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You See, it is True–You Only Love Me When I Do Exactly What You Want Me to Do!
I went into the bedroom, latched the door tight, surveyed the inviting bed, dove into it and pulled the covers up over my head. No more! Down pillows, yes, Oblivion, will you please get with it! Self-hate also gets in the way of successful relationships because we do not trust ourselves to be genuine. We develop some variety of phoniness because we assume people will not like us as we really are, since we ourselves do not. Every one of us probably has one or more acquaintances who are patently phony and are rather extreme examples of this tendency. It may, for example, be a woman who grew up in less affluent surroundings than those which she now lives. She is insecure in the next experience and, whether she allows herself to be aware of it or not, feels her current social set could not accept her if she were natural, so she puts on airs and acts in ways that she feels are the way a person in her setting should act; but the performance does not come off well since it is obviously false. While most of us are not as obviously phony as such a woman, we all have some of the tendency. One way it may express itself is in an effort to be kind or helpful when we do not really feel kindly toward a person. This is a made-to-order pitfall for those who have been raised in religious families where strong emphasis has been placed on the individual’s obligation to be helpful and loving. #RandolphHarris 1 of 11
In Christian homes children become familiar with such passages as: Love is patient and kind…it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. (I Corinthians 13.3-7.) These are beautiful words from a beautiful chapter. And when we are filled with feelings of warmth and love, they describe well some of the experiences that occur. When we are so full of feelings of caring that we could scarcely do otherwise then be loving, they are the genuine overflow toward another. Often we turn it around. We say to ourselves,” Kindness is a sign of love, so I should be kind, therefore I will be kind.” So we try to be kind to those for whom we may feel considerable unexpressed irritation or resentment. We remain emotionally distant because our kindness is phony. Our resentment is almost sure to seep through in indirect expressions, as when, for example, we seem condescending and patronizing in our kindness. Or perhaps we should be patient with our children, and so we act that way when we feel more like screaming at them. They sense our anger and yet have no way of coping with it directly since it remains unexpressed. And a wall of falseness stands between us because we have not trusted ourselves to be genuine. #RandolphHarris 2 of 11
The self-hate that makes us afraid to be ourselves gets us into very difficult binds in our relations with others because we tend to assume that we can gain affection only through acceptable performances, since we feel no one could possibly love us just because who we are. Destiny grew up in a home where great emphasis was placed on performance. Generally, she was made to feel that anything she did in the home as a child was inadequate and that she was rather worthless. The resulting feelings of self-hate made marriage a difficult experience for her. It was inevitable that she would assume that her husband, Marius, could not possibly love her for herself, so she constantly assumed that she would have to perform well or he would abandon her. Yet she seethed with anger, because he did not love her (so she self) without regard to her performance. The way in which Destiny kept the house became one of the focal points of this predicament. She has some tendency to let it become quite cluttered. Whenever this happened Marius became angry. He said that since there were no children and since she was not working the least she could do was to keep a reasonably picked up house. And since he himself was frightened and full of doubts about his own lovableness, he felt—and expressed the feeling—that when she failed to keep the house uncluttered she care nothing at all for him. #RandolphHarris 3 of 11
Marius’s reaction added fuel to the fire as far as the dilemma that Destiny felt. Anything that she did at that point was certain to be unsatisfying to her. If, in response to his anger, she busied herself and cleaned the place up, he praised her, and yet this only increased her anger, because she would say to herself, “Only when I perform well for him, he expresses affection.” I am not free to do as I please because he will leave me if I want him to stay with me.” If, on the other hand, she rebelled, as she often did, against the feeling of having to please him and let the house become more and more cluttered, Marius became more frustrated and angry, and she would use this to confirm her feelings of self-hate, for she could say, “You see, it is true. You only love me when I do exactly what you want me to do.” Perhaps the most damaging result of Destiny’s preoccupation with this bind was that she became virtually emotionally paralyzed. She became unable to know what she wanted, so concerned was she with what he wanted. She could not really tell whether it was more satisfying to herself to live in a clutter or an uncluttered house. Everything she did tended to be a reaction to Marius, rather than the act of a person doing what she wanted to do. Even the suggestion by Marius that they hire somebody to some in regularly and clean up was very frightening, for she told herself, “When someone is coming in and cleaning up, he will no longer need me. Then he will get rid of me!” #RandolphHarris 4 of 11
Destiny never learned to love herself, and so it was difficult for her to believe that Marius could be staying with her because he loved her and wanted her for reasons other than efficiency. If we hope to grow in emotional maturity and in the capacity to experience and express love, one must believe self-hate continually gets in the way of the experience of love, and it becomes evident that learning to love ourselves is a crucial and necessary experience. Since we will be more able and willing to disclose ourselves, a solid, deep rooted sense of one’s worth as a person is the foundation, we can become independent individuals, who know ourselves and thus have a self for others to discover and love. And out of this foundation of self-acceptance comes the capacity to accept others as they are, for we will find nothing in them that we have not found and accepted in one form or another in ourselves. Beauty is the form which reaches most deeply into the human heart and mind. It is the language which translates all the moods of humanity into feelings and insights and sensual experiences that we can understand. In beauty there are no foreigners: the deeper we penetrate into the human soul, be it of ourselves or our neighbors, the more we find ourselves at one with people of all nations, even those people behind iron curtains. It is by beauty that we feel the pulse of all humankind. #RandolphHarris 5 of 11
The love of the beauty of the World, while it is universal, involves, as a love secondary and subordinate to itself, the love of all the truly precious things that bad fortune can destroy. The truly precious things are those forming ladders reaching toward the beauty of the World, opening onto it. One who has gone farther, to the very beauty of the World itself, does not love them any less but much more deeply than before. Numbered among them are the pure and authentic achievements of art and science. In a much more general way they include everything that envelops human life with poetry through the various social strata. Every human being has at one’s roots here below a certain terrestrial poetry, a reflection of the Heavenly glory, the link, of which one is more or less vaguely conscious, with one’s universal country. Affliction is the tearing up of these roots. Human cities in particular, each one more or less according to its degree of perfection, surround the life of their inhabitants with poetry. They are images and reflections of the city of the World. Actually, the more they have the form of a nation, the more they claim to be countries themselves, the more distorted and soiled they are as images. However, to destroy cities, either materially or morally, or to exclude human beings from a city, thrusting them down to the state of social outcasts, this is to sever every bond of poetry and love between human beings and the Universe. It is to plunge them forcibly into the horror of ugliness. There can scarcely be a greater crime. We all have a share by our complicity in an almost innumerable quantity of such crimes. If only we could understand it, it should wring tears of blood from us. #RandolphHarris 6 of 11
This requires freedom, you say? Yes, freedom of the body within limits, but limits which free the mind. However, you may argue, “We have learned in our day to enslave the mind—what do you say to that?” The tyranny over the mind we need to fight, but let us make sure what kind of bondage we are fighting, and for what kind of freedom. It is not the freedom to become a millionaire, or the freedom to convince us through clever advertising to buy the million and one things we do not need, nor the things that are deleterious to us. In principle it is the freedom to be, not just to possess. Freedom is indeed an integral part of this beauty, but let it be a genuine freedom, a freedom to think and to feel, a freedom to speak and to contemplate, a freedom to appreciate and to create, a freedom to experience beauty. Let us return to the major problem of beauty versus power in our World. For the first time in all human history persons like you and me have been able literally to see the planet concentrated in exploration. Some people spend the entire night flying through the air. Flying to Boston, then Washington, then to Chicago, then back to New York City, is not unusual. Technological inventions obsess so many, one after the others. People use telephones to call long distance all over the planet, speaking with for hours with mortals in Australia or India and the internet to contact people Worlds away or order medication and shoes. #RandolphHarris 7 of 11
Television catches people up utterly, so that the house is full of blaring speakers and flickering screens. Anything with blue skies enthralls some. Many must watch the news programs, prime time series, documentaries, and every film, regardless of merit, ever taped. Many people have seen images of the planet supposedly photographed as a totality. The astronauts, and we through identifying with them and seeing the picture emblazoned in newspapers throughout the World, have been able to gaze at the World as a whirling planet in which all nations now are a part. This photograph is a symbol for a new relationship between nations. We saw the great wall of China, the Indian ocean the Russian steppes, the north and south Americas, the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and unfortunately we all got to watch Our Lady of Paris, also known as Norte-Dame Cathedral, which is 856 years old burn to the ground. Indeed, in the photograph we were what we in our stubbornness have been trying to escape in reality: all citizens of the same World. In this photograph the Chinese wall shuts our nothing, the perpetual squabbles of the nations turn out to be absurd, the revolvers held at the heads of Russian and the United States are transcended by the spinning planet in its orbit. #RandolphHarris 8 of 11
The whole Earth turns slowly before our eyes. I do not mean to belittle our national problems at all: I mean only to present a new symbol of the Word which for the first time requires us to see that all countries are citizens of the planet. As we are all awaiting the Royal baby, most of us realize we are grasped in this photograph of World culture by how colorful is this new Earth, new in the sense that it was our first view of the whole Earth. The whirling ball is shimmering gold on the side of the Sun, dazzling and resplendent, shading into a brilliant ultramarine. The shadow then merges into inky darkness and on into the pure black of the vast empty corridors that separate us from the solar systems of light far beyond. On and on the blackness stretches to the distant stars. The photograph was a symbol which can lead us to a radical change in our way of seeing and experiencing the World. The picture reached deeply into my own soul; the nations, usually so noisy, now seemed silent and serene. It showed the nations at last formed into a peaceful co-existence, charmed by the vast spaces of the Universe. Can anyone of us let this picture penetrate into our minds and souls without realizing that we live in a new World, a planet now of a beauty we had not suspected before? #RandolphHarris 9 of 11
It is not surprising that on Christmas Eve, in the flight of Apollo 8, Captain Frank Borman and his crew of two astronauts read for all the World to hear the story of creation in the book of Genesis. “The Earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep….And God said, ‘Let there be light.’ And God saw that the light was good.” This word “form” from the King James translation has the same meaning as I have used it in describing the form in the work of artists. The ground forms Joseph Binder used to emphasize are now wedded to space-forms; we reach not just into our own foundations as Binder taught us, but also into infinity. One of the astronauts, Russell Schweickart, told me that he carried with him into the stratosphere a number of quotations from different authors, T.S. Eliot, Archibald MacLeish, among them, which he thought might express his experience. One that especially grasped his personal feelings while in orbit was a short poem by Robert Nathan: “So beauty passes ever out of reach, save to the heart where happiness is home; there beauty walks, wherever it may be, and paints the Sunset on a quiet sea.” However we may conceive of the intimations of infinity with which our human minds are endowed, the metaphor of God the Artist is most expressive for many people. That is the concept of the painter of the Sunset on the quiet sea in Robert Nathan’s poem, and includes the forms of the Earth as well as of infinity. #RandolphHarris 10 of 11
Form is the essence of all things on Heaven and Earth, as I have tried to show in many different ways. Its dwelling is the light of setting Suns, and the round ocean and the living air. A presence that disturbs us with the joy of elevated thoughts. When I asked Russell Schweickart which of his fellow astronauts had uttered the phrase quoted by the newspapers with the photograph of the Sun-emblazoned Earth, he replied that everyone of them had felt the same thing when they looked out from their spaceship at the whirling Earth. It came our in words that one of them suddenly exclaimed, “God, it is beautiful.” So long as a mortal is a stranger to one’s own divine soul, so long has one not even begun to live. All that one does is to exist. In this matter most mortals deceive themselves. For they take comfort in the thought that this attitude of indifference, being a common one, must also be a true one. They feel that they cannot go far wrong is they think and behave as so many other mortals think and behave. Such ideas are the grossest self-deceptions. When the hour of calamity comes, they find out how empty this comfort, how isolated they really are in their spiritual helplessness. #RandolphHarris 11 of 11
The Kingdom of Heaven is within You–Wisdom Penetrates Everywhere on Account of its Perfect Purity
There will come a time, a time to tell you everything slowly so that you understand. However, now is not that time. Something is stirring in me, knowledge as clear as if a voice is speaking: this is not the most difficult part. Often two people will try to express their feelings toward each other verbally, or will try to explain themselves or some situation, and they simply cannot understand each other. This occurs when people are inarticulate, when conflicts about their feelings are prominent and they try to hide it, when they are not really familiar with what their feeling is, or when they are very intellectualized and the words are used defensively to obfuscate the situation. Especially with intellectual people, words paradoxically can be the largest obstacle to communication because people often spend a great deal of time and word trying not to say something or avoiding the central point, which is often known to themselves. If we are able to have a satisfying and fulfilling sense of completion in our lives insofar as meaningful relationships are concerned that we need to experience emotional intimacy beyond our immediate families, it seems an inescapable conclusion. And not to have these wider experiences both raises questions about the nature of our family relationships and threatens them. For to expect that all of one’s needs for emotion intimacy with adults can be satisfied by one person is to put an almost unbearable burden on any association. And to attempt to do so suggests an immaturity and overdependency that is detrimental to the experience and expression of love. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
If we are two independent individuals who recognize that we are essentially alone and do not fool ourselves into believing that we do not in the last analysis live essentially separate lives, even in marriage we are most happy and fulfilled. To attempt to avoid our essential loneliness and isolation through neurotic dependence on each other is a pseudo escape from an important reality. Let there be spaces in your togetherness for the pillars of the temple stand apart, and the oak and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow. Although our increased mobility and decreased clan experiences have tended to brings us face to face with our loneliness and isolation, the net results may not be negative. If we can develop close tires with others in spite of the fears of love that deter us, we may discover there are better reasons for intimacy than those created by the happenstance of being related by common ancestry. Three married couples formed a very close and loving relations that has existed over a period of seven or eight years. They have probably been together on an average of two times a month during that times. Since some members of the group had a professional interest in psychotherapy, it was not unnatural that the group frequently explored their feelings about each other and other relationships in their lives, often talking long into the night. Sometimes violent feelings came to the surface that seemed likely to split the couples apart. The strength of these feelings should put a red flag on some of one’s interpersonal relations. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
If an individual finds oneself verbally going in and hurting other people quite viciously and unintentionally or unconsciously, it is important to be able to better understand that one is somehow responding to an internal force rather than the situation he or she is involved in. Sometimes when a person feels another individual pulling away from them, the response to their living one psychologically is for the individual who feels they may be abandoned to go after that individual even more strongly, which is self-defeating since all they do is withdraw even more rapidly. Many individuals respond to abandonment by giving full vent to the hostility and anger that they are experiencing and blame it complete on the person with him they are involved with. However, it is best to stop whatever it is that one is doing and try, as honestly as one possibly can, to say to the other person: I do not feel I am being very fair with you,” or something to that effect, which lets him or her know that a bit of irrationality has exhibited itself and it has really confused the issues that we were discussing. Another important lesson is not to fear that irrational side. Know that it is there and know that there is enough sanity to not be afraid to give full vent to that irrational part of oneself, since it does two things: it can give an individual clearer handles as to where it came from, as well as giving the other person an opportunity to be more able to cope with one more as a total person in a more beneficial way. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
