying one’s feelings and one’s reactions who is the person who tends to come for therapy. One has, often for years, been trying to change, but finds oneself fixed in inauthentic behaviors one dislikes. It is only as one can become more of oneself, can be more of what one has denied in oneself, that there is any prospect of change. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

An even more common reaction to the path of life I have been describing is that to be what one truly is would mean to be bad, evil, uncontrolled, destructive. It would mean to unleash some kind of a monster on the World. This is a view which is very well known to me, since I meet in an almost every client. “If I dare to let the feelings flow which are dammed up within me, if by some chance I should live in those feelings, then this would be a catastrophe.” This is the attitude, spoken or unspoken, of nearly client as one moves into the experiencing of the unknown aspects of oneself. However, the whole course of one’s experience in therapy contradicts these fears. One finds that gradually one can be one’s anger, when anger is one’s real reaction, but that such accepted or transparent ager is not destructive. One finds that one can be one’s fear, but that knowingly to be one’s fear does not dissolve one. One finds that one can be self-pitying, and it is not bad. One can feel an be one’s feelings of pleasures of the flesh, or one’s lazy feelings, or one’s hostile feelings, and the roof of the World does not fall in. The reason seems to be that the more one is able to permit these feelings to flow and to be in one, the more they take their appropriate place in total harmony of one’s feelings. One discovers that one has other feelings with which these mingle and find a balance. One feels loving and tender and considerate and cooperative, as well as hostile or lustful or angry. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

When allowing oneself to feel one’s feelings, one feels interest and zest and curiosity, as well as laziness or apathy. One feels courageous and venturesome, as well as fearful. One’s feelings, when one lives closely and acceptingly with their complexity, operate in a constructive harmony rather than sweeping one into some uncontrollably evil path. Sometimes people express this concern by saying that is an individual were to be what one truly is, one would be releasing the beast in oneself. I feel somewhat amused by this, because I think we might take a closer look at the beasts. The lion is often a symbol of the “ravening beast.” However, what about him? Unless he has been very much warped by contact with humans, he has a number of the good qualities I have been describing. To be sure, the lion kills when he is hungry, but he does not go on a wild rampage of killing, nor does he overfeed himself. He keeps his handsome figure better than some of us. The lion is helpless and dependent in his puppyhood, but he moves from that to independence. He does not cling to dependence. He is selfish and self-centered in infancy, but in adulthood he shows a reasonable degree of cooperativeness, and feeds, cares for, and protects his young. He satisfies his desires for pleasures of the flesh, but this does not mean that he does on wild and lustful orgies. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

The lion’s various tendencies and urges have a harmony within him. He is, in some basic sense, a constructive and trustworthy member of the species felis leo. And what I am trying to suggest is that when one is truly and deeply a unique member of the human species, this is not something which should excite horror. It means instead that one lives fully and openly the complex process of being one of the most widely sensitive, responsive, and creative creatures on this planet. Fully to be one’s own uniqueness as human being, is not, in my experience, a process which would be labeled bad. More appropriate words might be that it is a beneficial, or constrictive, or a realistic, or trustworthy process. Those with a well-kept heart are persons who are prepared for and capable of responding to the situations of life in ways that are good and right. Their will functions as it should, to choose what is good and avoid what is evil, you have to find your own state of mind, you are reaching out for another World, a place where dreams come true, a place to create, and the other components of your nature cooperate to that end. They need not be perfect; but what all people manage in at least a few times and areas of life, they manage in life as whole. And when we are told to have childlike faith, it means to retain the ability to believe in the supernatural, the impossible. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

Children believe that glass door knobs are diamonds and that they have superpowers. They believe when they grow up that they will help bring about World peace. It is that type of faith in God, in the supernatural that adults need to have to manifest miracles. Almighty and everlasting God, Who hast hallowed this day by the Incarnation of Thy Word, and the Child-bearing of the Blessed Virgin Mary; grant Thy people to share in this celebration, that they who have been redeemed by Thy grace may be happy as Thine adopted children; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Almighty and everlasting God, the Light of the faithful and the Ruler of souls, Who hast hallowed us by the Incarnation of Thy Word, and the Child-bearing of the blessed Virgin Mary; we beseech Thee, let the power of Thy Holy Spirit come also upon us, and the mercy of the Highest overshadow us. O Christ, Almighty Son of God, come graciously on the day of Thy Nativity to be the Saviour of Thy people; that with Thy wonted goodness Thou mayest deliver us from all anxiety and all temporal fear, for Who livest and reignest will let our hearts be graciously enlightened by the His holy radiance so that we may escape the darkness of this World. By your guidance, we will attain to the country of eternal brightness; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. “If a person has faith, one must need to have hope; for without faith there cannot be any hope,” reports Moroni 7.42. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

BRIGHTON STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH

This is a modest yet charming copy of Ulysses S. Grant’s 1865 Italianate mansion. Made with stucco and stones with a mostly flat roof, wide bracketed eaves, and a small columned entrance, it presents classic elements of this style.

Rancho Cordova, CA |

Now Selling!

NOW SELLING! Brighton Station at Cresleigh Ranch is Rancho Cordova’s newest home community! This charming neighborhood offers an array of home types with eye catching architecture styles such as Mid-Century Modern, California Modern, Prairie, and Contemporary Farmhouse. These homes are designed by some of the most creative architects of the era—they are a symbol of a new democracy and a breaking away from the old. Cresleigh homes stand for something and evoke a spirit or the Romantic Movement by incorporating several architectural styles, all of them imitative of historic European models. However, the past is still idealized and traits such as spontaneity and individualism, that go hand-in-hand with freedom, are valued. The arts in general reflect this interest.

Cresleigh homes with its tall peaks and pointed arches of its entryways and narrow windows, reflect a romantic return to the age of chivalry, coupled with a Christian piety. Some even say they are reminiscent of the Winchester Mansion. And although they are grand, the working family can afford a version of one of these homes because they were designed by carpenter builders. Examples of these picturesque houses can be seen on the Cresleigh Homes website and through North America. Lawns were introduced in the 1870s by the British and gardening was considered to be good hygiene because it allowed one to get exercise and fresh air. Another outstanding feature of Cresleigh Homes is that the interior detail reflect the exterior architecture, giving it a structural integrity not found in some other builder’s homes.

Home life is paramount. The love of the family, the love between husbands and wives, and above all, a mother’s love for her children, were felt to be an extension of God’s love, and therefore home is a little Heaven on Earth. 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/

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

November 25, 2019 10:02 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cresleigh Homes

Mills Station at Cresleigh Ranch | Residence 3

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

#CresleighHomes

There is No Better Way in this World to Lose Something Forever than to Prejudge it!

November 15, 2019 4:54 pm

No human being in the World has ever risen to greatness without a correspondingly great soul. When this is no longer true, then will our civilization have to come to an end. Even the most misfitting child who’s changed upon the soul’s worth, sits with the genius of the Earth and turns they key to the whole World. In one applies it around themselves like scaffolding, theory can obscure and individual. When working in difficult places, scaffolding does provide the builder a secure place to stand and gives architects the opportunity to view an emerging building from new angles. However, a builder’s rough scaffolding can easily camouflage and be mistake for the intricate architecture is surrounds. Similarly, people can erect theory around other individual’s quickly—often automatically—when they are uncertain and hoping for a surer vantage point, as in the opening vignette. One of the most formidable challenges of being human, then, is to draw structure from a particular orientation without letting theory obscure the complex, unique individual in front of you. We have preserved this life, and the soul has preserved us. Exploring deeply can mean thinking not about the way one came to be the way one is, but that one is. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

The Greeks, who were apparently strong visual learners, originated the term stigma to refer to bodily signs designs to expose something unusual and bad about the moral status of the signifier. The signs were cut or burnt into the body and advertised that the bearer was a slave, a criminal, or a traitor—a blemished person, ritually polluted, to be avoided, especially in public places. Later, in Christian times, two players of metaphor were added to the term: the first referred to bodily signs of holy grace that took the form of eruptive blossoms on the skin; the second, a medical allusion to this religious allusion, referred to bodily signs of physical disorder. Today the term is widely used in something like the original literal sense, but is applied more to the disgrace itself than to the bodily evidence of it. Furthermore, shifts have occurred in the kinds of disgrace that arouse concern. Society establishes the means of categorizing persons and the complement of attributes felt to be ordinary and natural for members of each of these categories. Social setting established the categories of person likely to be encountered there. The routines of social intercourse in established settings allow us to deal with anticipated others without special attention or thought. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

