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

January 4, 2020 5:40 am

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 Also, old theories about if you seem to have a problem with everyone, then you are likely the problem is an outdated hypothesis because tribalism and pack mentality has become a common expression for many groups in American culture.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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

January 1, 2020 12:46 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let us look at these orders, these different natures, and their interrelation. In speaking of them we speak of ourselves, because we belong to both of them in every moment of our life and history. The human order, the order of history, is primarily the order of growing and dying. “Surely the people is grass.” Human’s experience of melancholy, awakened by fading and perishing nature, is symbolic of one’s transitoriness. Generations after generations grow up, struggle, suffer, enjoy and disappear. Should we take all this seriously? Should we take it more seriously than the growing and fading of the grass? He prophet, when one was asked to speak one’s nation, raised the question: Why speak to them? They are grass. We could continue: Why write and work and struggle for them? They are grass. What matter, when after a few years all those for whom we wrote and spoke and struggled will have vanished? They were grass, the grass withered, the flowers faded. That is the order of history. However, the other appears at the horizon: the word of God shall stand forever. Second, the order of history is an order of sin and punishment. The exile, following the destruction of Jerusalem, was, as all the prophets said, the punishment of the people for their sins. We do not like words such as “sin” and “punishment.” They seem to us old-fashioned, barbaric, and invalid in the light of modern psychology. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

However, whenever I have met exiles of high moral standards and insights, I have discovered that they feel responsible for what has happened within their own countries. And very often I have met citizens who democratic countries, citizens of this country, who have expressed a feeling of guilt for the situation of the World today. They were right, and the exiles were right: they are responsible, as are you and I. Whether or not we call it sin, whether or not we call it punishment, we are beaten by the consequences of our own failures. That is the order of history. However, at the horizon the other order appears, saying that our struggles are not in vain, that our iniquity is pardoned. There is a third element in the order of history, uniting finiteness and sin: the tragic law which controls the historical process, the law which ordains that human greatness utterly fall. There is human greatness in history. There are great and conquering nations and empires; there are even nations and empires which manifest a certain righteousness. There are princes and even good princes; there are judges and even just judges. There are states and constitutions and even states and constitutions which provide a certain amount of freedom; there are social orders and even some which provide a certain amount of equality. There are creative spirits and even some which have the power of knowledge and understanding. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

However, just in being great and powerful and righteous they touch the divine sphere, and they become arrogant, and they are brought to nothing. They are without roots; they wither; the divine storm blows over them, and they vanish. That is the subject of Greek tragedy. That is the message f the prophet to the nations of the World. They are all subject to the law of tragic self-destruction—the bad and the good, individuals and nations, the weak and the heroic. And again the other order, the order beyond history and tragedy, appears at the horizon: He gives power to the faint and their strength is renewed, so that they shall mount up with wings as eagles. The order beyond the order of history is the divine order. And it is paradoxical: humans are like grass, but the word of God spoken to them shall stand forever. Humans stand under the law of sin and punishment, but the divine order breaks through it and bring forgiveness. Humans faint, falling from the height of their moral goodness and youthful power, and just when they have fallen and are weakest, they run without weariness and rise up with wigs as eagles. God acts beyond all human assumptions and valuations. He acts surprisingly, unexpectedly, paradoxically. The negative character of the historical order is the beneficial character of the divine order. The weak and despairing, the sinful and tragic in the historical order are the strong and victorious in the divine order. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

The prophet speaks of the paradoxical destiny of the servant, the elected nation. Described as a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief, it is despised and rejected in the human order. Who does not think, hearing these words, of the exiles not only of Israel but of all nations of the World? However, the divine order appears. The exiled nation, or (as the Christians later, historically wrong, spiritually right, interpreted it) the Man on the Cross, represents another order, an order in which the weakest is the strongest, the most humiliated, the most victorious. The historical, human order is overcome by the suffering servant, the crucified Saviour. If we doubt this paradox, if we despair about our human situation, if our exile is without hope or meaning for us, the prophet should fill us with shame for the arrogance of our rationalism and the narrowness of our moralism, of history. He asks, “Who has directed the Spirit of God? With whom took He counsel and who instructed Him and taught Him the path of Justice?” We always wish to teach God the path of justice. We tell Him that He must punish the bad and reward the good, especially in relation to ourselves. However, He accepts no counsel concerning the course of history, as He took no counsel concerning the structure of the World, with all its natural destruction, cruelty, and transitoriness. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

The divine order cannot be judged according to the measures of the historical order, the measures of human comfort and morality, democracy and civilization. That was the answer Job received from God when he struggled with Him about the unintelligible injustice of his historical fate. God did not justify Himself in moral categories; He triumphantly pointed to the unexplorable greatness of nature which cannot be measured according to the measure of human righteousness. However, if the divine order and the historical order have nothing to do with each other, how can the divine order concern us at all? How can eternity and forgiveness and divine help concern us if we are in the other order, the historical order, standing under the law of finiteness and weakness and punishment? How can the divine order comfort us in our misery? How can we listen to the words of the prophets which tell us of the end of our warfare? There are three answers to this question. First, the divine order is not the historical order; and we should not confuse these two orders. No life is able to overcomes finiteness, sin, and tragedy. The illusions of our period have been that modern civilization can conquer them, and that we can achieve security in our own existence. Progress seemed to have conquered tragedy; the divine order seemed to be embodied in the progressive, historical order. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

However, for nearly three decades our generation has received blow after blow, destroying that illusion, and driving to despair and cynicism those who wanted to transform, and thought they could transform the historical order into a divine order. Let us learn from the catastrophe of our tie at least the fact that no life and no period are able to overcome finiteness, sin, and tragedy. The second answer is that there is another order to which we, as human beings, belong, an order which makes beings always dissatisfied with what is given to one. Humans transcend everything in the historical order, all the heights and depts of one’s own existence. One passes, as no other being is able to pass, beyond the limits of one’s given World. One participates in something infinite, in an order which is not transitory, not self-destructive, not tragic, but eternal, holy, and blessed. Therefore, when one listen to the prophetic word, when one hears of the everlasting God and of the greatness of His power and the mystery of His acts, a response is awakened in the depth of one’s soul; the infinite within one is touched. Every being knows, in some depth of one’s soul, that is true. Our despair itself, our inability to escae ourselves in life and in death, witnesses to our infinity. The third answer is that the two orders, the historical and the eternal, although they can never become the same, are within each other. The historical order is not separated from the eternal order. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

What is new in the prophets and in Christianity, beyond all paganism, old and new, is that the eternal order reveals itself in the historical order. The suffering servant of God and the enemies because of whom one suffers, the Man on the Cross and those who fainted under the Cross, the exiled and persecuted in all periods of history, have all transformed history. The strong in history fall; the strength of each of taken from us. However, those who seem weak in history finally shape history, because they are bound to the eternal order. We are not a lost generation because we are a suffering, destroyed generation. Each of us belongs to the eternal order, and the prophet speaks to all of us: Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people! I have learned that there are not different types but qualifications of love, since the different qualities are presented, by efficiency or deficiency, in every act of love. This insight, however, does not make the distinction of the qualities of love less important. If, as I shall suggest, one has to distinguish the libido, the philia, the eros, the agape qualities of love we must ask: how are they related to each other? What is meant if one speaks of love without qualification? Which quality of love is adequate to the Great Commandment? Which to its emotional quality? #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

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

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

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

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

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

BRIGHTON STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH

Rancho Cordova, CA |

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

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

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

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

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. These chic residences (1-4) reflect Cresleigh Ranch’s exuberant spirit, varied architectural traditions, and incomparable landscape. Happy Exploring! https://cresleigh.com/brighton-station/residence-4/

An Apple for the Teacher that Seems the thing to do Because I Want to Learn About Romance from You!