Each time people are honest, individuals can emerge from these experiences with deeper feelings of love for each other. Sometimes, in conflicts, what is actually going on is people are acting out a lot of the hostility that they have towards one of their parents, and it takes some insight into one’s own soul to understand the emotion that is influencing one’s response to another individual on what they thought were non-emotional issues. At times people feel defensiveness about reflecting on their own emotions, as they do not know what they will reveal about themselves. These feelings can be compounded by normal conflicts that happen during the day, which could lead to a blow on, when that is not a rational response. People who have unresolved issues are often emotionally dangling on the edge of a cliff with almost no way of rescue. If people realize they have problems, then they can do something about them by facing them. Those who get help have a desire not to let destructive impulses take over their lives. By revealing what the underlying situation involves, it leaves one to have more optimistic experiences with others and can lead to an increase in one’s feeling of personal significance, and in confidence regarding one’s ability to succeed at making connections with people. One can then proceed to enjoy more the human encounter. It is interesting that one of the most empathic themes of the New Testament is the importance attached to the experience of love among the early Christians as expressed in such phrases as, “Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
One reason for this emphasis on love, in addition to the teachings of Jesus, may have been the fact that in some instances conversion to Christianity meant complete spitting up of families who were hostile to the new sect and its members. With such isolation and loneliness thrust upon them, the new converts would naturally seek to satisfy their need for intimacy with each other. They did, no doubt, have the same fear of love that hinders us, for the record shows they bickered among themselves and found many ways to deprive themselves of experiencing and expressing the love they longed for. Can the expression of pleasures of the flesh can be exclusive? Certainly, if we choose to, we can limit expression of pleasures of the flesh to one person. There are any ways of expressing love to others in addition to expressing it through pleasures of the flesh. We are free to choose whatever way or ways we wish. From a mental health standpoint it is important to make this choice a conscious decision. A great many men and women expend a great deal of emotional energy attempting to avoid awareness of pleasures of the flesh for anyone other than a spouse. When awareness of desire does creep in they feel guilty and frightened because they do not trust themselves we the power of a conscious choice. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
We have already examined the damage to emotional and physical health that such dulling of awareness can bring about. If we can recognize and accept within ourselves that we do—in common with most of humanity—have such desires for pleasures of the flesh, it will be much more healthy. However, also keep in mind some people choose to abstain. Nonetheless, for those who choose to have adult relationships with passionate intimacy, they can enjoy the delicious feelings and decide on a conscious level what, if anything, they want to do about them. It is surprising how many people imagine they are somewhat unusual in having strong desires for pleasures of the flesh for more than one person. This is probably particularly true with women, for whom it is not culturally acceptable to have such feelings. However, women who are alive to their feelings do have these desires, and it is often a great relief to a woman to find she is not unique in this respect. As a culture we are quite reluctant to openly examine the fact that large numbers of married persons do not choose to be exclusive in their relationships. We are probably particularly afraid to recognize that any possible good could result from extramarital affairs. To do so might seem to condone or even encourage such behavior and perhaps lead to the collapse of our monogamous system, at least as we know it. However, if that system is of value and if it is not already a fiction, then the open examination of all relevant questions certainly should not destroy it. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
On the one hand it is undoubtedly true that many extramarital relationships are destructive events in which the individual is using a conquest as another way of avoiding intimacy, while on the other hand there are other instances where individuals appear to be open up to the experience and expression of love in an affair in a way in which they have not been able to do with a spouse. One of these aspects of marriage that we do not like to admit is the fact that it may not be most conducive to the experience of love. There are many reasons a married person can find for not feeling close to a spouse. There may be unspoken resentments about any number of things that have been built up over a period of time. The relationship may be experienced primarily in terms of obligation and duty so that the experience of freedom so conducive to love has evaporated in that trapped feeling. It is probably true that these are ways in which we avoid experiencing the love that is there because of our fear of love. However, be that as it may, it is not surprising that some people find they experience love more freely outside of marriage. Some people have an uncommon personal warmth, gentility, and graciousness. We often find the minds of others to be highly developed faculties of critical observation joined with an innate reverence for the sacred to explore the fundamental issues of the human heart: knowledge of its present state, of its higher potentials, of the nature of the Universe. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
Being intellectually stimulated is a very important quality in any relationship. Many people have a sincere inner aspiration for deeper knowledge and experience of the inviolable spirit within their own hearts. We are simply human beings exploring ever more profound truths with increasing depth and concentration. Freedom is thus more than a value itself: it underlies the possibility of valuing; it is basic to our capacity to value. Without freedom there is no value worthy of the name. In this time of disintegration of concern for pubic weal and private honor, in this time of the demise of our values, our recovery—if we are to achieve it—must be cased on our coming to terms with this source of all values: freedom. This is why freedom is so important as a goal of psychotherapy, for whatever values the client develops will be based upon one’s experience of autonomy, sense of personal power and possibilities, all of which are based on the freedom one hopes to achieve in therapy. “And I will show you something different from either your shadow at morning striding behind you. I will show you fear in a handful of dust. A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had on done so many,” The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot (1922). What followed the publication of Eliot’s poem, and what I believe Eliot was predicting, was the waste land of our culture, the disintegration of the World we all had know and counted on, The Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, World War II and the Savings and Loan Crises. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
Nobody knew it would happen then—except the artists. Even if T.S. Eliot would have known it consciously, I doubt it. However, when he wrote that poem, he knew it unconsciously with the genius of the poet. It is woven around the medieval myth of the wasteland and its impotent king. Eliot pictures our age as a wasteland in which the king has lost his potency and hence cannot procreate, a land in which no crops can grow, a land that is wasting away. The king is powerless to do anything about it. The whole poem is a fantastic prophecy—by common consent one of the great classic. In the same year, 1922, The Great Gatsby by F, Scott Fitzgerald appeared. Several films were made of this novel which I think were travesties; they missed the whole point of the story. Actually The Great Gatsby is a prediction of the demise of the American Dream, the dream that everybody can get rich like Horatio Alger. In this novel Fitzgerald draws the picture of a man who believes he can make himself over into anything he wishes: he sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He had a ferocious indifference to the drums of his destiny, to destiny itself. At one point Gatsby cries incredulously, “Can’t repeat the past? Why of course you can!” He believed he could do anything, he worshipped change, with no regard for destiny or society. Here is a man who believed in optimistic thinking with a vengeance. He lived by the belief that destiny and determinism had no place in this World. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
The novel ends in a crashing tragedy—a tragedy which the human potential movement the New Age people have not yet appreciated, even in the early 2000’s. If it does not give it some kind of religious meaning, if it does not make of it the analogy of a sacrament, the legal character of punishment has no true significance; and therefore all penal offices, from that of the judge to that of the executioner and the prison guard, should in some sort share in the priestly office. Justice in punishment can be defined in the same way as justice in almsgiving. It means giving our attention to the victim of affliction as to a being not a thing; it means wishing to preserve in one the faculty of free consent. When they are really despising the weakness of affliction, mortals think they are despising crime. One is thus the object of the greatest contempt. Contempt is the contrary of attention. There are exceptions only where there is a crime which for some reason has prestige, as is often the case with murder on account of the fleeting moment of power which it implies, or where the crime does not make a very vivid impression upon those who assess it culpability. Stealing is the crime most devoid of prestige, and it causes most indignation because property is the thing to which people are most generally and powerfully attached. Even in the penal code, that is apparent. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
No state is beneath that of a human being enveloped in cloud of guilt, be it true or false, and entirely in the power of a few mortals who are to decide one’s fate with a mortal who are to decide one’s fate with a word. These mortals do not pay any attention to one. Moreover, from the moment when anyone falls into the hands of the law with all its penal machinery until the moment one is free again—and those known as hardened criminals are like Neil Caffery in the TV Series White Collar, in that they hardly ever do get free until the day of their death—such a one is never an object of attention. Everything combines, down to the smallest details, down even to the inflections of people’s voices, to make one seem vile and outcast in all mortal’s eyes including one’s own. The brutality and flippancy, the terms of scorn and the jokes, the way of speaking, the way of listening and of not listening, all these things are equally effective. There is no intentional unkindness in it all. It is the automatic effect of a professional life which has as its object crime seen in the form of affliction, that is to day in the form of horror and defilement are exposed in their starkness. Such contact, being uninterrupted, necessarily contaminates, and the form this contamination takes is contempt. It is this contempt which is reflected on every prisoner at the bar. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
The penal apparatus is like a transmitter which turns the whole volume of defilement contained in all the circles where the miserable crime is to be found upon each accused person. The mere contact with this penal apparatus causes a kind of horror in part of the soul remaining intact, and the horror is in exact proportion to the innocence. Those who are completely rotten receive no injury and do not suffer. If there is not something between the penal apparatus and the crime capable of cleansing defilement, it cannot be otherwise. This can only be God. Infinite purity alone is not contaminated by contact with evil. All finite purity becomes defilement itself through prolonged contact. However, the code may be reformed, punishment cannot be human unless it passes through Christ. The severity of the sentence is not the most important thing. Under present conditions, a condemned mortal, although guilty and given a punishment which is relatively light in view of one’s offense, can more often than not be rightly considered as having been the victim of cruel injustice. What is important is that the punishment should be legitimate, that is to say that is should be recognized as having a divine character, not because of its content but because it is the law. It is important that the whole organization of penal justice should be directed toward obtaining from the magistrates and their assistants the attention and respect for the accused that is due from every mortal to any person who may be in one’s power and from the accused one’s consent to the punishment inflicted, a consent of which the innocent Christ has given us the perfect model. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
A death sentence for a slight offense, pronounced in such a way, would be less horrible than a sentence of six months in prison given as it is at the present day. Nothing is more frightful than the spectacle, now so frequent, of an accused, whose situation provides one with nothing to fall back on, but one’s own words, and who is incapable of arranging these words because of one’s social origin and lack of culture, as one stands broken down by guilt, affliction, and fears, stammering before judges who are not listening and who interrupt one in tones of ostentatious refinement. For as long as affliction is to be found in society, for as long as legal or private almsgiving and punishment are inevitable, the separation between civil institutions and religious life will be a crime. The lay conception considered alone is completely false. It only has some excuse as a reaction against a totalitarian religion. In that respect, it must be admitted, it is partly justifiable. In order to be present everywhere, as it should, religion must not only not be totalitarian, but it must limit itself strictly to the plane of supernatural love which alone is suitable for it. If it did so it would penetrate everywhere. The Bible says: “Wisdom penetrates everywhere on account of its perfect purity.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
Through the absence of Christ, mendicity, in the widest sense of the word, and penal action are perhaps the most frightful things on the Earth—two things that are almost infernal. They have the very color of hell. Prostitution might be added to them, for it is to real marriage what almsgiving and punishment without charity are to almsgiving and punishment which are just. Mortals have received the power to do good or harm not only to body but to the souls of their fellows, to the whole soul of those in whom God is not present and to all that part of the soul uninhabited by God of the others. A mortal may be indwelt by God, by the power of evil or merely by the mechanism of the flesh. When one gives or punishes, what one bears within one enters the soul of the other through the bread of the sword. The substance of the bread and the sword are virgin, empty of good and of evil, equally capable of conveying one or the other. One who is forced by affliction to receive bread or to suffer chastisement as one’s could exposed in starkness and defenseless both to evil and to good. There is only one way of never receiving anything but good. It is to know, with our whole soul and not just abstractly, that mortals who are not animated by pure charity are merely wheels in the mechanism of the order of the World, like inert matter. After that we see that everything comes directly from God, either through the love of a mortal, or through the lifelessness of matter, whether it be tangible or psychic, through spirit or water. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
All that increases the vital energy in us is like the bread for which Christ thanks the just. All the blows, the wounds, and the mutilations are like a stone thrown at us by the hand of Christ. Bread and stone both come from Christ and penetrating to our inward being bring Christ into us. Bread and stone are love. We must eat the bread and lay ourselves open to the stone, so that it may skin as deeply as possible into our flesh. If we have any armor able to protect our soul from the stones thrown by Christ, we should take it off and cast it away. Our World is manifold, and our attitudes are manifold. What is manifold is often frightening because it is not neat and simple. Mortal prefer to forget how many possibilities are often to them. They like to be told that there are two World and two ways. This is comforting because it is so tidy. Almost always one way turns out to be common and the other one is celebrated as superior. Those who tell of two ways and praise one are recognized as prophets or great teachers. They save mortals from confusion and hard choices. They offer a single choice that is easy to make because those who do not take the path that is commended to them live a wretched life. To walk far on this path may be difficult, but the choice is easy, and to hear the celebration of this path is pleasant. Wisdom offers simple schemes, but truth is not so simple. Not all simplicity is wide. However, a wealth of possibilities breeds dread. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
Hence, those who speak of many possibilities speak of the few and are of help to even fewer. The wise offer only two ways, of which one is good, and thus help many. We are to enter a new and different rhythm and tell such as will listen that they need not be forlorn, lost, or without hope because they find one to appeal to their hearts or mind. They are asked to follow the God within themselves, for the Kingdom of Heaven is within you. Those who feel alone in this matter or who can only walk outside the groups on an independent path should be reminded that there is a God within them who can guide and help them if they turn to him. The Quest not only begins in the heart but also ends there too. It is an endeavour to lift to a higher plane, and expand to a larger measure, the whole of one’s identity. It brings in the most important part of oneself—being, essence, consciousness. One know thyself! There is a whole philosophy distilled into the single and simple statement. Between the ordinary mortal who takes oneself is one is, and the philosopher who does exactly the same, there stands the Quester. In the first case, outlook is narrow, being limited by attending to the inescapable necessities and demands of day-to-day living. In other case, peace of mind has been established, the thirst for knowledge fulfilled, the discipline of self realized. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
In between these two, the Questers is not satisfied with oneself, has a strong wish to become a better and more enlightened mortal. One tires to exercise one’s will in the struggle for realization of one’s ideal. It lifts human consciousness vertically and enlarges human experience spiritually. If the Infinite Being is trying to express its own nature within the limitations of this Earth—and therefore trying to express itself through us, too—it is our highest duty to search for and cultivate our diviner attributes. Only in this way do we really fulfill ourselves. This search and this cultivation constitute the Quest. It offers a conception of life which originates on a higher level. The Quest is both a search for truth and dedication to the Overself. By “Quest” I mean the deliberate and conscious dedication to the search for spiritual truth, freedom, or awareness. The inner meaning of life does not readily reveal itself; it must be searched for. Such a search is the Quest. “Who among you fears the LORD and obeys the word of his servant? Let one who walks in the dark, who has no light, trust in the name of the LORD and rely on one’s God,” reports Isaiah 50.10-11. It is the Lord who gives salvation even unto Kings, it is the Lord who delivered even David from the hateful sword; let our sons grow as plants grow, and let our daughters be cornerstones, polished as if they were the cornerstones of the palace…happy is that people, whose God is the Lord. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
I Fed My Heart Some Jello and Birdseed with a Little Silver Spoon and it Became a Little Yellow Canary which Sang and was Happy!