When a stranger comes into our presence, then, first appearances are likely to enable us to anticipate one’s category and attributes, one’s “social identity”—to use a term that is better than “social status” because person attributes such as “honesty” are involved, as well as structural ones, like “occupation.” We lean on these anticipations that we have, transforming them into normative expectations, into righteously presented demands. Typically, we do not become aware that we have made these demands or aware of what they are until an active question arises as to whether or not they will be fulfilled. It is then that we are likely to realize that all along we had been making certain assumptions as to what the individual before us ought to be. Thus, the demands we make might better be called demands made “in effect,” and the character we impute to the individual might better be seen as an imputation made in potential retrospect—a characterization “in effect,” a virtual social identity. The category and attribute one could in fact be proved to possess will be called one’s actual social identity. While the stranger is present before us, evidence can arise of ones possessing an attribute that makes one different from others in the category of persons available for one to be, and of a less desirable kind—in the extreme, a person who is quite thoroughly bad, or dangerous, or weak. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

One is thus reduced in our minds from a whole and unusual person to a tainted, discounted one. Such an attribute is a stigma, especially when its discrediting effect is very extensive; sometimes it is also called a failing, a shortcoming, a limitation. It constitutes a special discrepancy between virtual and actual social identity. Note that there are others types of discrepancy between virtual and actual social identity, for example the kind that causes us to reclassify an individual from one socially anticipated category to a different but equally well-anticipated one, and the kind that causes us to alter our estimation of the individual upward. Not, too, that not all undesirable attributes are at issues, but only those which are incongruous with our stereotype of what a given type of individual should be. The term stigma is used to refer to an attribute that is deeply discrediting, but should be seen as a language of relationships, not attributes, is really needed. An attribute that stigmatizes one type of possessor can confirm the usualness of another, and therefore is neither creditable nor discreditable as a thing in itself. For example, some jobs in American cause holders without the expected college education to conceal this fact; others job, however, can lead the few of their holders who have a higher education to keep this a secret, lest they be marked as failures and outsiders. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

Similarly, a middle class boy may feel no compunction in being seen going to the library; a professional criminal, however, writes this: “I can remember before now on more than one occasion, for instance, going into a public library near where I was living, and looking over my shoulder a couple of times before I actually went in just to make sure no one who knew me was standing about and seeing me do it.” So, too, an individual who desires to fight for one’s country may conceal a physical defect, lest one’s claimed physical status be discredited; later, the same individual, embittered and trying to get out of the army, may success in gaining admission to the army hospital, where one would be discredited if discovered in not really having an acute sickness. A stigma, then, is really a special kind of relationship between attribute and stereotype, although I do not propose to continue to say so, in part because there are important attributes that almost everywhere in our society are discrediting. The term stigma and its synonyms conceal a double perspective: does this stigmatized individual assume one’s differentness is known about already or is evident on the spot, or does one assume it is neither known about by those present nor immediately perceivable by them? In the first case one deals with the plight of the discredited, in the second with that of the discreditable. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

This is an important difference, even though a particular stigmatized individual is likely to have experience with both being discredited, and discreditable, the two cannot always be separated. However, remaining committed to understanding and describing one’s World as he or she experiences it—even when formulating—helps individuals be sure they are focusing on the architecture, not the scaffolding. “No confraternity or sodality has ever been made sacred expect by the faith of those who formed it, as there is no known power beyond this World or in in that can make anything sacred except the power we claim for ourselves. We are children of the Universe no matter who thinks otherwise, we live and breathe and think and dream as do all sentient beings, and no one has a right to condemn us or deny us the right to love and live,” (Page 425 of Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis by Anne Rice). Three different types of stigma may be mentioned. First there are abomination of the body—the various physical deformities. Next there are blemishes of individual character perceived as weak will, domineering or unnatural passions, treacherous and rigid beliefs, and dishonesty, these being inferred from a known record of, for example, mental disorder, imprisonment, addiction, alcoholism, sexuality, unemployment, suicidal attempts, and radical political behavior. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

Finally, there are tribal stigma of race, nation, and religion, these being stigma that can be transmitted though lineages and equally contaminate all members of a family. In all of these various instances of stigma, however, including those the Greeks had in mind, the same sociological features are found: an individual who might have been received easily in ordinary social intercourse posses a trait that can obtrude itself upon attention and turn those of us whom one meets away from one, breaking that claim that one’s other attributes have on us. One possesses a stigma, an undesired differentness from what we had anticipated. We and those who do not depart negatively from the particular expectations at issue I shall call the normal. Some have “rebelled in their own way against the inevitable isolation that closes around us all; they have survived because the beauty of life would not let them leave it; and a thirst for knowledge has been born in them—a thirst for new ages and new forms and new expression of art and love—even as they see everything that have cherished crumbling and fading away. This is our Universe. We too are made of stardust as are all things on this planet; we too belong,” (Page 426 of Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis by Anne Rice). #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

The attitudes we normal have toward a person with a stigma, and the actions we take in regard to one, are well known, since these responses are what benevolent social action is designed to soften and ameliorate. By definition, of course, we believe the person with a stigma is not quite human. On this assumption we exercise varieties of discrimination, through which we effectively, if often unthinkingly, reduce one’s life chances. We construct a stigma-theory, an ideology to explain one’s inferiority and account for the danger one represents, sometimes rationalizing an animosity based on other differences, such as those of social class. We use specific stigma terms such as cripple, bastard, moron in daily discourse as a source of metaphor and imagery, typically without giving a thought to the original meaning. We tend to impute a wide range of imperfections on the basis of the original one, and at the same time to impute some desirable but undesired attributes, often of a supernatural cast, such as “six sense,” or “understanding”: For some, there may be a hesitancy about touching or steering the blind, while for others, the perceived failure to see may be generalized into a gestalt of disability, so that the individual shouts at the blind as if they were deaf or attempts to lift them as if they were crippled. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

Those confronting the blind may have a whole range of belief that is anchored in the stereotype. For instance, they may think they are subject to unique judgment, assuming the blinded individual draws on special channels of information unavailable to others. Further, we may perceive one’s defensive response to one’s situation as a direct expression of one’s defect, and then see both defect and response as just retribution for something one or one’s parents or one’s tribe did, and hence a justification of the way we treat one. Now turn from the normal to the person one is normal against. It seems generally true that members of a social category may strongly support a standard of judgment that they and others agree does not directly apply to them. Thus it is that a business person may demand womanly behavior from females or ascetic behavior from monks, and not construe oneself as someone who ought to realize either of these styles of conduct. The distinction is between realizing a norm and merely supporting it. The issue of stigma does not arise here, but only where there is some expectation on all sides that those in a given category should not only support a particular nor but also realize it. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

Also, it seems possible for an individual to fail to live up to what we effectively demand of one, and yet be relatively untouched by this failure; insulated by one’s alienation, protected by identity beliefs of one’s own, one feels that one is a full-fledged normal human being, and that we are the ones who are not quite human. One bears a stigma but does not seem to be impressed or repentant about doing so. Sometimes it may be difficult to know, at times, whether we have been hurt more by friends or our enemies. Human’s awesome scientific advances into the infinitude of pace as well as the infinitude of sub-atomic particles seems mostly likely to lead to the total destruction of the World unless we can make great advances in understanding and deal with interpersonal and inter-group tensions. I believe that when we accept ourselves as we are, then we change. I believe that we have learned this from others in society as well as within our own experiences—that we cannot change, we cannot move away from what we are, until we thoroughly accept what we are. Then change seems to come about almost unnoticed. Another result that comes out of being myself is that relationships then become real. Real relationships have an exciting way of being vital and meaningful, and real relationships tend to change instead of reaming static. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

Very rarely do we permit ourselves to understand precisely what others are saying. Our first reaction to most of the statements which we hear from other person is an immediate evaluation, or judgment, rather than an understanding of it. I believe this is because understanding is risky. If I let myself really understand another person, I might be changed by that understanding. And we all fear change. So as I say, it is not an easy thing to permit oneself to understand an individual, to enter thoroughly and completely and empathically into one’s frame of reference. It is also a rare thing. To understand is enriching in a double way. I learned from other’s experiences in ways that change me, that make me a different and, I think, a more responsive person. Even more important perhaps, is the fact that my understanding of these individuals permits them to change. It permits them to accept their own fears and bizarre thoughts and tragic feelings and discouragements, as well as their moment of courage and kindness and love and sensitivity. And it is their experience as well as mine that when someone fully understands those feelings, this enables them to accept those feelings in themselves. Then they find both the feelings and themselves changing. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