December 24, 2019 4:14 am

Only the open gate can receive visitors. Only the open hand can receive gifts. Only the open mind can receive wisdom. Only the open heart can receive love. When in doubt, tell the truth. This rare wisdom does not prevent one from being a normal human being. Whatever you are, be a good one. “Do not be conformed to this eon, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind,” Romans 12.2a. “DO NOT be conformed.” This warning of Paul is significant for all periods of history. It is urgently needed in our period. It applies to each of us, to our civilization, to humankind as a whole. It has many facets because of the many things to which one may be conformed. However, there is one all-embracing thing to which the apostle does not want us to be conformed—this eon. Instead of being conformed to this econ he wants us to be transformed by the coming eon, the state of renewal of our World and of ourselves. Not conformity, but the transformation—that is what Paul says in the words of our text. Our period has experienced many revolutionary transformations. The older ones amongst us remember them, often because they have suffered under them in their early lives. Today, both old and young are reacting against revolutions and further transformations of the World in which they have settled down. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

A mood of conservatism permeates large sections of humankind and certainly the people in our Western Civilization. This is natural and, as such, need not be a matter of concern. However, if conservatism becomes conformism, is the motto of the new generation is—not transformation, but conformity, it must become a matter of concern and be challenged. And this seems to be the case starting in school days, when some teachers prevent individual friendships because they threaten “adjustments” (this fallacious principle of education), on through the years when the laws of the gang are more important for the younger than all divine and human laws together, through the years in the institutes of higher learning where the standards imposed by older upon younger students allow the most extravagant behavior; through the years of entrance into the World of adult competition and adaptation to the means of success, through the years of maturity and power and the fear of violating social, political and religious taboos, and through the later years of one’s life when religious propagandists use the fear of approaching end to preach new forms of old religious conformisms. All these stages of our life are accompanied by incessant pressure from the communications media, one of whose functions is to produce conformity without letting people even become aware of it. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

Tact is the art of making a point without making an enemy. “Do not be conformed,” says the apostle, challenging, in these four words, the main trend of our whole present civilization. However, he challenges more than this. He challenges you and me, whether we are caught by this civilization or not. We may be conformist not only if we agree but also if we disagree, and we may be non-conformist, not only if we disagree but also if we agree. They are words of warning for those of us who believe that their revolutionary thrust liberates us from the danger of conformism. For it does not. The revolutionary gang can be as conformist as the conservative group. One can be conformed not only to a group, but also to oneself. The revolutionary can becomes used to oneself as a revolutionary, so that one loses one’s freedom and becomes a conformist to revolution. In the same way one can be conformed to one’s attitude of indifference or to cynicism or strictness or perfectionism, or one’s own emptiness. One can be conformed to oneself and be prevented from transforming oneself by a renewal of the spirit. One can be non-conformist without love, unable to transform anything because one has not transformed oneself. Civilization, the rise of the state, kingship, the universal religions—all are fed by the same psychological dynamic: guilt and the need for redemption. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

If it is no longer the clan that represents the collective immortality pool, then it is the state, the nation, the revolutionary cell, the corporation, the scientific society, one’s own race. Humans still grope for transcendence, but now this is not necessarily nature and God, but the SS or the CIA; the only thing that remains constant is that the individual still gives oneself with the same humble trembling as the primitive to one’s totemic ancestor. The stake is identical—immortality power—and the unit of motivation is still the single individual and one’s fears and hopes. To see graphically how constant these things have remained, we have only to tune in on the early-morning sign-offs on American television. The message is striking in its primitiveness: several minutes of the alternation of a picture of the flag with that of soldiers in landing barges, combat aircraft streaking across the sky, soldiers marching, the green fields and hills of home, a glistening white military cemetery, again the flag unfurled in the wind, the timeless Lincoln Memorial, and again the firm and determined faces of soldiers marching. The unspoken text is relentless in its assurance of vital power to each person, and a firm place in an immortality system. How the heart must quicken at what is suggested by these images, how the throat must choke up with gratitude. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

Of course militarism and the flag hardly begin to cover the various types of things that the person can expand into; human ingenuity is not so limited, which explains why rich and imaginative people often make such poor patriots. Samuel Johnson saw this clearly when he said that patriotism was the last refuge for scoundrels. In out time the young are turning to forms of what is called experiential transcendence—the intense experience of a feeling state which, for a little while anyway, eliminates the problem of time and death. This is a variation on the historical mode of mysticism, only in our time people can imbibe in it en masse helped by the modern technology of color and sound. By embracing the Primordial Oneness, one can escape death before it can hit one. How can that shadowy menace keep an appointment in Heaven with a being whose consciousness has already been dissolved? In a discotheque, the careworn self is smashed by echoing guitars and electronic shrieking, and its fragments are scattered even more finely by showering and splitting light effects. The sedative drift will take you to spaces beyond time and death, as will prayer or a church organ. This explains the massive attendance at rock music festivals which the mature generation has such trouble understanding. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

The festivals represent a joyful triumph over the flat emptiness of modern life, the mechanical succession of news events which carry everyone on willy-nilly, the ticking away of life in an absurd anarchy. The festival is the attempt by the young to reawaken a sense of the awesome and the miraculous as they throb in full communion to the beating music. As one rock music authority so well put it, what the modern young are seeking through this is a way to adequately express wonder, an expression that modern, secular, mechanistic society has denied. This kind of communion in joy and in intensive experience is, we have to conclude, modern youth’s heroic victory over human limitation. Yet it, too, is hardly a modern invention despite the new technics which mediates it. It is a replay of the basic Dionysian expansiveness, the submergence and loss of identity in the transcending power of the pulsating “now” and the frenzied group of like-minded believers. The heroic expansiveness, joy, and wonder have an underside—finitude, guilt, and death—and we have to watch for its expression too. After you have melted your identity into transcending, pulsating power, what do you do to establish some kind of balance? What kind of forceful, instrumental attitude do you summon up to remarshal yourself and your grip on experience? #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

One cannot live in the trembling smallness of awe, else one will melt away. Where is the object on which to focus one’s new self-assertion—and object that is for the most people a victim? This is what we have to be constantly on guard for. The Dionysian festival reflected human’s experience in the round, and so far the masochistic loss of self there was the corresponding sadistic affirmation of self: the Dionysian celebrators tore apart with their bare hands and ate raw a scapegoat or bull to climax the ceremony. Every heroic victory is two-sided: it aims toward merger with an absolute beyond in a burst of life affirmation, but it carries within it the rotten core of death denial in a physical body here on Earth. If culture is a lie about the possibilities of victory over death, then that lie must somehow take its toll of life, no matter how colorful and expansive the celebration of joyful victory may seem. The massive meetings of the Nazi youth or those of Stain in Red Square and Mao in Peking literally take our breath away and give us a sense of wonder. However, the proof that these celebrations have an underside in Auschwitz and Siberia: these are the places where the goats are torn apart, where the pathetic cowardliness of what it is all about on its underside is revealed. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

We might say that modern heroism is somewhat out of joint compared with Dionysianism, where both aspects of transcendence took place on the spot; modern scapegoating has its consummation in bureaucratic forms, gas ovens, slow rotting in prison camps. However, it still is all about the real, lived terror of the individual German, Russian, and Chinese over one’s own life, however coldly and matter-of-factly it may be staged, whatever the clean and disinterested scientific methods used. Adolf Eichmann, for instance, was a simple bureaucratic trimmer who followed orders because he wanted to be liked; but this can only be the surface of the story, we now see. Rubber-stampers sign orders for butchery in order to be liked; but to be liked means to be admitted to the group that is elected for immortality. Evil rests on the passionate person motive to perpetuate oneself, and for each individual this is literally a life-and-death matter for which any sacrifice is not too great, provided it is the sacrifice of someone else provided that the leader and the group approve of it. Whatever side of heroism we look at, one thing is certain: it is an all-consuming activity to make the World conform to our desires. And as far as means are concerned, we are all equally insignificant and impotent terrestrial beings trying to coerce the Universe, trying to make the World over to our own urges. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

