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It is the Work of the Enlightened to Show People What they Cannot See for themselves—their Own Higher Possibilities!
CRESLEIGH MEADOWS AT PLUMAS RANCH
Plumas Lake, CA | from the mid $300’s
Coming Soon!
Cresleigh Meadows is coming soon! Found just north of Feather River Boulevard, Cresleigh Meadows is home of the largest neighborhood in Plumas Ranch as well as the popular Bear River Park. With four floor plans available, ranging from approximately 2,000 – 3,500 square feet offering, three to five bedrooms, we are certain you will find the home that fits your needs and lifestyle.
Popular design elements include open floor plans, large kitchen islands, and flex spaces are staples in Cresleigh homes. Multi-generational living options also available in select homes. https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-meadows-at-plumas-ranch/
One Must be Able to Turn to the Soul with Clear Confidence that there they Can Freely Seek the Whole Unvarnished and Uncompromised Truth!
Cresleigh Homes
Mills Station at Cresleigh Ranch | Residence 3
This week, follow Abbie Johnson on a tour of #MillsStationResidence 3 at #CresleighRanch! This home is highly customizable, with 3-4 bedrooms, 3 & 1/2 bath, covered patio, extendable living space, and more! Visit our website to use the interactive blueprint tool, or schedule a tour with us to see this home for yourself! Link: https://cresleigh.com/mills-station/residence-3/
The Soul Can Become a Big Factor in Raising the Level of Intelligence in the World and in Developing Leaders!
I was taken with your earnestness, your passion. You were not jaded or cynical. There was an immediacy to your feelings for these happenings, these creatures, those question. You make well ask, “But why does a person who is seeking help change for the better when one is involved, over a period of time, in a relationship with a therapist which contains conditions without a “front” or façade, openly being the feeling and attitudes which at the moment are flowing in one?” Few people think about the noble role that the soul plays. Our ability to collect, organize, and preserve the voice and observations we have is critical to our continued survival as a species. The more genuine and congruent the therapist in the relations is, the more probability there is that change in personality in the client will occur. As one find someone who is willing to listen acceptantly to one’s feelings, one little by little become sable to listen to oneself. One begins to receive the communications from within oneself—to realize that one is angry, to recognize when one is frightened, even to realize when one is feeling courageous. As one becomes more open to what is going on within one, one becomes able to listen to feelings which one has always denied and repressed. One can listen to feelings which have seemed to one so terrible, or so disorganizing, or so abnormal, or so shameful, that one has never been able to recognize their existence in one’s self. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14
While one is listen to their soul, one also becomes more acceptant of one’s self. As an individual expresses more and more of the hidden and awful aspects one oneself, one finds that the therapist showing a consistent and unconditional beneficial regard for one and one’s feelings. Slowly one moves towards taking the same attitude toward oneself, accepting oneself as one is, and therefore ready to move forward in the process of becoming. In being a sincere person, we learn that we cannot say one thing and believe in another. Take the fact of your sincerity and enthusiasm as testimony to the value of the techniques of emotion and management. It is precisely by such a technique of emotion management that sincerity itself is achieved. And so, through this hall of mirrors in the soul, when learn that when we become angry, our bodies become tense. Our heart races. We breathe more quickly and get less oxygen. Our adrenaline gets higher. When some people get angry, they cuss, want to hit someone, yell in a bucket, cry, eat, smoke a cigarette, talk to themselves. However, these responses carry a risk of offending someone, and could possibly make an individual seem less attractive or dangerous. So we need to consider some ways of how to alleviate angry toward an irate person. There is no celestial witch-doctor, no angelic magician coming to change their character overnight. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14
When I deal with an irate person, I pretend something traumatic has happened in their lives. Once I had an irate that was complaining about me, cursing at me, threatening to get my name and report me to the company. I later found out his son had just died. Now when I meet an irate, I think of that man. If you think about the other person and why they are so upset, you have taken attention off of yourself and your own frustration. And you will not feel so angry. If anger erupts despite these presentative tactics, then deep breathing, talking to yourself, reminding yourself that “you do not have to go home with that individual” are offered as ways to manage emotions. Using these, the worker become less prone to cuss, hit, cry, or smoke. The goal is to keep the focus on your response and on ways to prevent an angry repose through anger-desensitization. And sometimes you have to realize people are mentally disturbed, maybe they cannot afford their medication, and that may help you to not let them upset you so much, but it may allow you to feel more compassion for them. Imagine how hard it must be for mentally ill people to live with themselves and not seek help. Many theorists have seen emotion as a sealed biological event, something that external stimuli can bring on, as cold weather brings on a cold. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14