Whether it is understanding a woman who feels that very literally she has a hook in her head by which other lead her about, or understanding a man who feels that no one is as lonely, no one is as separated from others as he, I find these understandings to be of value to me. However also, and even more importantly, to be understood a very beneficial value to these individuals. Here is another learning which has had importance for me. I have found it enriching to open channels whereby others can communicate their feelings, their private perceptual Worlds, to me. Because understanding is rewarding, I would like to reduce the barriers between others and me, so that they can, if they wish, reveal themselves more fully. On a national scale, we cannot permit another individual to think differently than we do. Yet it has come to seem to me that this separateness of individuals, the right of each individual to utilize one’s experience in one’s own way and to discover one’s own meanings in it,–this is one of the most priceless potentialities of life. Not surprisingly, one good way to start designing an essential being is to plan to allow one’s soul to flourish and let its heart shape the rest. The soul gets you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no soul. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

Each person is an island unto oneself, in a very real sense; and one can only build bridges to other islands if one is first of all willing to be oneself and permitted to be oneself. So I find that when I can accept another person, which means specifically accepting the feelings and attitudes and beliefs that one has as a real and vital part of one, then I am assisting one to become a person: and there seems to me great value in this. The next learning I want to state may be difficult to communicate. It is this. The more I am open to the realities in me and in the other person, the less do I find myself wishing to “fix things.” As I try to listen to myself and the experiencing going on in me, and the more I try to extend that same listening attitude to another person, the more respect I feel for the complex process of life. So I become less and less inclined to hurry to fix things, to set goals, to mold people, to manipulate and push them in the way that I would like them to go. I am much more content simply to be myself and to let another person be oneself. I know this must seem strange. If we are not going to do things to people, what is life for? If we are not going to mold them to our purposes, what is life for? If we are not going to teach the thing things that we think they should learn, what is life for? If we are not going to make them think and feel as we do, what is life for? #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

How can anyone hold such an inactive point of view as the one I am expressing? I am sure that attitudes such as these must be a part of the reaction of many of you. Yet the paradoxical aspect of my experience is that the more I am simply willing to be myself, in all this complexity of life and the more I am willing to understand and accept the realities in myself and in the other person, the more change seems to be stirred up. It is a very paradoxical thing—that to the degree that each one of us is willing to be oneself, then one finds not only oneself changing; but one finds that other people to whom one relates are also changing. At least this is a very vivid part of my experience, and one of the deepest things I think I have learned in my personal and professional life. All my professional life I have been going in directions that others thought were foolish, and about which I have had many doubts myself. However, I have never regretted moving in directions which felt right, even though I have often felt lonely or foolish at the time. I have found that when I trusted some inner non-intellectual sensing, I have discovered wisdom in the move. In fact, I have found that when I have followed one of these unconventional paths because it felt right or true, then in five or ten years many of my colleagues have joined me, and I no longer need to feel alone in it. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

As I gradually come to trust my total reactions more deeply, I find that I can use them to guide my thinking. I have come to have more respect for those vague thoughts which occur in me from time to time, which feel as thought they were significant. I am inclined to think that these unclear thoughts or hunches will lead me to important areas. I think of it as trusting the totality of my experience, which I have learned to suspect is wiser than my intellect. It is fallible I am sure, but I believe it to be less fallible than my conscious mind alone. My attitude is very well expressed in saying carrying on my own humble creative effort, I depend greatly upon that which I do not yet know, and upon that which I have not yet done. Very closely related to this learning is a corollary that, evaluation by others is not a guide for me. The judgments of others, while they are to be listened to, and taken into account for what they are, can never be a guide for me. This has been a hard thing to learn. I remember how shaken I was, in the early days, when a scholarly thoughtful being who seemed to me a much more competent and knowledgeable psychologist than I, told m what a mistake I was making by getting interested in psychotherapy. It could never lead anywhere, and as a psychologist I would not even have the opportunity to practise it. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

In later years it has sometimes jolted me a bit to learn that I am, in the eyes of some others, a fraud, a person practicing medicine without a license, the author of a very superficial and damaging sort of therapy, a power seeker, a mystic, and so forth. And I have equally been disturbed by equally extreme praise. However, I have not been too much concerned because I have come to feel that only one person (at least in my lifetime, and perhaps ever) can know whether what I am doing is honest, thorough, open, and sound, or false and defensive and unsound, and I am that person. I am happy to get all sorts of evidence regarding what I am doing and criticism (both friendly and hostile) and praise (both sincere and fawning) are a part of such evidence. However, to weigh this evidence and to determine its meaning and usefulness is a task I cannot relinquish to anyone else. Experience is, for me, the highest authority. The touchstone of validity is my own experience. No other person’s ideas, and none of my own ideas, are as authoritative as my experience. It is to experience that I must return again and again, to discover a closer approximation to the truth as it is in the process of becoming me. Neither the Bible nor the prophets—neither Dr. Freud nor research—neither the revelations of God nor man or woman—can take precedence over my own direct experience. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

My experience is not authoritative because it is infallible. It is the basis of authority because it can always be checked in new primary ways. In this way its frequent error or fallibility is always open to correction. I enjoy the discovering order in my experience. It seems inevitable that I seek for the meaning or the orderliness or lawfulness in any large body of experience. In is this kind of curiosity, which I find it very satisfying to purse, which as led me to each of the major formulations I have made. It is justified because it is satisfying to perceive the World as having order, and because rewarding results often ensure when one understands the orderly relationships which appear in nature. Suppose our hypotheses were disproved! Suppose our opinions were not justified! Every bit of evidence one can acquire, in any area, leads one that much closer to what is true. And being closer to the truth can never be harmful or dangerous or unsatisfying thing. So while I still hate to readjust my thinking, still hate to give up old ways of perceiving an conceptualizing, yet at some deeper level I have, to a considerable degree, come to realize that these painful reorganizations or what is known as learning, and that though painful they always lead to a more satisfying because somewhat more accurate way of seeing life. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

I feel I can only puzzle my way though life and I will find a much more satisfying approximation to the truth. I am sure the facts will be my friends. The very way of feeling which has seemed to me the most private, most personal, and hence the most incomprehensible by others, has turned out to be an expression for which there is a resonance in many other people. It has led me to believe that what is most personal and unique in each one of us is probably the very element which would, if it were shared or expressed, speak most deeply to others This has helped me to understand artists and poets as people who have dared to express the unique in themselves. When I can sensitively understand the feelings which people are expressing, when I am able to accept them as separate persons in their own right, then I find that they tend to move in certain directions. And what are these directions in which they tend to move? The words which I believe are most truly descriptive are words such as beneficial, constructive, moving toward self-actualization, growing toward maturity, growing toward socialization. I have come to fee that the more fully the individual is understood and accepted, the more one tends to drop the false fronts with which one has been meeting life, and the more one tends to move in a direction which is forward. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

I would not want to be misunderstood on this. I do not have a Pollyanna view of human nature. I am quite aware that out of defensiveness and inner fear individuals can and do behave in ways which are incredibly cruel, horribly destructive, immature, regressive, anti-social, hurtful. Yet none of the most refreshing and invigorating parts of my experience is to work with such individuals and to discover the strongly beneficial directional tendencies which exist in them, as in all of us, at the deepest levels. Life at its best, is a flowing, changing process in which nothing is fixed. Life is the most richest and most rewarding it is a flowing process. To experience this is both fascinating and a little frightening. I find I am at my best when I can let the flow of my experience carry me, in a direction which appears to be forward, toward goals of which I am but dimly aware. In thus floating with the complex stream of my experiencing, and in trying to understand its ever-changing complexity, it should be evident that there are no fixed points. Life is guided by a changing understanding of an interpretation of my experience. It is always in process of becoming. I can only try to live by my interpretation of the current meaning of my experience, and try to give others the permission and freedom to develop their own inward freedom and thus their own meaningful interpretation of their own experience. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

If there is such a thing as truth, this free individual process of search should I, believe, converge toward it. And in a limited way, this is also what I seem to have experienced. “But what endures is what has always matter: love—that we love one another as surely as we are alive. And if there is any hope for us to ever really be good—that hope will be realized through love. To love any one person or thing truly is the beginning of the wisdom to love all things. This has to be so. It has to be. I believe it and I do not really believe anything else,” (Page 440 of Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis by Anne Rice). Where is the being who is free of the ego? To one we must bow deep reverence, in wondering admiration, in enforced humility. Here is one who has found one’s true self, one’s personal independence, one’s own being. Here at last is a free being, someone who has found one’s real worth in a World of false values. Here at last is a truly great being and truly sincere being. Whosoever enters into this realization becomes a human Sun who sheds enlightenment, radiates strength, and emanates love to all beings. One’s serenity is alive and buoyant, not lethargic and dull. “And it came to pass that the work of the Lord did prosper unto the baptizing and uniting to the church of God, many souls, yea, even tens of thousands. Thus we may see that the Lord is merciful unto all who will, in the sincerity of their hearts, call upon his holy name,” reports Helaman 3.26-27. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

MILLS STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH

Rancho Cordova, CA |

Now Selling!

