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Obligations Curtail Our Freedom to Waste Ourselves
People who are kind, generous, and compassionate give others a striking affirmation of the intrinsic worth and importance of human beings. After being reduced to bodily terms, we are never the same. For the rest of our lives, we are unable to forget how much it is possible t be in need of others. We approach our relationships differently from then on, emphasizing those bonds which seem likely to withstand the tests of time and strain, and putting less effort into bonds of convenience. The nature of our aspirations changes along with the style of our relationships. We start asking different things of life. Considering how common impairments are, how tremendous the spiritual change it brings, it becomes clear that each has our own special demons and divine figures, our own other-World landscapes and struggles. As a result of these changes, people suffering from detriment or restriction can often tell in a glance whether someone they meet has every had the experience of being helpless. They notice that a gap separates them from those who continue to be beguiled by good health. They watch as friends and relatives go on living from day to day as if they are invincible, dwelling inside a privileged deception. People suffering from ailments are not star athlete’s, who can take a hit and keep on ticking, and sometimes unnecessary psychological stress can make their condition worse, as it can amplify the pain they are experiencing or cause other conditions to flare up. #RandolphHarris 1 of 8
Healthy people often find themselves distracted by the crude exterior of affliction, bypassing much of the complexity going on beneath the surface. Knowing what to say and do in the presence of a person who is incapacitated requires an awareness of what it is like to have time on one’s hands and to be at the mercy of others, but also knowledge of the range of emotions that arise in reaction to helplessness itself. A man spent several weeks confined to his bed. He was seriously ill and was unable to get out of bed, or move at all, even if it was only to go from laying on one side to laying on the other side. It was in that state of extreme helplessness that he saw how much a person can be in need of others. He was in need not only of his doctors, nurses, and medical staff, but also of God and spiritual help. Not only for medical care, but for comforting words or gestures. The problem of impairment raises two fundamental questions…Why me? (the questions of bafflement), and What can be done? (The question of order and control). We oppose the lessons of helplessness, hardening ourselves against the indignities and rejecting the forced revisions of our priorities. We hope only for recovery and for a return to self-sufficiency. Anything less invokes bitterness. We want to see more clearly and hear more sharply the themes that are special to us. #RandolphHarris 2 of 8
The important thing is to realize that, although life seems to be a matter of literal causes and effects, in fact we are living our deep stories, often unconsciously. We are condemned to live out what we cannot imagine. People suffering from an aliment or disability first blame the condition. One says, “If only I was not elderly or disabled or pregnant, life for be better for me.” Then they blame other people, saying, “Life would be better if people did not treat me like I football player.” Then, we finally realize it is what we put out there is what determines how our life is and how people treat us. We make our life good—it does not just happen. There are countless pitfalls on the way our of misery. Focusing relentlessly on what has been lost, comparing oneself to others, aspiring for things that are out of reach, and placing blame on others are only some of the most common snares. Each personal variation is uniquely painful. Soul work involves an effort toward increasing awareness of these situations that form the foundations of our lives, for if we become familiar with the characters and themes that are central to our conditions, we can be free from their compulsions and the blindness that comes upon us when we are caught up in them. #RandolphHarris 3 of 8
When culture and language fail to acknowledge the difficulty of receiving, the dependent person is left doubly burdened, in disliking the help that cannot be repaid and in feeling guilty about the dislike. People know that when someone visits them, that they are simply being visited. They know that one is in receipt of a charitable act and that there is no true relationship. One knows they have nothing in common with the individuals coming to see them, they know all too well. We have often heard people who are elderly or disabled say, “Look at my life—all I do is eat and sleep. What kind of life is this?” They equate their lack of productivity activity with worthlessness. Some people take their mind off of their pain by thinking about what does work right. The most important thing to do is to keep the spirit supple. When we return to our central thought that the prayer of faith shall save the sick and God shall rise the individual up, we must remember that the prayer of faith is definite—it is faith in something and about something. This type of prayer is not generalized, but specific. It is conscious and definite. The prayer of faith is a prayer which expresses faith about some particular thing. What is included is a specific want, or definite need. #RandolphHarris 4 of 8
If one was praying for a home, one would not be asking for an automobile. If one were praying that his or her neighbor be healed, one would not be asking for money with which to take a trip. In order to enjoy the soulfulness of mythic life, we need a deep inner faith that allows us to know and visit our own deep strata where meaning and values truly are formed. Ritual is an action that speaks to the mind and heart, but it may not make sense in a literal context. In church, people do not eat bread in order to feed their bodies, but to nourish their souls. It is a higher symbolic act. If we could grasp this simple idea, that some actions may not have an effect on actual life, but speak instead to the soul, and if we could let go of the dominant role of function in so many things we do, then we might give more to the soul every day. Frail people try to conceal their needs as much as they can and they like to keep their conditions private. Social workers have been admitted to many apartments where it is more like people are living in private cells, concealing the evidence of their incapacities and averting their eyes from each others’ problems. Usually their presence is only accepted because something had necessitated their help. It was discovered in one such instance that a client had been sitting in the dark for weeks. The light bulbs had burned out in the ceiling fixtures, and he had no floor or table lamps. #RandolphHarris 5 of 8
Rather than ask one of his neighbors to help, he had been reading by daylight and going to bed when it became too dark to see. His back was hurting and he could barely move without experiencing a great deal of pain, as if his spine was going to snap. Therefore, keep in mind, the one who gives help is more powerful than the one who receives it. Knowing what to do for a person suffering from an impairment and what to cease doing begins with understanding what life is like from that person’s perspective. Without this comprehension, there is a tendency to worry about the wrong things and to give assistance in the wrong ways. Learning all that we can about being dependent allows us to fall short of the ideal to the right extent. Sometimes fear can strike a disabled or elderly person like a malignancy, sapping every and power and attention from their daily lives. They are afraid of the process of their ailment, they are afraid of increasing loss of control, they are afraid of the outcome, and they are afraid of dying. They fear how their families and friends see them, how they feel about them and how their condition affects their lives. #RandolphHarris 6 of 8
However, what can be even more difficult is when people do not know or cannot see that you are disabled or have a diminished capacity and they force you to work, harass you, physically attack you, use you for money, and threaten you because they know they can get away with it. For young people who are physically disabled, it is like experiencing one’s old age prematurely. They are locked into a parallel isolation, shamed by feelings they do not dare confess. These individuals are frightened because they are young and still have a lot of life to live and are deteriorating much sooner than they are supposed to. They do not have a professor of whatever to understand them and how they feel, and their economy of friends tends to shrink. People do not know how to behave toward them, and it is easy to lose heart for coping. Sometimes they have no spirit for anything, like their heart finally dropped out of them. Theses youngster even get bullied and attacked by people who are much older than them, but have not yet experienced what it is like to have fractured vertebrae in their spine, or whatever. However, they have courage. Courage that comes for their belief in God. The Word courage comes from the Latin cor for heart. We give ourselves fresh heart by pulling our attention away from what has been lost. #RandolphHarris 7 of 8
It is not that fear and disheartenment can be willed away, but we have to turn our focus in a direction most favorable to their alleviation. The consciousness that heals is definite and deliberate; it is a specializing of the Universal Law. In this law we may have absolute and implicit confidence, but we must also remember that the law can do for us only what it does through us. Its energy and creativeness must be interpreted through our belief and imagination. This is but another way of saying that if we want the principle of electricity to light our living room we must provide a fixture which makes it possible for the electricity to become a light. When we pray in faith we receive what things we pray for. If we believe that we shall receive them, we shall receive them. There is a specific, definite thing we are to receive, but we are to receive it as we believe. For many, relief and happiness can come by understanding the relationship between peace of conscience and peace of mind and by living the principles upon which both of these blessings are founded. God wants each of his children to enjoy the transcendent blessing of peace of conscience. A tranquil conscience invites freedom from anguish, sorrow, guilt, shame, and self-condemnation. It provides a foundation for happiness. It is a condition of immense worth, yet there are few on Earth that enjoy it most often because the principles upon which peace of conscience is founded are either not adequately understood or followed. #RandolphHarris 8 of 8 
Our Memories of the Family are a Significant Part of the Mythology
We have lost a certain depth in the way we understand our experiences, using language that is often doubletalk and shallow in order to describe complex and profound aspects of life. Resentment is a reliable gauge of when assistants are doing more than they should. The problem with heeding this measure is that there are ongoing pressures to deny its validity. Dedicated assistants insist that they are doing fine. At all costs, they want to avoid evoking in the person that they are assisting fear of abandonment and to keep from revealing that the care has become taxing. They conceal their feelings and strive to maintain a contented exterior. Eventually, their pretense isolates them from the person who needs their assistance, and any previous intimacy become veiled by this effort to hide the truth. A myth is a sacred story set in a time and place outside history, describing in fictional form the fundamental truths of nature and human life. Mythology gives to the invisible and eternal factors that are always part of life but do not appear in a literal, factual story. Most of the time, when we tell a story about our lives, we couch it in purely human terms. When was the last time you talked about monsters, angels, or demons when you were describing some strongly felt experience? Myth reaches beyond the personal to express an imagery reflective of archetypal issues that shape every human life. #RandolphHarris 1 of 5