All beauty is contained in the ever-changing waves of the sea. It is a beautiful carving, harmoniously bringing forms and sounds together, which are part of totality, and woven together with the serenity we expect from the divine. But oh, the great World is such a wilderness of marvels. I am very happy. It is the joy that goes with the serenity of beauty. The genius of the films as an art form is that they can re-enact myth and symbol. In films we can combine fantasy and actuality, unite past and present and future; and what the beholder sees is not merely a spectacle. One experiences in one’s own emotions what the character on the screen is experiencing. As was demonstrated so well in the film Romeo Must Die, one is able to experience this Hero, Han (Jet Li) through his fantasies, his daydreams, his anxieties and hopes and fears, his plans and his memories. In this sense movies have claim to being the unique art form for our day. They can move instantaneously from childhood, to the present, to an imagined future, and can move from action to fantasy at will. Their genius is in encompassing and stimulating the imagination of the viewer. For many—perhaps most—people, the primary source of joy is other people. However, joy implies the possibility of misery; where there is ecstasy, so is there agony; if hell is other people, so is the divine. The theory pinpoints the arenas of joy and misery as the interpersonal-need areas called inclusion, control, and affection. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
The fear of time—the inexorable rolling on of fate, of entropy in our Universe which continues even though we may blot out our awareness of it can be a source of our most severe anxiety. The experience of time hanging over our heads like a sword of Damocles in a subjective phenomenon, private and personal. The symbol and the legends are our ways of holding its threats at bay. The many legends of the afterlife—Heaven, reincarnation, the final conflict—are examples. The legend of progress and the legend of symbolic immortality are all parts of our struggle to make time meaningful. Inclusion behavior refers to association between people, being excluded or included, belonging, togetherness. The need to be included manifests itself as wanting to be attended to, and to attract attention and interest. The classroom hellion who throws erasers is often objecting mostly to the lack of attention paid to him or her. Even if the individual is given negative affection one is partially satisfied, because at least someone is paying attention to him or her. Symbols are our source of freedom and civilization. That is, from our capacity to form into symbols the mass of experiences which impinge upon us as infants, we are able to establish some distance from the World in which we can infuse meaning into our experience. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
The symbol-forming process is not born with the birth of the infant but begins to emerge after ten or twelve months. It is one aspect of the development of the infant’s capacity for self-consciousness. This growth is required before the infant is mature enough to abstract itself from the situation and to embrace itself and the World in the same concept. Between these two opposite things—self on the one hand and World on the other—there is a greater or lesser tension. We call this tension awakeness, alertness. It is out of this tension that symbols are born. Symbols, and symbolic thinking, are one aspect of consciousness and self-awareness. The capacity to be aware that I am telling the truth emerges simultaneously with my capacity for telling a lie. The lie is a behavior of transcendence. Being a distinct person, that is, having an identity, is an essential aspect of inclusion. An integral part of being recognized and paid attention to is that the individual be distinguishable from other people. One must be known as a specific individual; one must have a particular identity. The extreme of this identification is that one be understood. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
To be understood implies that someone is interested enough on one to find out one’s characteristics. When, say, from the first to the third year, the symbols the infant picks up are doctrines and covenants that are too rigid, made so by too much anxiety on the infant’s part arising from over-permissiveness or over-rigidity on the part of the parents, the infant’s capacity to develop symbols is partially block. A rigidity is begun which limits not only the child’s symbol-forming from then on, but also the child’s openness to the countless symbols that are available in our culture. Then we have a rigid, unfree, drive person, who in later life may well be termed neurotic. This is the curtailing and destruction in the person of the capacity to grow, to change, to create. It may set an almost insurmountable barrier for the creativity of art later on, or the child, when he or she gets to be adults, may well revolt against the whole society and become an artist! An issue that arises frequently at the outset of interpersonal relation is that of commitment, the decision to become involved in a given relation or activity. Usually, in the initial testing of a relationship, individuals try to present themselves to one another, partly to find out in which facet of themselves others will be interested. Frequently, a member is initially silent because he or she is not sure that people are interested in one, a concern about inclusion. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
The flavor of inclusion is conveyed through such concepts as interacting with people, with attention, acknowledgement, prominence, recognition, and prestige; with identity, individuality, and interest. It is unlike affection in that it does not involve strong emotional attachments to individual persons. It is unlike control in that the preoccupation is with prominence, not dominance. Just as the symbol-forming power may be arrested in individuals, so also it may be altered, for good or ill, in whole populations. For civilizations are themselves dependent precisely on symbolism. By superseding instinct, the symbol makes civilization possible. Symbolism is so woven into our civilization that our language depends on it. The World is a symbol, and its meaning is constituted by the ideas, images and emotions, which it raises in the mind of the hearer. Language, art and symbolism on the deeper level are identical. Control behavior refers to the decision-making process between people, and the areas of power, influence, and authority. The need for control varies along a continuum from the desire for power, authority, and control over others (and therefore over one’s future), to the need to be controlled, and have responsibility lifted from oneself. An argument provides the setting for distinguishing the inclusion-seeker from the control-seeker. The one seeking inclusion or prominence wants very much to be one of the participants in the argument, while the control-seeker wants to be the winner or, if not the winner, on the same side of the winner. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
The prominence-seeker would prefer to be the losing participant; the dominance-seeker would prefer to be a winning nonparticipant. For symbolism is our stand against the rule of sheer instinct. It is the bulwark by which civilization and art tame sheer instinct. In place of the force of instinct which suppresses individuality, society has gained the efficacy of symbols, at once preservative of the commonweal and the individual standpoint. The function of reason is not at all to compete with symbols or to try to suppress all symbols and legends. It is to judge between them. Reason should rightly operate to purify and clarify symbols; it is detrimental to the soul to try by reason to destroy them. Control is also manifested in behavior directed toward people who try to control others. Expressions of independence and rebellion exemplify lack of willingness to be controlled, while compliance, submission, and taking orders indicate various degrees of accepting the control of others. There is no necessary relation between an individual’s behavior toward controlling others and one’s behavior toward being controlled. Two persons who control others may differ in the degree to which they allow others to control them. The domineering sergeant, for example, may accept orders from one’s lieutenant with pleasure and gratefulness, while the neighborhood bully may also rebel against his or her parents. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
Advances in civilization threaten the very society which discovers them. The art of free society consists first in the maintenance of a symbolic code; and secondly in the fearlessness of revision, to secure that the code serves those purposes which satisfy an enlightened reason. Those societies which cannot combine reverence to their symbols with freedom of revision, must ultimately decay either from anarchy, or from the slow atrophy of life stifled by useless shadows. Control behavior differs from inclusion behavior in that it does not require prominence. The power behind the throne is an excellent example of a role that would fill a high control-need and a low need for inclusion. The joker exemplifies a high inclusion-need and a low need for control. Control behavior differs from affection behavior in that it has to do with power relations rather than emotional closeness. The frequent difficulties between those who want to get down to business and those who want to get to know one another illustrate a situation in which control behavior is more important for some and affection behavior for others. Affection behavior refers to close personal emotional feelings between two people, especially love and hate in their various degrees. Affection is a dyadic relation; it can occur only between pairs of people at any one time, whereas both inclusions and control relations may occur either in dyads or between one person and a group of persons. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
Artists know this intuitively. With fearless energy, poets, painters, architects, musicians, and sculptors expose us to the contents of the symbols. Often the results of such creative action disconcert us. However, the artist’s job is not to comfort—nor even to inform and instruct. The artist’s purpose is to liberate, to cleanse the creative process of those rationalized accretions which we invent in order to shield ourselves from the powerful truth of authentic symbols. Good art wounds as well as delights. It must, because our defenses against the truth are wound so tightly around us. However, as art chips away at our defenses, it also opens us to healing potentialities that transcend intellectual games and ego-preserving strategies. The future of our civilization, its survival and health, is inseparable from the future of its art. Modern art is thus neither a luxury nor a decorative excrescence hanging on the edges of culture. Art is central to any civilization which hopes to remain vital and healthy. In groups, affection behavior is characterized by overtures of friendship and differentiation between members. A common method of avoiding a close tie with any one member is to be equally friendly to all members. Thus, popularity may not involve affection at all; it may be inclusion behavior, as contrasted with going steady, which is usually primarily affection. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
A discussion of the nature of love cannot, perhaps, be had without talking about what might be called unequal love relationships. Between a parent and a small child, for example, there is a natural inequality. The parent (hopefully!) is capable of a more mature love than the child and will find satisfaction in expressing love and meeting needs of the child that arise from the natural dependency of the child. The child, on the other hand, no matter how responsive, cuddling, and love one is, remains a child and cannot meet the same needs in the parent that a mature adult could. If the parent has been and is so lacking in other satisfying love experiences that one demands satisfaction of needs that are beyond the capabilities and maturity of the child, the adult is bound to feel frustrated; for the inequality in the relationship is the natural order of things. When a markedly unequal relationship exists between two adults, questions arise about the nature of the feelings involved. For example, a woman may live with a husband she had slowly fallen out of love with. He may contribute little or nothing to her support; indeed she may support him. When he is not feeling well, he may sometimes be physically cruel to her. An outsider looking at the relationship can see a dozen ways in which she would be better off if she locked him out of home and heart. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
If she is asked why she continues the relationship she may say, “Well, I feel sorry for him and just cannot bring myself to divorce him. I keep hoping he will get better, but I guess I really know that is unlikely to happen. And in spite of it all, I love him. I really do!” Is this love? Who can judge? Who can dispute the woman’s word that she has a deep caring for her husband? However, when the relationship is examined, serious questions arise. The desirable thing that happen in a loving relationship are not occurring here. The mutual enjoyment that marks a relationship of love can only be said to exist, if at all, on a very minimal level. It would appear that she, by staying with him, is stifling many of her opportunities for growth. One might be easily fooled by appearances into believing that she loves her husband unconditionally, for she makes few apparent demands upon him. However, it would seem impossible that she does not have a great deal of hostility toward him, though she may not recognize it, which she does not express directly. And perhaps her undemanding stance is the expression of her hostility, for in so doing she encourages him to play indefinitely the role of a dependent individual who does not need to take responsibility for one’s own life. It might well be a more honest expression of her feelings and potentially better for both of them if she kicked him out. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
What prompts her to continue the relationship? There are probably several reasons. She may be so filled with self-hate that she would not be comfortable if she were not in a marriage where she is constantly hurt. Every counselor has witnessed situations in which a relationship such as the one described has terminated for some reason and the woman has almost immediately entered into a new alliance that is equally hurtful (and predictably so), suggesting that she has a deep-seated need to be punished. Then again she may be so insecure about herself and her worth that she feels that even so hurtful a marriage is better than none. Feeling it unlikely that anyone more satisfying would have anything to do with her, she avoids the potential loneliness and isolation she pictures herself as experiencing without her husband. Fear of love may also be a potent factor in perpetuating the marriage. Without being aware of it, she may feel safer in an alliance where the experience of love is minimal at best. As we have already seen, a relationship in which we are free to express and receive love, free to express our anger, and free to do what we want to do is frightening. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
Even a hurtful association may somehow represent safety to us if it helps us to feel that we are not free to experience these freedoms. So when we find ourselves in a relationship in which there is almost constant hurt and we are continually frustrated in our growth and other satisfactions, we may need to ask ourselves why we continue it. Even though we may be quite correct when we say we love the person, this is likely not the real reason we continue a course of action so damaging to us. It will be helpful at this point to recognize again that love never exists in an unalloyed form. Each of us brings our existing self to any relationship—our fear, our past experiences of hurt our self-hate, and our feelings that we are unlovable. All of these factors enter in to contaminate any experience of intimacy into which we may enter. So it will be always true that we are only partially able to enjoy each other’s presence, be empathetic, provide maximum opportunity for each other’s growth, and love each other unconditionally. However, for must of us even the partial experience of love will seem worth the effort. Having examined some of the qualities of love, it becomes apparent that a great deal of pleasures of the flesh has little, if anything, to do with the expression of affection, despite our professed ideals to the contrary. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