Mills 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 Mission, Mid-Century Modern, California Modern, and Contemporary Farmhouse. Stepping onto this beautiful tile, in this home, will transport you back to Victorian England—but the modern shower and light fixtures will remind you that you are actually in your #MillsStation Residence 3. 😉

There are so many ways to customize your #CresleighRanch home. Tag us so we can see how you’ve decorated yours!

#CresleighHomes

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/mills-station/

I Searched a Way to Me By Drawing Pieces of Myself Out of their Eyes!

November 14, 2019 2:26 am

Surely we will achieve great things together. The importance of forms is revealed in the inescapable unity of the body with the World. The body is always a part of the World. The body is always a part of the World. I sit on this chair; the chair is on a floor in this building; and the building, in turn, rests on the mountain of stone that is Manhattan Island. Whenever I walk, my body is interrelated with the World in which and on which I take my steps. This presupposes some harmony between body and World. We know from physics that the Earth rises infinitesimally to meet my step, as any two bodies attract each other. The balance is essential in walking is one as a relationship of my body to the ground on which it stands and walks. The Earth is there to meet each foot as it falls, and the rhythm of my walking depends on my faith that the Earth will be there. Our active need for form is shown in the fact that we automatically construct it in an infinite number of ways. The human imagination leaps to form the whole, to complete the scene in order to make sense of it. The instantaneous way this is done shows how we are driven to construct the remainder of the scene. If the scene is to have meaning, to fill in the gaps is essential. That we may do this in misleading ways—at times in neurotic or paranoid ways—does not gainsay the central point. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21

We have Rome, our whole glowing Italy, within the four walls of our library. We have in our books the ruins of an antique World and the glories of a modern one. Our passion for soul and form expressed our yearning to make the World adequate to our needs and desires, and, more important, to experience ourselves as having significance. “You have robbed these people of ambition. You have robbed them of the capacity for deep concerns. You have robbed them of the opportunity to grow in spirit. You have cast doubt on the inherent value. All you have to lose in death, no matter how long you have lived, is the present moment in which you die. You can live three thousand years or thirty thousand years, and all you have to lose is the life you are living right now. Suffering helps to generate the soul. The energy it is giving off by suffering, of course, it might organize into a soul. To put it another way, a being’s unsatisfied curiosity might generate that human being’s soul,” (Page 312 and 316 of Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis by Anne Rice). Soul’s exist because we believe that information and knowledge are not the exclusive domain of a certain type or class of person, but rather the province of every living being. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21

The souls are shrines where all the relics of the ancient saints, full of true virtue, and that without delusion or imposture, are reserved and reposed. “And the fuel might be the collective suffering endured by that human all through his or her life, and some other intangible ingredient, perhaps, such as an overview, an attitude, a perspective on life, that too might help the formation of a soul,” (Page 316 of Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis by Anne Rice). The soul is fundamental in Gothic art, a graphic example of which is Mont-Saint-Michel, the triangle of rock rising from the sea capped by the Gothic triangle of human-built architecture which, in turn, ends in a pinnacle pointing toward Heaven—a magnificent art form in which we have the triangle of nature, human, God. And psychologically speaking, we have the basic human triangle—man, woman, and child. Because the wield unfathomable power, a truly great soul contains something in it to offend everyone, and one may even point you toward a new appropriate life. The knowledge of the soul extends beyond human understanding and it can bring order to chaos by extending its wisdom and culture to the masses, which will preserve every aspect of human knowledge. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21

The alienated person is one who observes one’s behavior from the point of view of the spectator. One’s central ego does not live in one’s present and previous experiences. The self appears without soul. What is occurring in the person, hidden as it may be by passivity or other neurotic symptoms, is a conflict-filled passion to make sense out of a crisis-ridden life. Alienation can be not only part of depressive and schizophrenic psychoses, but to some extent it occurs in almost all neuroses as an unspecific result of the general shock of the psychic conflict. This is the soil in which rebellious resignation grows. Here also grows compulsive non-conformism which, while it contains constructive strivings for freedom, distorts its meaning and perpetuates self-alienation as much as does compulsive conformism. Hipsters are often alienate from themselves as in the man in the gray flannel suit. The alienated person is not born alienated, nor does one choose alienation. Lacking genuine acceptance, love, and concern for one’s individuality in childhood, one experiences basic anxiety. Early one begins to move away from one’s self, which seems not good enough to be loved. One moves away from what one is, one can at least be safe—safe perhaps by being very good and perfect and being loved for it, or by being very strong and being admired or feared for it, or by learning not to feel, not to want, not to care. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21

Therefore, one has to free oneself from any need for others, which means first their love and affection, and, later on, in many instances, pleasures of the flesh. If there is no response, why feel, why want? So the person puts all one’s efforts into becoming what one should be. Later, one idealizes one’s self-effacement as goodness, one’s aggression as strength, one’s withdrawal as freedom, self-expression, and self-realization, one moves toward safety, self-elimination, and self-idealization. The alienated individual often is a good observer of oneself. Together with the therapist, one looks at oneself as though one were a third person in the empty chair. One seems not to care about anything, not to desire anything, particularly anything to which one could get attached. Experiences are dissociated from feelings, feelings do not reach awareness. Events happen to one, and no feeling is experienced, no joy, no longing, no love, no anger, no despair, no continuity of time and life, no self. One has no active relation to life. And these people often go to an ophthalmologist with complaints about visual disturbances for which no organic basis is found. In seeing we relate actively to the World around us, while hearing involves awareness of something which comes toward us. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21

Physical symptoms, such as tiredness, dizziness, a general or localized numbness, various degrees of anesthesia in pleasures of the flesh, headaches, or gastric disturbances, often are the only clinical evidence of a deeper emotional problem. The absence of manifest anxiety, rage, or conflict in the clinical picture—playing dead—has led some psychoanalysts to diagnose this condition as an emotional or even constitutional defect, or as an irreversible end-stage of neurotic process. Clinical experiences, however, shows that below the apparently insensitive, frozen surface of these patients is a highly sensitive self, weakened and paralyzed by violent conflict. Underground there exist strong longings and feelings. Alienated people are deeply blocked. There is dissociation from the active, spontaneous core of oneself and one’s feelings and, therefore, from one’s incentives and one’s capacity for making decisions. Recently, a person said: “I am color-blind until somebody reveals the colors to me. Only when plugged into the wall-socket of ‘the other’ do I get the light, the energy, the reality of myself.” He could have added, “and the feeling of being alive.” This explains the existence of is called the “echo phenomenon” in the alienated person. One’s own inner voice often is so weak and unconvincing that one hardly hears it. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21

With echo phenomenon, a person’s statement, a creative idea, a promising plan on which one has been working for weeks remains unreal and meaningless to one until, with much hesitation, one expresses it to another person. When, however, “the other,” whom one experiences as an insider of life, repeats one’s statement, one’s idea, or one’s plan, this echo suddenly sounds real and convincing to one, while one’s own—usually much better—formulation of the same thought remains unreal. In one’s inner experiences one does not count. One does not exist as an individual on one’s own. One may say, “Nothing moves me,” or “I cannot make any move.” However, should one follow one’s limited movements in life, one will notice that one moves for short spurts, like an electric car with a dead battery, which must be pushed by another car to a charging station. It stops, however, not simply due to a lack of power, but due to the action of an automatic built-in brake. The persons seems to say in a non-verbal way: “I will not move on.” People suffering from anxiety experience deprivation and resignation, such as, “I do not want anything. If I do not want, I cannot be hurt,” or in an active way, by violent feelings of bitterness, frustration, resentment, and rage against life and the World which has withheld love or recognition. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21