Furthermore, once emotion—which we call a biological response syndrome is operating, the individual passively undergoes it. This is an organismic conception. However, it seems to me a limited view. For if we conceive of emotion as only this, what are we to make of the many ways in which people taught to attend to stimuli and manage emotion, ways that can actually change feeling? It we conceive of feeling not as a periodic abdication to biology but as something we do by attending to inner sensation in a given way, by defining situations in a given way, by managing in given ways, then it becomes plainer just how plastic and susceptible to reshaping techniques a feeling can be. The very act of managing emotion can be seen as part of what the emotion becomes. However, if we assume, as the organismic theorists do, that how we manage or express feeling is extrinsic to emotion, this idea gets lost. The organismic theorists want to explain how emotion is motored by instinct, and so they by-pass the question of how we come to assess, label, and manage emotion. Emotion is a bodily orientation to an imaginary act. As such, it has a signal function; it warns of where we stand vis-à-vis outer or inner events. Feeling as it spontaneously emerges acts for better or worse as a clue. It filters out evidence about the self-relevance of what we see, recall, or fantasize. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14
The exact point at which we feel injured or insulted, complimented or enhanced, varies. Seeing and hearing is a way of knowing about the World. It is a way of testing reality. Anxiety has a signal function. It signals danger from inside, as when we fear an overload of rage, or from outside, as when an insult threatens to humiliate us beyond endurance. However, it is important to heed your feelings and sometimes turn back, it may protect you from danger. Every emotion has a signal function. No every emotion signals danger. However, every emotion does signal the “me” I put into seeing “you.: It signals the often unconscious perspective we apply when we go about seeing. Feeling signals that inner perspective. Thus, by using helpful techniques for changing feeling—in the service of avoiding stress on ourselves and making life pleasanter for those around us—we can intervene in the signal function of feeling. This simple point is obscured whenever we apply the belief that emotion is dangerous in the first place because it distorts perception and leads people to act irrationally—which means that all ways of reducing emotion are automatically good. Of course, a person gripped by fear may make mistake, may find reflection difficult, and may not (as we say) be able to think. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14
However, a persona totally without emotion has no warning system, no guidelines to the self-relevance of a sight, a memory, or a fantasy. Like one who cannot feel and touches fire, an emotionless person suffers a sense of arbitrariness, which from the point of view of his or her self-interests is irrational. In fact, emotion is a potential avenue to the reasonable view. We may misinterpret an event, feel accordingly, and then draw false conclusions from what we feel. (We sometimes call this neurosis.) We can handle this by applying a secondary framework that corrects habits of feeling and inference, as when we say, “I know I have a tendency to interpret certain gestures as rejections.” However, feeling is the essential clue that a certain viewpoint, even though it may need frequent adjustment, is alive and well. Furthermore, it can tell us about a way of telling us about a way of seeing. A less affluent person may see the deprivations of the ghetto more accurately, more rationally, through indignation and anger than through obedience or resigned realism. One will focus clearly on the police officer’s smoking gun, the landlord’s Cadillac, the look of disapproval on the employment agent’s affluent face. Outside of anger, these images become like boulders on a mountainside, minuscule parts of the landscape. Likewise, a chronically morose person who falls in love may suddenly see the World as happier people do. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14
Emotion locates the position in the viewer. It uncovers an often unconscious perspective, a comparison. “You look tall” may mean “From where I lie on the floor, you look tall.” “I feel awe” may mean “compared with what I do or think I could do, he is awesome.” Awe, love, anger, and envy tell of a self vis-à-vis a situation. When we reflect on feeling we reflect on this sense of “from where I am.” The word objective means “free from personal feeling.: Yet ironically, we need feeling in order to reflect on the external or “objective” World. Taking feelings into account as clues and then correcting for them may be our best shot at objectivity. Like hearing or seeing, feeling provides a useful set of clues in figuring out what is real. A show of feeling by someone else is interesting to us precisely because it may reflect a buried perspective and may offer a clue as to how that person may act. In public life, expressions of feeling often make for news. For example, a TV sports newscaster noted: “Reese Witherspoon has passed the stage of trying to survive in a commercial sport. We are beyond that now. The women’s tennis teams, too. The woman are really serious players. They get really mad if the hit a net ball. They get even madder than the guys, I would say.” He had seen Reese Witherspoon miss a shot (it was a new ball), redden in the face, stamp her foot, and spank the net with her racket. From this her inferred that women “really wants to win.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 14
Wanting to win, she is a “serious” player—a pro. Being a pro, she can be expected to see the tennis match as something on which her professional reputation and financial future depend. Further, from the way she broke an ordinary field of calm with a brief display of anger, she was really serious. He also inferred that she really meant it—she was “serious.” He also inferred what she must have wanted and expected just before the net ball and what the newly grasped reality—a miss—must have felt like. He tried to pick out what part of her went into seeing the ball. A miss, if you really want to win, is maddening. From the commentator’s words and tone, TV viewers could infer his point of view. He assessed the woman’s anger in relation to a prior expectation about how pros in general see, feel, and act and about how women in general act. Women tennis pros, he implied, do not laugh apologetically at a miss, as a nonprofessional woman player might. They feel, he said, in a way that is appropriate to the role of a professional player. In fact, as newcomers they overconform. “They get even madder than the guys.” Thus the view can ferret out the sportscaster’s mental set and the role of women in it. In the same way that we infer other people’s view points from how they display feeling, we decide what we ourselves are really like by reflecting on how we feel about ordinary events. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14