A difference between inclusion behavior, control behavior, and affection behavior is illustrated by the different feelings a mortal has in being turned down by a fraternity, failed in a course by a professor, and rejected by his young lady. The fraternity excludes him, telling him that they as a group do not have sufficient interest in him. The professor fails him and says, in effect, that he finds him incompetent in his field. His young lady rejects him, implying that she does not find him lovable. With respect to an interpersonal relation, inclusion is concerned primarily with the formation of a relation, whereas control and affection are concerned with relations already formed. Within existent relations, control is the area concerned with who gives orders and makes decisions for whom, whereas affection is concerned with how emotionally close or distant the relation becomes. Inclusion is concerned with the problem in or out, control is concerned with top or bottom, and affection with close or far. The specific difficulties that arise in each area, and that must be overcome in order to realize the full potential of human relationships. Since the inclusion area involves the process of formation, it usually occurs first in the life of a group. People must decide whether they do or do not want to form a group. The issues of interaction are those of making contact, or encounter. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
A person who has too little inclusion, who will be called undersocial, tends to be introverted and withdrawn. Consciously, one wants to maintain this distance between himself and others, and insists that he does not want to get emmeshed with people and lose his privacy. However, unconsciously, he definitely wants others to pay attention to him. His biggest fears are that people will ignore him, generally have no interest in him, and would just as soon leave him behind. His unconscious attitude may be summarized by, “No one is interested in me, so I am not going to risk being ignored. I will stay away from people and get along by myself.” There is a strong drive toward self-sufficiency as a technique for existence without others. Behind his withdrawal is the private feeling that others do not understand him. His deepest anxiety, that referring to the self concept, is that he is worthless. He thinks that if no one ever considered him important enough to receive attention, he must be of no value whatsoever. It is likely that this basic fear of abandonment or isolation is the most potent of all interpersonal fears. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
The oversocial person tends toward extraversion. He seeks people incessantly and wants them to seek him out. He is also afraid they will ignore him. His unconscious feelings are the same as those of the withdrawn person, but his overt behavior is the opposite. His unconscious attitude is summarized by, “Although no one is interested in me, I will make people pay attention to me in anyway I can.” His inclination is always to seek companionship. He is the type who “cannot stand alone.” All of his activities will be designed to be done “together.” The interpersonal behavior of the oversocial type of person is designed to focus attention on himself, to make people notice him, to be prominent. The direct method is to be an intensive, exhibitionistic participator. By simply forcing himself on the group he forces the group to focus attention on him. The more subtle technique is to try to acquire power (control) or try to be well liked (affection), but for the primary purpose of gaining attention. To the individual for whom the resolution of inclusion relations was successful in childhood, interaction with people present no problem. He is comfortable with people and comfortable being alone. He can be a high or low participator in a group, or can take a moderate role equally well, without anxiety. He is capable of strong commitment to and involvement with certain groups and also can withhold commitment if he feels it is appropriate. Unconsciously, he feels that he is a worthwhile, significant person. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
Several methods help to being out inclusion feelings. They focus on the issues involving contact and human encounter, and help to clarify the feelings and lead to some effective coping methods. Difficult as it is really to listen to someone in affliction, it is just as difficult for one to know that compassion is listening to one. The love of our neighbor is the love which comes down from God to mortals It precedes that which rises from mortals to God. God is longing to come down to those in affliction. As soon as a soul is disposed to consent, though it were the last, the most miserable, the most deformed of souls, God will precipitate himself into it to order, through it to look at and listen to the afflicted. Only as time passes does the soul become aware that God is there. However, though it finds no name for him, wherever the afflicted are loved for themselves along, it is God who is present. God is not present, even if we invoke him, where the afflicted are merely regarded as an occasion for doing. They may even be loved on this account, but then they are in their natural role, the role of matter and of things. We have to being to them in their inert, anonymous condition a personal love. Care of the soul requires our appreciation of these ways it presents itself. It is important, then, to revere the spirit and to let the soul burst into life—in creativity, individuality, and imagination. #RandolpHarris 16 of 16
Sometimes One Can Mistake Gratitude for Love—Dogs are Hardly an Article of Faith
Love or the lack of it is at the root of everything. Guard your children. Weigh wisdom of intervention if such is even possible. Ponder the question of inevitability. To cease wishing is a contemporary emotional and spiritual wasteland, almost like inhabiting the land of the dead. Another characteristic is satiety; if wishes are thought of only as pushed toward gratification, the end consisting of the satisfying of the need, the reality is that emptiness and vacuity and futility are greatest where all wishes are met. For this means one stops wishing. Without faith we cannot want anymore, we cannot wish. The truth of faith consists in true symbols concerning the ultimate. And the faithful is one human being with the power of thought and the need for conceptual understanding. There is a dimension of meaning expressed in the symbolism of the whish, this is what gives the wish its specifically human quality, and without this meaning, the emotional and spiritual aspects of wanting become dried up. When we have faith, it is a symbol that peace and prosperity are just around the corner and it is only a matter of time until all our need will be met. However, the relation to the ultimate is not the same in each case. The philosophical relation is in principle a detached description of the basic structure in which the ultimate manifests itself. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
The relation of faith is in principle an involved expression of concern about the meaning of the ultimate for the faithful. The difference is obvious and fundamental. However, it is, as the phrase “in principle” indicates, a difference which is not maintained in the actual life of philosophy and of faith. It cannot be maintained, because the philosopher is a human being with an ultimate concern, hidden or open. And the faithful one is a human being with the power of thought and the need for conceptual understanding. This is not only a biological fact. It has consequences for the life of philosophy in the philosopher and or the life of faith in the faithful. An analysis of philosophical systems, essays or fragments of all kinds shows that the direction in which the philosopher asks the question and the preference one gives to special types of answers is determined by cognitive consideration and by a state of ultimate concern. The historically most significant philosophies show not only the greatest power of thought but the most passionate concern about the meaning of the ultimate whose manifestations they describe. The philosophy, in its genuine meaning, is carried on by people in whom passions of an ultimate concern is united with a clear and detached observation of the way ultimate reality manifests itself in the process of the Universe. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
At most general faith means much the same as trust. Therefore, we are being asked to have faith as knowledge of specific truths revealed by God. Faith is a practical commitment beyond the evidence to one’s belief that God exists. We are to have a firm and certain knowledge of God’s benevolence towards us, founded upon the truth of the freely given promise in Christ, both revealed to our minds and sealed upon our hearts through the Holy Spirit. It is this element of ultimate concern behind the philosophical ideas which supplies the truth of faith in them. Our vision of the Universe and our predicament within it unites faith and conceptual work. We may hold that in our sinful state we will inevitably offer a resistance to faith that may be overcome only by God’s grace. It is, however, a further step for individuals of faith to put their revealed knowledge into practice by trusting their lives to God and seeking to obey his will. Humans contain the potentialities of these creative principles, and can choose to make their lives an ascent towards and then a union with the intuitive intelligence. The One is not a being, but infinite being. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
Thus Christian and Jewish philosophers who held to a creator God could affirm such a conception that God is infinite, and created the World. God, as the creator of all, is not far from any one of us. Philosophy is not only the mother’s womb out of which science and history have come, it is also an ever-present element in actual scientific and historical work. The frame of reference within which the great physicists have seen and are seeing the Universe of their inquiries is philosophical, even if their actual inquiries verify it. In no case is it a result of their discoveries. It is always a vision of the totality of being which consciously or unconsciously determines the frame of their thought. Because this is so one justified in saying that even in the scientific view of reality an element of faith is effective. Scientific view of reality an element of faith is effective. Scientists rightly try to prevent these elements of faith and philosophical truth from interfering with their actual research. This is possible to a great extent; but even the most protected experiment is not absolutely pure—pure in the sense of the exclusion of interfering factors such as the observer, and as the interest which determines the kind of question asked of nature in an experiment. What we said about the philosopher must also be said about the scientist. Even in one’s scientific work one is a human being, grasped by an ultimate concern, and one asks the question of the Universe as such, the philosophical question. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
Intellectual inquiry into the faith is to be understood as faith seeking understanding (fides quaerens intellectum). To believe is to thin with assent (credere est assensione cogitare). It is an act of the intellect determined not by the reason, but by the will. Faith involves a commitment to believe in a God, to believe God, and to believe in God. What is eternal is unchanging. In the same way the historian is consciously or unconsciously a philosopher. It is quite obvious that every task of the historian beyond finding of the facts is dependent on evaluation of historical factors, especially the nature of mortals, one’s freedom, one’s determination, one’s development out of nature and so forth. It is less obvious but also true that even in the fact of finding historical facts philosophical presuppositions are involved. This is especially true in deciding, out of the infinite number of happenings in every infinitely small moment of time, which facts shall be called historically relevant facts. The historian is further forced to give one’s evaluation of sources and their reliability, a task which is not independent of one’s interpretation of human nature. Finally, in the moment in which a historical work gives implicit or explicit assertions about the meaning of historical events for human existence, the philosophical presuppositions of history are evident. Where there is philosophy there is an expression of an ultimate concern; there is an element of faith, however hidden it may be by the passions of the historian for pure facts. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
God does not possess anything superadded to his essence, and his essence includes all his perfections. No one can attain to truth unless one philosophizes in the light of faith. Our faith in eternal salvation shows that we have theological truths that exceed human reason. And if one could attain truths about religious claims without faith, these truths would be incomplete. Higher truths are attained through faith. All these consideration show that, in spite of their essential difference, there is an actual union of philosophical truth and the truth of faith in every philosophy and that this union is significant for the work of the scientist and the historian. This union has been called philosophical faith. The term is misleading, because it seems to confuse the two elements, philosophical truth and the truth of faith. Furthermore, the term seems to indicate that there is one philosophical faith, a philosophia perennis, as it has been termed. However, only philosophical questions are perennial, not the answers. There is a continuous process of interpretation of philosophical elements and elements of faith, not one philosophical faith. Revealed theology is a single speculative science concerned with knowledge of God. Because of its greater certitude and higher dignity of subject matter, it is nobler than any other science. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
Philosophical theology, though, can make demonstrations using the articles of faith as its principles. Moreover, it can apologetically refute objections raised against the faith even if no articles of faith are presupposed. There is truth of faith in philosophical truth. And there is philosophical truth in the truth of faith. In order to see the latter point we must confront the conceptual expression of philosophical truth with the symbolical expression of truth of faith. Now, one can say that most philosophical concepts have mythological ancestors and that most mythological symbols have conceptual elements which can and must be developed as soon as the philosophical consciousness has appeared. In the idea of God the concepts of being, life, spirit, unity and diversity are implied. In the symbol of the creation concepts of finitude, anxiety, freedom and time are implied. The symbol of the “fall of Adam” implies a concept of mortal’s essential nature, of one’s conflict with oneself, of one’s estrangement from oneself. Only because every religious symbol has conceptual potentialities is theo-logy possible. There is a philosophy implied in every symbol of faith. However, faith does not determine the movement of the philosophical thought, just as philosophy does not determine the character of one’s ultimate concern. Symbols of faith can open the eyes of the philosopher to qualities of the Universe which otherwise would not have been recognized. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
Faith is the starting point, scripture offers the data, and philosophy is a supplement not a competitor. Faith, philosophy, and scripture help make sense of each other. However, faith does not command a definite philosophy, although churches and theological movements have claimed and used Platonic, Aristotelian, Kantian or Humean philosophies. The philosophical implications of the symbols of faith can be developed in many ways, but the truth of faith and the truth of philosophy have no authority over each other. In the past few years, a number of persons in psychiatry and related fields have been pondering and exploring the problems of wishing and willing. We may assume that this confluence of concern must be in answer to a strong need in out time for a new light on these problems. It is not wishing that cases illness but lack of wishing. The problem is to deepen people’s capacity to wish, and one side of our task in therapy is to create the ability to wish. Wish is an optimistic picturing in imagination. It is a transitive verb—to wish involves an act. Wishing is similar to faith because it allows us to see beyond our experience and knowledge and hope that something good may happen, and so we send out more beneficial vibrations into the Universe. Every genuine wish is a creative act. I find support for this in therapy: it is indeed a beneficial step when the patient can feel and state strongly, for example, “I wish to buy a beautiful Cresleigh home and feel safe and secure in my community.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
That wish, in effect, moves the conflict from a submerged, unarticulated plane in which one takes no responsibility but expects God and parent to read his or her wishes by telepathy, to an overt, healthy conflict over what one wants. On the basis of theological myth of creation God exults when mortals come through with a wish of one’s own. The wish in interpersonal relationship requires mutuality. This is a truth shown in its breach in many myths, and brings the person to one’s doom. Peer Gynt in Ibsen’s play runs around the World wishing and acting on his wishes; the only trouble is that is wishes have noting to do with the other person he meets but are entirely egocentric, encased in cask of self, sealed up with a bung of self. In The Sleeping Beauty, by the same token, the young princes who assault the briars in order to rescue and awaken the slumbering girl before the time is ripe, are exemplars of behavior which tries to force the other in love and pleasures of flesh before the other is ready; they exhibit a wishing without mutuality. The young princes are devoted to their own desires and needs without relation to Thou. If wish and will can be seen and experienced in this light of autonomous, imaginative acts of interpersonal mutuality, there is profound truth in St. Augustine’s dictum, “Love and do what you will.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