If we are going to talk about affluence and ennui, then it seems useful to me to make some preliminary remarks about the meanings of those words. Clarity about definitions is crucial in any discussion, this one included. If we grasp the meaning of a word in all its ramification and connotations, then we can often better understand certain problems that are circumscribed by that word. Its definition and history help our understanding. The phrase “the affluent society” has stuck with us ever since John Kenneth Gailbraith’s book of that title appeared in 1958. “Affluence” derives from the same Latin verb (fluere, to follow) that “fluid” does and it means, quite literally, an overflow. However, as we are all aware, and overflow can be either good or bad. If the Sacramento River overflows its banks in a flood, that is a disaster. However, if a farmer has a bumper crop and his or her grain bins are full to overflowing, that is good. “Affluence,” then, is an ambiguous term. It can suggest the abundance that makes life a pleasure rather than a struggle for mere survival, or it can mean superfluity, an overwhelming and even fatal excess. Prayer and aspiration directed toward God will bring the sought-for guidance from within. Moreover, one may have been given help of which one is as yet unaware and, eventually, this will come through into one’s conscious mind. One should not exaggerate the need for a teacher. Ultimately, one’s development will depend on principles rather than on personalities. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

Many humans are beings who have lived a lie to live at all. Psychiatrists who practice in New York report that the complaints of impotence increase when the stock market is in a low. Conversely, potency is vigorous when the market is high, or a “bull” market as the apt term has it. We are reminded of how archaic man killed the king as soon as he became impotent: it is conceivable that for primitives, like Wall Streeter, actual impotency might develop if the cultural system of denial lost its power. All of which supports those who old that death anxiety always lingers under the surface and is never surely and smoothly absorbed in the cultural hero system. How can the body ever be surely transcended by an animal who is body and who fears this very thing on some level of one’s awareness? I mention these things in passing only to remind the reader of the tragic aspect of human heroics and the naturalness of vicious scapegoating: somebody has to pay for the way things are. This is the meaning of the Devil in history, as many authorities have told us. The Devil represents the body, the absolute determinism of human’s Earthly condition, and that is why the Devil is so dangerous: he reveals the reality of the situation, the fact that we cannot really escape our Earthly destiny. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

To fight the Devil is to fight what he stands for, and to make the Devil a scapegoat is to do away with what he represents: the defeat of the supernatural, the negation of the spiritual victory over body-boundness. Hence all the vampire stories where the blood-feasting evil one is the terrifying threat. The truth of the vampire story, of bats, blood, and canine teeth, is the same as the truth of the castration complex: that the causa sui project via the body is a lie, that our bodies are really our doom; so long as we are in them we are subject to the complete dominion o Earthly laws of blood and animality. Hence only the sign of the cross can win out over the vampire, only the domain of invisible spirit that promises victory over the body and death can save humans. Thus the vampire story is a perennial horror-passion play reflecting the entire truth of the human condition and the hope beyond it. The Devil is the one who prevents the heroic victory of immortality in each culture—even the atheistic, scientific-humanist ones. On matters of spiritual apotheosis every leader shows one’s basic kinship to Martin Luther, because he has to decry the fettering of man’s glorious spirit by the body, by personal appetite and selfishness. The Devil always confounds the body with the ethereal and makes the decadent capitalist World seem like socialist Heaven. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great. People, if we are Christians, it is imperative that we live pure, Godly lives in the midst of our Corinthian, pornotopian culture. We must live above the horrifying statistics or the Church will become increasingly irrelevant and powerless, and our children will leave it. The Church can have no power apart from purity. This demands that we live out Paul’s dictum: “train yourself to be Godly”—holy sweat! An important place to begin our training is with the discipline of accountability. This to be done with someone who will regularly hold you accountable for your more life, asking you hard questions. If you are married, ideally you should use your spouse, but I also recommend another man, one who will give you no quarter in sensual matters. You need someone of the same gender who will understand your sensuality from the inside out—someone you can be completely honest with, to whom you can confess temptations and attractions. You need someone who will help you toe the mark and keep your soul faithful to God, Mutual accountability is the ideal. In this connection I think of a certain salesman who regularly maintains accountability via phone contact with other Christian salesmen, and even works at scheduling trips to cities at the same time they will be there. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

Along with this comes the discipline of prayer. Pray daily and specifically for your own purity. I am amazed that so few people who are concerned about their lives pray about it. Enlist the prayers of your spouse and friends, and pray for others in this respect. Do not wait to be asked. Pray for the purity of your friends too. They need it, and so do you! Next, fill yourself with God’s Word through the discipline of memorization. A person can keep one’s way pure by living accord to God’s work. And, God has hidden his work in your heart so that you will not sin against others. Equally important, our body is the body from which we live. We do not live alone. Thank goodness! Our choices, as they settle into character (to be explained later) are farmed out or outsources to our body in its social context, where they then occur more or less automatically, without our having to think about what we are doing. And that is, in general, a very good thing. Just recall how cumbersome it is when we have to think about what we are doing—learning to skate, drive a car, speak a language. The very purpose of learning or training in some activity is to bring it under our direction without having to think about it or make decisions regarding it. The body makes this possible. It has knowledge of its own. Of course this basically good and even glorious feature of the body—its capacity to have a life of its own, as we might say—is also a major problem for, and a primary area of, spiritual formation. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

For, trained in a World of wrongness and evil, the body comes to act wrongly before we think, and has motions of sin in its members, which may thwart the true intent of our spirit or will by leaping ahead of it. “It is not me,” he cries, “but sin that dwells in me!” reports Romans 7.17. And “the flesh wants what is contrary to the spirit and the spirit what is contrary to the flesh. They are in opposition to each other, so that it is impossible for you to do what you really want,” reports Galatians 5.17. However, at the same time, this amazing capacity of the body means that it (like the other dimensions of human life) can be re-formed to become our ally in Christlikeness. Such a re-formation of the body is one major part of the process of spiritual formation. The body is not, in the biblical view, essentially evil; and while it is infected with evil, it can be delivered. Spiritual formation is also and essentially a bodily process. It cannot succeed unless the body is also transformed. One of the most damming indictments of humankind is found in Isaiah 53.6: “We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to one’s own way.” Each of us has turned to one’s own way. That is the very essence of sin, the very core of it—going our own way. In a World governed by a sovereign Creator, going our own way is a rebellion. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

Consider a particular territory in a country rebellion against the central government of the nation. The citizens of that territory may be generally decent people, basically upright and caring in their dealings with one another. However, all their goodness among themselves is totally irrelevant to the central government. To hose authorities there is only one issue: the state of rebellion. Until that issues is resolved, nothing else matters. If we think in terms of present-day realities, this illustration is in danger of losing its force. Some central governments are so obviously corrupt and unjust, we may applaud a rebellious territory. We might, in some cases, consider their rebellion a just course of actions. However, God’s government is perfect and just. His moral law is holy, righteous and good. No one ever has a valid reason to rebel against the government of God. We rebel for only one reason: We were born rebellious. We were born with a perverse inclination to go our own way, to set up our own internal government rather than submit to God. O God, the most gracious Maker and most merciful Restorer of humankind, Who, when humans, by the envy of the Devil, was cast down from eternal life, didst redeem him with the Blood of Thine Only Son; give life to Thy servants, whose death Thou dost in no wise desire; and as Thou doest not leave them when they are astray, so do Thou receive them when they are brought back. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

Let the sorrowful sighings of Thy servants move Thy pity. Do Thou heal their wounds; do Thou extend Thy saving hand to the prostrate, lest Thy Church should be despoiled of any portion of her body; lest Thy flock should suffer loss; lest those who were born again in the salutary laver should be possessed by the second death. Spare Thou those who confess; that in this mortal life they may, by Thy help, so mourn over their sins, that in the day of the dreadful judgment they may escape the sentence of eternal damnation, and may know neither the terrors of the darkness nor the fury of the flame; and that having returned from the path of error to the way of righteousness, they may be pierced with no more wounds, but may retain in fulness and perpetuity both what Thy grace hath vouchsafed, and what Thy mercy hath restored; through the same our Lord Jesus Christ. “They shall not go forth unto the Gentiles until the day that they shall repent of their iniquity, and become clean,” reports Ether 4.6. O Lord God, Who inhabitest eternity, the Heavens declare thy glory, the Earth thy riches, the Universe is thy temple; Thy presence fills immensity, yet thou hast of thy pleasure created life, and communicated happiness; Thou hast made me what I am and given me what I have; in thee I live and move and have my being; Thy providence has set the bounds of my habitation, and wisely administers all my affairs. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