Consider this example, a statement from a young man of nineteen: I had agreed to give a party with a young woman who was an old friend. Ad the time approached, it became apparent to me that, while I liked her, I did not want the [social] identification with her that such an action [the jointly sponsored party] would bring. I tried explaining this to her without success, and at first I resolved to do the socially acceptable thing—go through with it. But the day before the party, I knew I simply could not do it, so I canceled out. My friend did not understand and was places in a very embarrassing position. I cannot feel ashamed no matter how hard I try. All I felt then was relief, and this is still my dominant response. I acted selfishly, but fully consciously. I imagine that my friendship could not have meant that much. The young man reached his conclusion by reasoning back from his absence of guilt or shame, from the feeling of relief he experienced. (He might also have concluded: “I have show myself to be the sort of fellow who can feel square with himself in the cases of unmet obligation. I can withstand the guilt. It is enough for me that I tried to feel shame.”) For the sportscaster and the young man, feeling was taken as a signal. To observer and actor alike it was a clue to an underlying truth, a truth that had to be dug out or inferred, a truth about the self vis-à-vis a situation. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14
The sportscaster took the anger of the women tennis player as a clue to how seriously Reese took the game of tennis. The young man who backed out on his friend took his sense of relief and absence of guilt feelings as a clue to the absence of seriousness in his “old friendship.” Feeling can be used to give a clue to the operating truth, but in private life as well as on the job, two complications can arise. The first one lies between the clue of feeling and the interpretation of it. We are capable of disguising what we feel, of pretending to feel what we do not—of doing surface acting. The box of clues is hidden, but it is not changed. The second complication emerges in a more fundamental relation between stimulus and response, between a net ball and feeling frustration, between letting someone down and feeling guilty, between being called names by an “irate” and getting angry back. Here the clues can be dissolved by deep acting, which from one point of view involves deceiving oneself as much as deceiving others. In surface acting we deceive others about what we really feel, but we do not deceive ourselves. Diplomats and actors do this best, and very small children do it worst (it is part of their charm). In deep acting we make feigning easy by making it unnecessary. When we are more successfully at emotional control, the techniques of deep acting are joined to the principles of social engineering. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14
Can a person suppress one’s anger at a person who insults one? People can be taught how—if one is qualified by a demonstrably friendly disposition to start with. Ne may have most for a while the sense of what one would have felt has one not been trying so hard to feel something else. By taking over the levers of feeling production, by pretending deeply, one alters oneself. Deep acting has always had the edge over simple pretending in its power to convince. In jobs that require dealing with the public, employers are wise to want workers to be sincere, to go well beyond the smile that is “just painted on.” Always be honest. Behind the most effective display is the feeling that fits it, and that feeling can be managed. As workers, the more seriously social engineering affects our behavior and our feelings, the more intensely we must address a new ambiguity about who is directing them (is this me or the company talking?). As customers, the greater our awareness of social engineering, the more effort we put into distinguishing between gestures of real personal feelings and gestures of company policy. We have practical knowledge of the commercial takeover of the signal function of feeling. In a routine way, we make up for it; at either end, as worker or customer, we try to correct for the social engineering of feeling. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14
We mentally subtract feeling with commercial purpose to it from the total pattern of display that we sense to be sincerely felt. In interpreting a smile, we try to take out what social engineering put in, pocketing only what seems meant just for us. We say, “It is her job to be friendly,” or “They have to believe in their product like that in order to sell it.” In the end, it seems, we make up an idea of our “real self,” an inner jewel that remains our unique possession no matter whose billboard is on our back or whose smile is on our face. We push this “real self” further inside, making it more inaccessible. Subtracting credibility from the parts of our emotional machinery that are in commercial hands, we turn to what is left to find out who we “really are.” And around the surface of our human character, where once we were vulnerable, we don a cloak to protect us against the commercial elements. And finally as one listens more accurately to the feelings within, and become less evaluative and more acceptant toward oneself, one also moves towards greater congruence. One finds it possible to move out from behind the facades one has used, to drop one’s defensive behaviors, and more openly to be what one truly is. As these changes occur, as one becomes more self-aware, more self-acceptant, less defensive and more open, one finds that one is free to change and grow in the directions natural to the human organism. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14
In regard to feelings and personal meanings, one moves away from a state in which feelings are unrecognized, unowned, unexpressed. One moves toward a flow in which ever-changing feelings are experiences in the moment, knowingly and acceptantly, and may be accurately expressed. The process involves a change in the manner of one’s experience. Initially one is remote from one’s experiencing. An example would be the intellectualizing person who talks about oneself and one’s feelings in abstractions, leaving you wondering what is actually going on within him or her. From such remoteness one moves toward an immediacy of experiencing in which one lives openly in one’s experiencing, and knows that one can turn to it to discover its current meanings. The process involves a loosening of the cognitive maps of experience. From construing experience in rigid ways, which are perceived as external facts, the client moves toward developing changing, loosely held construings of meaning in experience, constructs which are modifiable by each new experience. In general, the evidence shows that the process moves away from fixity, remoteness from feelings and experience, rigidity of self-concept, remoteness from people, impersonality of functioning. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14