We cannot be naïve about human nature. We know full well that this wishing is stated in ideal terms. We know that the trouble is precisely that mortals do wish and will against their neighbor, that imagination is not only the source of our capacity to form the creative mutual wish but it is also bounded by the individual’s own limits, convictions, and experience; and, thus, there is always in our wishing an element of doing violence to the others as well as to ourselves, no matter how well analyzed we may be or how much the recipient of grace or how many times we have experienced satori. This is called the willful element, willful here being the insistence of one’s own wish against the reality of the situation. Willfulness is the kind of will motivated by defiance, in which the wish is more against something than for its object. The defiant, willful is correlated with fantasy rather than with imagination, and is the spirit which negates reality, whether it be a person or an aspect of impersonal nature, rather than sees it, forms it, respect it, or takes joy in it. There are two realms of will, the first consisting of an experience of the self in its totality, a relatively spontaneous movement in a certain direction. In this kind of willing, the body moves as a whole, and the experience is characterized by a relaxation and by an imaginative, open quality. This is an experience of freedom which is anterior to all talk about political or psychological freedom; it is a freedom, presupposed by the determinist and anterior to all the discussions of determinism. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
In contrast, the will of the second realm is that in which some obtrusive element enters is that in which some obtrusive element enters, some necessity for a decision of an either/or character, a decision with an element of an against something alone with a for something. If one uses the Freudian terminology, the “will of the Super-Ego” would be included in their realm. We can will to read but not to understand, we can will knowledge but not wisdom, we can will scrupulosity but not mortality. This is illustrated in creative work. In the second realm of will is the conscious, effortful, critical application to creative endeavor, in preparing a speech for meeting or revising one’s manuscript, for example. However, when actually giving the speech, or when hopefully creative inspiration takes over in our writing, we are engrossed with a degree of forgetfulness of self. In this experience, wishing and willing become one. One characteristic of the creative experience is that it makes for a temporary union by transcending the conflict. The temptation is for the second ream to take over the first; we lose our spontaneity, our free flow of activity, and will become effortful, controlled and so forth, Victorian will power. Our error, then, is that will tries to take over the work of imagination. This is very close to a wish. Will is the capacity to organize oneself so that movement in a certain direction or toward a certain goal may take place. Wish is the imaginative playing with the possibility of some act or state occurring. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
Will and wish may be seen as operating in polarity. Will requires self-consciousness; wish does not. Will implies some possibility of either/or choice; wish does not. Wish gives the warmth, the content, the imagination, the innocence’s play, the freshness, and the richness of the will. Will gives the self-direction, the maturity, to wish. Will protect wish, permits it to continue without wish, will loses its life-blood, its viability, and tends to expire in self-contradiction. If you have only will and no wish, you have the dried-up, Victorian, neopuritan mortal. If you have only wish and no will, you have the driven, unfree, infantile person who, as an adult-remaining-an-infant, may become the robot mortal. Awareness of one’s feelings lays the groundwork for knowing what one want. This point may look very simple at first glance—who does not know what one wants? However, the amazing thing is how few people actually do. If one looks honestly into oneself, does one not find that most of what one thinks one wants is just routines like fresh fish on Friday; or what one wants is what one thinks one should want—like being a success in his or her work; or wants to want—like loving one’s neighbor? One can often see clearly the expression of direct and honest wants in children before they have been taught to falsify their desires. The child exclaims, “I like ice cream, I want a cone,” and there is no confusion about who wants what. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
Such directness of desire often comes like a breath of fresh air in a murky land. It may not be best that one has the cone at the time, and it is obviously the parents’ responsibility to say Yes or No if the child is not mature enough to decide. However, let the parents not teach the child to falsify one’s emotions by trying to persuade him or her that he or she does not want the cone! To be aware of one’s feelings and desires does not at all imply expressing them indiscriminately wherever one happens to be. Judgment and decision are part of any mature consciousness of self. However, how is one going to have a basis for judging wat one will or will not do unless one first knows what one wants? For an adolescent to be aware that one wants to drive a brand-new BMW 3 Series, does not mean that one acts on this impulse. However, suppose he never lets his impulses reach the threshold of awareness because they are not socially acceptable? How is he then to know years later, when he buys a care, whether he wants to drive it or not, or whether because thus is then the acceptable and expected act, the routine thing to do? People who voice with alarm the caution that unless desires and emotions are suppressed they will pop out every which way, and everyone, will experience neurotic emotions. As a matter of fact, we know that it is precisely the emotions and desires which have been repressed which later return to drive the person compulsively. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
The Victorian gyroscope kind of person had to control his or her emotions rigidly, for, by virtue of having locked them up in jail, one had turned them into lawbreakers. However, the more integrated a person is, the loses compulsive become one’s emotions. In the mature person feelings and wants occur in a configuration. In seeing a dinner as part of a drama on the stage, to give a simple example, one is not consumed with desires for food; one came to see a drama and not to eat. Or wen listening to a concert singer, one is not consumed with pleasures of the flesh even though she may be very attractive; the configuration is set by the fact that one chose in coming to hear music. Of course, as we have indicted, none of us escape conflicts from time to time. However, these are different from being compulsively driven by emotions. Every direct and immediate experience of feeling and wanting is spontaneous and unique. That is to say, the wanting and feeling are uniquely part of that particular situation at the particular time and place. Spontaneity means to be able to respond directly to the total picture—or, as it is technically called, to respond to the figure-ground configuration. Spontaneity is the active “I” becoming part of the figure ground. In a good portrait painting the background is always an integral part of the portrait; so an act of a mature human being is an integral part of the self in relation to the World around it. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
Spontaneity, thus, is very different from effervescence or egocentricity, or letting out one’s feelings regardless of the environment. Spontaneity, rather is the acting “I” responding to a particular environment at a given moment. The originality and uniqueness which is always part of spontaneous feeling can be understood in this light. For just as there never was exactly that situation before and never will be again, so the feeling one has at that time is new and never to be exactly repeated. It is only neurotic behavior which is rigidly repetitive. God’s great plan of happiness provide a perfect balance between eternal justice and the mercy we can obtain through the Atonement of Jesus Christ. It also enables us to be transformed into new creatures in Christ. A loving God reaches out to each of us. We know that through his love and because of his Atonement of his only begotten Son, all humankind may be saved, by obedience to the laws and ordinances. Eternal relationships are also fundamental to our theology. The family is ordained of God. Under the great plan of our loving Creator, the mission is to achieve the supernal blessing of exaltation in the celestial kingdom. Finally, God’s love is so great that, except for the few who become people of perdition, God has provided a destiny of glory for all his children, including those who have passed away. Our loving Heavenly Father wants us to have joy. “Do not tell secrets to those whose faith and silence you have not already tested,” reports Kate Atkinson. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
Desire’s Perfect Goal Should Not Disenthrall Thy Soul—Here is a Star, there is a Star, Some Lose Their Way!
The love that lasts longest is the love that is never returned. Love would conquer all, of course, but one has to know when it is there first. Glaucus was a fisherman. One day he had drawn his nets to land and had taken a great many fishes of various kinds. So he emptied his nets and proceeded to sort the fishes on the grass. The place where he stood was a beautiful island in the river, a solitary spot, uninhabited, and not used for pasturage of cattle, not visited by anyone but himself. On a sudden, the fishes, which had been laid on the grass, began to revive and move their fins as if they were in the water; and while he looked on astonished, they one and all moved off to the water, plunged in, and swam away. He did not know what to make of this, whether some god had done it, or some secret power in the herbage. “What herb has such a power?” he exclaimed; and gathering some of it, he tasted it. Scarce had the juices of the plant reached his palate when he found himself agitated with a longing desire for the water. Glaucus could no longer restrain himself, but bidding farewell to Earth, he plunged into the stream. The gods of the water received him graciously and admitted hi to the honour of their society. They obtained the consent of Oceanus and Tethys, the sovereign of the sea, that all that was mortal in him should be washed away. #RandolphHarris 1 of 10
A hundred rivers poured their waters over Glaucus and then he lost all sense of his former nature and all consciousness. When he recovered, he found himself changed in form and mind. His hair was sea-green, and trailed behind him on the water; his shoulders grew broad, and what had been thighs and legs assumed the form of a fish’s tail. The sea-gods complimented him on the change of his appearance, and Glaucus fancied himself rather a good-looking personage. One day, Glaucus saw a beautiful maiden Scylla, the favourite of the water-nymphs, rambling on the shore, and when she had found a sheltered nook, laving her limbs on the clear water, he fell in live with her. Glaucus showed himself on the surface, spoke to the maiden, saying such things as he thought most likely to win her to stay; for she turned to run immediately on sight of him, and ran till she had gained a cliff overlooking the sea. Here she stopped and turned round to see whether it was a god or s sea animal, and observed with wonder his shape and colour. Glaucus, partly emerging from the water and supporting himself against a rock, said, “Maiden, I am not monster, nor sea animal, but a god; and neither Proteus nor Triton ranks higher than I. Once I was a mortal, and followed the sea for a living; but now I belong wholly to it.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 10
Then he told the story of his metamorphosis, and how he had been promoted to his present dignity, and added, “But what avails all this if it fails to move your heart?” Glaucus was going on in this strain, but the maiden, Scylla, turned and hastened away. Glaucus was in despair, but it occurred to him to consult the enchantress, Circe. Accordingly he repaired to her island. After mutual salutations, Glaucus said, “Goddess, I entreat your pity; you alone can relieve the pain I suffer. The power of the herbs I know as well as any one, for it is to them I owe my change of form. I love Scylla. I am ashamed to tell you how I have sued and promised to her, and how scornfully she has treated me. I beseech you to use your incantations, or potent herbs, if they are more prevailing, not to cure me of my love—for that I do not wish—but to make Scylla share it and yield me a like return.” To which Circe replied, for she was not insensible to the attractions of the sea-green deity, “You had better pursue a willing object; you are worthy to be sought, instead of having to seek in vain. Be not different, know your own worth. I protest to you that even I, goddess though I be, and learned in the virtue of plants and spells, should not know how to refuse you. If Scylla scorns you, scorn her; meet one who is ready to meet you half way, and thus make a due return to both at once.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 10
However, Glaucus replied, “Sooner shall trees grow at the bottom of the ocean, and seaweed on the top of the mountains, than I will cease to love Scylla, and her alone.” The goddess Circe was indignant, but she could not punish him, neither did she wish to do so, for she liked him too well; so she turned all her wrath against her rival, poor Scylla. She took her plants of poisonous powers and mixed them together, with incantations and charms. Then she passed through the crowd of gamboling beasts, the victims of her art, and proceeded to the coast of Sicily, where Scylla lived. There was a little bay on the shore to which Scylla used to resort, in the heat of the day, to breathe their air of the sea, and to bathe in its waters. Here the goddess poured her poisonous mixture, and muttered over it incantations of mighty power. Scylla came as usual and plunged into the water up to her waist. What was her horror to perceive a brood of serpents and barking monsters surrounding her! At first she could not imagine they were a part of herself, and tried to run from them and to drive them away; but as she ran she carried them with her, and when she tried to touch her limbs, she found her hands touch only the yawning jaws of monsters. Scylla remained rooted to the spot. #RandolphHarris 4 of 10
Scylla’s temper grew as ugly as her form, and she took pleasure in devouring hapless mariners who came within her grasp. Thus she destroyed six of the companions of Ulysses, and tried to wreck the ships of Aeneas, till at least she was turned into a rock, and as such still continues to be a terror to mariners. Mistakes are a deliberately wrong choice in the contest between what is clearly good and what is clearly bad is sin. We all want a partner, but some want one to the point of it being a pathology. Many people knowingly or unknowingly force a relationship due to an addiction of love. If one is honest with oneself, and know that one has nothing in common with their focus of their intertest, such as different goals, different lifestyles, and different hobbies, and the person is not attracted to the individual pursing a relationship, this is a clear indication that they do not like you in a romantic way, much like how Scylla was not in the least bit interested in Glaucus. Yet, Glaucus could not take no for an answer and ended up running her like, and the rage she experienced ruined the lives of others. Absolutely imagine if you had people dragging you into things you did not want to be part of, and you will understand why this is not a healthy thing to do. It is never a healthy thing to do. #RandolphHarris 5 of 10
People who think they can learn from their mistakes have a different brain reaction to mistake than people who think intelligence is fixed. One major difference between people who think intelligence is malleable and those who think intelligence is fixed is how one responds to mistake. When one makes a mistake, the best thing to do is to try to learn from it and figure it out. Conversely, some people who think they cannot gain intelligence will not take the opportunities to learn from their mistakes, and they usually employ defense mechanisms to justify their behaviour so they do not feel guilt or remourse. Defense mechanisms are psychological maneuvers that operate below the surface of one’s awareness (they are unconscious) to protect one from emotional pain or distress. The most familiar one is probably denial. Denial allows one to dismiss a painful reality so that one can go on acting as if a situation or event is not true—because one does not want to admit it is true. Transgression is different from being overtaken in a fault. Both sins and mistakes can hurt us and both require attention. People who try to force relations, often end up feeling insecure, hurt, and betrayed for no reason. Then these individuals start questioning themselves as to why they are never good enough for the person they are interested in. #RandolphHarris 6 of 10