I thank thee for thy riches to me in Jesus, for the unclouded revelation of him in thy word, where I behold his person, character, grace, glory, humiliation, sufferings, death, and resurrection; give me to feel a need of his continual saviourhood, and cry with Job, “I am vile,” and with Peter, “I perish,” with the publican, “Be merciful to me, a sinner.” Subdue me in the love of sin, let me know the need of renovation as well as of forgiveness, in order to serve and enjoy thee forever. I come to thee in the all-prevailing name of Jesus, with nothing of my own to plead, no works, no worthiness, no promises. I am often straying, often knowingly opposing thy authority, often abusing thy goodness; much of my guilt arises from my religious privileges, my low estimation of them, my failure to use them to my advantage, but I am not careless of thy favour or regardless of thy glory; impress me deeply with a sense of thine omnipresence, that thou art about my path, my ways, my lying down, my end. The self-actualizes has one’s limitations, like other human beings. One is subject to the same vicissitudes of fortune that they are. One is liable to the natural changes of life, to sickness and death. One is certainly not so powerful as so many credulous and superstitious believes imagine one to be. To remind the worshippers that one is still a human being is not to criticize or denigrate one. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17

BRIGHTON STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH

Rancho Cordova, CA |

Now Selling!

NOW SELLING! Brighton Station at Cresleigh Ranch is Rancho Cordova’s newest home community! This charming neighborhood offers an array of home types with eye catching architecture styles such as Mid-Century Modern, California Modern, Prairie, and Contemporary Farmhouse. This contemporary farmhouse offers plenty of room for delightful diversions; the exterior texture adds old-fashion flair; the back yard and patio accommodate out-of-doors lounging. Inside, a large living area with fireplace affords grand lounging; a dining room, cozy interludes.

A fully functioning kitchen, bathroom, and two car garage are accessible on the first floor as well. This home is comfortable in a country or suburban setting. Other special features make this a great place to come home to. 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/

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.

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

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

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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

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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/

At the Heart of Each Atom there is Quiescence, that Mysterious Stillness of the Unseen Power of God!

December 14, 2019 4:12 am

One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant people, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The professional actor has a modest say over how the stage is assembled, the props selected, and the other characters positioned, as well as a say over his or her own presence in the play. This is also true in private life. In both cases the person is locus of the acting process. However, something more operates when institutions are involved, for within institutions various elements of acting are taken away from the individual and replaced by institutional mechanisms. The locus of acting, of emotion management, moves up to the level of the institution. Many people and objects, arranged according to institutional rule and custom, together accomplish the act. Companies, prisons, schools, churches—institutions of virtually any sort—assume some of the functions of a director and alter the relation of actor to director. Officials in institutions believe they have done things rights when they have established illusions that foster the desired feelings in workers, when they have placed parameters around a worker’s emotion memories, a worker’s use of the as if. It is not that workers are allowed to see and think as they like and required only to show feeling (surface acting) in institutionally approved ways. The matter would be simpler and less alarming if stopped there. However, it does not. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

Some institutions have become very sophisticated in the techniques of deep acting; they suggest how to imagine and thus how to feel. As a farmer puts blinders on his or her workerhorse to guide its vision forward, institutions manage how we feel. We commonly assume that institutions are called in when individual controls fail: those who cannot control their emotions are sent to mental hospitals, homes for disturbed children, or prisons. However, in looking at the matter this way, we may ignore to shape feeling. We might ask instead what sort of church, school, or family influence was unavailable to the parents of institutionalized patients, who presumably tired to make their children into adequate emotion managers. One of the ways we guide visions into progression is by prearranging what is available to the worker’s view. A teaching hospital, for example, designs the stage for medical students facing their first autopsy. Seeing the eye of a dead person might call to mind a loved one or oneself; to see this organ coldly violated by a knife might lead a student to faint, or flee in horror, or quit medicine then and there. However, this seldom happens. The immaculate, brightly lit appearance of the operating room, and the serious professional behavior required, justify and facilitate a clinical and impersonal attitude toward death. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

Certain parts of the body are kept covered, particularly the face and genitalia, and the hands, which are so strongly connected with human, personal qualities, are never dissected. Once the vital organs have been taken out, the body is removed from the room, bringing the autopsy down to tissues, which are more easily depersonalized. The deft touch, skill, and professional attitude of the prosector makes the procedure neater and more bloodless than might otherwise be the case, and this increases intellectual interest and makes it possible to approach the whole thing scientifically rather than emotionally. Students appear to avoid talking about the autopsy, and when they do talk about it, the discussion is impersonal and stylized. Finally, whereas in laboratory dissection humor appears to be a widespread and effective emotional control device, it is absent in the autopsy room, perhaps because the death has been too recent and [humor] would appear too insensitive. Covering the corpse’s face and genitalia, avoiding the hands, later removing the body, moving fast, using white uniforms, and talking in uniformed talk—these are customs designed to manage the human feeling that threatens order. Institutions arrange their front stages. They guide the way we see and what we are likely to feel spontaneously. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

Consider the inevitable institutional halls, especially those near the areas where people wait. Often in medical, academic, and corporate settings we find on the walls a row of photographs or oil paintings of persons in whom we should have full confidence. In the waiting room of the psychiatrist: With crossed legs you claim repose, tranquility. Everything is under control. With the straight shoulder you say dignity, status. No matter what comes up, this guy has nothing to fear, is calmly certain of his worth and of his ability. With the head turned sharply to the left you indicate that someone is claiming his attention. No doubt hundreds of people would like this guy’s attention. He was engrossed in his book, but now he is being interrupted. And what was he reading? Reader’s Digest? Architectural Digest? The Bible? Oh, no; he is into something heavy. We cannot see the title, but we know it is plenty important. Usually it is Osler’s Principles and Practice of Medicine. And the finger marking his place? Why he is been at it so intently, so diligently, he is already halfway through. And the other hand, lying so lightly, so gracefully, on the book. That shows intelligence, experience, mastery. He is not scratching his head trying to figure out what the hell the author is getting at. Anytime you knock on this guy’s door, you will find him just like that, dressed to the nines, tie up tight in his buttoned-down collar, freshly pressed jacket, deeply immersed in one of these heavy tomes. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

The professional’s office, of course, should be done in a pleasant but impersonal décor, not too messy and colorful but not too cold and bare; it should reflect just the amount of professional warmth the doctor or lawyer or banker himself or herself ought to show. Home is carefully distinguished from office, personal flair from professional expertise. This stage setting is intended to inspire our confidence that the service is, after all, worth paying a lot for. Airlines seem to model “stage sets” on the living rooms seen on daytime television serials: the Muzak tunes, the TV and movie screens, and the smiling flight attendants serving drinks are all calculated to make you feel at home. Even follow passengers are considered part of the stage. At American Airlines, for example, flight attendants in training are advised that they can prevent the boarding of certain types of passengers who pose a security threat. One’s effect on the emotion memory of other money-paying passengers might he all wrong. Sometimes props are less important than the influential directors. Institutions authorize stage directors to coach the hired cast in deep acting. Buttressed with the authority of a high office or a specialized degree, the director may make suggestions that are often interpreted at lower levels as orders. The director’s role may be simple and direct, as in the case of a group of college students training to be clinicians in a camp for emotionally disturbed children. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