It moves toward fluidity, changingness, immediacy of feelings and experience, acceptance of feelings and experience, tentativeness of constructs, discovery of a changing self in one’s changing experience, realness and closeness of relationship, a unity and integration of functioning. We are continually learning more about this process by which change comes about, and I am not sure that this very brief summary conveys much of the richness of our findings. LORD our God, great, eternal, wonderful in glory, Who keepest covenant and promises for those that love Thee with their whole heart; Who art the Life of all, the Help of those that flee unto Thee, the Hope of those who cry unto Thee; cleanse us from our sins, secret and open, and from every thought displeasing to Thy goodness,–cleanse our bodies and souls, our hearts and consciences, that with a pure heart and a clear soul, with perfect love and calm hope, we may venture confidently and fearlessly to pray Thee. LORD, we beseech Thee, let thy favour be present to Thy people who supplicate Thee; that what by Thy inspiration they faithfully ask, by the speedy bounty they may obtain; through Jesus Christ our Lord. We beseech Thee, O Lord, to look upon Thy servants, whom Thou hast enabled to put their trust in Thee; and grant them both to ask such things as shall please Thee, and also to obtain what they ask: through Jesus Christ our Lord. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14
CRESLEIGH RIVERSIDE AT PLUMAS RANCH
Residence Two a spacious single story home with over 2,500 square feet of home thoughtfully designed to maximize every available foot of space. Three bedrooms, three bathrooms, and a three car garage all come included in this home. The layout is an entertainer’s dream with large kitchen and working island, dining room connected through the butler’s pantry, and a large great room overlooking the ample rear yard.
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There is No Better Way in this World to Lose Something Forever than to Prejudge it!
MILLS STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH
Rancho Cordova, CA |
Now Selling!
Mills Station at Cresleigh Ranch is Rancho Cordova’s newest home community! This charming neighborhood offers an array of home types with eye catching architecture styles such as Mission, Mid-Century Modern, California Modern, and Contemporary Farmhouse. Stepping onto this beautiful tile, in this home, will transport you back to Victorian England—but the modern shower and light fixtures will remind you that you are actually in your #MillsStation Residence 3. 😉
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I Searched a Way to Me By Drawing Pieces of Myself Out of their Eyes!
Surely we will achieve great things together. The importance of forms is revealed in the inescapable unity of the body with the World. The body is always a part of the World. The body is always a part of the World. I sit on this chair; the chair is on a floor in this building; and the building, in turn, rests on the mountain of stone that is Manhattan Island. Whenever I walk, my body is interrelated with the World in which and on which I take my steps. This presupposes some harmony between body and World. We know from physics that the Earth rises infinitesimally to meet my step, as any two bodies attract each other. The balance is essential in walking is one as a relationship of my body to the ground on which it stands and walks. The Earth is there to meet each foot as it falls, and the rhythm of my walking depends on my faith that the Earth will be there. Our active need for form is shown in the fact that we automatically construct it in an infinite number of ways. The human imagination leaps to form the whole, to complete the scene in order to make sense of it. The instantaneous way this is done shows how we are driven to construct the remainder of the scene. If the scene is to have meaning, to fill in the gaps is essential. That we may do this in misleading ways—at times in neurotic or paranoid ways—does not gainsay the central point. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
We have Rome, our whole glowing Italy, within the four walls of our library. We have in our books the ruins of an antique World and the glories of a modern one. Our passion for soul and form expressed our yearning to make the World adequate to our needs and desires, and, more important, to experience ourselves as having significance. “You have robbed these people of ambition. You have robbed them of the capacity for deep concerns. You have robbed them of the opportunity to grow in spirit. You have cast doubt on the inherent value. All you have to lose in death, no matter how long you have lived, is the present moment in which you die. You can live three thousand years or thirty thousand years, and all you have to lose is the life you are living right now. Suffering helps to generate the soul. The energy it is giving off by suffering, of course, it might organize into a soul. To put it another way, a being’s unsatisfied curiosity might generate that human being’s soul,” (Page 312 and 316 of Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis by Anne Rice). Soul’s exist because we believe that information and knowledge are not the exclusive domain of a certain type or class of person, but rather the province of every living being. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