There should be no license for sin, but mercy should go hand and hand with reproof. Though it may be hard to admit, there comes a time when one just needs to cut their losses and leave a person alone. The progression of a romantic relationship cannot be formed. It must evolve naturally, over time. Impatient, insecure, or damaged people try to force relationships. Mortal make these kinds of mistakes all the times. However, these things are on an essentially predetermined course. A fool is a person lacking judgment or prudence. The Saviour used the term fool to characterize the lesson in this parable about the rich man who built greater barns to store his abundant fruits and goods and then said to his soul, “Thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry,” reports Luke 12.19. The distinction between sins and mistakes is important to our actions. We have seen some very bitter finger pointing. All of us make mistakes, and some of us very serious ones. Any thoughtful person feels a kind of failure because one’s sins or moral failure. One does not get clean by rolling in the mire. One does not get clean and whole by brooding unduly over the past, although we can certainly learn from our mistake. There is no strength in weakness; there is no strength in sin; and we do not overcome our mistake and our sins by fighting them directly. #RandolphHarris 7 of 10
If people dwell upon them too much, they may succumb to their sins. The avoidance of guilt can be addictive, too. Guilt-avoidance has become a drug of choice for many people, because it is so pleasurable, almost intoxicating, to think of oneself as morally pure. Those who are addicted to guilt-avoidance are usually a bit inconsistent. They avoid the guilt themselves, but they do not mind imposing a bit of it—maybe even a lot of it—on others. It can be immensely pleasurable to notice the flaws of others while ignoring your own. However, that is a sin, too. All things considered, we are on a safer ground when we focus on our own sins, not those of others. At least this is how we process theologians see things. We believe that when we harm others, or fail to act in ways that prevent them from being harmed, we violated something deep within the nature of nature. We have violated an Eros toward life’s flourishing that is divine. In sinning against others, we sin against God. It takes courage to stand up. The freedom to be different. The freedom to take guilt and make something beautiful of it. Humans have the freedom to turn guilt into love. Few gifts are more desirable than a clear conscience—a soul at peace with itself. Only God can heal a troubled soul. However, if we want God to forgive us, we must follow the procedure he has given to us. #RandolphHarris 8 of 10
Confession is a necessary requirement for complete forgiveness. It is an indication of true Godly sorrow. It is part of the cleansing process—the starting anew requires a clean page in the diary of our conscience. Confessions should be made to the appropriate person who has been wronged by us and to the Lord also. In addition, the nature of our transgression may be serious enough to require a confession to God in prayer. “Therefore I say unto you, Go; and whoever transgressed against me, him shall you judge according to the sins which he or she has committed; and if he or she confess his or her sins before thee and me, and repents in the sincerity of one’s heart, that person one shall forgive, and I will also forgive that individual,” reports Mosiah 26.29. Remember, it is complete deliverance from the tortures of a guilt-ridden soul that we seek. Repentance is not easy. Godly sorrow brings one to the depth of humility. This is why the gift of forgiveness is so sweet and draws the transgressor so close to the Saviour with a special bond of affection. Full repentance liberates the individual with joy unspeakable. #RandolphHarris 9 of 10
Any type of open and truthful disclosure reduces stress and helps individuals come to terms with their behaviour. It is not coincidental that some of the most powerful people or institutions in may cultures encourage people to confess their transgressions. And there is strong evidence that writing about upsetting experiences or dark secrets can benefit your mental and physical well-being. Similar to religious confessions, expressive writing encouraged individuals to explore their deepest thoughts and feelings about upsetting experiences. For such emotional purges to work, people must be completely honest with themselves. Putting emotional turmoil into words changes how we think about it. Giving concrete form to secret experiences can help categorize them in new ways. Talking or writing about a disturbing event helps us to understand it better. And things we do not understand cause greater anxiety. Once we are able to express our upheavals, we tend to ruminate about them less, freeing us up to focus on others thing. Dozens of studies have also shown that expression is linked to less stress and improved sleep and cardiovascular function. Also, better sleep is associated with enhanced immune function and better general health—which correlates with better mental health, too. Confession can help people get through difficult times. #RandolphHarris 10 of 10
Give Your Faith to No One Undeserved
We desire to possess a beauty that is worthy pursuing, worth fighting for, a beauty that is core to who we truly are. We want beauty that can be see; beauty that can be felt; beauty that affects others; a beauty all our own to unveil. Egyptians worshipped God in all things, and they believed they possessed a profound magic by which they were able to draw down cosmic powers into the statues of their gods, and that they reflect the divine mind behind the Universe. The idea behind it was they could turn from thinking about God to addressing him, and that way they were able to communicate with the living God, as distinct from merely giving intellectual assent to the God of philosophers. Intelligent, loving devotion to God has always been important with through eternity, it will never become obsolete. Because of the way different cultures channel God, it becomes obvious why scholars have long maintained that each era has a unique spirit, a nature or climate that sets it apart from all other epochs. Another remarkable and apparently pleasant feature of the spiritual existence is the absence of the measure of time and space as we know it here on Earth. God sent his word to heal us, and there is no time or distance in their spirit. Divine love permeates every part of our lives because God is greatly concerned with the quality of character we are building. The future the Lord has planned for us will be built on the strength of character we forge by his grace. #RandolphHarris 1 of 8
It is God’s intention that our lives should be a seamless manifestation of his Spirit. God’s qualities are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. The Lord has made abundant provisions for his indwelling our lives here and now. A fundamental aspect in our caring for our souls is to understand that we are always in the presence of God and it is important to redirect our minds constantly to the Lord. God is the great longing focus of our souls, and we are privileged to walk in this profound reality. God provided for human freedom through a doctrine of self-creation: humans are free even in the act by which they come into existence, for God allows human to collaborate in their own creation. God makes available a distinctively authentic and free mode of existence to all humanity. Only through practice of virtue are we able to transcend the barriers that separate the mental life of one age from that of another. “If you fully obey the LORD, your God, and carefully follow all his commands I give you today, The Lord, your God, will set you high above all the nations of Earth. If you obey the Lord, all these blessings will come upon you and accompany you. You will be blessed in your city and blessed in your country. You will be blessed when you come in and blessed when you go out. The LORD will grant that the enemies who rise up against you will be defeated before you,” Reports Deuteronomy 28.1.1-3 and 6-7. #RandolphHarris 2 of 8
Most people experience a rush of pleasure the moment a puzzling solution comes to them. When God puts a promise in our hearts, we have to come to the place where we believe in that promise so strongly no one and no circumstance can move us. Beauty grows in us to the extent that love grows, because charity itself is the soul’s beauty. As the soul is the life of the body, so God is the life of the soul. As spiritual knowledge unfolds, it must be understood, valued, obeyed, remembered, and expanded. The greatest achievement humankind can make in this World is to become familiarized with the divine truth, so thoroughly, so perfectly, that the example or conduct of no living creature in the World can ever turn us away from the knowledge that we have obtained. Of all treasures of knowledge, the most vital is the knowledge of God. The role of obedience in gaining spiritual knowledge is crucial. The Lord gives us gifts. He will quicken our minds. God will give us a knowledge that is so deeply rooted in our souls that it can never be rooted out. All we have to do is seek for the light and the understanding which is promised to us, and which we can receive, as long as we are true and faithful to every covenant and obligation, will become a treasure we are allowed to possess. “We trust God will deliver us, and deliver us out of the hands of our enemies,” reports Alma 58.37. #RandolphHarris 3 of 8
The satisfaction of performing a benevolent action will certainly encourage acts of benevolence in someone who desires the advantage of society. We must acknowledge the place of God in our lives, as we are already under his government. Our discoveries in nature have already prepared us to accept the main claims of revelation about God as a creator and judge. I do not like to see things on purpose. I like them to soak in. A friend asked me to go to the top of the state capitol castle once, and I told him that he should not treat park as a sight—it is a feeling, an emotional experience. And the same with every place. When you slow down and have a moment to reflect on everything, it is very beautiful. Some people go to watch people, I enjoy looking at the nature and the architecture. When there are not many people around, you can get a sense of how majestic everything is. It is like sensing God. There is perhaps no better evidence of the psychological impact nature can make than to look at the landscape and just be at peace. It is a warmth so powerful that even the blue sky is barely perceptible through the all-consuming, healing, green atmosphere. It is as if, the trees, grace, flowers, the statues, and the architecture of the castle cols the atmosphere, like rain in a time of drought, or shade at an oasis in the desert. It can be a very spiritual experience to reflect on the living memorial. Happiness should be all one feels. Just like a sunny autumn day. #RandolphHarris 4 of 8
Profound spiritual truth cannot simply be poured from one mind and heart to another. It takes faith and diligent effort. Precious truth comes a small piece at a time through faith, with great exertion, and at times wrenching struggles. The Lord intends it to be that way so that we can mature and progress. As packets of knowledge unfold, they must be understood, valued, obeyed, remembered, and expanded. As each element of truth is encountered, we must carefully examine it in the light of prior knowledge to determine where it fits. Ponder it; inspect it inside out. Study it from every vantage point to discover hidden meanings. View it in perspective to confirm one has not jumped to false conclusions. Prayerful reflection yields further understanding. Such evaluation is particularly important when the truth comes as an impression of Spirit. This awareness of age had a halo of innocence around it, and it also enjoys a measure of nobility. Spiritually sensitive information should be kept in a sacred place that communicates to the Lord. That is how we are to treasure it. Gaining spiritual knowledge is not a mechanical process. It is a sacred privilege based upon spiritual law. We can receive inspired help, as long as we humbly ask our Eternal Father. We must also seek the divine light, exercise faith in the Savior, and strive to live righteous lives. God will bless us and lead us as we move through this wonderful World. #RandolphHarris 5 of 8
Our Father in Heaven loves all of his children equally, perfectly, and infinitely. The Lord’s love is an advantage and brings out the flavours of the personality. The Lord’s love can carve out an interior space where wisdom can take up residence. Character strengths and virtues are brought into existence by God. We love virtue. It is always nice to have people in our lives who are good in some important way. Good people make us laugh, support us in hard times, and inspire us. Virtuous actions are better than ordinary behaviours because virtues integrate ethics and health, are embodied traits of character, are sources of human strengths and resilience, are embedded within a cultural context and community, contribute to a sense of meaningful life purpose, and are grounded in the cognitive capacity for wisdom. We are expected to wait calmly in the face of frustration, adversity, or suffering because we are connected to something bigger than the self and the present circumstances. As we endure, God will give us the gift of acceptance, which is unconditional. Given that charity or supernatural love is paramount in our spiritual life, it is clear why we have a high level of devotion to God. When we accurately reflect on ourselves, we realize the excellence of our natural gifts. There is no knowledge of self without knowledge of God. “It is the Lord, your God, you must follow, and him you must revere,” reports Deuteronomy 13. 4. #RandolphHarris 6 of 8
The human person recognizes an intimate unity of the body and mind and understands that they are held in unity by the spiritual soul (as secondary formal and efficient causes) and by God (as ultimate first, formal, efficient, and final causes). People who use both reason and will in finding the standard moral knowledge are guided by well-ordered love, which is associated with healthy physiological and psychological functioning. The divine being is nothing else than the human being, or, rather, the human nature purified, freed from the limitations of the individual human. Our knowledge of God is our acknowledgment of his attitude toward us, especially his attitude of benevolence and love. The character strengths of this virtue include love, kindness, and social intelligence. Humanity relies on doing more than what is only fair—we must show generosity when an equitable exchange would suffice, kindness even if it cannot (or will not) be returned, and understanding even when punishment is due. “Wherefore, whoso believeth in God might with surety hope for a better World, yea, even a place at the right hand of God, which hope comes of faith, makes an anchor to the souls of people, which would make them sure and steadfast, always abounding in good works, being led to glorify God,” reports Ether 12.4. Intelligence exists and we interpret it. Justice, as a civic strength, is the underlying foundation of healthy community life. #RandolphHarris 7 of 8
We need to recognize the hard mortal realities in all of this and must use common sense and guidance by personal revelation. We need to remember that trials and temptations are an important part of our lives. When people are faced with adversity or affliction, we are advised not to criticize others for the way they choose to exercise their moral agency. “Pray for them that repentance may come unto them,” reports Moroni 8.28. We each also have the privilege to carefully and prayerfully seek the Lord’s will for regarding our individual challenges and dilemmas. Personal revelation is personal, indeed. It is not based on gender or position, but on worthiness. It comes in response to sincere inquiry. “And the remission of sins bringeth meekness, and humbleness of heart and because of our meekness and humbleness of heart cometh the visitation of the Holy Ghost, which Comforter filleth with hope and perfect love, which love endureth by diligence unto prayer, until the end shall come, when all the saints shall dwell with God,” reports Moroni 8.26. When our lives are in balance, before we realize it our lives will be full of spiritual understanding that will confirm that our Heavenly Father loves us and that his plan is fair and true and we should strive to understand and enjoy it. We should be worthy of trust, and always keep confidences. #RandolphHarris 8 of 8
Strong Family Cultures Will Help Our Children Live in the World