These students, who composed the junior staff, did not know at first how they were supposed to feel or think about the wild behavior of disturbed children. However, in the director’s chair sat the senior counselors, advising them on how to see the children: “They were expected to see the children as victims of uncontrollable impulses somehow related to their harsh and depriving backgrounds, and in need of enormous doses of kindliness and indulgence in order to break down their images of the adult World as hateful and hostile. They were also taught how to feel properly toward them: The clinician must never respond in anger or with intent to punish, although one might sometimes have to restrain or even isolate children in order to prevent them from hurting themselves or one another. Above all, the staff were expected to be warm and loving and always to be governed by a clinical attitude. To be warm and loving toward a child who kicks, screams, and insults you—a child whose problem is unlovability—requires emotion work. The art of it is passed down from senior to junior counselor, as in other settings it passes from judge to law clerk, professor to graduate student, boss to subordinate. The professional worker will implicitly frown on certain uses of emotion memory. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

The senior counselor of disturbed children will not allow one’s self to think, “Brett reminds me of a terrible brat I had to babysit when I was thirteen, and if he is like that I will end up hating him.” Instead, one will reconceive Mark in another way: “Brett is really like the other kid I used to babysit when I was fourteen. He was difficult, but I got to like him, so I expect I will get to like Brett despite the way he pushes me away suspiciously.” A proper way to experience the child, not simply a proper way to seem to feel, was understood by everyone as part of the job. And the young caretakers did admirably: To an extraordinary degree they fulfilled these expectations, including, I am convinced, the expectations that they feel sympathy and tenderness and love toward their charges, despite their terrestrial-like behavior. The speed with which these college students learned to behave in this way cannot be easily explained in terms of gradual learning through a slow process of internalization. In more circuitous ways, too, the formal rules that prop up an institution set limits to the emotional possibilities of all concerned. Consider, for example, the rules that guard access to information. Any institution with a bit of hierarchy in it must suppress democracy to some extent and thus must find ways to suppress democracy to some extent and thus must find ways to suppress envy and resentment at the bottom. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

Often envy is suppressed by enforcing a hierarchy of secrets. The customary rule of secrecy about pay is a case in point: those at the bottom are almost never allowed to know how much money those at the top get each month, nor, to the fullest extent, what privileges they enjoy. Also kept secret are deliberations that determine when and to what level an individual is likely to rise or fall within the organization. As one University of California administrative memorandum explained: “Letters concerning the disposition of tenure review cases will be kept confidential, in order that those involved not hold grudges or otherwise harbor resentment toward those unfavorably disposed in their case.” In this situation, where the top depends upon being protected from the middle and the bottom—from those involved as the memo put it—leaks can cause panic. Finally, drugs of various sorts can be used to stimulate or depress mood, and companies are not above engineering their use. Just as the plow displaced manual labor, in some reported instances drug use seems to be displacing emotion labor. The labor that it takes to withstand stress and boredom on the job can be performed, some workers have found, by Darvon and Valium. Workers at the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, for example, found that nurses in its medical department used to give out Valium, Darvon, codeine, and other drugs for free and without prescription. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

There are a number of ways, some of them company-sponsored, to “have a nice day” on the job, as part of the job. The stage actor makes the finding and expressing of feeling one’s main professional task. In Stanislavski’s analogy, he seeks it with the dedication of a prospector for precious metal. He comes to see feeling as the object of painstaking internal mining, and when he finds it, he processes it like gold. In the context of the theater, this use of feeling is considered exciting and honorable. However, what happens when deep and surface acting become part of a day’s work, part of what we sell to an employer in return for a day’s wage? What happens when our feelings are processed like raw ore? A lot of people who deal with others, especially when dealing with customers, engage in some acting. If a worker pretends he or she is feeling really up, sometimes they actually get into it. The customer will then respond to the individual as though he or she were really friendly, and then more of the employee responds back [surface acting]. Sometimes one will purposely take some deep breathes. Try to relax one’s neck muscles [deep acting with the body]. One may just talk to one’s self: “Watch it. Do not let him get to you. Do not let him get to you. Do not let him get to you.” And then one will talk to one’s partner and she will say the same thing to one. After a while, the anger foes away [deep acting, self-[prompting]. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

One has to try to remember if a customer is drinking too much, he or she is probably scared of something. It might help to think to yourself, “he’s a little child.” Really, that is what he is. And when you see him that way, you will not get mad that the customer is yelling at you. He is like a child yelling at you. [deep acting, Method acting]. Surface and deep acting in a commercial setting, unlike acting in a dramatic, private, or therapeutic context, make one’s face and one’s feelings take on the properties of a resource. However, it is not a resource to be used for the purpose of art, as in drama, or for the purposes of self-discovery, as in therapy, or for the pursuit of fulfillment, as in everyday life. It is a resource to be used to make money. Outside of Stanislavski’s parlor, out there in the American marketplace, the actor may wake up to find oneself actually operated upon. In spite of—or perhaps because of—the fact that instinctivists and behaviorists share certain similarities in their respective pictures of humans and their philosophical orientation, they have fought each other with a remarkable fanaticism. Nature or nurture, instinct or environment became flags around which each side rallied, refusing to see any common ground. In recent years there has been a growing tendency to overcome the sharp alternatives of the instinctivist-behaviorist war. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

One solution to the instinctivist-behaviorist war is to change the terminology; some tended to reserve the term “instinct” for the lower animals and to speak instead of “organic drives” when discussing human motivations. In this way some developed such formulations as “most of Human’s behavior is learned, whereas mist of a bird’s behavior is not learned.” This latter formulation is characteristic of the new trend to replace the old “either/or” by a “more-or-less” formulation, thus taking account of gradual change in the weight of the respective factors. The model for this view is a continuum, on the one end of which is (almost) complete innate determination, on the other end (almost) complete learning. Perhaps a more serious weakness in the present psychological handling of instinct is possessed in the assumption that a two-class system is adequate for the classification of complex behavior. The implication that all behavior must be determined by learning or by heredity, neither of which is more than partially understood, is entirely unjustified. The final form of any response is affected by a multiplicity of variables, only two of which are genetical and experiential factors. It is to the identification and analysis of all these factors that psychology should address itself. When this task is properly conceived and executed there will be no need nor reason for ambiguous concepts of instinctive behavior. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

Because learning plays a more important role in the behavior of higher than in the behavior of lower forms, the natively determined behavior pattern of higher forms become much more extensively modified by experience than those of lower forms. It is through such modification that the animal may become adjusted to different environments and escape from the narrow bounds the optimum condition imposes. Higher forms are therefore less dependent upon specific external environmental conditions for survival than are lower forms. Because of the interaction of acquired and innate factors in behavior it is impossible to classify many behavior patterns. Each type of behavior must be separately investigated. Yet, there are more important problems from the standpoint of this study and that is the difference between organic drives (food, fight, flight, sexuality—formerly called instincts), whose function it is to guarantee the survival of the individual and the species, and nonorganic drives (character-rooted passions), which are not phylogenetically programmed and are not common to all beings: the desire for love and freedom; destructiveness, narcissism, sadism, masochism. Often these nonorganized drives that form being’s second nature are confused with organic drives. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

A case and point is the sexual drive. It is a psychoanalytically well-established observation that often the intensity of what is subjectively felt as sexual desire (including its corresponding physiological manifestations) is due to nonsexual passions such as narcissism, sadism, masochism, the wish for power, and even anxiety, loneliness, and boredom. For a narcissistic male, for instance, the sight of a woman may be sexually exciting because he is excited by the possibility of proving to himself how attractive he is. Or a sadistic person may be sexually excited by the chance to conquer a woman (or as the case may be, a man) and to control her or him. Many people are bound for years to each other emotionally just by this motive, especially when the sadism of one fits the masochism of the other. It is rather well known that fame, power, and wealthy makes is possessor sexually attractive if certain physical conditions are present. In all these instances, the physical desire is mobilized by nonsexual passions which thus find their satisfaction. Indeed, it is anybody’s guess how many children owe their existence to vanity, sadism, and masochism, rather than to genuine physical attraction, not to speak of love. However, people, especially men, prefer to think that they are “oversexed” rather than that they are “overvain.” The same phenomenon has been clinically studied minutely in cases of compulsive eating. This symptom is not motivated by physiological but by psychic hunger, engendered by the feeling of being depressed, anxious, empty. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