The souls are shrines where all the relics of the ancient saints, full of true virtue, and that without delusion or imposture, are reserved and reposed. “And the fuel might be the collective suffering endured by that human all through his or her life, and some other intangible ingredient, perhaps, such as an overview, an attitude, a perspective on life, that too might help the formation of a soul,” (Page 316 of Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis by Anne Rice). The soul is fundamental in Gothic art, a graphic example of which is Mont-Saint-Michel, the triangle of rock rising from the sea capped by the Gothic triangle of human-built architecture which, in turn, ends in a pinnacle pointing toward Heaven—a magnificent art form in which we have the triangle of nature, human, God. And psychologically speaking, we have the basic human triangle—man, woman, and child. Because the wield unfathomable power, a truly great soul contains something in it to offend everyone, and one may even point you toward a new appropriate life. The knowledge of the soul extends beyond human understanding and it can bring order to chaos by extending its wisdom and culture to the masses, which will preserve every aspect of human knowledge. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
The alienated person is one who observes one’s behavior from the point of view of the spectator. One’s central ego does not live in one’s present and previous experiences. The self appears without soul. What is occurring in the person, hidden as it may be by passivity or other neurotic symptoms, is a conflict-filled passion to make sense out of a crisis-ridden life. Alienation can be not only part of depressive and schizophrenic psychoses, but to some extent it occurs in almost all neuroses as an unspecific result of the general shock of the psychic conflict. This is the soil in which rebellious resignation grows. Here also grows compulsive non-conformism which, while it contains constructive strivings for freedom, distorts its meaning and perpetuates self-alienation as much as does compulsive conformism. Hipsters are often alienate from themselves as in the man in the gray flannel suit. The alienated person is not born alienated, nor does one choose alienation. Lacking genuine acceptance, love, and concern for one’s individuality in childhood, one experiences basic anxiety. Early one begins to move away from one’s self, which seems not good enough to be loved. One moves away from what one is, one can at least be safe—safe perhaps by being very good and perfect and being loved for it, or by being very strong and being admired or feared for it, or by learning not to feel, not to want, not to care. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
Therefore, one has to free oneself from any need for others, which means first their love and affection, and, later on, in many instances, pleasures of the flesh. If there is no response, why feel, why want? So the person puts all one’s efforts into becoming what one should be. Later, one idealizes one’s self-effacement as goodness, one’s aggression as strength, one’s withdrawal as freedom, self-expression, and self-realization, one moves toward safety, self-elimination, and self-idealization. The alienated individual often is a good observer of oneself. Together with the therapist, one looks at oneself as though one were a third person in the empty chair. One seems not to care about anything, not to desire anything, particularly anything to which one could get attached. Experiences are dissociated from feelings, feelings do not reach awareness. Events happen to one, and no feeling is experienced, no joy, no longing, no love, no anger, no despair, no continuity of time and life, no self. One has no active relation to life. And these people often go to an ophthalmologist with complaints about visual disturbances for which no organic basis is found. In seeing we relate actively to the World around us, while hearing involves awareness of something which comes toward us. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
Physical symptoms, such as tiredness, dizziness, a general or localized numbness, various degrees of anesthesia in pleasures of the flesh, headaches, or gastric disturbances, often are the only clinical evidence of a deeper emotional problem. The absence of manifest anxiety, rage, or conflict in the clinical picture—playing dead—has led some psychoanalysts to diagnose this condition as an emotional or even constitutional defect, or as an irreversible end-stage of neurotic process. Clinical experiences, however, shows that below the apparently insensitive, frozen surface of these patients is a highly sensitive self, weakened and paralyzed by violent conflict. Underground there exist strong longings and feelings. Alienated people are deeply blocked. There is dissociation from the active, spontaneous core of oneself and one’s feelings and, therefore, from one’s incentives and one’s capacity for making decisions. Recently, a person said: “I am color-blind until somebody reveals the colors to me. Only when plugged into the wall-socket of ‘the other’ do I get the light, the energy, the reality of myself.” He could have added, “and the feeling of being alive.” This explains the existence of is called the “echo phenomenon” in the alienated person. One’s own inner voice often is so weak and unconvincing that one hardly hears it. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
With echo phenomenon, a person’s statement, a creative idea, a promising plan on which one has been working for weeks remains unreal and meaningless to one until, with much hesitation, one expresses it to another person. When, however, “the other,” whom one experiences as an insider of life, repeats one’s statement, one’s idea, or one’s plan, this echo suddenly sounds real and convincing to one, while one’s own—usually much better—formulation of the same thought remains unreal. In one’s inner experiences one does not count. One does not exist as an individual on one’s own. One may say, “Nothing moves me,” or “I cannot make any move.” However, should one follow one’s limited movements in life, one will notice that one moves for short spurts, like an electric car with a dead battery, which must be pushed by another car to a charging station. It stops, however, not simply due to a lack of power, but due to the action of an automatic built-in brake. The persons seems to say in a non-verbal way: “I will not move on.” People suffering from anxiety experience deprivation and resignation, such as, “I do not want anything. If I do not want, I cannot be hurt,” or in an active way, by violent feelings of bitterness, frustration, resentment, and rage against life and the World which has withheld love or recognition. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