When we are trying to understand our problems and our suffering, we look for a story that will be revealing. Our surface explanations usually show their shortcomings; they do not satisfy. And so we turn to family themes. Unacknowledged weariness puts a barrier between the ill people and those who assist them. However, the feelings leak through in subtle ways. My son says he likes fixing me dinner every night, but he looks so tense when he is here. He comes right over from work, and his wife holds dinner at their house until he gets home. He smiles, makes chitchat, but I know he is racing against times. Sometimes he looks like he is going to explode, his face is so tight, but he keeps on smiling. I wish he could just say it is too much for him. I would be disappointed, do not get me wrong, but TV dinners would not kill me. People can see beneath cheerful demeanor that their child is suffering, but do not want to initiate their release from the obligation. Many are afraid, not of TV dinners, but of the loneliness that would await them on a nightly basis if they spoke up and urged their child to only visit them on weekends. The worst consequence of silence, however, is the gap it leaves between them. When you notice your child can no longer speak to you beyond chitchat, it is clear that one has become an unmentionable problem in their life. #RandolphHarris 2 of 5
Our memories of the family are a significant part of the mythology by which we live. We can learn things like the notion of exchange. For example, trading frequency for quality, guilty silence for relieving honesty. Dependent people and their helpers can release each other from guilt, but gestures must be mutual if they are to be effective. The reward for recognizing resentment as a limit is enjoying the elderly or disabled person’s company again. To feel that one can give pleasure and to receive small acts of sweetness is a fair exchange for new hours’ wait. A spiral of good feeling is set in motion between parent and child, which will replace the negative snowball that has been evolving between family members as the child becomes more and more weary of the care. If given the chance, few people would choose being waited on over being enjoyed. When we analyze what the prayer of faith means we discover that it is a statement of belief in some power which is able, ready, and willing to do the healing. At first, this may seem like a rather cold-blooded analysis, for to pick a prayer of faith apart seems to rob it of its sentimentality. Nevertheless, if we would arrive at a state of consciousness that heals we must be willing to analyze some of those things which seem so intimate and so holy that we that we dislike even to mention them. #RandolphHarris 3 of 5
Some of those who are calling out for help are the honest in heart who are earnestly seeking the truth, but they do not know where to find it. The prayer of faith may be thought of as a petition, as a beseeching, or as an agonizing cry of the soul for deliverance, but whatever we term it and from whatever viewpoint we look at it, we discover that it still is an attitude of thought, a way of thinking, a movement in consciousness. If the prayer is one of faith, then this mental movement is one of acceptance, for faith is an acceptance unqualified by denial. Complete faith is absolute and beneficial. Faith is the attitude of one who makes a complete mental surrender. It can arise only through a consciousness of complete abandonment. To the consciousness of faith there are no longer any arguments against its conviction. Faith has no opposites; it is an uncompromising mental attitude, and this is exactly what the prayer of faith is. It is a prayer, a petition, or a beseeching stated in come form of mental acceptance, unqualified belief, unquestioned trust. While the burden of petition and the necessity of faith rests on the one making the petition or having the faith, the response to this petition and this faith is made by some creative agency which has the power and the willingness to perform the act. It is God who raises us up. #RandolphHarris 4 of 5
We make some strong claims in faith. We do not apologize for that. We have that responsibility. We have the truth. We are proclaiming the truth. When we consider how we help others, give it careful, prayerful thought. Some of those who are calling out for help are confused and disturbed by this complex, somewhat contradictory World in which we live, a World that has many crosswinds and crosscurrents, and even some whirlpools that can entrap and destroy. Let us remember that. Many of these people are yearning for the inner peace and joy that really can come only through love of God and love of family and from keeping God’s commandments. If from thence thou shalt seek the Lord thy God, thou shalt find him, if thou seek hum with all they heart and with all thy soul, we shall know the truth, and the truth shall make us free. That implies that there is a truth which, known, automatically becomes demonstrated. Civilizations may come and go, empires may flourish and decay, time may pass, and change may deface all previous experience, but law is eternal. Thus, the scientist learns to depend on law. As we are able to perfect our lives, the blessings we have become more meaningful, and we experience that inner joy and peace for which there is no substitute. #RandolphHarris 5 of 5
If a Photograph or a Diamond Ring is All You Have, it Means the World to You!
Not everyone can find the middle of a circle, but only a person who has the proper knowledge. Similarly, anyone can get angry—that is easy—or can give away money or spend it; but to do all this to the right person, to the right extent, at the right time, for the right reason, and in the right way is no longer something easy that anyone can do. It is for this reason that good conduct is rare, praiseworthy, and noble. This kind of spirituality, so ordinary and close to home, is especially nourishing to the soul. Without this caring incorporated of the sacred into life, the World can become so far removed from the human situation as to be irrelevant. An appreciation for vernacular spirituality is important because without it our idealization of the holy, making it precious and too far removed from life, can actually obstruct a genuine sensitivity to what is sacred. The word mercy has fallen out of common usage in our language. It derives from the antiquated French merci, which means compassion and forbearance toward someone in one’s power. In Latin, merces signifies pay or reward, and the root merc refers to aspects of commerce. The words merchant and mercenary at first seem antithetical to mercy, and one wonders at their common root, but when we have to give help or depend on others for help, we understand why the concept of exchange underlies both usages. Mercy is based entirely on exchange. #RandolphHarris 1 of 6
Giving help eventually embitters us, unless we are compensated at least by appreciation; accepting help degrades us, unless we are convinced that our helpers are getting something in return. As much as we might prefer to reject this stark accounting, we discover in living through situations of dependence that good will is not enough. There is a delicate balance at the heart of mercy, showing how reciprocation replenishes both the spirit if the helper and the person who is helped. Maturing in age is one of the ways the soul nudges itself into attention to the spiritual aspect of life. The body’s changes teach us about fate, time, nature, mortality, and character. Aging forces us to decide what is important in life. However, those who depend on others for daily survival often feel their very existence is an imposition. Some people engage in a relentless pressure to please—to prove themselves worth of the burdens they impose. Many people who suffer from ailments suppress complaints and avoid asserting themselves, believing that they owe every possible accommodation to those who help them survive. Taking care of a person does not have to entail having power over major aspects of his or her life, but frailty seems to invite invasion. My father used to tell me stories about how care givers would steal my great grandmother’s jewelry, money, wedding and engagement rings, pictures of her family and even her wedding pictures. “You cannot imagine how helpless I feel,” she would tell him.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 6
So long as we still possess it, the power to carry out simple intentions is one of the many unnoticed pleasures of life. When we lose it, we see what it means to do the most ordinary things our own way. People cut off from inner thoughts and feelings, caught up in pain and suffering and loss cannot get very far when they try to understand themselves consciously. Some people make rebellious bids for control that they then keep secret from their helpers. One woman had a fall down the basement stairs and her daughter was so upset. She hired a woman to come in and do her laundry once a week, so she would never have to go down there. However, the senior citizen still when down there. He daughter did not know, and she is very careful about it. She feels like it is her house, her basement, her washing machine and her life. Submission does not come easily to people who have spent decades running their own lives. Going down those steps made that woman’s basement her own again, just as choosing to violate her daughter’s restrictions made her life her own again. Seizing freedom can be as unreasonable as it is gratifying. #RandolphHarris 3 of 6
People who have had restriction places on their lives by ailments, injuries, or from aging often feel the need to do something to regain their independence as a means of reminding themselves that they are still able to exert influence over their own domain or their own body. Many people with physical limitations feel their social environment is gradually diminished until all that remains of their power resources is the humble capacity to comply. They feel that they may be required to give up their legal rights and are required to comply or approve in exchange for the room and board they can afford or for the retirement and medical benefits. The managers of their buildings often disrespect them and the analysis often harass them and no one seems to care. The seniors and disabled feel if they complain about the abusive treatment, they will lose their housing, be physically attacked, or their medical and financial benefits will be discontinued, which would mean they would not be able to afford their medication or living expenses and be left on the streets to die. Psychological symptoms, too, often manifest themselves in weight gain or loss, in allergies to various foods, or in idiosyncratic eating habits. And they become more and more isolated emotionally. When people who have disempowered relatives and they become depressed, they mistake this despondency for an accusation that they are not doing a good job. Hoping for appreciation, they instead get quietly hostile acquiescence. #RandolphHarris 4 of 6