Some families are in jeopardy of being lost. Values are the prime target of the adversary, as well are the sanctity of marriage and the central importance of families. It is the duty of parents to teach their children to keep the commandments of God. Our morals and spiritual values provide an anchor and the safe harbor of a home where each child of a loving Heavenly Father can be influenced for food and acquire eternal values. People who feel the love and support of their parents are proud of the example they have set. This makes life so enjoyable for many families that the children want to follow in the footsteps of the parents, to continue on through experiencing the same joy that had been theirs in their younger days. Some parents always find the time to take the family on vacation and they can count on fun experiences. As a result of such a solid background, the children are not able to turn from the teachings of their parents because their actions would reflect on their parents’ character. Culture is defined as the way of life of a people. There is a unique gospel culture, a set of values and expectations and practices common to all followers of God. This gospel culture, or way of life, comes from the plan of salvation, the commandments of God, and the teachings of living prophets. It is given expression in the way we raise our families and live our individual lives. #RandolphHarris 1 of 5
However, so much has changed during our lifetime. The effects of childhood trauma, including emotional neglect or abuse in childhood, can have alarmingly potent effect on our psyche as we enter adulthood, event to the extent of rewiring the brain. The children of narcissistic parents, those who meet the diagnostic criteria for Narcissistic Personality Disorder, know this all too well, having been raised by someone with a limited capacity for empathy and an excessive sense of grandiosity, false superiority and entitlement. Children of narcissistic parents are programmed at an early age to seek validation where there is one, to believe their worthiness is tied to the reputation of their families, and to internalize the message that they can only sustain their value by how well they can serve the needs of their parents. If given at all, they have lived an existence where love was rarely given. As the child of a narcissistic parent or parent, one is taught that they are not inherently worthy, but rather that there worth depended on what they could do for the narcissistic parent and how compliant one is. The emphasis on appearance, status, reputation is at an all-time high in households with a narcissistic parent. Due to the narcissistic parent’s grandiosity, false mask and need to be the best, children in these situations are probably part of a family that was presented in the best possible light, with neglect taking place behind closed doors. #RandolphHarris 2 of 5
There is something really disturbing about parents who compete with their kids. Women who strive to be as hot as their teenage daughters. Parents threatened by the success of their adult children. Men who date girls the same age as their son’s girlfriend or daughter. And men who actually date their son’s girlfriends. Some parents even conspire with the children’s enemies to hurt their own kids because they envy them so much. So how have we gotten to this place? We all know that times have changed—and parenting is much more difficult as a result. Some parents feel like they did not have a chance to live the life they wanted so they take out their anger usually on one child who reminds them of what they would like to be. Let us take a closet look and find a way out of this madness and toward a better way to parent. Shine a light on yourself, rather than on your child. Get out of the mindset that your child is the enemy and you must win. Win what? No matter how your child behaves, you must commit to parenting from thoughtfulness, not anxiety, jealousy, and reactivity. Keep in the forefront of your mind that even at times of high stress, you are an adult and your children are supposed to learn from you. You want your children to look back and think of you as someone who loved God, followed the laws, and did everything possible to protect them, instead of sabotaging their lives and setting them up to fail. #RandolphHarris 3 of 5
As adults, some people know that their parent or parents are bad and do not have their best interest at heart, but they still talk to them because they know their parents will not live forever and want to enjoy them while they are around, while secretly praying that their parent will repent and start showing them rest and unconditional love. Strong leaders focus on the preservation of their own integrity. They have a willingness to take responsibility for their own emotional well-being and do not try to make other people happy by changing their character. Being a strong leader is a quality that will actually help your child want to be led by you, rather than battle you. Remember that you are on your child’s team, not on the opposing side. You should not be sharing the personal business with their enemies who happen to be dangerous nor plotting to end the life of your own child. Some people saw that Casper the Ghost is a cautionary tale about Richie’s parents from Richie Rich killing him for insurance money. The Bible predicted that in the last days, “They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law,” reports Luke 12.53. #RandolphHarris 4 of 5
Lessons taught in the home by goodly parents are becoming increasingly important in today’s World, where the influence of the adversary is so wide spread. As we know, he is attempting to erode and destroy the very foundation of our society—the family. In cleaver and carefully camouflaged ways, the wicked one is attacking commitment to family life throughout the World and undermining the culture and covenants of faithful believers in God. Parents must resolve that teaching in the home is a most sacred and important responsibility. We must train up our children in the way he or he should go, this responsibility ultimately rests on the parents. According to the great plan of happiness, it is goodly parents with the care and development of Heavenly Father’s children. Parents should also pray in earnest, asking our Eternal Father to help them love, understand, and guide the children the Lord sent to them. It is also a good idea to hold family prayer, scripture study, and family home evenings and eat together as often as possible, making dinner a time of communication and the teachings of values. Parents should also share their testimonies often with their children, commit them to keep the commandments of God, and promise the blessings that our Heavenly Father promises his faithful children. Our strengthened family cultures will be a protection for our children from the fiery darts of the adversary embedded in their peer culture, the entertainment and television news. #RandolphHarris 5 of 5
If Envy Were a Fever, All the World Would be Ill!
We often hear that the love of money is the root of all evil, but it is not. The love of money, however, can be evil. If you have money you can get things and do things. Because people believe money has power, it can be incredibly difficult to stay on the right course and not lose one’s soul in the process. Many people lose sight of where they come from and make decision that satisfy their personal desires. They forget, or choose to forget who was there for them when they needed to borrow money to pay the mortgage, or when they sold a car under false pretenses, but kept the car and the money, or who shared their Christmas bonus with them. They forget about how much money they took from your family to get where they are today, and when they feel they have made it, materialistic people no longer have a use for you because they see you as inferior and your life does not matter to them. These types of covetous people will sale your secrets to your enemy. Will take bribes to set you up so they can ruin your life because they want to infect others with the pain they experienced growing up in poverty and deprivation. “For the love of money people will steal from their mother. For the love of money people will rob their own brother. For the love of money people will lie, Lord, they will cheat. For the love of money people will sell their precious body for a small piece of paper it carries a lot of weight. Call it lean, mean, mean, green Almighty dollar,” (For the Love of Money by the O’Jays). #RandolphHarris 1 of 6
Money talks, and it can start to define people and their respective lifestyles. The clothes you wear, the house you live in, the car you drive and the job you occupy all serve as indicators to one’s personal success. As a collection, these materials signify, in some form, who you are as a person. At least that is what materialistic people believe. However, it does not take money nor power to be a decent human being. We all know shallow people who do not care what other think of them and have done some strange things for some change. Then they start to think they are better than others because their hustling and illegal activities have allowed them to obtain luxury items, expensive cars, and lavish homes. And they forget all about the people they stole from, betrayed, and hurt to get where they are. Some people had never really experienced being financially strapped because they made the right decision in life. Get a job at a young age, go to college, and worked toward a degree. People sometimes people who had kids at an early age, where on government relief, and experienced and abusive married are jealous that someone did things the right want and want to see that person suffer. And after they bring you down and you see what poverty is like and are trying to work your way out of it, they know you need help, but instead they pretend not to know what you are going through. Because you are a forgiving person, you do not spite them, but wish them well. #RandolphHarris 2 of 6
As you try hard to work your way back to success, your heart and mind will not even allow you to ask people with an ugly spirit for help. All money and not good money and although they stole from you and hurt you, it is better to struggle and try hard so when you come back up, you do not have any obligations to unholy people. People abuse their power and fail to treat others with the respect they deserve. The fundamental idea of respect is one that we can all agree upon, and it is an essential basis for solving our everyday problems. While people may spread lies and make up rumors about you, it is essential to seek first to understand before judging someone. Everyone has had different experiences in their lives that have helped shape who they are now. Growing up in a small rural community has taught me so many things. It is nearly impossible to enjoy life in a rural community without showing others respect. Our actions towards others determine our reputation, no matter what people say about us out of envy and malice. If people do not like their reputation, they can change their actions. Our actions is the one thing we can control. When it comes to overcoming being greedy, selfish, and overly indulgent, we all need more help. The worst fear many have is people will get rich in this country and forget God and his people. We will all be literally called upon to make an accounting before God concerning how we have used our resources to bless lives and build the kingdom of God. #RandolphHarris 3 of 6
No one of us is less treasured or cherished of God than another. God loves us each of us—insecurities, anxieties, self-image, and all. God does not want any of us to suffer, but sometimes we learn lessons as we suffer. We learn what it is like to be injured, hungry, poor, and unpopular. These are important things for some people to experience so they do not grow up to become monsters. It teaches us to be more understanding, humble, more compassionate, and show respect to people we do not know. We learn not to become a prisoner—a prisoner of sin, stupidity, and a pigsty. God does not want us to wallow with swine. People who take for granted their father and disenfranchise their family members will fall victim to a fictional affront. Even if we are not making as much money as we used to or live in a place the is rather shabby and loud, we still can be very happy with our lives. Keep in mind, wealth cannot buy health. If envy were a fever all the World would be ill. And even though you see your material lifestyles as being a shadow of what it used to be, people can still be jealous of you because of how well you are coming through the white squall they created in your life. Because envy is so far reaching—it can resent anything, including virtue and talent, and it can be offended by everything, including every goodness and joy. As we seem to grow larger in the sight of others, they feel that they are growing smaller. And they keep spending money to make themselves feel better, while you are still steadfastly focused of spiritual enlightenment and career development. #RandolphHarris 4 of 6
The purpose of life is learning as much as we can so that we can be ready for the gift of eternal life. There is more to come after our mortal bodies are no more. Our souls are eternal and the actions we choose in this lifetime determine how our eternal life will be. It is also better to go through this life with a clear conscience, as a guilty conscience might be worse than hell. This is a great truth. Understanding the plan for eternal life will help people keep the commandments, make better decision, and have the right motivation. The eternal perspective of the gospel leads us to understand the place that we occupy in God’s plan, to accept difficulties and progress through them, to make decisions, and to center our lives on our divine potential. Perspective is the way we see things when we look at them from a certain distance, and it allows us to appreciate their true value. We were taught this plan before we came to Earth and there rejoiced in the privilege of participating in it. Perhaps people who used you and hurt you do not understand what life is about and we should feel sorry for them that money is the only thing that matters to them because the great wicked one also has a plan, it is cunning, evil, subtle plan of destruction. It is the great wicked one’s objective to take captive the children of Father in Heaven and with every possible means frustrate the great plan of happiness. However, our Heavenly Father endowed his sons and daughters with unique traits especially fitted for their individual responsibilities as they fulfill God’s plan. #RandolphHarris 5 of 6
The struggle to success is a difficult one. For those of us that have a belief in God, the right combination of smarts and tenacity, we are blessed to have been cultivated in large by our actively influential surroundings. The environment we grew up in is an important factor in our upbringing and in the success that we will one day achieve. This is not to say that we are product of our circumstances entirely—there have been several people who were subject to horrific situations growing up, and through the love and guidance of God, that managed to make themselves into something and were successful in morphing their dreams into a reality. Whether we embrace our environment growing up and think back to it fondly, or remember our situation growing up and thank our lucky stars that we were able to make it out alive—the fact remains the same: our past made us who we are today and if we are happy with who we are, we cannot wish to have lived a different way. That includes where and with whom we grew up. “Be you therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in Heaven is perfect,” reports Matthew 5.48. Mortal perfection can be achieved as we try to perform every duty, keep every law, and strive to be perfect in our sphere as our Heavenly Father is in his. If we do the best we can, the Lord will bless us according to our deeds and the desires of our hearts. The Lord’s entire work and glory pertains to the immortality and eternal life of each human being. #RandolphHarris 6 of 6
Present Effects on Human Happiness with an Inquiry Into Our Prospects Respecting the Future Removal or Mitigation of the Evils Which It Occasions
Evil exists in the World not to create despair but activity. Dreams which are to be understood as fulfillments of wishes is not new, but has long since been recognized. Many girls and boys dream of growing up and one day getting married and having a home of their own, a career, children and at least two automobiles. However, evenless pessimistic observers have emphasized the fact that in our dreams pain and disgust are more frequent than pleasure. Research indications that 58 percent of dreams are disagreeable, and only 28 percent have a been beneficially pleasant. Besides those dreams that convey into our sleep the many painful emotions of life, there are also anxiety-dreams, in which this most terrible of all the painful emotions torment us until we wake. Now it is precisely by these anxiety-dreams that children are so often haunted. The anxiety-dream does really seem to preclude a generalization of the thesis that dreams are wish-fulfillments, and even to condemn it as an absurdity. Nevertheless, it is not difficult to parry these apparently invincible objections. It is merely necessary to observe that our doctrine is not based upon the obvious dream-content, but relates to the thought-content, which, in the course of interpretation is found to life behind the dream. It is true that there are dreams the manifest content of which is the most painful nature. However, has anyone ever tried to interpret these dreams—to discover their latent thought-content? #RandolphHarris 1 of 6