In both forms, deprivation and resignation, we find the same powerful, unconscious premise: “I shall not participate in the game of life, get emotionally involved, or make a move on my own, until there is a guarantee for the fulfillment of my needs.” These by now have become “just” claims for total love or unique success which form part of the unconscious idealized image that has to be actualized. The apparently static condition of self-alienation reveals itself as a dynamic and comprehensive attempt to avoid the painful experience of severe inner conflict, particularly between strong dependency needs and co-existing violent and hostile aggression. By remaining alienated from oneself and detached from others, the person avoids the anxiety connected with emotional involvement in conflict. However, one pays for this with a steadily increasing restriction of one’s life, one’s feelings, and one’s wants; one pays with a loss of oneself. Self-alienation is an unavoidable result of the neurotic process. Simultaneously, however, it is an active move away from—or, rather, against—the real self: Alienation prevents disturbing self-awareness. The alienated person often complains of being in a fog, but unconsciously one wants to stay in it. One welcomes self-anesthesia. Alienation, in the sense of conforming like an automaton, protects one from the burden and responsibility of commitment to oneself and one’s identity. It permits self-elimination. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
Alienation, it its most active form, is the rejection of being oneself and the attempt to become the other, the ideal self. It means escape from the hated self through self-idealization. These three ways, in which the despair at not being willing to be oneself finds expression, is called loss of the self, sickness unto death. The first way is to avoid consciousness of the self: By diversions or in other ways, for instance, by work and busy occupations as a means of distractions, one seeks to preserve an obscurity about one’s condition, yet again in such a way that it does not become quite clear to one that one does it for this reason (that one does what one does in order to being about obscurity). When a person packs their schedule full of appointments or work, they are often moving in a great empty circle. However, when they glance inwardly, one will see from the periphery and aww the void enclosed there. One will see the emptiness, but the way that centrifugal force prevents a whirling object from falling inward, one is removed for a long time from the void they circle. This void is the existential vacuum, and it is a main aspect of the neuroses of our time. Our culture is continuously providing new means for self-anesthesia through shallow living, social drinking, late and late-late shows on television, never-ending double features at the movies, Miltown taken like candy. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
The second way to avoid willing to be oneself is willing to be simply the conventional self: By becoming wise about how things go in this World, such a being forgets oneself…finds it too venturesome to think, to be oneself, far easier and safer to be like the others, to become an imitation, a number, a cipher in the crowd. This form of despair is hardly ever noticed in the World. Such a being, precisely by losing oneself in this way, has gained perfectibility in adjusting. Today, what has become a mass phenomenon: self-elimination through conforming adjustment. The third, most radical way to avoid willing to be oneself is willing to be someone else. Generally, this is how schizophrenic people, in a decisive though modified way, also most neurotic people want to free themselves from the burden they experience their actual self to be, escaping into fantasy, and trying to become that ideal other self they feel they should be. This is what many people believe Kim Kardashian is experiencing by trying to become Paris Hilton. This process leads, in two ways, to steadily increasing atrophy and paralysis of the self and interference with its further growth. The first factor is the result of a kind of inner deprivation. All available energy is used in the compulsive attempt to actualize the other, the ideal, self. Too little energy is left for the developing of the real potentials of the self. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
The second, much more active factor is the destructive force of contempt and hate which is generated incessantly by the omnipotent, idealized self-image and directed against the despicable, actual self that failed. Early self-rejection and active self-alienation are the roots of masochistic and compulsive homosexual trends. To rid of his hated self is the pervasive motivation of the masochist. In Anne Rice’s Tales of the Body Thief Prince Lestat switched bodies with Reglan James, someone he also found attractive. By throwing his soul, as it were, into the other body, talking with his voice and laughing with his heart; Lestat was able to experience himself doing all the things the other did. It was so vivid and real because he was no longer himself. In this way he enjoyed many intervals of fantastic happiness, but end the end was sad and near death because as they say, “The sky is always bluest over your neighbour’s house.” Basically, the lives of others may look better and easier, but what have no idea how hard they work nor what they are actually going through to get there and maintain. Nonetheless, by living someone else’s life, this self-elimination and identification with somebody else gives Lestat a fantastic happiness because he is temporarily freed from his hated self; but it also drives him into the self-destructive morbid-dependency relationship with the nun. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
Dr. Freud was right when he observed the close relationship between narcissism and homosexuality. They dynamics of compulsive homosexuality, however, become clear only when we recognize that narcissism is an expression not of self-love, but of alienation from the self. A person clings to illusions about oneself because and as far as one has lost oneself. The narcissist lost vital aspects of oneself due to early rejection which one internalized. One defends oneself against this self-rejection by compulsive self-idealization. If the early rejection is experienced as directed particularly against aspects of the self connected with the pleasures of the flesh, no clear sense of gender identity can develop. It is a desperate search for a self and identity which drives one into the homosexual relationship. “I do not want to be me. I want to have his balls. I want to be him,” a patient recently said. Symbiosis seems to provide the solution in two ways: by merging with the partner one hopes to become the other, the ideal, self. This partner often is the externalized symbol of the lost, the repressed part of one’s own self, for example, of one’s masculinity. The second function of the symbiotic relationship is what I have called the magic mirror symbiosis. The alienated person exists, becomes at least partially alive, only in the mirror image reflected by others. Without it one feels emotionally dead. A patent says it well: “I searched a way to me by drawing pieces of myself out of their eyes.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