In both forms, deprivation and resignation, we find the same powerful, unconscious premise: “I shall not participate in the game of life, get emotionally involved, or make a move on my own, until there is a guarantee for the fulfillment of my needs.” These by now have become “just” claims for total love or unique success which form part of the unconscious idealized image that has to be actualized. The apparently static condition of self-alienation reveals itself as a dynamic and comprehensive attempt to avoid the painful experience of severe inner conflict, particularly between strong dependency needs and co-existing violent and hostile aggression. By remaining alienated from oneself and detached from others, the person avoids the anxiety connected with emotional involvement in conflict. However, one pays for this with a steadily increasing restriction of one’s life, one’s feelings, and one’s wants; one pays with a loss of oneself. Self-alienation is an unavoidable result of the neurotic process. Simultaneously, however, it is an active move away from—or, rather, against—the real self: Alienation prevents disturbing self-awareness. The alienated person often complains of being in a fog, but unconsciously one wants to stay in it. One welcomes self-anesthesia. Alienation, in the sense of conforming like an automaton, protects one from the burden and responsibility of commitment to oneself and one’s identity. It permits self-elimination. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21

Alienation, it its most active form, is the rejection of being oneself and the attempt to become the other, the ideal self. It means escape from the hated self through self-idealization. These three ways, in which the despair at not being willing to be oneself finds expression, is called loss of the self, sickness unto death. The first way is to avoid consciousness of the self: By diversions or in other ways, for instance, by work and busy occupations as a means of distractions, one seeks to preserve an obscurity about one’s condition, yet again in such a way that it does not become quite clear to one that one does it for this reason (that one does what one does in order to being about obscurity). When a person packs their schedule full of appointments or work, they are often moving in a great empty circle. However, when they glance inwardly, one will see from the periphery and aww the void enclosed there. One will see the emptiness, but the way that centrifugal force prevents a whirling object from falling inward, one is removed for a long time from the void they circle. This void is the existential vacuum, and it is a main aspect of the neuroses of our time. Our culture is continuously providing new means for self-anesthesia through shallow living, social drinking, late and late-late shows on television, never-ending double features at the movies, Miltown taken like candy. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21

The second way to avoid willing to be oneself is willing to be simply the conventional self: By becoming wise about how things go in this World, such a being forgets oneself…finds it too venturesome to think, to be oneself, far easier and safer to be like the others, to become an imitation, a number, a cipher in the crowd. This form of despair is hardly ever noticed in the World. Such a being, precisely by losing oneself in this way, has gained perfectibility in adjusting. Today, what has become a mass phenomenon: self-elimination through conforming adjustment. The third, most radical way to avoid willing to be oneself is willing to be someone else. Generally, this is how schizophrenic people, in a decisive though modified way, also most neurotic people want to free themselves from the burden they experience their actual self to be, escaping into fantasy, and trying to become that ideal other self they feel they should be. This is what many people believe Kim Kardashian is experiencing by trying to become Paris Hilton. This process leads, in two ways, to steadily increasing atrophy and paralysis of the self and interference with its further growth. The first factor is the result of a kind of inner deprivation. All available energy is used in the compulsive attempt to actualize the other, the ideal, self. Too little energy is left for the developing of the real potentials of the self. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21

The second, much more active factor is the destructive force of contempt and hate which is generated incessantly by the omnipotent, idealized self-image and directed against the despicable, actual self that failed. Early self-rejection and active self-alienation are the roots of masochistic and compulsive homosexual trends. To rid of his hated self is the pervasive motivation of the masochist. In Anne Rice’s Tales of the Body Thief Prince Lestat switched bodies with Reglan James, someone he also found attractive. By throwing his soul, as it were, into the other body, talking with his voice and laughing with his heart; Lestat was able to experience himself doing all the things the other did. It was so vivid and real because he was no longer himself. In this way he enjoyed many intervals of fantastic happiness, but end the end was sad and near death because as they say, “The sky is always bluest over your neighbour’s house.” Basically, the lives of others may look better and easier, but what have no idea how hard they work nor what they are actually going through to get there and maintain. Nonetheless, by living someone else’s life, this self-elimination and identification with somebody else gives Lestat a fantastic happiness because he is temporarily freed from his hated self; but it also drives him into the self-destructive morbid-dependency relationship with the nun. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21

Dr. Freud was right when he observed the close relationship between narcissism and homosexuality. They dynamics of compulsive homosexuality, however, become clear only when we recognize that narcissism is an expression not of self-love, but of alienation from the self. A person clings to illusions about oneself because and as far as one has lost oneself. The narcissist lost vital aspects of oneself due to early rejection which one internalized. One defends oneself against this self-rejection by compulsive self-idealization. If the early rejection is experienced as directed particularly against aspects of the self connected with the pleasures of the flesh, no clear sense of gender identity can develop. It is a desperate search for a self and identity which drives one into the homosexual relationship. “I do not want to be me. I want to have his balls. I want to be him,” a patient recently said. Symbiosis seems to provide the solution in two ways: by merging with the partner one hopes to become the other, the ideal, self. This partner often is the externalized symbol of the lost, the repressed part of one’s own self, for example, of one’s masculinity. The second function of the symbiotic relationship is what I have called the magic mirror symbiosis. The alienated person exists, becomes at least partially alive, only in the mirror image reflected by others. Without it one feels emotionally dead. A patent says it well: “I searched a way to me by drawing pieces of myself out of their eyes.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 21

In the symbiotic relationship each partner functions as a mirror of the other’s self-image. One’s love has to neutralize the acid of destructive self-hate in the other. When the mirror functions stops, the relationship immediately breaks. Phenomena such as so-called penis envy (a woman’s wish to be a man), or vagina envy (a man’s wish to be a woman), have to be seen as symbols of a partial or total rejection of personal and sexual identity. “If I had the chance of being myself, I would not be myself,” a woman said. “I would be a boy.” As a boy you are in control. You can do what you want; it is very depressing not to be a man.” Such statements have to be analyzed as an expression of the total attitude the patient has toward oneself and one’s life, as a characteristic of one’s very specific being in the World. The wish not to be oneself often focuses on the body, fostering a negative body-image which may crystallize around tallness or shortness, above average weight, below average weight, face, skin, gender—and color. If self-rejection selects the focus on color or nationality, distorting attitudes not only of the parents but of the community have been in operation. We may well ask whether segregation does not foster as much self-alienation in the segregating person who glorifies body aspects, as in the victim. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21

Only when the unconscious attempts fail—be they self-anesthesia, self-elimination through conforming adjustment, or escape from the self through identification with the other, the ideal self-does the patient come to us. Something has happened to one which shows that one’s safety system is not so safe, one’s solution not so perfect as one expected. One hopes that the therapist will help one to correct one’s mistake, to improve one’s solution. In therapy, one is in search of one’s self, and the therapist wants to help the patient move in a centripetal direction, to reconnect one with the vital roots and creative potential of the individual, and the individual longs for a genuine relationship. However, one still feels driven to accelerate one’s centrifugal move away from oneself, which means to perfect one’s alienation. Or at least one expects to be freed from anxiety. However, in doing so, it blocks awareness and destroys the patient’s chance for growth and change. All too often the patient gets what one wants: the therapist complies with one’s expectations for a painless (because changeless) cure. The task of the psychoanalyst is not to remove anxiety and thereby to perpetuate alienation. One has to help the patient find one’s way back to oneself. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21

One has to help one face the anxiety generated on this road by self-confrontation and the surrender of cherished illusions. This can rarely be done by analysis in the orthodox manner, with the therapist sitting behind the couch taking notes and giving interpretations. The alienated, “shut-up” patient has all one’s life used words not to express but to hide one’s feelings. Psychoanalysis has to outgrown alienated concepts of personality as well as alienating techniques in therapy. The image of a beings as an id harboring only libidinous, aggressive and destructive drives, but no constructive forces; as a super-ego, functioning as an inner police force, not as a healthy human conscience; and as a more or less passive ego, which reminds one of a rather sick self—such an image of being in itself appears fragmented and alienated. The concept of a doctor-patient relationship which is seen as determined by the transference of a neurotic past but disregards the constructive impact of the creative meeting in the present is in itself alienating. Instead of lessening the patient’s alienation, it is likely to prolong it. Psychoanalysis, born as a child of the age of enlightenment, overestimated the therapeutic effect of knowledge in itself. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21