Therefore, destructiveness and cruelty are not instinctual drives, but passions rooted in the total existence of humans. They are one of the ways to make sense of life; they are not and could not be present in the animal, because they are by their very natures rooted in the human condition. The main error many instinctivists have made is that they have confused the two kinds of drives, those rooted in instinct, and those rooted in character. A sadistic person who waits for the occasion, as it were, to express one’s sadism, looks as if he or she fitted the hydraulic model of a dammed-up instinct. However, only people with a sadistic character wait for the opportunity to behave sadistically, just as people with a loving character wait for the right opportunity to express their love. imagine an absolutely material World, containing only physical and chemical fact, and existing from eternity without a God, without even an interested spectator: would there by any sense in saying of that World that one of its states is better than another? Or if there were two Worlds possible, would there be any rhyme or reason in calling one good and the other bad—good or bad absolutely, I mean, and apart from the fact that one might relate itself better than the other to the philosopher’s private interests? However, we must leave these private interests out of the account, for the philosopher is a mental fact, and we are asking whether goods and evils and obligations exist in physical facts per se. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

Surely there is no status for good and evil to exist in, in a purely insentient World. How can one physical fact, considered simply as a physical fact, be better than another? Betterness is not a physical relation. It its mere material capacity, a thing can no more be good or bad than it can be pleasant of painful. Good for what? Good for the production of another physical fact, do you say? But what in a purely physical Universe demands the production of that other fact? Physical facts simple are or are not; and neither when present or absent, can they be supposed to make demands. If they do, they can only do so by having desires; and then they have ceased to be purely physical facts, and have become facts of conscious sensibility. Goodness, badness, and obligation must be realized somewhere in order really to exist; and the first step in ethical philosophy is to see that no merely inorganic nature of things can realize them. Neither moral relations nor the moral law can swing in vacuo. Their only habitat can be a mind which feels them; and no World composed of merely physical facts can possibly be a World to which ethical propositions apply. The moment one sentient being, however, is made a part of the Universe, there is a chance for goods and evils really to exist. Moral relations now have their status, in that being’s consciousness. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

So far as one feels anything to be good, one makes it good. It is good, for one; and being good for one, is absolutely good, for one is the sole creator of values in that Universe, and outside of one’s opinion, things have no moral character at all. In such a Universe as that it would of course be absurd to raise the question of whether the solitary thinker’s judgments of good and ill are true or not. Truth supposes a standard outside of the thinker to which one must confirm; but here the thinker is a sort of divinity, subject to no higher judge. Let us call the supposed Universe which one inhabits a moral solitude. In such a moral solitude it is clear that there can be no outward obligation, and that the only trouble the god-like thinker is liable to have will be over the consistency of one’s own several ideals with one another. Some of these will no doubt be more pungent and appealing than the rest, their goodness will have a profounder, more penetrating taste; they will return to haunt one with more obstinate regrets if violated. So the thinker will have to order one’s life with them as its chief determinants, or else remain inwardly discordant and unhappy. Into whatever equilibrium one may settle, though, and however one may straighten out one’s system, it will be a right system; for beyond the facts of one’s own subjectivity there is nothing moral in the World. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

The enlightened being can condemn nobody, can regard none as outside one’s range of compassion, and can find a place in one’s heart for the worst sinner. One knows that duality is but a dream and discovers oneself anew in all sentient creatures. One knows that the World’s woe arises out of its false and fictitious sense of separateness. One receives too many confidences ever to be surprised by any of them, too many confessions ever to be shocked. However, even if one had never heard or read a single one, one would receive them just as calmly. For one’s compassions and insight, one’s tolerance and realism embrace the whole range of human feeling or human behavior. One is always oneself, without pose, without pretense, and without self-consciousness. It is not the studied poise of good breeding but a natural poise upwelling from within. One’s uniqueness extends through body, feelings, thoughts, character, outlook—it is total. The ordinary being see only one’s personal objective, but the illumined being sees simultaneously both the objective and the person pursuing it. One’s silence bravely takes its stand on the fact that truth is a reality, is a power, is invincible. One knows the proper value to stamp on fame, position, and wealth, and the proper place to assign them. One neither rejects them with harsh ascetic scorn nor seeks them with hard self-centered ambition. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

The strength with which he has conquered both oneself and life will be evident to those who are sensitive to more than merely commonplace things. In every affair one knows where one stands, but more in the sense than one listens and obeys the higher guidance than in any other. Blessed be the Lord God, Who cometh in the Name of the Lord, and hath dawned upon us; Whose Coming hath redeemed us, Whose Nativity hath enlightened us; Who by His Coming hath sought out the lost, and illuminated those who sat in darkness. Grant, therefore, O Father Almighty, that we celebrating with pious devotion the day of his Nativity, may find the day of judgement a day of mercy; that as we have known His benignity as our Redeemer, we may feel His gentle tenderness as out Judge. We give Thee thanks, O Lord our God, and bless Thee from day to day, Who hast been pleased to bring us to this Thy holy solemnity. Vouchsafe us, with Thy faithful people, in peace and quietness through many succeeding years to welcome Christ, through Thy mercy. “And they did pray unto the Lord their God continually, insomuch that the Lord did bless them, according to his word, so that they did wax strong and prosper in the land,” reports Alma 62.51. One learns from within, intuitively, much more than from without, the full teaching to which other beings or their books have led them. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

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It is the Work of the Enlightened to Show People What they Cannot See for themselves—their Own Higher Possibilities!

December 7, 2019 2:11 am

That perfect tranquility of life, which is nowhere to be found but in retreat, a faithful friend, and a good soul. When I look into my soul, I cannot understand why I ever step out of it. Our neighborhoods represent the best and last frontier in our collaborative efforts to advocate for and improve the lives of our community members. It is within the structure of neighborhoods that our family develops, incorporates values, and even learn the skills necessary for responsible citizenship. If you thoroughly know anything of value, teach it to others. Healthier personalities have the ability to find and maintain relationships of love and friendships in the World. This ability insures that a healthier person will have access to relief from the existential loneliness in which we all live. It will be noted that I used the term “relief.” Loneliness is not a disease of which one can be cured; it is instead an inescapable fact of human existence. Less healthy personalities, cut off as they are from the fount of their real selves, find themselves terrible company. They cannot long tolerate solitude, and they run willy-nilly into busy-work, or superficial companionship with others. They do not, however, truly encounter another person and enter into dialogue with one. Hence, the feeling of loneliness, of not being known and understood, chronically nags at them like a stone in their shoe or a headache. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

The healthier personality, because one is less self-concealing and has readier access to one’s own fantasy, feelings, and memories, is less afraid of solitude when this is one’s lot; and when one is with others, one can feel secure enough in one’s own worth that one can let encounter and dialogue happen. During the process of such dialogue, the shell which encapsulates one as a separate, isolated being ruptures; and one’s inner World expands to include the received World of experience of the other. When the dialogue ends, one has experienced oneself in the new dimensions evoked by the other person, and one has learned of the personal World of another—thus one has enlarged and changed. The less healthy personality defends oneself against being so affected and changed in one’s contact with others. One “rubs shells,” or clinks one’s character armor against that of the other person, but does not meet the other. There is no encounter. Just as a healthy personality dares to let oneself be the one he or she is, so does he respect, even cherish and defend, the “suchness,” the idiosyncrasy, of the other person in one’s World. One eschews sneaky efforts to manipulate the feelings, thoughts, and actions of the other; hence one truly experiences the other person as an other, as a source of being, different in some respect from oneself and similar to one in other ways. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

The less healthy person dares neither to let oneself be, nor to trust the being when one is not trying to control the being. In one’s transactions, one seeks always to influence the other, if in no other modality than in the way in which one will be seen and experienced by the other. In the extreme instances of unhealthy personality, the individual actually (this can only be stated metaphorically) detaches one’s ego from one’s body and functions as a spectator and manipulator of one’s own depersonalized body as it transacts with the other person. This depersonalized body is then manipulated before the other, in the hope that the other’s experience of and responses toward this counterfeit person can thus be controlled: robots performing before others who are perceived as robots. However, when people make a profession of their stigma, the majority group leaders are obliged to have dealings with representatives of other categories, and so find themselves breaking out of the closed circle of their own kind. Instead of leaning on their crutch, they get to play golf with it, ceasing, in terms of social participation, to be representative of the people they represent. Also, those who professionally present the viewpoint of their category may introduce some systematic bias in the presentation simply because they are sufficiently involved in the problem to write about it. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