Once families acknowledge the presence and important of power in situations of power in situations of dependency, they tend to have little difficulty taking stock of its distribution and beginning to remedy imbalances on either side. The belief that we do not have the ability to heal arises out of the mistaken idea that our power does the healing, or that the intellect does the healing. All that the will and the intellect could do is to behold or watch the process. The mind fixes its gaze steadfastly upon the principle and then declares that this principle is operative in human affairs, and particularly in the affairs of the one being treated. There is but one healer. This is the spirit of truth. There is but one life principle. This is God in us. There is but one final law. This is the law of good. There is but one ultimate impulsion. This impulsion is love. That which really does the healing can never fluctuate, can never change in its nature. It is not more one day and less the next. It is at this moment absolutely all thee is and it is ever available. We must forever rid ourselves of the idea that it is the personal person who does the healing. We must know that it is not us, but the Father that dwells in us, he does the works. Principle operated irrespective of personal opinion, and when through acquiescence we agree that it is operating, then it must operate. #RandolphHarris 5 of 6
Sure, an elderly person might not like how you just put water in the sink, swish it around with some suds and call it clean; he or she used to scrub it first with cleanser and then rinse it with disinfectant. Someone might not like how you haphazardly ruin their checkbook by just dashing off the bills, not bothering to mark down the dates, check numbers, who it was to, all that stuff. Especially sometimes when someone does not even mark down the amount of the check. Therefore, it is important to find small, but specific concessions to help meet the preferences of the elderly and disabled, which will yield large satisfactions. There is no formula for this process, but it helps to build an edifice of faith that the Lord will help make crooked paths straight. One must not only know that God is all there is, but one must know that God exists right where the need is—not in the form of the need but in the form of an answer to the need. And I can tell when, when all you have is pictures of your family, who you have never met, they mean the World to you, as well as gold and diamond trinkets. People like connections to their heritage. Grandparents get great joy of seeing pictures of their grandbabies. And child love to have pictures of their ancestors. #RandolphHarris 6 of 6
Take Steps of Faith and God Will Create New Opportunities
We are a healthy people and have a faith that God can see. Put actions behind what you believe. The care of the soul concentrates on the everyday conditions of life. The home is a sacred space, a place for our soul work where we can paint the walls, write our dreams, think our thoughts, enjoy our members, record our visions and look forward to the bright future. If an emotional problem presents itself, the real issues may not be some single trauma or troubled relationship. Maybe the issue is a life set up in such a way that soul is habitually neglected. Problems are part of every human life, and they do not necessarily wither the soul. The soul suffers more from the everyday conditions of life when they do not nourish it with the solid experiences it craves. Care of the soul asks us to observe its needs continually, give them our wholehearted attention. Spirituality demands attention, mindfulness, regularity, and devotion. Dwelling on the thought that God is love, we permit this love to envelop everything and everyone, bringing with it a sense of peace and joy and certainty. When we realize that God is life, we open our whole thoughts to such a complete inflowing of this divine life. The divine substance exceeds by its immensity every form which our intellect attains. #RandolphHarris 1 of 6
God’s presence in the human mind enables it to recognize eternal truth. God is in all things, not, indeed, as part of their essence, or as a quality, but in the manner that an efficient cause is present to that on which it acts. Hence, God is in all things, and intimately. God is present (even when unrecognized) at the ground or apex of the soul. Knowing that all things are possible to faith, be not afraid. Faith makes the way certain and goes before us and prepares the way. When we know that God is peace, we open our minds to the quiet influence and the calm certainty of this peace. And knowing that God is joy, allows us to meet every situation in happiness. It is important that we commit our lives unto that power which can do all things with complete assurance. The Lord has demonstrated throughout the generations that when the inhabitants of the Earth remember him and are obedient to his direction, he will bless then not only with spiritual blessings, but with material abundance. It has always been so. When the lives of the people are in harmony with the Lord’s will, all of the essential factors that produce the blessings God deigns to give his children seem to come into line. Love and harmony prevail. Even the weather, the climate, and the elements seem to respond. Peace and tranquility endure. #RandolphHarris 2 of 6
No one lives entirely by oneself. We are all individual part of humanity, and whether or not we realize it, each is influencing those around them, and each in one’s turn is being influenced by others. No doubt the thoughts and opinions and actions of the whole World finally are based on what everyone things and believes. According Sir Isaac Newton’s III law, every action creates a separate, but equal reaction. Science tells us that this same power, if properly used, can become an instrument for the most rapid advance in civilization the World has every known. The limitless energy that scientists now know how to use can clean up and irrigate most wastelands in the World. Nature has placed before us the possibility of the greatest blessings in the World. If the majority of people came to believe in spiritual power and the benefits that can be obtained from it, they would all have a great desire to try a new kind of experiment, one that would bless instead of curse humanity. Have you ever notices the contagion of a happy person; one who has an enthusiastic joy in living? That person’s spirit permeates those around them, and the radiance from their personality influences the environment to such an extent that it finally changes it. #RandolphHarris 3 of 6
Most people notice the effect a calm and poised person has on others and how they feel safe in that individual’s presence. However, we have all also had the experience of finding ourselves more or less frustrated and confused and beginning to wonder what it is all about. Perhaps the greatest tragedies of all time have occurred when people have received the promised blessings of the Lord and then have forgotten the sources of their good life. We have to make sure to acknowledge the Lord and thank him for his blessings. As we succeed, we have the sure promise of the Lord that he will prosper us in every way necessary for our well-being. When we have the privilege of sitting down quietly with someone whose atmosphere is permeated with peace and confidence, and gradually we have felt the rough edges of our agitation disappear until finally our own atmosphere changes, and we are filled with hope and confidence. God is present everywhere and in all people. For just as there is an energy caught from the Universe and locked in the physical atom that can be released, so there is a spiritual energy caught in every person’s mind and locked up in the individual life waiting to be released. Faith and conviction are the instruments through which this energy is used. #RandolphHarris 4 of 6
Spiritual power is within us to heal, bless and prosper those whom we think of. It has brought us the abundant life. It has made us happy, healthy, and serene. We who enjoy the abundant life want to share this happiness. It is wonderful to realize that we can sit in the quiet of our own being and consciously direct a power greater than we are for the definite purpose of helping ourselves and someone else. This power should be used for both purposes. For we have to get back to this simple proposition—we must use the power to help ourselves first, in order that we may establish a realization of our ability to use it for others. If we would bring happiness to those around us, we must first become happy ourselves. However, before we can become happy something has to happen to us that causes us to know that God is right where we are, that God is the final power in the Universe, and that love is an all-conquering force. We are better physically because we keep the Word of Wisdom and avoid those things harmful to our bodies. We are better spiritually because our goals are clarified. We learn more about our relationship with our Heavenly Father. We are more motivated to be a more understanding person, a more faithful individual. We must have confidence and self-assurance. #RandolphHarris 5 of 6
And this kind of confidence and self-assurance comes only through having proved to ourselves completely that there is a power greater than we are, that it is a power for good, and that it is available, and that we actually know how to use it. And the only proof we will every have is what it does to us and to others. Anyone who uses the creative energy of faith will receive a direct answer or will see a sign following the use of this power. We must make our religion and spiritual conviction come alive and move through us into action. If we decide to, we can pray effectively. If we have the will, we can learn to live with a sense of confidence and security by getting over our fears. Love is the greatest healing power in the World. Everyone needs to be loved. Everyone needs to be needed. Everyone has some kind of talent and wants to use it. Somehow in the magic of this marvelous World, we can find our place and make our contribution. When we think about peace we become peaceful. It is from this peace that we affirm the presence of love and truth and goodness. Because our prayer of affirmation works exactly like any other law in nature, signs will follow our belief. #RandolphHarris 6 of 6
There are Seven Billion People on this Planet and God Cares What I Had for Lunch
God is life, God is power, and this life and this power are available right now. Perspective is the way we see things when we look at them from a certain distance, and it allows us to appreciate their true valuable. Professional psychology has created a catalogue of disorders, known as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders fifth edition (DSM-5), which is used by doctors and insurance companies to help diagnose and standardize problems of emotional life and behavior with precision. For example, there is a category called adjustment disorders. The problem is adjusting to life, while perhaps sane to all outward appearances, may sometimes be detrimental to the soul. It is extremely important that we do not make decisions of eternal value from the perspective of mortality. For decisions that affect eternity, we need to consider the perspective of our Father in Heaven, as his perspective is essential. God’s eternity signifies an everlasting, endless time. God is a Father, King, and Friend mediated with a knowledge that cannot be surpassed by abstract speculation. God’s plan gives us endurance even amid the wreckage of proximate hopes. Hope keeps us anxiously engaged in good causes even when these appear to be losing causes. Not having an eternal perspective, or losing it, can lead us to have an Earthly perspective as our personal standard and to make decision that are not in harmony with the will of God. #RandolphHarris 1 of 6
God is eternal and through the contingency of finite things and as through the holy through the demands of the moral law, are an immediate, purely spiritual experience called mystical. The union of love and will between the Creator and his creations is permanently retained. Perversion, however, may be regarded either as a condition or as a capability. Society is more eager to accept it as a condition than to respect it as a capability. On its path to progress, society gets just so far—and then again prefers birth to merit, social status to personal achievement. The DSM-5 should also include the diagnosis psychological modernism, an uncritical acceptance of the values of the modern World. It includes blind faith in technology, inordinate attachment to material gadgets and conveniences, uncritical acceptance of the march of scientific progress, devotion to electronic media, and a life-style dictated by advertising. This orientation toward life also tends toward a mechanistic and rationalistic understanding of matters of the heart. In this modernist syndrome, technology becomes the root metaphor for dealing with psychological problems. A modern person comes to therapy and days, “Look, I do not want any long-term analysis. If something is broken, let us fix it. Tell me what I have to do, and I will do it.” The boogey man has long been an indispensable figure in the family for frightening children. Grownups are now terrorized with the threat that the psychiatrist will come get them. #RandolphHarris 2 of 6