The decay of the family has long been a favourite them of social alarmists. Looking back on the conventions which in their own early days were held to be sacred, whether or not they were actually observed, seniors exclaim on the bankruptcy of those marriage conventions today and the consequence dissolution of home life. Even under modification, there has always been some form of marriage, and the home in some shape has still persisted. It is, therefore, only the shallow and the ignorant who can mistake the changes that take place in their own little day and environment for the obliteration of great landmarks—that is, when we have put aside those well-meaning people who like to pay with the idea of the bankruptcy of marries in order to startle their fellows into a more lively concern with social problems. It is not only a truth for the human species that marriage is omnipresent; it is also found among other beings. As a matter of fact, marriage, so far from dying out, tends in various countries of the West to increase in frequency. Dr. Malinowski reports that the elements of soundness and truth in rival doctrines that procreative institutions of humankind are more or less transformation into culturally socialized forms. What mainly concerns us here to observe is that, whatever view of the family we adopt, we are still constrained to admit that, under all changes of forms, it has always persisted, so that its existence may even be said to be woven into the texture of the species. #RandolphHarris 2 of 6
Obedience to the law of chastity will increase our happiness in mortality and make possible our progress in eternity. Why is the law of chastity so important? The law of chastity is a moral code that only allows intimate, adult relationships between a man and a woman who are legally and lawfully wedded as husband and wife. The eternal importance of chastity can only be understood within the overarching context of our Heavenly Father’s plan of happiness of the Lord’s children. “For I, the Lord God, delight in the chastity of men and women,” reports Jacob 2.28. All human beings—male and female—are created in the image of God. Each is a beloved spirit son or daughter of Heavenly parents, and has a divine nature and destiny. All men and women lived with God as the Lord’s spirit children before coming to the Earth as mortal beings. The Father’s plan enabled his spirit sons and daughters to obtain physical bodies, to gain mortal experience, and to progress toward exaltation. The fundamental principle is that unfreakish human populations possess a power of multiplying in a geometrical possession. The next step is to urge that this power always is and must be checked by countervailing forces; for, on the most optimistic supposition, means of subsistence could in the long run at best be increased only in an arithmetical progression. However, no human population ever does achieve its full multiplicative potential. #RandolphHarris 3 of 6
Do not allow yourself to be alone and walk in the darkness without light. The problem of the origin of species in natural selection is that there is constantly a struggle for existence because our inordinate power of multiplication is bound—sooner or later, and usually sooner—to run up against the inexorably constricting walls of scarcity. All measures of intended amelioration which directly or indirectly encourage an increase of population that outstrips resources—and most do—will, in the not very distant end, merely multiply the number of bearers of misery and agents of vice. These harsh and gloomy conclusions were only modified, not upset, by the belated recognition of the option of moral restraint. For it was, and remains, hard to cherish high hopes from the preaching of such prudence; and in any society which did generally accept such preaching all but the richest would have to marry women nearing the evening of their reproductive powers. In the school of mortality, we experience tenderness, love, kindness, happiness, sorrow, disappointment, pain, and even the challenges of physical limitations in ways that prepare us for eternity. Simply stated, there are lessons we must learn and experience we must have while we are human. The means by which mortal life is created is divinely appointed. The power of procreation is spiritually significant. Misuse of this power subverts the purpose of the Father’s plan and our mortal existence. #RandolphHarris 4 of 6
It is perfectly impossible to conceive that any creatures of God’s hand can be condemned to eternal suffering. Could we once admit such an idea, all our natural conceptions of goodness and justice would be completely overthrown, and we could no longer look on God as a merciful and righteous Being. Eternal death means eternal death and not eternal life in torment. The doctrine of life and immortality which was brought to life by the gospel is the doctrine that the end of righteousness is everlasting life, but the wages of sin are death. What that means is when you are sinning and hurting people and you know it is wrong, you will be repaid by eternal death and will not go to Heaven with all the good people. So, even if you think you are getting away with doing bad and appear to be doing well in this life, remember, God sees everything. Specific guidelines for the proper use of the ability to create life are vital elements in the Father’s plan. How we feel about and use that supernal power will determine in large measure our happiness in mortality and our destiny. The power to create mortal life is the most exalted power God has given his children. Its use was mandated in the first commandment, but another important commandment was given to forbid its misuse. The emphasis we place on the law of chastity is explained by our understanding of the purpose of our procreative powers in the accomplishment of God’s plan. #RandolphHarris 5 of 6
Intimate relations are proper only between a man and a woman in the marriage relationship prescribed in God’s plan. Such relations are not merely a curiosity to be explored, an appetite to be satisfied, or a type of recreation or entertainment to be pursued selfishly. They are not a conquest to be achieved or simply an act to be performed. Rather, they are in mortality one of the ultimate expressions of our divine nature and potential and a way of strengthening emotional and spiritual bounds between husband and wife. We are agents blessed with moral agency and are defined by our divine heritage as children of God—and not by sexual behaviors, contemporary attitudes, or secular philosophies. Contraception is one kind of preventive check; none at all would be required if the multiplicative power was not still there to be checked. Catastrophe does not have to be a tendency—not if people can be persuaded to employ the means which science has and will put into our hands. No plan for social improvement can be complete, unless it embraces the means both of increasing production, and of preventing population making a proportionate advance. We are here on Earth to develop Godlike qualities and to bridle all of the passions of the flesh. The Father’s plan is designed to provide direction for His Children, to help them become happy, and bring them safely home to him with resurrected, exalted bodies. #RandolphHarris 6 of 6
God is Up in His Ivory Shower!
When people are talking to people, it is important that one darn sure understands what is going on. Cultural legacies matter—they are powerful and pervasive and they persist, long after their original usefulness has passed. However, do not assume that legacies are an indelible part of who we are. “Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but only that which is good and edifying, that it may minister grace unto the hearers,” reports Ephesians 4.29. If we are honest about where we come from and are willing to confront those aspects of our heritage that do not suit the professional World, we can change. We can and should participate in continuing civil dialogue, especially when we view the World from differing perspectives. When we understand what it really means to be a good person—when we understand how much culture and history and the World outside of the individual matter to professional success—then we do not have to throw up our hands in despair at other people when they make mistakes. We have a way to make success out of the unsuccessful. “A soft answer turns away wrath: but grievous words stir up anger,” reports Proverbs 15.1. Although it is important to be frank about a subject we would all too often rather ignore, a soft answer consists of a reasoned response—disciplined words from a humble heart. Words that may be firm in information can be soft in spirit. #RandolphHarris 1 of 7
Why are we so squeamish? Why is the fact that each of us comes from a culture with its own distinctive mix of strength and weaknesses, tendencies and predispositions, so difficult to acknowledge? Who we are cannot be separated from where we are from—and when we ignore that fact, accidents happen. You can imagine how frustrating it can be when people are all thinking furiously, trying to square their assumptions about a person or situation they know nothing about. There exists today a great need for people to cultivate respect for each other across wide distances of belief and behavior and across deep canyons of conflicting agendas. It is impossible to know all that informs our minds and hearts or even to fully understand the context for the trials and choices we each face. Even intelligent individuals have trouble with the group mentality trap. In order to avoid the hazards of hardheadedness and self-interest in a group setting where the issues at hand may appear to be impossible to solve, we need to understand a genuine dialogue that will free individuals to do their best thinking. When each person feels that his or her opinions and emotions are taken seriously, the intelligence of a group or community can move beyond the intelligence quotient of any of the individuals, into the collective genius. Learning to relate to the person behind the opinions by shifting to a more beneficial point of view is the most effective way of ending the conflict. #RandolphHarris 2 of 7
When a person is trying to express to you what is going on, it is never a good idea to compare and contrast their situation with someone you think who has a more difficult time. Whatever the person talking to you is going through has nothing to do with comparing their situation to someone else’s. They are trying to explain what is going on with them and get some kind of empathy or advice. Sometimes we need to fully own the limits of our own imperfections and rough edges in communicating with others, and practice with tender regard for another’s experience what we are thinking. Hearing someone who has it harder does not and should not make us feel better. It would be like a struggling adult talking about their situation and someone saying, “Well, when your father was twenty-one he has a successful career, a house in the hills, and a brand-new car.” And it is like, that is nice, but there may be something someone is trying to express about their situation that has nothing to do with a comparison. They may be looking for help on how to deal with something they think is personal. Rising above our own feelings requires an unselfish generosity, the kind of generosity that contributes to happiness. Everyone has a different lifestyle and other people’s failures of successes have nothing to do with one’s situation. #RandolphHarris 3 of 7
It is sometimes like because people, even if they are older, get together in groups and because they have had a hard life, they want to take it out on someone who was rising above the doom and gloom and mistakes others made with their life. And when they finally bring that person down and that person is suffering, they want that individual to know that they have had a hard life and why should you have it any different. It is like seeing you suffer makes them feel better, and they want to blame you for their problems. Typically as we age, empathy for another person’s perspective comes easier than it does during earlier periods, but not always for some. Research on healthy adult development reveals that one key characteristic of maturity is the increased capacity to respect and even embrace another person’s point of view. Vast improvements in relationships are made when we can move beyond our rigid ideas and attempt to encounter others as people, not positions. Perhaps most exciting are the community—even global—implications of simply getting to know each other before we attempt to “solve” problems. “For the Lord sees not as people see; people look at the outside appearance, but God look at the heart,” reports 1 Samuel 16.7. It does not matter who is more right. What matters is listening to each other an understanding the other’s perspective. The willingness to see through each other’s eyes will transform corrupt communication in ministering grace. #RandolphHarris 4 of 7
Western communication has what linguists call a transmitter orientation—that is, it is considered the responsibility of the speaker to communicate ideas clearly and unambiguously. However, there is something beautiful in the subtlety of the exchange in Eastern culture, in the attention that each party must pay to the motivations and desires of the other. It is civilized, in the truest sense of that word: it does not permit insensitivity or insensitivity or indifference. However, high-power distance communication works only when the listener is capable of paying close attention, and it only works if the two parties in a conversation have the luxury of time, in order to unwind each other’s meanings. It does not work in high finance when time is an issue and people are exhausted and trying to get a situation taken care of before a deadline. Speaking through grace and compassionate language when the cultivated gift of the Holy Ghost pierces our hearts with empathy for the feelings and context of others. It enables us to transform hazardous situations into holy places. God looks upon our hearts and cares what we are thinking. It is also important to understand that sometimes people have had discussions in the past, and they only reason they may revisit them is because some third-party steps in with their opinions. So people who have had a discussion in the past understand what the other is saying and does not have to go into much detail. #RandolphHarris 5 of 7
And, frankly, sometimes people just need to mind their own business and keep their opinions to themselves, especially if you start trying to power force in a situation that has nothing to do with you and there is clear evidence that your influence has made the situation much worse. No one asked for your opinion, no one asked for your help and if you had followed the law all the pain and suffer and decades of corrective action and millions of dollars would not have been spent trying to correct a problem you created by trying to force your influence over a situation that was under control. People are not here to have their faith questioned and challenged. We are here to remind ourselves that we are not alone, to reaffirm centuries-old traditions with like-minded souls from around the World. We are not brainwashed, we are not being forced, we are all confirmed, we are doing this on our own. The Church does not make mistakes. We are all sinners, we are not perfect, we cannot expect anyone to be perfect like God, but it is important to show respect and not try to force your situations or ways onto others, especially when they can have fatal and lifelong impacts. Sometimes when people are watching you, they cannot help but feel jealous because you believe in something; it is more than they can say. #RandolphHarris 6 of 7
When you follow a leader, a code, a God, and it give your life meaning not by seeking to attain control of someone else’s narrative and reshaping, but through the opposite: by relinquishing it; we shall go one pursuing the path which the Lord has marked out before us. We have the right to influence who gets elected, what gets taught in schools, what gets sold in stores, and what rights we have in order to make decisions about our own bodies in lives. You cannot own a person and try to control their lives by using political forces. You cannot assume you know more than a person does about their products when you are not an expect. America is a law of lands and we have a capitalistic system because other systems can be very dangerous and deadly, as they do not respect human lives nor freedom of choice. America used to be a different World, where slavery was legal and everyone can see how deadly and dangerous it is when people do not have the freedom to make choices about their own lives, bodies, health and occupations. “Teach ye diligently and my grace shall attend you, that you may be instructed more perfectly in theory, in principle, in doctrine, in law of the gospel, in all things that pertain unto the kingdom of God, that are expedient for you to understand; of both in Heaven and in the Earth, and under the Earth; things which must shortly come to pass; thing which are at home; things which are abroad; the wars and the perplexities of the nations,” reports Doctrines and Covenants 88.78-80. #RandolphHarris 7 of 7
Randolph Harris II International Institute 