Although any particular stigma category is likely to have professionals who take different lines, and may even support publications which advocate different programs, there is uniform tacit agreement that the situation of the individual with this particular stigma is worth attention. Whether a writer takes a stigma very seriously or makes light of it, one must define it as something worth writing about. This minimal agreement, even when there are no others, helps to consolidate belief in the stigma as a basis for self-conception. Here again representatives are not representative, for representation can hardly come from those who give no attention to their stigma, or who are relatively unlettered. I do not mean to suggest here that professionals provide the stigmatized with the sole public source of reminder as to their situation in life; there are other reminders. Each time someone with a particular stigma makes a spectacle of oneself by breaking a law, winning a prize, or becoming a first of one’s kind, a local community make take gossipy note of this; these events can even make news in the mass media of the wider society. In any case, they who share the noted person’s stigma suddenly become accessible to the normal immediately around and become subject to a slight transfer of credit or discredit to themselves. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

By being now embraced by the masses, the situation of the stigmatized individual’s situation thus leads them easily into living in a World of publicized heroes and villains of their own stripe, their relation to this World being underlined by immediate associated, both normal and otherwise, who bring them news about how one of their kind has fared. When one considers one set of individuals, from whom the stigmatized person can expect some support, those who share one’s stigma and by virtue of this are defined and define themselves as one’s own kind. The second set are—to borrow a term once used by homosexuals—the “wise,” namely, persons who are not perceived as part of the dominate group but whose special situation some times has made them intimately privy to the secret life of the stigmatized individual and sympathetic with it, and who find themselves accorded a measure of acceptance, a measure of courtesy membership in the clan. Wise persons are the marginal beings before whom the individual with a fault need feel no shame nor exert self-control, knowing that in spite of one’s failing one will be seen as an ordinary other. An example may be cited from the World of a woman of the evening. Although she sneers at respectability, the lady, particularly, the woman of the evening, is supersensitive in polite society, taking refuge in her off hours with Bohemian artists, writers, actors and would-be intellectuals. There she may be accepted as an off-beat personality, without being a curiosity. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

Before taking the standpoint of those with a particular stigma, the person perceived as normal who is becoming wise may first have to pass through a heart-changing personal experience, of which there are many literary records. And after the sympathetic normal makes oneself available to the stigmatized, one often must wait their validation of one as a courtesy member. The self must not only be offered, it must be accepted. Sometimes, of course, the final step does seem to be initiated by the normal; the following is an example of this. “I do not know whether I can or not, but let me tell of an incident. I was once admitted to a group of African American boys of about my own age with whom I used to fish. When I first began to join them, they would carefully use a term of endearment in my presence. Gradually, as we went fishing more and more often, they began to joke with each other in front of me and call each other the more derogatory term of endearment. The change was in their utilization of the word when joking after the precious inability to use the word at all. One day when we were swimming, a boy shoved me with mock violence and I said to him, ‘Do not give me that (expletive) talk.’ He replied, ‘You bastard,’ with a big grin. From that time on, we could all use the term of endearment but the old categories had totally changed. Never, as long as I live, will I forget the way my stomach felt after I used the term of endearment without any reservation.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

Heaven lies within and without us, it is true. But in most cases, only by the intervention of some authentic spiritual genius do we seem able to translate this into actuality for ourselves. Life is teaching us all the time but its voice needs a human being as a more direct medium, its lessons need human speech or writing to gain clearer utterance. If we never tried to seem a little better than we are, how could we improve or train ourselves from the outside inward? And the same impulse to show the World a better or idealized aspect of ourselves finds an organized expression in the various professions and classes, each of which has to some extent a cant or pose, which its members assume unconsciously, for the most part, but which has the effect of a conspiracy to work upon the credulity of the rest of the World. There is a cant not only of theology and of philanthropy, but also of law, medicine, teaching, even of science—perhaps especially of science, just now, since the more a particular kind of merit is recognized and admired, the more it is likely to be assumed to be worthy. Thus, when the individual presents oneself before others, one’s performance will tend to incorporate and exemplify the officially accredited values of the society, more so, in fact, than does one’s behavior as a whole. To the degree that a performance highlights the common official values of the society in which it occurs, we may look upon it, in the matter of Durkheim and Radcliffe-Brown, as a ceremony—as an expressive rejuvenation and reaffirmation of the moral values of the community. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

Furthermore, in so far as the expressive bias of performances comes to be accepted as reality, then that which is accepted at the moment as reality will have some of the characteristics of a celebration. To stay in one’s room away from the place where the party is given, or away from where the practitioner attends one’s client, is to stay away from where reality is being performed. The World, in truth, is a wedding. One of the richest sources of data on the presentation of idealized performances is the literature on social mobility. In most societies there seems to be a major or general system of stratification, and in most stratified societies there is an idealization of the higher strata and some aspiration on the part of those in low places to move to higher ones. (One must be careful to appreciate that this involves not merely a desire for a prestigeful place but also a desire for a place close to the sacred center of the common values of the society.) Commonly we find that upward mobility involves the presentation of proper performances and that efforts to move upward and effort to keep from moving downward are expressed in terms of sacrifices made for the maintenance of front. Once the proper sign-equipment has been obtained and familiarity gained in the management of it, then this equipment can be used to embellish and illumine one’s daily performances with a favorable social style. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

Perhaps the most important piece of sign-equipment associated with social class consist of the status symbols through which material wealth is expressed. American society is similar to others in this regard but seems to have been singled out as an extreme example of wealth-oriented class structure—perhaps because in America the license to employ symbols of wealth and financial capacity to do so are so widely distributed. Indian society, on the other hand, has sometimes been cited not only as one in which mobility occurs in terms of caste groups, not individuals, but also as one in which performances tend to establish favorable claims regarding non-material values. The caste system, for example, is far from a rigid system in which the position of each component is fixed for all time. Movement has always been possible, and especially so in the middle regions of the hierarchy. A low caste was able, in a generation or two, to rise to a higher position in the hierarchy by adopting vegetarianism and teetotalism, by Sanskritizing its ritual and pantheon. In short, it took over, as far as possible, the customs, rites, and beliefs of the Brahmins, and the adoption of the Brahminic way of life by a low caste seems to have been frequent, though theoretically forbidden. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

The tendency of the lower castes to imitate the higher has been a powerful factor in the spread of Sanskritic ritual and customs, and in the achievement of a certain amount of cultural uniformity, not only throughout the caste scale but over the entire length and breadth of India. Nature herself is forever silently voicing these majestic truths and if we are unable to receive them from her lips, as we usually are, then we must receive them from a teacher’s lecture. We know that the mere reading of books and journals is not enough, and our essential conviction (as also the acknowledgment of the Old World since time immemorial) is that a personal guide who can instruct and inspire one to travel through the twilit jungle land which lies between ignorance and truth is indispensable. This missing element in many quests is the spiritual guide. One of the greatest helps to convert our timid thoughts and our trembling wishes into deeps is the inspiration received from a superior mind. Most beings find they need a concrete symbol to receiver their devotion and concentrate their aspiration. In short, they find they need a Spiritual Leader, be one historical and of the past, or contemporary and of the present. It is said that wisdom comes with experience. However, the enlightened who offer to impart it, whether in person or in writing, may save us some of the effort and suffering which accompany experience. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