Doctors have no imagination in describing diseases. Perhaps that is why their accounts of real illnesses fit imaginary illnesses so well. Such a person is rejecting out of hand the possibility that the source of a problem in a relationship, for example, may be a weak sense of values or failure to come to grips with mortality. The modernist syndrome urges people to buy the latest electronic gear and to be plugged in to news, entertainment, and up-to-the-minute weather reports. It is vitally important not to miss out on anything. There are some people who spend most of their day in front of several television monitors keeping track of events from around the World. These people do not need all of this information professionally, but they feel their lives would be empty if they let any gaps appear in their grasp of the news. A woman who manages a computer firm knows the very latest chemical and mechanical medical treatments, and she can tell you the side effects of whatever pill you are taking; yet in private she feels overwhelmed by her failure to get her life on track and settled. Her sickness is not amenable to the literal medications she knows so well, because her World-weariness is a soul of malady. The difference between mad-doctors and other man-people is roughly the same as that between convex and concave folly. #RandolphHarris 3 of 6
The revenge of mollusk on man, of Shaw on Shakespeare, of the ghetto on God is rapid technological progress, opposition to which qualities one as a reactionary. There seems to be an inverse relationship between information and wisdom. We are overloaded with information about living healthfully, but we have largely lost our sense of the body’s wisdom. We can tune in to news reports and know what is happening in every corner of the World, but we do not seem to have much wisdom in dealing with these World problems. The World demands that we be responsible to it, not to ourselves. We have many demanding academic programs in professional psychology, and states often have rigid requirements for the practice of psychotherapy, and yet there is undoubtedly a severe dearth of wisdom about the mysteries of the soul. Only one is an artist who can see the mysterious in what is ordinary, and can thus transform a solution into a problem. The modernist syndrome also tends to literalize everything it touches. We have a spiritual longing for community and relatedness and for a cosmic vision, but we go after them with literal hardware instead of with sensitivity of the heart. We want to know about peoples from far away places, but we do not want to feel emotionally connected to them. The Lord has given us his standards of worthiness. He has not done it to keep us away from him, but to draw us to him. #RandolphHarris 4 of 6
Philosophy is at the center of every life problem, but it takes soul to reflect on one’s own life with genuine philosophical seriousness. If we looked at mortality as the whole of existence, then pain, sorrow, failure, and short life would be calamity. Our many studies of World cultures are soulless, replacing the common bonding of humanity and it shared wisdom with bites of information that have no way of getting into us deeply, nourishing and transforming our sense of ourselves. Soul, of course, has been extracted from the beginning because we conceive education to be about skills and information, not about depth of feeling and imagination We are not concerned with the weeping and wailing of the family. That is why we must look at life as an eternal thing stretching far into the premortal past and on into the eternal post-death future, then all happenings may be put in proper perspective. The Lord knows what he wants to accomplish with each one of us. He knows the kind of reform he wants to achieve in our lives, and we do not have the right to counsel him. His thoughts are higher than our thoughts. We have a loving, just, and merciful Heavenly Father, who has prepared a plan for our eternal happiness. How seldom do we realize that there are no obstructions to divine power. The Heavens, even the highest Heavens, cannot contain you. #RandolphHarris 5 of 6
As an individual gradually accumulates a storehouse of faith, when the emergency arises, one is able to stand calm and certain, uncaught by the fears of others. God always comes first and that is why our faith is sufficient. Our trust is complete. Our assurance is absolute. Our words are honored by a power great than us—that power which we all have access to, life itself. In life, joy and happiness are important also. For life intended us to be glad. Peace is also important because it rises above the storm of confusion and doubt and uncertainty that so often confronts us. If we listen to peace we will hear it, and it will infiltrate our whole being. We will discover that our words of peace, acting the law of good, will draw upon a power greater than we are and liquidate the confusion. This is the presence of God. Coming to know that divine power and understanding the complexity and the order and the harmony of the human body reinforces our faith in God. Here alone are peace and joy and certainty. Here alone is freedom from fear and doubt. We must learn to turn daily to the one and only supreme source, which is God. To be worthy of the celestial kingdom and the joy that is there, we must keep the commandments! For one who is not able to abide by the law of a celestial kingdom cannot abide a celestial glory. #RandolphHarris 6 of 6
God Promises He Will Renew Your Strength
In darkness there is to be found a precious brilliance, our essential nature, distilled by depression as perhaps the greatest gift of melancholy. The one and only way to know what fear, anger, joy, or remorse is, is to actually experience those feelings. If we persist in our modern way of treating depression, as an illness to be cured only mechanically and chemically, we may lose the gifts of soul. Our identity is located deeply in the soul, rather than on the surface of personality. Identity is felt as one’s soul finding its weight and measure. Some people who are experiencing depression or sadness related to a situation that they have no way of controlling, and are not suffering from a behavioral problem or a chemical imbalance need to be careful. Recovery from depression can be a lot like recovering from a dangerous and deadly narcotic addiction. People who go into rehabilitation programs, to save their lives, from drug addiction often have to terminate relationships with the people that helped power and fuel their addiction. And after they are released from a rehabilitation program, they are most vulnerable. That is why it is advised that they stay away from their friends and family, who make hang out with people who use drugs. Even if only one or two people in the group use drugs, a recovering addict has to avoid them. #RandolphHarris 1 of 10
When a person is released from a rehabilitation program, their systems are pure and they may not be able to handle any drugs at all in their system, but may not be aware and could die much easier from an overdose. Correspondingly, people who are suffering from a situation they find intolerable and it has been going on a long time, and there is nothing the individual can do to change their circumstances, they have to do whatever they can to avoid the people who intentionally harassing them and using them as a source pleasure by humiliating them and reminding them of painful aspects of their lives and doing things to hurt that individual to make themselves feel better. People like that are wicked, and beyond help. Recovering from trauma is a lot like recovering from a drug addiction, in that sense. You have to stay away from the group, even if there is only one bad person in the group because depression can lead to suicide, and you have endured so much that you may not know how much more you can take before you end your own life. A sad or depressed mood is just part of the soul’s cycle. The depressed person sometimes thins that the good times are all past, that there is nothing left for the present or the future. #RandolphHarris 2 of 10
Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem, but sometimes the problem seems to be permanent. At the clinic, the patient states that he or she feels young and wants to live; and claims that one had no serious intention of killing oneself, but was only singing the lyrics of an operetta. One admits that, in retrospect, one might have been a little careless in showing oneself in a theater loge in the company of. Therefore, it is important to save yourself from this temporary problem, before you do something you may not be able to recovery from. These thoughts and feelings, sad as they are, favor the soul’s desire to be both in time and in eternity. Sometimes we associate depression with literal aging. Having been identified with youth, the soul now takes on important qualities of age that are beneficial and helpful. If age is denied, soul becomes lost in an inappropriate clinging to youth. However, there are also people who are mature, but have not been able to grow and experience adult life as they would like to, and that can also make them sad. It is like one has been promised straight whiskey, but fearing that one is being fed weak tea. Not everyone is clinging to youth, some people are trying to grow beyond their life circumstances. #RandolphHarris 3 of 10
It would be wrong to believe that all the foul deeds in this World are caused by corruption, as if baseness operated automatically with the insertion of a coin. There are people who gladly place the misuse of their knowledge and skills at the disposal of the ruling classes, in the expectation that they will be rewarded by positions, titles, medals, and riches. As we age, we get a sense of having lived through something, of being older and wiser. We know that life is suffering, and that knowledge makes a difference. Your life may not matter to others, it may be a joke to them, but that life is precious, it is all you have. One cannot enjoy the bouncy, carefree innocence of youth any longer, and there is a pleasure in a new feeling of self-acceptance and self-knowledge. Our age and maturity is a measure of nobility. Scholars can become easily depressed and have to find ways to counter their dark moods. However, there are also dangers of living without study and speculation, and without reflection on our lives. Some detest psychiatry because it feeds the individual’s hunger for power, and because, like journalism, it carries within itself vast potentialities for its abuse. The psychiatrist, whose capacity for well-considered action and hence one’s talent for corruptibility some consider slight, as essentially feebleminded. #RandolphHarris 4 of 10