In the symbiotic relationship each partner functions as a mirror of the other’s self-image. One’s love has to neutralize the acid of destructive self-hate in the other. When the mirror functions stops, the relationship immediately breaks. Phenomena such as so-called penis envy (a woman’s wish to be a man), or vagina envy (a man’s wish to be a woman), have to be seen as symbols of a partial or total rejection of personal and sexual identity. “If I had the chance of being myself, I would not be myself,” a woman said. “I would be a boy.” As a boy you are in control. You can do what you want; it is very depressing not to be a man.” Such statements have to be analyzed as an expression of the total attitude the patient has toward oneself and one’s life, as a characteristic of one’s very specific being in the World. The wish not to be oneself often focuses on the body, fostering a negative body-image which may crystallize around tallness or shortness, above average weight, below average weight, face, skin, gender—and color. If self-rejection selects the focus on color or nationality, distorting attitudes not only of the parents but of the community have been in operation. We may well ask whether segregation does not foster as much self-alienation in the segregating person who glorifies body aspects, as in the victim. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
Only when the unconscious attempts fail—be they self-anesthesia, self-elimination through conforming adjustment, or escape from the self through identification with the other, the ideal self-does the patient come to us. Something has happened to one which shows that one’s safety system is not so safe, one’s solution not so perfect as one expected. One hopes that the therapist will help one to correct one’s mistake, to improve one’s solution. In therapy, one is in search of one’s self, and the therapist wants to help the patient move in a centripetal direction, to reconnect one with the vital roots and creative potential of the individual, and the individual longs for a genuine relationship. However, one still feels driven to accelerate one’s centrifugal move away from oneself, which means to perfect one’s alienation. Or at least one expects to be freed from anxiety. However, in doing so, it blocks awareness and destroys the patient’s chance for growth and change. All too often the patient gets what one wants: the therapist complies with one’s expectations for a painless (because changeless) cure. The task of the psychoanalyst is not to remove anxiety and thereby to perpetuate alienation. One has to help the patient find one’s way back to oneself. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
One has to help one face the anxiety generated on this road by self-confrontation and the surrender of cherished illusions. This can rarely be done by analysis in the orthodox manner, with the therapist sitting behind the couch taking notes and giving interpretations. The alienated, “shut-up” patient has all one’s life used words not to express but to hide one’s feelings. Psychoanalysis has to outgrown alienated concepts of personality as well as alienating techniques in therapy. The image of a beings as an id harboring only libidinous, aggressive and destructive drives, but no constructive forces; as a super-ego, functioning as an inner police force, not as a healthy human conscience; and as a more or less passive ego, which reminds one of a rather sick self—such an image of being in itself appears fragmented and alienated. The concept of a doctor-patient relationship which is seen as determined by the transference of a neurotic past but disregards the constructive impact of the creative meeting in the present is in itself alienating. Instead of lessening the patient’s alienation, it is likely to prolong it. Psychoanalysis, born as a child of the age of enlightenment, overestimated the therapeutic effect of knowledge in itself. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
Making the unconscious conscious is not, in itself, therapeutically effective. To know, for example, that I harbor strong, compulsive dependency needs, may increase rather than lessen my self-alienation. Self-knowledge becomes therapeutically active only when it is owned, and generates the emotional shock which is inherent in the process of self-confrontation. Only such experience has the power to lead to change, choice, and commitment. Gnothi seauton (know yourself) has been seen as the goal of all human endeavor, but it cannot be the goal if it is not at the same time the beginning. The ethical individual knows oneself, but this knowledge is not a mere contemplation, it is a reflection upon oneself which itself is an action and therefore I have deliberately preferred to use the expression “choose oneself” instead of “know oneself” when the individual knows oneself and has chosen oneself one is about to realize oneself. Frequently at the end of an orthodox analysis, the patient has gained much knowledge. One could easily present one’s own case. One looks with some interest at the stranger who happens to be oneself. One may even reflect the image which the therapist expects. However, one has not changed. To break through one’s alienation one need to begin to feel oneself and to permit oneself more and more to be. The first step involves helping one to stop hating himself or herself. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