In fact, of course, there are many Hindu circles whose members are much concerned with injecting an expression of wealth, luxury, and class status into the performance of their daily round and who think too little of ascetic purity to bother affecting it. Correspondingly, there have always been influential groups in America whose members has felt that some aspect of every performance ought to play down the expression of sheer wealth in order to foster the impression that standards regarding birth, culture, or moral earnestness are the ones that prevail. Every generation has to find its own way through these mysteries and to these truths anew, despite the heavy freight of recorded teachings and revelations which it receives from all the previous ones. This is why new prophets have always been needed to provide the very antiquated clues. Something or someone is needed to draw us from the ego to God. When one finds out that all one’s efforts at self-improvement are movements around a circle, that the ego does not really intend to give itself up in surrender to the soul and therefore only pretends to do so, one realizes that left to oneself one cannot succeed in really changing one’s inner centre of gravity. If one is to free oneself from such a hopeless position, help is needed from some outside source. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

It is not that teachers make a difference—they make the difference for the future. Students need to know that you care before they care what you know. The home environment is a most powerful factor in determining the level of growth achievement of individuals, people’s interest in learning, and the number of years of education the individual will receiver. It accounts for more of the person’s motivation in learning than does the educational curriculum or the quality of instruction in our education. The soul is the most enduring of memorials, the trustiest monument for the presentation of an event or a name or an affection; for it, and it only, is respected by wars and revolutions, and survives them. The purposes of human evolution require the presence at all times through human history of some spiritually fulfilled individuals to act as guides or teachers. At no period has the race been left entirely without them, no matter how bleak, how savage, or how materialistic the period has been. While the dream is still continuing, one cannot help taking its scenes and figures as being quite real. However, if someone rings a bell until one awakens from the dreaming state, one will then see that both scenes and figures were mere figments of one’s own imagination. In a sense, the teacher of philosophy acts as this awakener did, except that one directs one’s efforts to the sense-deceived consciousness of everyday life. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

It is not enough to set up a spiritual ideal for one to attain. One needs also the psychological help, the emotional and mental re-education which can remove large obstructions to that attainment. No seeker is so wise, so informed, so perfect, or so balanced as not to need the constructive criticism and expert counsel of a true spiritual guide. Such is the World today, with its tensions and greeds, its confusions and wrongs, its ignorance and evil-doing, that if anyone has a store of virtue and an awareness of divinity, people have need of them and hence of one. There is too little of the one and hardly any of the other among us. A being needs comfort and support in these times more than in ordinary times. Where can one best find them? By sitting humbly in intellectual discipleship under those who have been blessed by the higher power with the revelation of its own existence. One can absorb from them a certitude that the World is still ruled by higher laws and its history by higher purposes. “And because of your diligence and your faith and your patience with the word in nourishing it, that it may take root in you, behold, by and by ye shall pluck the fruit thereof, which is most precious, which is sweet, and which is above all that is sweet, and which is white above all that is white, yea, and pure above all that is pure; and ye shall feast upon this fruit even until ye are filled, that ye hunger not, neither shall ye thirst,” reports Alma 32.42. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

Certainly we do not intend to deride any good thing, and we are thankful for whatever truly helps human beings in their desperate life upon the Earth. Nothing else would be compatible with the spirit of Jesus. The constant love of God is extended to every human being who ever lives, sometimes in places and postures that God himself would not prefer, but still with some good effect. However, whether or not a spirituality adequate to human need and producing genuine renovation of the heart can be a matter of mere human abilities is a question of fact. To be mistaken about it will have consequences of the most serious nature. In any case, we may be sure of this: the formation and, later, transformation of the inner life of humans, from which our outer existence flows, is an inescapable human problem. Spiritual formation, without regard to any specifically religious context or tradition, is the process by which the human spirit or will is given a definite form or character. It is a process that happens to everyone. The most despicable as well as the most admirable of persons have had a spiritual formation. Gangsters as well as saints ae the outcome of spiritual formation. Their spirits or hearts have been formed. We each can become a certain kind of person in the depts of our being, gaining a specific type of character. And that is the outcome of a process of spiritual formation as understood in general human terms that apply to everyone, whether they want it or not. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

Fortunate of blessed are those who are able to find or are given a path of life that will form their spirit and inner World in a way that is truly strong and good and directed Godward. The shaping and reshaping of the inner life is, accordingly, a problem that has been around as long as humanity itself; and the earliest records of human thought bear eloquent witness to the human struggle to solve it—but with very limited success, one would have to say. True, some points in human history have shown more success in the elevation of the human spirit than others. However, the low points far exceed the high points, and the average is discouragingly low. Societies the World around are currently in desperate straits trying to produce people who are merely capable of coping with their life on Earth in a nondestructive manner. This is as true as of North American and Europe as it is of the rest of the World, though the struggle takes superficially different forms in various areas. In spiritual matters there really is no “Third World.” It is all Third World. When a child of God undertakes a public task or mission one will neither over nor under do one’s work. One will do exactly what is required. The enlightened being expressed self without selfishness, individuality without individualism. One possesses a sense of infinite leisure, a manner devoid of all haste, a willingness to achieve one’s ends little by little. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

Although fully deserving it, one is too humble to demand and always too embarrassed when offered nay special reverence. One’s personality is one with one’s teaching: one’s life incarnates, practices, and actualizes it. One is content to let then attribute to others the help they are getting from one. One’s ego needs no gratitude and no recognition and would not know what to do with them if they came. One rejoices in their progress as the chief thing. What one gives one gives freely and asks for no requital. Since one’s life itself is not fixed but moves incessantly, one cannot congeal one’s thought into fixed doctrines that are strict and rigid or one’s character into fixed attitudes. One will put forth whatever wisdom indicates in any situation and to any question, not solely what the past indicates—which is what accumulated knowledge or a lined-up character really does. One’s mind is free, one’s policies always fresh. One is neither orthodox nor unorthodox. Naturally such a fluid standpoint will not find approval from the many who have to wear a partisan or fanatic label. The self-renounced illuminate sits beside the gleaming river of life and dips one’s pitcher like others into those troubled waters of passion or pain. Yet one wears an inscrutable smile which perhaps says: “I see all and know all. If I drink with you, it is to be you. If I remain with you, it is to help you. For paradoxically, I sit also at this river’s source.” #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

If someone knows what I do not yet know, if one has trodden father on this path, then it is well to learn from one if one will teach me. The instruction and criticism of a qualified living guide are worth having. However, owing to the rarity of such guides, many seekers are unable to find one. One should appreciate the value of finding a master worthy of being followed. The inner demand of the one will attract in time the outer meeting with the other. No maniac can sure oneself. We dare not leave the treatment of humanity’s mania entirely to humanity themselves. The help of sane outsiders is needed. However, it should be given indirectly and unobtrusively. If the more mature, older, and more experience nightingales find it necessary to give lessons in singing to the younger ones, why not the same situation among human beings? It is the greatest irony of human’s existence that in the end one will be saved from one’s meanness and misery not by those who shout the loudest but by the quietest, the most silent of one’s fellows. For the power and knowledge which one will gain from discipleship with them will be what one needs above all else—power over the baseness in oneself and knowledge f the divine World-Idea. “Then my brethren, ye shall reap the reward of your faith, and your diligence, and patience, and long-suffering, waiting for the tree to bring forth fruit unto you,” reports Alma 32.43. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

I must say I find the news very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to my library and read a book. The love of learning, the sequestered nooks, and all the sweet serenity of the soul is found when we open our hearts to God. O God, Who hast made this most sacred night to shine with the illumination of the True Light; grant, we beseech Thee, that as we have known the mystery of that Light upon Earth, we may also perfectly enjoy it in heaven; through the same as Jesus Christ our Lord. Grant, O Merciful God, that He Who was born to be the Saviour of the World, as He is the Author of our divine birth, so may be Himself the Bestower of our immortality; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Almighty and everlasting God, Who hast willed that on the Nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, should depend the beginning and the completion of all religion; grant us, we beseech Thee, to be reckoned as a portion of Him, on Whom is built the whole salvation of humankind; Who with Thee. We beseech Thee, O Lord, bestow on Thy servants the increase of faith, hope, and charity; that as they glory in the Nativity of Thy Son our Lord, they may, by Thy governance, not feel the adversities of the World; and also that what they desire to celebrate in time, they may enjoy to all eternity; through the same as Jesus Christ our Lord. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

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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

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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/

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Randolph Harris II International Institute

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