The genius of insanity is thus opposed by the feeblemindedness of psychiatry. This psychiatric stupidity often turns into malice and even a maniacal desire to persecute. However, what is scary to people who do not believe in God is that there is a being, there is something, there is a force vastly more powerful than human beings. Do not allow people to box you in and make you feel that you make never break free of the chain that you are bound by. They do not know what God has planned for your life. If you allow depression to visit, you will feel the change in your body, in your muscles, and on your face—some relief from the burden of youthful enthusiasm and the unbearable lightness of being. Aging brings out the flavors of a personality. The individual emerges over time, the way fruit matures and ripens. Depression, aging, and individuality all go together: the sadness of growing old is part of becoming an individual. Melancholy thoughts carve out an interior space where wisdom can take up residence. As we age, our ideas, formerly light, rambling, and unrelated to each other, become more densely gathered into values and a philosophy, giving our lives substance and firmness. #RandolphHarris 5 of 10
A journalist is a person without any ideas but with an ability to express them; a writer whose skill is improved by a deadline: the more time they have, the worse the write. Depression is sometimes described as a condition in which there are no idea—nothing to hang on to. However, maybe we have to broaden our vision and see that feelings of emptiness, the loss of familiar understandings and structures in life, and the vanishing of enthusiasm, even though they seem negative, are elements that can be appropriate and used to give life fresh imagination. We can initiate a new creative series by the definite and deliberate contemplation of our own minds, and out of the new thoughts will some new things, for the law is a reflector only. We shall discover that the very law that bound us will now free us; the power that seemed to stifle us will bring emancipation. The very power which appeared to produce evil will produce the opposite if, as, and when we change our thought patterns. The changing of these thought patterns is more than a thing of the intellect; it is also a thing of feeling, of a deep, inner conviction. We must feel that we are one with the eternal reality, and that our word is spoke in complete reliance on it; therefore it cannot fail. #RandolphHarris 6 of 10
Sometimes, of course, depression, like any emotion, can go beyond ordinary limits, becoming a completely debilitating illness. However, in extreme cases, too, even in the midst of strong treatments, we can still look at the core of depression and find ways to overcome it. One of the greatest stressors associated with depression is that it will never end, that life will never be joyful and active. This is one of the feelings that is part of the pattern—the sense of being trapped, forever to be held in the remote of a labyrinth of haunts. One may feel constrained, with nowhere to go. This stress seems to decrease when we stop fighting it. We must get control of our thoughts, feelings, and emotions. Gradually, as we re-form our thoughts they will become subjective; they will sink into that place in mind which is the power within us and which must constitute the meeting place between the absolute cause and the relative effect which it projects. It may take time to do this, but think of the reward, the gift, the outcome. Keeping the goal in mind, refusing to be baffled or defeated, with uplifted thought and calm but definite purpose, we cannot fail. This is a starting point for a more grounded, open-ended kind of knowledge that never closes up in fixed opinions. #RandolphHarris 7 of 10
The emptiness and dissolution of meaning that are often present in depression show how attached we can become to our ways of understanding and explaining our lives. Often our personal philosophies and our values seem to be all too neatly wrapped, leaving little room for mystery. Depression comes along then and opens up a hole. Depression makes holes in our theories and assumptions, but even this painful process can be honored as a necessary and valuable source of healing. At first, we are prone to treat everything and everyone around us, in an attempt to influence our environment and other people, and to exercise control over things to our own liking. Most of us pass through this phase. As we progress in this science we come to realize that the aim of scientific treatment is not control of people and things. We treat ourselves, our own mind, our own consciousnesses, no matter what the desired end may be, and gradually we learn to include a larger and a more harmonious field of action. We learn that when we get our own consciousness straightened out, things in our external World adjust themselves to meet our new and better inward awareness. The final mystery is oneself. #RandolphHarris 8 of 10
Depression’s devaluation of human life, shows that cold remorse and self-judgment do not have to be seen as clinical syndromes, but as a necessary humility in human life that actually accomplishes something for the soul. We know who we are because we have uncovered the stuff of which we are made. It has been sifted out by depressive thought, reduced, in the chemical sense, to essence. Months or years focused on God and his love and healing power has allowed us to understand that everything bends back upon itself, even time, space, and light. This is divine intuition that teaches that everything which goes out will come back again. “All of you that are pure in heart, lift up your heads and receive the pleasing word of God, and feast upon his love; for you may, if your minds are firm, forever (Jacob 3.2).” If we deny or cover up anything that is home in the soul, then we cannot be fully present to others. Hiding the dark places results in a loss of soul; speaking for them and from them offers a way toward genuine community and intimacy. Even after you uncover piece after piece of the sacrifices you have made, and feel an intense regret, but discover the real core of your being and the loyalty to the things you love. #RandolphHarris 9 of 10
As you reflect on your core the feeling of guilt and depression will be replaced by a stronger individual, who is no longer manipulated. Do not focus on thoughts and experiences the sad feelings and turmoil is waiting in the for you. Especially when the first time around was so painful and apparently unsuccessful. Care of the soul does not mean wallowing in the symptom, but it does mean trying to learn from depression what qualities the soul needs. Allow the Angel of God to carry your soul out of the coldness, isolation, darkness, and emptiness away to its remote places where it is no longer quarreling and where it finds unique insight and enjoys a special vision. Experience teaches us what is best. We learn that God alone is eternal and that loves overcomes hate. We have brought chance into compliance with love, reason, and faith. We have caught the lightning and made it turn the wheels of industry. We have engaged the laws of nature and harnessed their energy to our purposes. Truth will enter into a new Heaven and a new Earth, a different consciousness. When consciousness is changed, experience automatically changes. Now in the thing we do rejoice. When you become weary and feel like quitting, there is a way to have your strength renewed—wait on the Lord. The reward is in the attempt. #RandolphHarris 10 of 10
God Expects Us to be Especially Mindful of the Bounteous Blessings
It has a very long history, dating back to our origins, has a momentum that shows little indication of slowing down. The word violence comes from the Latin word vis, meaning “life force.” Its very roots suggest that in violence the thrust of life is making itself visible. If that fundamental vitality is not present in the heart, it nevertheless seems to appear distorted by our representations and compromises, our fears and our narcissistic manipulations. There may be talk of honor, but it is mostly just more fuel for the fires of violence and has nothing to do with real honor. God, we can make something out of that! Perhaps humankind will get down on its knees and, fearing for its own sanity, will beg the Creator for more madness! It would be a mistake to approach violence with any simple idea of getting rid of it. Chances are, if we try to eradicate our violence, we will also cut ourselves off from the deep power that sustains creative life. Besides, psychoanalysis teaches, repression never accomplishes what we want. The repressed always returns in monstrous form. The life current of the soul, vis, is like the natural force of planet life, like the grass that grows up through cement and in a relatively short time obliterates grand monuments of culture. This land where confusion between the real and false reigns supreme. A magic enchantment now attaches itself to neurotic symptoms. #RandolphHarris 1 of 8
How did all this fakery and moral insanity come about? There are plenty of views about what constitutes and causes violence, but nay deep understanding of violence has to include our own capacity for extreme aggression and the dehumanizing of others, especially toward those who offend us. So simple a thing as new food can be threatening, and it is well known that fashions in dress can be statements of either conformity or anarchy. Political groups have identified themselves through their gender, ethnic background, hair colour and style, and citizenship status. Such choices in everyday life have genuine power, and a society concerned about order and smooth functioning may gradually and unconsciously flatten itself out of the apparent good of the whole. If we try taming and boxing in this innate power, it will inevitably find its way into the light. The more intimate we are with our own violent urges and their roots, the less likely we are to be irresponsible with such urges, and the deeper our understanding will be of others’ violence. Repression of the life force is a diagnosis that fits most of the emotional problems, and people have suffered serious injury to their bodies as well as their own souls. When people let their minds be colonized by revengeful or retaliatory or first-strike fantasies, they create enemies and have an undue anticipation of unleashing their aggression. #RandolphHarris 2 of 8
People freed from onerous taxes and humiliating restrictions on their property rights, professional choices, and religious practices, could realistically harbour hopes for economic advancement, political participation, and a measure of social acceptance. Countless individuals whose life is in bankruptcy clamor for relief through the court of psychoanalysis, because the public now expects, and indeed demands, help through this channel. We have personally analyzed many psychopathic personalities whose treatment we were unable to bring to proper conclusion because of their impregnable moral insanity. We were sorry to learn, from reports in the newspapers, that many of these people continue to occupy positions of public trust. Humankind has no choice but to learn to resist this sort of bedazzlement. If one were to question how central violence is in contemporary culture, one would find the answer in the frequency with which violence occurs in film, news, and television. These mediums do not just feature plenty of violence, but also conjures violence as acceptable reactions until these fantasies become crystallized in a thing that has the power of lure of a fetish. In this sense people’s arsenals with their mystery and threat are dark carries of what has been ignored in the soul. #RandolphHarris 3 of 8
Because so many people are walking around with open emotional wounds that have never been resolved, they have refused to associate themselves with the dark forces lurking in their mind, heart, and soul. That rage and violence is them forced into fetishistic form, where they remain, fascinating and lethal. When people to not care for their wounds and souls, the dysfunction is forced to appear in fetish ad in violent behavior. Moreover, it is an integral part of mental diseases. There is nothing neutral about the soul. It is the seat and the source of life. Either we respond to what the soul presents in its fantasies and desires, or people will suffer from neglect of themselves. The power of the soul can hurl a person into ecstasy or into depression. It can be creative or destructive, gentle or aggressive. Power incubates within the soul and then makes it influential move into life as the expression of soul. If there is no soulfulness, then there is no true power, and if there is no power, then there can be no true soul. When the soul’s power is neglected, usurped, or toyed with, then it breaks down into violence and victimization, controller and subject. Whenever one person victimizes another, real power has been lost and replaced by a literalistic drama that is dangerous for both parties. #RandolphHarris 4 of 8