Any true psychotherapy, and this is particularly true for the alienated person is reconciliation of being with oneself and thereby with the World, and a transformation of hostility against oneself into friendship with oneself and thereby with the World.IN the beginning of therapy, the patient who refuses participation in life will also refuse true participation in psychoanalysis, even though one may lie down on the expensive couch or sit down on the plush lazy boy with a complaint smile. One is deeply convinced that nobody cares, nobody understands one, and that communicating one’s true feelings, one’s sufferings, and one rage to anybody, including the analyst, is sheer waste. To defrost, to open up, to experience and to accept oneself become possible for the patient only in a warm, mutually trusting relationship in which, often for the first time in one’s life, one feels fully accepted as one is, accepted with those aspects of oneself which early in life one had felt compelled to reject or repress. Only this enables the patient gradually to drop one’s defenses. One will test the liability of this acceptance again and again before one risks emotional involvement. One will need this basic trust especially when one begins to experience the dizziness of freedom. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
The road from self-alienation and self-rejection to self-acceptance and self-realization leads through steadily growing self-awareness, which is made possible by the new creative experience of acceptance and meeting. Thus, the main therapeutic factor becomes the doctor-patient relationship itself. In the beginning of therapy, question such as, “What do you feel now?” or “What would you really want?” may bring the patient close to panic. One becomes aware for a moment how deeply one’s capacity for spontaneous feeling or wanting is impaired. My own experience with compulsive eaters has convinced me that cognitive behavioral and physiological treatments can be essential first steps on the path to recovery. They help people understand the importance of reassessing their habits, belief systems, and approaches to food. They educate them about their physiology and the physiology of practise. But most important of all, perhaps, they prompt clients to begin a process of deep reflection about their lives—who they essentially are and where they are headed—and this, in turn, sometimes leads to a fundamental change. There are no absolute truths; all realities (or stories) are socially constructed; and fluidity among realities is desirable. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
Human nature will not find a better helper than love. Utility is subsumed as part of the character of being beautiful. The harmony of an internal form, the inner consistency of a theory, the character of beauty that touches your sensibilities—these are significant factors the determine why one given insight comes into consciousness rathe than another. As a psychoanalyst, I can only add that my experience in helping people achieve insights from unconscious dimensions within themselves reveals the same phenomenon—insights emerge not chiefly because they are intellectually true or even because they are helpful, but because they have a certain form, the form that is beautiful because it completes what is incomplete. Do not join the book burners. Do not think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Do not be afraid to go in your soul and read every truth you have witnesses. Move forward without wasting anything. It is not that object simply speak to us; they also conform to our ways of knowing. The mind thus is an active process of forming and re-forming the World. It must be the totality of ourselves that understand, not simply reason. And it is the totality of ourselves that fashions the images which the World conforms. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
Not only does reason form and re-form the World, but the preconscious, with its impulses and needs, does so also and does so on the basis of which and intentionality. Human beings not only think but feel and will as they make form in their World. If this World is to be wise as well as strong, if we are to achieve our destiny, then we need more new ideas for more wise beings in the phase of passion for form. Persons in therapy—or anybody for that matter—is not simply engaged in knowing their World: what they are engaged in is a passionate re-forming of their World by virtue of their interrelationship with it. We should be open to all—except the censor. We must know all the facts and hear all the alternatives and listen to all the criticisms. Let us welcome controversial topics, thoughts, ideas, authors, and books. For the Bill of Rights is the guardian of our security as well as our liberty. You must live feverishly in seeking an education. Colleges are not going to do you any good unless you are raised and live in a place of seeking knowledge everyday. This passion for form is a way of trying to find and constitute meaning in life. And this is what genuine creativity is. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Imagination, broadly defined, seems to me to be a principle in human life underlying even reason, for the rational functions, according to our definitions, can lead to understanding—can participate in the constituting of reality—only as they are creative. Creativity is thus involved in our every experience as we try to make meaning in our self-World relationship. A soul is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears parasites, the elements and clumsy hands…so God protects the souls not only against humankind but also against nature and devotes His life to this war with the forces of oblivion. “But one that believeth these things which I have spoken, one will I visit with the manifestations of my Spirit, and one shall know and bear record. For because of my Spirit one shall know that these things are true; for it persuadeth people to do good,” Ether 4.11. God connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire Universe and from all our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. I think the healthy of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our God. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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Evil Flows from Poisoned Wells; Good Flows from Pure and Crystal Fountains, Dazzling a Silvery Shower of Love and Beauty!
Of Luxuries Bright, Milky Soft and Rosy– Shall Not the Judge of All the Earth do Right?
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The Power of the Ballot We Need in Sheer Self-Defence—Else What Shall Save Us from a Second Slavery?
It is Well to Seek Guidance—The Error and Exaggeration Creep in When One Becomes too Concentrated on a Single Source of Guidance!
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Not Only is Everything Subject to Change but Everything Also Exists in Relation to Something Else—Thus Change and Relativity Dominate the World Scene!
Randolph Harris II International Institute 