Making the unconscious conscious is not, in itself, therapeutically effective. To know, for example, that I harbor strong, compulsive dependency needs, may increase rather than lessen my self-alienation. Self-knowledge becomes therapeutically active only when it is owned, and generates the emotional shock which is inherent in the process of self-confrontation. Only such experience has the power to lead to change, choice, and commitment. Gnothi seauton (know yourself) has been seen as the goal of all human endeavor, but it cannot be the goal if it is not at the same time the beginning. The ethical individual knows oneself, but this knowledge is not a mere contemplation, it is a reflection upon oneself which itself is an action and therefore I have deliberately preferred to use the expression “choose oneself” instead of “know oneself” when the individual knows oneself and has chosen oneself one is about to realize oneself. Frequently at the end of an orthodox analysis, the patient has gained much knowledge. One could easily present one’s own case. One looks with some interest at the stranger who happens to be oneself. One may even reflect the image which the therapist expects. However, one has not changed. To break through one’s alienation one need to begin to feel oneself and to permit oneself more and more to be. The first step involves helping one to stop hating himself or herself. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21

Any true psychotherapy, and this is particularly true for the alienated person is reconciliation of being with oneself and thereby with the World, and a transformation of hostility against oneself into friendship with oneself and thereby with the World.IN the beginning of therapy, the patient who refuses participation in life will also refuse true participation in psychoanalysis, even though one may lie down on the expensive couch or sit down on the plush lazy boy with a complaint smile. One is deeply convinced that nobody cares, nobody understands one, and that communicating one’s true feelings, one’s sufferings, and one rage to anybody, including the analyst, is sheer waste. To defrost, to open up, to experience and to accept oneself become possible for the patient only in a warm, mutually trusting relationship in which, often for the first time in one’s life, one feels fully accepted as one is, accepted with those aspects of oneself which early in life one had felt compelled to reject or repress. Only this enables the patient gradually to drop one’s defenses. One will test the liability of this acceptance again and again before one risks emotional involvement. One will need this basic trust especially when one begins to experience the dizziness of freedom. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21

The road from self-alienation and self-rejection to self-acceptance and self-realization leads through steadily growing self-awareness, which is made possible by the new creative experience of acceptance and meeting. Thus, the main therapeutic factor becomes the doctor-patient relationship itself. In the beginning of therapy, question such as, “What do you feel now?” or “What would you really want?” may bring the patient close to panic. One becomes aware for a moment how deeply one’s capacity for spontaneous feeling or wanting is impaired. My own experience with compulsive eaters has convinced me that cognitive behavioral and physiological treatments can be essential first steps on the path to recovery. They help people understand the importance of reassessing their habits, belief systems, and approaches to food. They educate them about their physiology and the physiology of practise. But most important of all, perhaps, they prompt clients to begin a process of deep reflection about their lives—who they essentially are and where they are headed—and this, in turn, sometimes leads to a fundamental change. There are no absolute truths; all realities (or stories) are socially constructed; and fluidity among realities is desirable. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21

Human nature will not find a better helper than love. Utility is subsumed as part of the character of being beautiful. The harmony of an internal form, the inner consistency of a theory, the character of beauty that touches your sensibilities—these are significant factors the determine why one given insight comes into consciousness rathe than another. As a psychoanalyst, I can only add that my experience in helping people achieve insights from unconscious dimensions within themselves reveals the same phenomenon—insights emerge not chiefly because they are intellectually true or even because they are helpful, but because they have a certain form, the form that is beautiful because it completes what is incomplete. Do not join the book burners. Do not think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Do not be afraid to go in your soul and read every truth you have witnesses. Move forward without wasting anything. It is not that object simply speak to us; they also conform to our ways of knowing. The mind thus is an active process of forming and re-forming the World. It must be the totality of ourselves that understand, not simply reason. And it is the totality of ourselves that fashions the images which the World conforms. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21

Not only does reason form and re-form the World, but the preconscious, with its impulses and needs, does so also and does so on the basis of which and intentionality. Human beings not only think but feel and will as they make form in their World. If this World is to be wise as well as strong, if we are to achieve our destiny, then we need more new ideas for more wise beings in the phase of passion for form. Persons in therapy—or anybody for that matter—is not simply engaged in knowing their World: what they are engaged in is a passionate re-forming of their World by virtue of their interrelationship with it. We should be open to all—except the censor. We must know all the facts and hear all the alternatives and listen to all the criticisms. Let us welcome controversial topics, thoughts, ideas, authors, and books. For the Bill of Rights is the guardian of our security as well as our liberty. You must live feverishly in seeking an education. Colleges are not going to do you any good unless you are raised and live in a place of seeking knowledge everyday. This passion for form is a way of trying to find and constitute meaning in life. And this is what genuine creativity is. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21

Imagination, broadly defined, seems to me to be a principle in human life underlying even reason, for the rational functions, according to our definitions, can lead to understanding—can participate in the constituting of reality—only as they are creative. Creativity is thus involved in our every experience as we try to make meaning in our self-World relationship. A soul is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears parasites, the elements and clumsy hands…so God protects the souls not only against humankind but also against nature and devotes His life to this war with the forces of oblivion. “But one that believeth these things which I have spoken, one will I visit with the manifestations of my Spirit, and one shall know and bear record. For because of my Spirit one shall know that these things are true; for it persuadeth people to do good,” Ether 4.11. God connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire Universe and from all our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. I think the healthy of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our God. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21

Cresleigh Homes

One of the many community amenities over at Hub Apartments, residents, take advantage of the business center and complimentary WiFi whenever you would like! 👍
.
#HUBApts
#CresleighHomes

https://www.hub-folsomapts.com/

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

November 2, 2019 1:40 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

October 30, 2019 11:09 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cresleigh Homes

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

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

#PlumasLake
#California
#NewHomes

The Power of the Ballot We Need in Sheer Self-Defence—Else What Shall Save Us from a Second Slavery?

October 21, 2019 3:33 am

It was a drenching storm inside of me. However, I am so very strong. That is a given, is it not? And when you love another as I loved Rowan, you do not strive to hurt. Never. The trivial operations of the heart are burnt away in quietude. Burnt away in humility that I could feel this, know this, and contain it within my prudent soul. “O water, voice of my heart, crying in the sand, all night long crying with a mournful cry, as I lie and listen, and cannot understand the voice of my heart in my side of the voice of the sea, o water, crying for rest, is it I, is it I? All night long the water is crying to me. Unresting water, there shall be weary and wonder and cry like the sea, all life long crying without avail, as the water all night long is crying to me,” says Arthur Symons. Between me and the other World there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter rough it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? They say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At theses I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

And yet, being a problem is a strange experience—peculiar even for one who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe. It is in the early days of rollicking boyhood that the revelation first bursts upon one, all in a day, as it were. I remember well when the shadow swept across me. I was a little thing, away up in the hills of New England, where the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and Tagkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse, something put it into the boys’ and girls’ heads to buy gorgeous visiting-cards—ten cents a package—and exchange. The exchange was merry till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card—refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their World by a vast veil. I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held al beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. That sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at examination time, or beat them at a foot race, or even beat their stringy heads. Alas, with the years all this fine contempt began to fade; for the Worlds I longed for, and all their dazzling opportunities were theirs, not mine. However, they should not keep these prizes, I said; some, all, I would wrest from them. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

Just how I would do it I could never decide: by reading law, by healing the sick, by telling the wonderful tales that swam in my head—some way. With other Black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale World about them and mocking distrust of everything White; r wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? The shades of the prison house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the Whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on it resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above. After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American World—a World which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other World. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a World that looks on in amused contempt and pity. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

One ever feels one’s twoness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge one’s double self into a better and truer self. In this merging one wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. One would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the World and Africa. One would not bleach one’s Negro soul in a flood of White Americanism, for one knows that Negro blood has a message for the World. One simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be bot a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by one’s fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in one’s face. This, then, is the end of one’s striving: to be co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use one’s best powers and one’s latent genius. These powers of body and mind have in the past been strangely wasted, dispersed, or forgotten. The shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia the Shadowy and of Egypt the Sphinx. Throughout history, the powers of single Black men flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the World has rightly gauged their brightness. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

Here in America, in the few days since Emancipation, the Black man’s turning hither and thither in hesitant and doubtful striving has often made one’s very strength to lose effectiveness, to seem like absence of power, like weakness. And yet it is not weakness—it is the contradiction of double aims. The double-aimed struggle of the Black artisan—on the one hand to escape White contempt for a nation of mere hewers of wood and drawers of water, and on the other hand to plough and nail and dig for a poverty-stricken horde—could only result in making one a poor craftsman, for one had but half a heart in either cause. By the poverty and ignorance of one’s people, the Negro minister or doctor was tempted toward quackery and demagogy; and by the criticism of the other World, toward ideal that made one ashamed of one’s lowly tasks. The would-be Black savant was confronted by the paradox that the knowledge one’s people needed was a twice-told tale to one’s White neighbors, while the knowledge which would teach the White World was Green to one’s own flesh and blood. The cold, the Canaan was always dim and far away. If, however, the vistas disclosed as yet no goal, no resting-place, little but flattery and criticism, the journey at least gave leisure for reflection and self-examination; it changed the child of Emancipation to the youth with dawning self-consciousness, self-realization, self-respect. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