People who turn to violence are visibly controlling; what is less obvious are their weakness and feeling of powerlessness. On the other hand, those who habitually play the submissive may be quite unaware of their own more subtle methods of control. This is why issues of power are so difficult to deal with; things are not as they appear to be. Weaklings puff themselves up and try to act strong; tough people hide their vulnerabilities; many fail to look past the surface. People assume that the fabrications of power all around them are genuine, and they all fall prey to them. Fear is never far removed from power and genuine innocence is always to be found in the vicinity of blood-guilt. Guns are dangerous not only because it threatens lives, but also because it concretizes and fetishizes a person’s desire for power, keeping power both in sight and also removed from its soulful presence in our daily lives. However, guns are also a source of protection. Many people turn to violent gun violence because they may feel they have no power or because they want to be famous. If we want to stop school shootings, perhaps we need to look beyond mental help, and help people who are targets of bullies and encourage them to join groups where they know that they are loved and accepted. #RandolphHarris 5 of 8
Sometimes healthy people seek mental help or are forced into it and the healthy often emerge from the analyst’s office sick. The soul is explosive and powerful. If we do not claim the soul’s power on our own behalf, we become its victims. We suffer our own emotions rather than feel them working for us. We suffer our emotions rather than feel them working for us. We hold our thoughts and passions inward, disconnecting them from life, and then they stir trouble within, making us feel profoundly unsettled or, it seems, turning into illness. We all know what it feels like to hold anger in our hearts, as it builds and transmuted into corrosive resentment and rage. Even unexpressed love creates a pressure that demands release in come kind of expression. Therefore, if violence is the repressed life force showing itself symptomatically, then cure for violence is care of the soul’s power. God teaches us to love our enemies because we do not hurt the people we love, it is a way to keep society civil and save your soul. God always says that vengeance is his and he will get revenge for the wrongs that others have done to you, so it is best to follow the laws of the land so your hands stay clean and the guilty can be punished by the law so they can be taken off the streets where their violence cannot escalate. #RandolphHarris 6 of 8
People who teach love and virtue, like Socrates and Plato, were condemned by the wicked because of the “unsettling” and “threatening” power of their soul, which was reveled in their personal lives and in their works. They did not carry guns, but they were still considered a problem because there is nothing more powerful than peace, love, harmony, and education, which leads to the true passion and revelation of one’s own soul. My past is your present. What embarrasses me in my dreams, amuses you in your interpretations, but I insist on the privacy of my dreams, and on embarrassing you with your foul waking life. In the presence of deep power, life becomes robust and passionate, signs that the soul is engaged and being given expression. When God is honored in our lives, everything we do becomes more genuine, quickening our lives with intensity, passion, power, and courage. One the scale of our individual lives we reproduce the divine order in its entirety. Our thought is creative, but in our ignorance, we use it destructively, and that is why people suffer the onslaughts of uncontained violence. To learn to think in the right manner is to learn to create that which is good, and which gives compete expression to the self without ever containing anything destructive or negative. The only lasting joy and happiness we will ever find during our mortal experience will come by following the Savior. #RandolphHarris 7 of 8
The Lord has blessed us with lands of promise to enjoy during our mortal probation. In the doctrine of progression, we learn that all people were born into the spirit World—prior to taking on Earthly bodies. Our lives did not begin at birth and will not end at death. We are here on Earth to learn and progress for a while; in the process there will be joy and pain. This mortal probation is the period of testing and demonstrating character or abilities. “If people have sought to do wickedly during days of probation, they will be found unclean before judgment (1 Nephi 10.21).” The chief reward of surrendering innocence, so that the soul may be fully expressed, as an increase of power. That is why we must “Continue in the straight and narrow path until end of the day of probation (2 Nephi 33.9).” Therefore, instead of being confused by the situations around us we should be calm, tranquil, and confident that through reforming our word and changing our whole body of thinking, we can as easily change the existing conditions as perpetuate them. The nations of Earth, if they would continue to follow the ways of God, could be a blessing to his children here. We need complete assurance, an inner determination, faith, and confidence to know that we can proceed with definite, deliberate determination and that there can be no question about the result; they will be inevitable. Be better than smart, be thoughtful. #RandolphHarris 8 of 8
The Soul is More Mysterious
The soul’s indications are many, but they are usually extremely subtle. In the process of civilization, the far most important thing is the aim of creating unity out of the individual human beings. It is true that the aim of happiness is still there, but it is pushed into the background. It almost seems as if the creation of a great human community would be successful, we should focus on the benefit of the soul. The soul does not necessarily benefit from long, hard work, nor from fairness of any kind. Its effects are achieved more with God than effort. While it is true that science must deal with cause and effect in practical applications, it is also true that in physics the antiquated idea of cause and effect has been eliminated, which means that things do not always work in the way they are supposed to, basing the performance on precedent. Just because an individual has worked a long time and is fair about it, does not mean one will have the benefits of soul one wants. Nor should any individual enter such work innocently, agreeing to work hard, and then expect something for their labour. This consumer logic is based on fairness and reasonableness, and has nothing to do with the way the soul operates and may be the least effective way to seek out the soul’s power. #RandolphHarris 1 of 6
The soul is more mysterious. The developmental process of the individual can thus be expected to have special features of its own which are not reproduced in the process of human civilization. Just as a planet revolves around a central body as well as rotating on its own axis, so the human individual takes part in the course of development of humankind at the same time as one pursues one’s own path in life. However, to our dull eyes the play of forces in the Heavens seems fixed in a never-changing order; in the field of organic life we can still see how the forces contend with one another, and how the effects of the conflict are continually changing, as though it were the envelope of the soul. Much of the civilization of the future may oppress the life of the individual today. We lose opportunities to know ourselves for our motives and our secrets because people just want to open our boxes and pry into our lives when we may not even to share a cup of coffee with them. Disregard for privacy, increasing technology is at the forerunner of this conflict. Do we need to expose everything that is hidden? Do we need to understand all mysteries? We are used to hearing about the great revelations of science—the discovery of atoms, particles, and DNA—and so quite naturally we think that mysteries are there to be solved. #RandolphHarris 2 of 6
People have at all times set the greatest value on ethics, as though they expected that it in particular would produce especially important results. And it does in fact deal with a subject which can easily be recognized as the sorest spot in every civilization. Ethics is thus to be regarded as a therapeutic attempt—as an endeavor to achieve, by means of a command of God to get rid of the greatest hindrance to civilization, namely, the constitutional inclination of human beings to be aggressive towards one another; and for that very reason we are especially interested in what is probably the most recent of the cultural commands of God, the commandment to love one’s neighbor ur as oneself. From the point of view of soul, it is just as important, maybe more important, to check the urgency of curiosity and suspicion, to allow certain things to remain distant and buried, to trust one’s soul mate or mate soul with things that should not be brought to the light of day. Because we know that science cannot get along without dealing with cause and effect any more than a farmer can get along without planting crops if one expects to reap a harvest. If we want an unbroken bond with an individual, we have to respect their privacy so our relationships will be tightened by reverence. #RandolphHarris 3 of 6
The special lesson in the power of soul is learned in the moments of thought when it is decided by someone that their chest would remain closed. The soul, too, does not trouble itself enough about the fact of the mental constitutions of human beings. It issues a command and does not ask whether it is possible for people to obey it. On the contrary, it assumes that a human’s soul is psychologically capable of anything that is required of it, and our soul has unlimited mastery over on beings. One can easily overpower another person and discover his or her secrets, but by preserving their privacy, one maintains one’s power. In general, we keep our power when we protect the power of others. The commandment, “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” is the strongest defense against human aggressiveness and an excellent example of the respect God expects of us. You ever heard that Summer bodies are made in the Winter? That means if we want to tone up our bodies, we start before the Summer arrives to achieve our goals. Likewise, we should start preparing for Heaven, while we are on Earth. There is time. We still have the farmer, planting time, and harvest season, but we also have an alternative. There is also a choice and volition introducing a personal factor. Humans have free will. #RandolphHarris 4 of 6
The fateful question for the human species seems to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction. New causes bring new effects, and every sequence of cause and effect takes place in something which is greater than cause or effect. Freedom is where it is perceived and in such a degree as it is recognized. Such an attitude is scientific and mathematical. The soul practices a different kind of math and logic. It presents images that are not immediately intelligible to the reasoning mind. It insinuates, offers fleeting impressions, persuades more with desire than with reasonableness. In order to reach the soul’s power, one has to be conversant with its style, and watchful. The soul also gives us a vision that nothing is solid, everything is moving, shifting, changing. Even though we view the Universe as a mass of solid facts, God is the supreme cause and has liquid laws, for matter is spirit reduced to its greatest thinness. We focus on the purpose of life because the ultimate objective of our mortal journey has been revealed by our Creator, who said, “If you keep my commandments and endure to the end you shall have eternal life, which is the greatest of all the gifts of God.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 6
The reward is worth the effort. God’s gift of eternal life is subject to conditions established by him. “Behold, are not the things that God has wrought marvelous in our eyes? And who can comprehend the marvelous works of God? Who shall say that is was not a miracle that by God’s word the Heaven and the Earth should be; and by the power of this word humans were created of the dust of the Earth; and by the power of God’s word have miracles been wrought (Mormon 9.17)?” God allowed us to come to Earth with freedom to choose our own course. In his great love, he did not leave us alone. He provided a guide—a spiritual Global Positioning System (GPS)—to help us achieve successful navigation and tracking in our journey. Spiritual nature is love and truth and beauty. The Bible refers to the spirit moving upon the face of the deep, which means absolute intelligence thinking within itself. This is but another way of saying that the starting point of every creation is the word of God or the word of Universal intelligence. Our excruciating experiences will develop in us an unshakable faith in God. We have a great heritage of love—love of God and love of humankind. It is an inheritance of sobriety, independence, hard work, high moral values, and fellowship. #RandolphHarris 6 of 6
To these Truths I Share My Witness
The past is gone and the Sun is shining on the other side of the clouds. The power of the soul is like a great reservoir, like the force of water in a fast-rushing river. It is natural, not manipulated, and stems from an unknown source. Our role with this kind of power is to be an attentive observer noticing how the soul wants to thrust itself into life. It is also our task to find artful means of articulating and structuring that power, taking full responsibility for it, but trusting too that the soul has intentions and necessities that we may understand only partially. The soul work requires both much reflection and also great dedication. Believing that a spiritual revolution must precede the political and economic revolutions, the social revival has to be supported by literature and art. Think of all the ancient cultures that poured masses of money, materials, and energy into pyramids, castles, temples, and cathedrals on behalf of sacred play or holy imagination. The idea is to find the soulful perspective that feeds action with both passion and imaginal contemplation. This is how we embrace the mysterious depths of the soul as well as conscious understanding and intention. General life, needs, and interests of the people should have an effect upon the general social revival. We must accept as true certain deliverances of consciousness which appear to give us direct information about the external World, the self, and morality. #RandolphHarris 1 of 6
Science, which deals only with phenomena, cannot upset our belief in God, but the increasing unity of the laws and theories which science discovers acts as a confirmation of our intuitive belief in the unity of the cause of nature. If the natural attributes of God, such as omnipotence and intelligence, are revealed through our experience of the external World, the moral attributes are revealed to us primarily in our moral experience. In our own willing we learn something of the nature of God’s activity; the realization that there is an authoritative demand on us to act on the relatively higher motive is the chief revelation of God within our moral experience. The authoritativeness of the demand can be explained only in theistic terms, and the content of the demand reveals to us God’s moral nature. “And no unclean thing can enter into God’s kingdom; therefore nothing enters into his rest save it be those who have been purified, because of their faith, and the repentance of all their sins, and their faithfulness unto the end (3 Nephi 27.19).” The power of the soul comes from living close to the heart, and not at odds with it. Therefore, paradoxically, soul power may emerge from failure, depression, and loss. The general rule is that the soul appears in the gaps and holes of experience. We have all experienced moments when we have lost an opportunity or endured an illness only to find an unexpected inner strength. #RandolphHarris 2 of 6
We cannot always control all that happens to us, but we have absolute control over how we respond to the changes in our lives. That inner strength and perseverance comes from knowing that God is the only presence and the only power in the Universe, and knowing that God is love. We have the power to press on because we deliberately turn from everything that is ungodly and unlike this love. We desire to feel and express this love and compassion and well-wishing for others as the theme of our lives. There will be times in our lives when we find ourselves on an unexpected path, facing circumstances much more severe than a disrupted vacation. How do we respond when events often out of our control, altered the life we have planned or hoped for? We must never doubt our divine nature and eternal potential. It is important, even when the unexpected happens, to progress toward perfection and ultimately realize our divine destiny as heirs of eternal life. No amount of change, trial, or opposition can alter that eternal course—only our choices, as we exercise our agency. It does not seem possible that so simple a method as this can produce such a dynamic result, but experience has definitely proved that it can. #RandolphHarris 3 of 6
Rather than blame God for anything, we must turn to hum and pour out our hearts (feelings, dreams, emotions, desires, goal, fears, and love). In response to our faith and silent prayers, the Lord will respond. God wants of to be comfortable, and he will ease the burdens which are put on our shoulders, that we cannot even feel them upon our backs. God will strengthen us that we may bear up our burdens with ease. Anyone who tries this method will experience definite results. The most wonderful thing about it is that we do not have to change anything but ourselves. For every person is the cause of one’s own experience, whether we know it or not. We are all carrying the negative experiences of out past into the future merely because we have not disconnected them from our minds. If we are creating a negative future, it is because we have not changed our thought about it. We have seen the same thing happen to people who have failed in the past, as though nothing could ever work out right for them. We have seen them deliberately change their thought, disconnect their memory from failure, push it aside mentally as though it no longer belonged, as through it were no longer a part of them, and affirm that God alone accompanies them, that life is made to live successfully and happily. Accepting this and daily affirming it, we have seen failure and defeat turn into success and triumph. #RandolphHarris 4 of 6
We are who we are because of the special combinations that make up our souls. Power begins in knowing this special soul, which may be entirely different from our fantasies about who we are or who we want to be. Power pours in our soul when we fill the emptiness with God and withstand temptations to fill it prematurely. When we are feeling weak, it is a prerequisite for the discovery of power. The soul has room to present itself when we feed it things that are good. We are swinging into line with the great harmony of the Universe. However, before we can entirely disconnect ourselves from the negations of the past, we have to learn to fill the mind with beneficial acceptances which are so much greater and deeper than the negations we have been entertaining that they consume them by their very presence, just as light dissipates darkness. We have to know that God loves us and wants the best for us, and totally reverse our whole psychological outlook on life. If we disconnect ourselves from the past and find ourselves firmly rooted in God today, in lobe, hope, joyful experiences, and become grateful and acknowledge the blessings we have, this will teach us to harmonize with everything that transpires today, in the future, and it will cultivate our souls. #RandolphHarris 5 of 6
Healing blessings come in many ways, each suited to our own individual needs, as known to God who loves us best. Sometimes a healing cures our aliments, or lifts our burden. However, in other causes we are healed by being given strength or understanding or patience to bear the burdens places on us. When we awaken to the divine within us, it will reach out and embrace everything around us, and it will discover the same presence in people and in events and in all nature. For God is not separate from what he is doing. The divine life is in everyone and everything. This is the secrets that Jesus discovered. The simple fact is that God is right where you are. Whatever change in life’s circumstance may come our way, and whatever unexpected path we may have to travel, how we respond is a choice. Turning to the Savior and grasping his outstretched arms is always our best option. True enduring happiness with accompanying strength, courage and capacity to overcome the most challenging difficulties comes from a life centered in God. There is no guarantee of overnight results, but there is absolute assurance that, in the Lord’s time, solutions will come, peace will prevail, and emptiness will be filled. #RandolphHarris 6 of 6
People Who Excel in Life Tend to be Emotionally Intelligent
It is God’s will that we be free men and women enabled to rise to our full potential both temporally and spiritually. People who excel in life tend to be emotionally intelligent. The recipe for handling relationships smoothly is to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way. Indeed, the costs of poor emotional skills can be high. They range from problems in marriage and parenting to poor physical health. A lack of emotional intelligence (self-control, self-awareness, sensitivity to the feelings of others, persistence, and self-motivation) can ruin careers and sabotage achievement. Perhaps the greatest toll falls on children and teenagers. For them, poor emotional skills can contribute to depression, eating disorders, unexpected pregnancy, aggression, and violent crime. We should promote emotional competence as well as intellectual skills. The result would be greater self-control, altruism, and compassion—all basic capacities needed if our society is to thrive. What means does civilization employ in order to inhibit the aggressiveness which it opposes it, to make it harmless, to get rid of it, perhaps? We have already become acquainted with a few of these methods, but not yet with the one that appears to be most important. #RandolphHarris 1 of 11
What happens in an individual to render his or her desire for aggression innocuous? Civilization obtains mastery over the individual’s dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within one to understand why they feel the way they feel. The tension people feel in jealousy may be that of much greater Worlds colliding than can be seen by looking only at our personal situations. Its pain comes, at least in part, from opening up to unexplored territory and letting go of old familiar truths in the face of unknown and threatening new possibilities. It is not unusual for a jealous person to feel so altruistic and reasonable about one’s own life, so clean of the vice of selfishness, that one finds the loved one self-serving. Many people experience jealousy because the soul wants complete openness and freedom. That leaves a sense of order and limit in the darkness of repression, where it stirs and becomes wild and unreasonable, and potentially violent. It also may be time for one to reevaluate one’s beliefs. People who feel rage and suspicious call for some kind of adjustment and reflection. To begin with, if we ask how a person comes to have a sense of guilt after unjustifiably hurting another person, we arrive at an answer which cannot be disputed: a person feels guilty (maybe even sinful) when he or she has done something bad. #RandolphHarris 2 of 11