In those somber forests of one’s striving one’s own soul rose before one, and one saw in oneself, darkly as through a veil; and yet one saw in oneself some faint revelation of one’s power, of one’s mission. One began to have a dim feeling that, to attain one’s place in the World, one must be oneself, and not another. For the first time one sought to analyze the burden one bore upon one’s back, that dead-weight of social degradation partially masked behind a half-named Negro problem. One felt one’s poverty; without a cent, without a home, without land, tools, or savings, one had entered into competition with rich, landed, skilled neighbors. To be a less affluent man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of the hardships. One felt the weight of one’s ignorance—not simply of letters, but of life, of business, of humanities; the accumulated sloth and shirking and awkwardness of decades and centuries shackled one’s hands and feet. Nor was one’s burden all poverty and ignorance. The red stain of bastardy which three centuries of systematic legal defilement of Negro women had stamped upon one’s race, meant not only the loss of ancient African chastity, but also the hereditary weight of a mass of corruption from American adulterers, threatening almost the obliteration of the Negro home. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

A people thus handicapped ought not to be asked to race with the World, but rather allowed to give all its times and thought to its own social problems. But alas! while sociologists gleefully count one’s bastards and one’s women of the evening, they very soul of the toiling, sweating Black man is darkened by the shadow of a vast despair. Beings call the shadow prejudice, and learnedly explain it as the natural defense of culture against barbarism, learning against ignorance, purity against crime, the higher against the lower races. To which the Negro cries Amen! and swears that to so much of this strange prejudice as is founded on just homage to civilization, culture, righteousness, and progress, one humbly bows and merely does obeisance. However, before that nameless prejudice that leaps beyond all this one stands helpless, dismayed, and well-nigh speechless; before that personal disrespect and mockery, the ridicule and systematic humiliation, the distortion of fact and wanton license of fancy, the cynical ignoring of the better and the boisterous welcoming of the worse, all-pervading desire to inculcate disdain for everything Black, from Toussaint to the Devil—before this there rises a sickening despair that would disarm and discourage any nation save that black host to whom “discouragement” is unwritten word. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

However, some of that is changing. Having a black credit card usually means that you are affluent and have perfect credit. Financially speaking, being in the black is good because it means your company is making a profit or breaking even. Even some designers are starting to pain the trim of houses black, and some walls in the rooms black, and the classic tuxedo is black, and many people love black luxury cars. I have heard authors like Anne Rice talk about how beautiful it was to see a man so dark that his skin looked like polished onyx, and many bodybuilders tan because it makes the muscle glisten more under the light and defines them more. And an African American called Tyler Perry opened a new Atlanta studio location when he purchased 330 acres to make the home of Tyler Perry Studios, which is the largest film production studio in the nation. Tyler Perry is also the first African-American to outright own a major film production studio. Furthermore, Tyler Perry was listed as the highest paid man in entertainment by Forbes, in 2011, earning $130,000,000.00 USD. So the Black history is not as bleak as it may seem. And Tyler Perry actually makes really good Movies, one of my favorites that I have seen was The Family that Preys for it was nice to see a diverse cast, predominantly African-American with women working as heads of the company and wearing the latest fashions, and men opening their own corporations. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

However, the facing of so vast a prejudice could not but bring the inevitable self-questioning, self-disparagement, and lowering of ideals which every accompany repression and breed in an atmosphere of contempt and hate. Whisperings and portents came borne upon the four winds: Lo! We are diseased and dying, cried the dark hosts; we cannot write, our voting is vain; what need of education, since we must always cook and serve? And the Nation echoed and enforced this self-criticism, saying: Be content to be servants, and noting more; what need of higher culture for half-men? Away with the Black man’s ballot, by force or fraud—and behold the suicide of the race! And that is exactly what you are saying to a Black person who was successful and then meets with illegal oppression every time they express their frustration about a system that systemically robs them of what they have earned when you tell them, “Be thankful you are not homeless.” The bottom-line is if you all followed these laws that are in place to protect citizens, some of us would be better off anyway. You can do better and will do better, as did Lindsey in Tyler Perry’s Good Deeds. However, what we are also finding is in reality, Black women are no longer the backbone of the community, they are helping to set up and discourage their sons, brothers, husbands, and fathers as they have been infected with racism and self-hate as was Andrea in Tyler Perry’s The Family that Preys. They would rather see a White man win at the displacement of their own. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

Still, Meghan Markle, Prince Harry, and Tyler Perry have become beacons of success and healers of racism for have overcome obstacles and oppression to reach the elite and most highly coveted roles in the World, which some will never obtain no matter how hard they try. Out of the evil came something of Good—the more careful adjustment of education to real life, the clearer perception of the Negroes’ social responsibilities, and the sobering realization of the meaning of progress. So dawned the time of Sturm and Drang: storm and stress today rock our yacht on the mad waters of the World-sea; there is within and without the sound of conflict, the burning of the body and rending of soul; inspiration strives with doubt, and faith with vain questionings. The bright ideals of the past—physical freedom, political power, the training of brains and the training of hands—all these in turn have waxed and waned, until even the last grows dim and overcast. Are they all wrong, all false? No, not that, but each alone was oversimple and incomplete—the dreams of a credulous race-childhood, or the fond imaginings of the other World which does not know and does not want to know our power. To be really true, all these ideals must be melted and welded into one. The training of the schools we need today more than ever—the training of deft hands, quick eyes and ears, and above all the broader, deeper, higher culture of gifted minds and pure hearts. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

The power of the ballot we need in sheer self-defence—else what shall save us from a second slavery? Freedom, too, the long-sought, we still seek—the freedom of life and limb, the freedom to work and think, the freedom to love and aspire. Work, culture, liberty—all these we need, not singly but together, not successively but together, each growing and aiding each, and all striving toward that vaster ideal that swims before the Negro people, the ideal of human fraternity, gained through the unifying ideal of Race; the ideal of fostering and developing the traits and talents of the Negro, not in opposition to or contempt for other races, but rather in large conformity to the greater ideals of the American Republic, in order that some day on American sol two World-races may give each to each those characteristics both so sadly lack. We the darker ones come even now not altogether emptyhanded: there are today no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes; there is no true American music but the wild sweet melodies of the Negro slave; the American fairy tales and folklore are Indian and African; and, all in all, we Black men seem to have the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars, bitcoins, and smartness. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

If she replaces her brutal dyspeptic blundering with light-hatred but determined Negro humility, will America be poorer? Or coarse and cruel wit with loving jovial good-humor? or her vulgar music with the soul of the Sorrow Songs? Merely a concrete test of the underlying principles of the great republic is the Negro Problem, and the spiritual striving of the freedmen’s sons is the travail of souls whose burden is almost beyond the measure of their strength who bear it in the name of an historic race, in the name of this land of their fathers’ father, and in the name of human opportunity. Like the flower children, this kind of character has been set up for the ultimate tragedy. One may be attracted to your beauty and spontaneous grace, and on the other he or she hates you for the very purity and innocence you represent. Innocence expects something from us, demands something, draws out our tendencies for care and sustenance; and many a man or woman hates these tendencies in oneself, and hates more whatever causes one to act on them. When we are confronted by authentic childlike innocence, we are touched by it and want to protect the child, but we hope one will grow to the age when one can protect oneself. However, when this innocence is present in adults—as in some nonviolent or pacifist persons, or flower children—we are attracted by it, our consciences are pricked, but we are also bothered by our own sympathies being drawn out in spite of ourselves, and we vaguely feel that we are being exploited. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

These innocents are a thorn in the flesh of the World; they threaten to annihilate “law and order,” the police and the authority of government. The innocence threatens to upset the World as we know it. Authentic innocence is a kind of goodness, and this also throws many people into a state of ambivalence. The citizens of ancient Athens, one remembers, voted out of office a candidate known as “Aristides the Good” because they were tired of hearing him always referred to as “the Good.” Goodness makes demands on us, and the naïve belief that people simply love the good is one of our earliest illusions. Many cannot stand such pure innocence in their World. The development of one’s ambivalence is pictured as envy and antipathy that feed upon themselves. Evil is a force that feels good to people and it grips them beyond even their own needs for survival, that make them challenge the whole Universe to combat; and thus feeding on itself, sooner or later it comes to a tragic end as it seeks to overthrow nature itself. There are people who have the spirit, a pure heart and lack of revenge, but they are rare. We cannot let our judgment or our ethics hinge upon a split-second use of muscles, for that would make us entirely dependent upon the individual’s self-control. We would then end up with a legalism without ethical content. This is the error of all strict and rigid doctrines, whether it is religiously or computer directed, and our primary purpose is to avoid such tyranny. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