When your jealousy, with or without your conscious consent, is setting limits on your life it is because your jealousy is drawing out a strange cast of characters—the moralist, the detective, the paranoid, the archconservative. People often feel jealous because they assume that something threatening and dangerous is near. They believe that they are hard on the trail of facts, but they behave as if they do not know any details. Then aggressiveness is introjected, internalized. It expresses itself as a need for punishment. Since a person’s own feelings would not have led one along this path, one must have had a motive for submitting to this extraneous influence. Such a motive is easily discovered in one’s helplessness and one’s dependence on other people, and it can best be designated as fear of loss of love. If one losses the love of another person upon whom one is dependent, one also ceases to be protected from a variety of dangers. Above all, the individual feels they are exposed to the danger that this stronger person will show his or her superiority in the form of punishment. At the beginning, therefore, what is bad is whatever causes one to be threatened with the loss of love. For fear of that loss, one must avoid it. #RandolphHarris 3 of 11
Feelings of violence can show how slit off one is from the power of one’s knowledge. Blinded by a cloud of innocence, people seem not to know their friend or oneself or the complexity of relationships in general. They plead for simple attention and care. When one does not get these things, one feels controlled and toyed with. Then, in place of a more genuine power, violent rage pours out of the individual. The paranoid element in one’s jealousy both keeps the possibility of deeper knowledge within reach, but also dissociates itself from will and intentionality. It makes little difference whether one has already done the bad things or only intends to do it. In either cause the danger only sets in if and when the individual discovers it. This state of mind is called a bad conscience; but actually it does not deserve this name, for at this stage the sense of guilt is clearly only a fear of loss of love, social anxiety. Consequently, such people habitually allow themselves to do any bad things which promises them enjoyment, so long as they are sure that the authority will not know anything about it or cannot blame them for it; they are afraid only of being found out. For instance, when people vandalize cars of someone they are jealous of, they usually do so when they know people are in deep sleeps so they will not be held accountable for their crimes. #RandolphHarris 4 of 11
The obsessive side of jealousy seems in part to be a function of its hiddenness, arising when it is not being revealed and given place. When jealous feelings and images penetrate the heart and mind, a kind of initiation takes place. Their souls become profoundly disturbed. Sometimes people also become jealous of other person, who they do not know, because some people might appear to have a lot of talent, or be an insanely inspired artist or seem to possess the power of a politician graced with the charisma that might make him or her a World leader. How can anyone compete with a person who has desire of cosmic proportions without always feeling threatened? They become fitful, outrageously infuriated, betrayed, and offended. If one did not become jealous, they feel that too many events would take place, too much life would be lived, too many connections would be made. Therefore, jealousy serves the soul by pressing for limits on an individual one does not have control over, but deeply desires to control or possess their absolute beauty and fulfilling absolute power. From the jealousy person’s point of view, not only is their possessiveness right, it is required that one be outraged. This serves to compensate for a sense of union that does not exist or is not terribly deep. #RandolphHarris 5 of 11
When a jealousy person’s feelings come upon them, they feel alien and do not know what to do with them. When some part of one longs for more experience, new people, and starting over, jealousy remembers attachment and feels the unending pain of separation and divorces. These types of people become tormented by jealousy. They sense tension between attachment to what is and the promise of a new passion. How does one care for the soul when it is presenting itself through jealousy? Can we perceive that the soul wants when it wrenches us with longing for what another person has? Jealousy can be consuming. It can crowd out every other thought and emotion with its pungency. It can make a person distracted, touched, aching for the life, position, and possession of others. My neighbors have happiness, money, success, children—why do I not? My friend has a great career, good looks, luck—what is wrong with me? There may be a good dose of self-pity in jealousy, but it is the longing that is so bitter. Jealousy eats away at the heart, soul, and mind. It has a corrosive power. In jealousy, desire and self-denial work together to create characteristic sense of frustration and obsessiveness. #RandolphHarris 6 of 11
The jealous person thinks he or she is the victim of bad fortune it also involves strong willfulness in the form of resistance to fate and character. When misfortune befalls an individual, one must search one’s soul, acknowledge sinfulness, heighten the demands of one’s conscience, impose abstinences on oneself and they often punish themselves with penances. Whole people have behaved in this way and still do. Fate is regarded as a substitute for the parental agency. If any person’s unfortunate it, they sometimes take it to mean that they are no longer loved by their higher power; and threatened by such a loss of love, they become more conservative, and no longer neglect their religion. However, a person with a jealous nature fights fervently against the deal fate has handed them. They feel deprived and cheated. Because jealous people are so out of touch with the potential value of his or her own fate, one has elaborate fantasies about others being blessed with good fortune that belongs to them. The point of caring for the envious soul is not to get rid of the jealousy, but to be guided back by it into one’s own fate. The pain in jealousy is like pain in the body: it makes one stop and take notice of something that has gone wrong and needs attention. Jealous people simply fail to see the necessity and value in their own lives. #RandolphHarris 7 of 11
When things turn bad, there is a tendency to blame others or even God. Sometimes a sense of entitlement arises, and individuals or groups try to shift their responsibility to others. Some people allow their jealousy to allow them to have a preoccupation with the lives of others and then neglect their own. Their angry explanations for their misfortune distract them from the pain of their past and dealing with it productively. Symptoms are often obviously painful, but at the same time they may protect against a deeper pain associated with awareness and facing the fundamental realities of fate. It is through their jealousy that they suck all that pain into itself and in an odd way keeps them from owning their past. The problem is not the individual’s ability to have a good life, it is his or her capacity not to have one. Jealous people need to be taught to care for their soul. If in jealousy the person wishes life were better, then maybe it is a good idea to feel that emptiness deeply. People must take more responsibility for their situations, and over time eventually improve it. And it is important to be honest with oneself. In jealousy, fantasies are potent and utterly captivating, yet floating in an atmosphere somehow removed from actual life. These fantasies are illusions, images kept at bay so they cannot touch life directly. Dwelling in an imaginary life is a way of avoiding soul. #RandolphHarris 8 of 11
Jealousy is resistance to reason. If a jealous person is met with a misfortune or denial of a desire, they do not throw the blame on oneself, but on one’s fetish, which has obviously not done its duty, and one gives it a thrashing instead of punishing oneself. When one has a sense of guilt after having committed a misdeed, and because of it, the feeling should more properly be called remorse. It relates only to a deed that has been done, and, of course, it presupposes that a conscience—the readiness to feel guilty—was already in existence before the deed took place. Remorse of this sort can, therefore, never help one to discover the origin of conscience and of the sense of guilt in general. What happens in these everyday cases is usually this: an instinctual need acquires the strength to achieve satisfaction in spite of the conscience, which is, after all, limited in its strength; and with the natural weakening of the need owning to it having been satisfied, the former balance of power is restored. The task is to care for the soul, but it is also true that the soul cares for us. #RandolphHarris 9 of 11
We must do our best to honor whatever the soul presents to us. It suffering can only be relieved by the reestablishment of the will placed on us by the Heavenly Powers. And we may well heave a sigh of relief at the thought that it is nevertheless vouchsafed to a few to salvage without effort from the whirlpool of their own feelings the deepest truths, toward which the rest of us have to find our way through tormenting uncertainty and with restless groping. God wishes only good for everyone. We are all rooted in pure spirit, in perfect life, and at any moment we can so unify ourselves with the power of good that evil will disappear from our experience. We have to live each day as though all the joy there is in the Universe were ours now. And we have to live each day as though all the joy we ever expect to experience were ours now. If we make every day a day of praise and thanksgiving, a day in which we recognize the divine bounty and the eternal goodness, and if we live today as though God were the only presence and the only power there is, we would not have to worry about tomorrow. We are all human and have all made mistakes. The starting point for creating a better future for ourselves is to deliberately free our minds from the mistakes of the past and feel they no longer be held against us; they need no longer be a liability. #RandolphHarris 10 of 11
Suppose we have had a deep sense of animosity toward others and because of this we find that we are not meeting people in the right spirit; they, naturally, respond to us the way we meet them, and out whole set of human relations is out of harmony. We cannot go back over the past and relive it. We cannot make adjustments in the past. We have to make them in the present. It is not going to do us any good to sit around and cry over the past and bemoan our fate, because in the very day in which we are living we are creating our future, which will become monotonous repetitions of the past. The one who is suffering from one’s past mistakes of resentment and animosity merely turns quietly to oneself and prays: I have decided to change al this. I want to like people and I want them to like me. I want to get along happily with others. I forgive myself for everything that has happened up until now. I lose it and let it go. I not only forgive myself, I forgive everyone who I feel has held anything against me. I forgive and I am forgiven. Furthermore, the power of the Universe conspires to help us. We should feel that we live in an eternal presence of pure spirit whose whole purpose is good, whose whole desire is constructive, and whose whole feeling toward us is one of love and compassion. #RandolphHarris 11 of 11
Randolph Harris II International Institute 