Innocence can also be a blinder for many people, which makes them veiled to the true motives of others and only life experience will unveil them. Experience tempers the self, deepens consciousness and awareness, purges and sharpens our sight—where as innocence acts as a blinder and tends to keep us from growing, from new awareness, from identifying with the sufferings of humankind as well as its joys (both being foreign to the innocent person). Theses are two potential poles of experience: to remain innocent, blocking out what does not appeal to you, striving to preserve the Garden of Eden state; or to strive toward spirituality and move to the “deeper music of humanity.” Does a victim have something to do with making oneself the prey? Wha does the interdependence of human beings mean—the fact that we are all bound in a web, which includes unconscious as well as conscious factors, that spreads out from ourselves and our parents and children like rings from a wave to include ultimately whole oceans of humanity? Can one be excused from responsibility for sensing the effect of one’s beauty and innocence—on others around them? What about the blithe existence built on one’s own convictions and one’s own integrity alone, unaware of the outreaching waves from one to others? Is this not a kind of unreal purity—a mortal life fashioned as though one is not a mortal—which can no longer, in our interdependent World, be accepted, let alone praised as righteous? #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

Because the likelihood is that this kind of innocence has as it purpose to cover up something; it is the innocence of the child when the person is no longer a child. Having the capacity to experience the World, one has at the same time the responsibility for not closing one’s sensibilities to that experience. The choice is clear: we must pay our human sacrifice to the Sphinx outside the city gates, or we must accept guilt and responsibility as realities within ourselves. One who cannot accept one’s guilt with responsibility will find oneself projecting one’s guilt on the Sphinx outside the city. Why so we always sacrifice the innocents? Hey obviously have a special attraction for the human-flesh-eating creature; it loves the tender, the helpless, and the powerless rather than the experiences. We know that this is true in the fantasies of all of us—the innocent and powerless, the inexperienced, have a special attraction. It is that we can give them the experience, thus augmenting our own self-esteem? We never hear of the dragon devouring an eighty-year old corrupt district attorney, or a haggardly seventy-year old former garden, prompting to news anchor for preying on the innocent. However, it is the youths and virgins that are required to satisfy the taste of the dragon. It is obvious that the establishment is envious of youth, envious of the innocent, whose lives are ahead of them. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

This envy of youth is exacerbated, particularly in America, by the worship of youth; it is usually always better to be young. The older people, those who have lost their innocence long since, declare wars that these virginal youths are required to fight; and we go through the complex ritual of uniforms and bands and songs and disseminating an enormous amount of propaganda which is largely a projection of society’s own aggression and violence. The established people, who represent established ways, are also afraid of the youth. This is particularly obvious in our own day and society. Envy and fear—these are two motives for the sacrifice, and while they do not go very deep, they may help us for the moment. Curiously, but understandably, there seems to be inherent in human life an urge to get over innocence. Is this related, in some curious way, to the urge to get beyond the age when we can be so easily scarified? The normal child wants to grow up, to experience what is about one, to become a man or woman of the World; and although one possesses natural guards against too precipitous experiences, one looks forward to the age when one will be sufficiently self-reliant to let down those guards. There is a tendency for normal innocence to get lost. The flirtatiousness shown by girls just entering into their teen, most of it quite unconscious, is also part of the drama in the age-old urge to get over innocence. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

The temptation of Adam and Eve, symbolized by eating the apple and thus gaining the knowledge of good and evil, was a headlong drive to experience and be experienced, to leave innocence behind, to make it something of the past. It is not by accident that pleasures of the flesh is take as the symbol for the loss of innocence, the attainment of experience. The headlong push to get rid of virginity at an early age can well backfire into a loss of experience rather than a gain. The experience itself is not very momentous (some of my female patients tell of saying to the man who has deflowered them: “Is that all?” or “I was not ready.” or “You make me feel inferior.” “I did not want it.” “I am dirty and shamed.” Even some men get tired of pleasures of the flesh saying, “I got expletive.” or “I am tired of expletive.” If they are ready to leave their innocence behind, the girl/woman and boy/man can be released into a while new dimension of experience, and can present them with infinitely more possibilities for awareness and tenderness than life had before. In rebellions on campus and the by the likes of Greta Thunberg, one can often observe the curious need—generally unconscious—on the part of the student to get themselves caught and in this way to overcome one’s innocence. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

For instance, my friends and his cohorts held students hostage on campus and they were arrested by the police and were promptly dismissed from university for the rest of the year. One of the best students in the university, my friend found himself thrown out of his class and with plenty of leisure on his hands. What did he do? He went up into New England and took the next few weeks to pray. One had the feeling that this was the purpose of it all: he had wanted to be caught. He was calling for a structureless World to give him some structure; a young mand with a steady stream of success behind him, son of a famous father, never anything against which he could test his strength, nothing yet that would stand in one’s path and require him to try his mettle. In such students, this is a cry for experience equivalent to their previous innocence. Young people have already lost their innocence in one sense: concentration camps and atom bombs and 9/11 have rendered their World structureless, but they are without the equivalent experience to go with it. They cry for experience to match their precociously lost innocence. The dragon and the Sphinx are within you. If that is where the dragon and the Sphinx are really located, we must first become aware of them. Out error is not in our myth-making; this is a health, necessary function of the human imagination, a help toward mental health; our denial of it on the basis of rationalistic doctrines only makes the evil in ourselves and our World harder to get at. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

No, the dragon and the Sphinx are not in themselves the problem. The problem is only whether you project them or confront and integrate them. To admit them in ourselves means admitting that evil and good dwell within the same being, and that potentialities for evil increase in proportion to our capacity for good. The good we seek is an increased sensitivity, a sharpened awareness, a heightened consciousness of both good and evil. Violence has the face of the fallen Angels. However, what are fallen Angels expect human beings; and what are human beings expect fallen Angels? Surely enough. Forgive the humans their violence…for violence has a human face. Through the vision of your intent takes form it originates from darkness and unlimited possibility. This is the manipulation of reality. You have to take back the essence of your creation as your on. This is internal power and the externalization of it to create change in your World. It is the power of counter creation. It is your birthright as a child of God. Remember people bend reality. It something is true for one, another has the opportunity to think otherwise making the others truth a lie. All that exists is within the perception of the observer alone. This paradox is a direct result of the illusion of the limits of creation. All is true and so nothing exists but the lie. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

Being centered within your own God like power is of utmost importance upon the path. Even when evoked to create change directly, keep in mind that you are the God that wields these powers for the cause of Counter Creation. Just be careful! As a God you will be tested and so how these powers are wielded is a powerful initiatic test in its own right. “That ye contend no more against the Holy Ghost, but that ye receive it, and take upon you the name of Christ; that ye humble yourselves even to the dust, and worship God, in whatsoever place ye may be in, in spirit and in truth; and that ye live in thanksgiving daily, for the many mercies and blessings which he doth bestow upon you,” Alma 34.38. We must recognize what is not always recognized, that the growth of mind and character takes time, just as the growth f trunk and limb takes time. A being does not begin to mature and become what one is likely to be until one is past thirty. The young being who has the wisdom to devote some of one’s abundant energies to this quest will one day be the envy of the antiquated being who would devote only one’s slackened forces and shortened days to it. Give substance to your desire so it can take shape upon their spiritual planes and manifest here on the corporeal realm of existence. This process creates a reciprocal gateway of energy which has intense alchemical effects. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

Randolph Harris II International Institute

Category Archives: Cosmetic

There is Always a Moment in Life When the Doors Open and Lets the Future in!

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

CRESLEIGH MEADOWS AT PLUMAS RANCH

Plumas Lake, CA | from the mid $300’s

Coming Soon!

#CresleighHomes

If I Would be What I Feel like Being, You Mean that Would Be All Right?

BRIGHTON STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH

Rancho Cordova, CA |

Now Selling!

There is No Better Way in this World to Lose Something Forever than to Prejudge it!

MILLS STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH

Rancho Cordova, CA |

Now Selling!

Post navigation