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I Used to think Love was Something I Could Take or Leave Alone but Now I Could Not do without My Supply!

January 5, 2020 4:28 am

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you should begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense. Though no one can go back and make a brand new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand new end. We should be lenient in our judgment, because often the mistakes of others would have been ours had we had the opportunity to make them. What is food to one being is bitter poison to others. Every negative development in a person is to be understood as the result of damaging influences in early childhood. This has led sometimes to irrational self-accusation on the part of parents who feel guilty for every undesirable or pathological trait that appears in a child after birth, and to a tendency of people in analysis to put the blame for all their trouble on their parents, and to avoid confronting themselves with the problem of their own responsibility. Good intentions mean noting if they cover up the unconscious intentions; “honest” dishonesty demonstrates that it is not enough to have “meant” well consciously. Forces operate in beings of which one is not aware and rationalization protects one from awareness; unconscious forces are integrated in a system to which we call character. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

Character syndromes are rooted and nourished in the particular forms of relatedness of the individual to the outside World and oneself; furthermore, inasmuch as the social group shares a common character structure (“social character”) the socioeconomic conditions shared by all members of a group mold the social character. That is where the saying, “birds of a feather flock together” comes from. Love, tenderness, sadism, masochism, ambition, curiosity, anxiety, rivalry—these and many other drives are no longer each attributed to a special instinct, but to the influence of the environment (essentially the significant persons in early childhood) via the psyche. The description given thus far suggest that character determines, the character trait, whether loving or destroying, drives a person to behave in a certain way, and the person is acting according to one’s character feels satisfied. Indeed, the character traits tells us how a person would like to behave. However, we must add an important qualification: if one could. The conflict between what we would like to do and the demands of self-interest remains crucial. We cannot always behave as we are driven to by our passions, because we have to modify our behavior to some extent in order to remain alive. The average person tries to find a compromise between what one’s character would make one want to do and what one must do in order not to suffer more or less harmful consequences. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

The degree to which a person follows the dictates of self-preservation (ego interest) varies, of course. At one extreme the weight of the ego interest is zero; this holds true for the martyr and a certain type person who targets and terminates prominent people. At the other extreme is the opportunist for who self-interest includes everything that could make one more successful, popular, or comfortable. Between these two extremes all people can be arranged, characterized by a specific blend of self-interest and character-rooted passions. How much a person represses one’s passionate desires depends not only on factors within oneself but on the situations; if the situation changes, repressed desires become conscious and are acted out. This holds true, for instance, for the person with a sadistic-masochistic character. Everybody knows the type of person who is submissive to one’s boss and sadistically domineering to one’s wife and children. Another case in point is the change that occurs in character when the total social situation changes. The sadistic character who may have posed as a meek or even friendly individual may become a fiend in a terroristic society in which sadism is valued rather than deplored. Another may suppress sadistic behavior in all visible actions, while showing it in a subtle expression of the face or in seemingly harmless and marginal remarks. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

Repression of character traits also occurs with regard to the most noble impulses. In spite of the fact that the teachings of Jesus are still part of our moral ideology, a being acting in accordance with them is generally considered a fool or a neurotic; hence many people still rationalize their generous impulses as being motivated by self-interests. These considerations show that the motivating power of character traits is influenced by self-interest in varying degrees. They imply that character constitutes the main motivation of human behavior, but restricted and modified by the demands of self-interest under varying conditions. Here is possessed the fundamental difference between behaviorism and psychoanalytic characterology. Conditioning works through its appeal to self-interest, such as the desire for food, security, praise, avoidance of pain. In animals, self-interest proves to be so strong that by repeated and optimally spaced reinforcements that interest for self-preservation proves to be stronger than other instincts like pleasures of the flesh or aggression. Humans of course also behave in accordance with one’s self-interest; but not always, and not necessarily so. One often acts according to one’s passions, one’s meanest and one’s noblest, and is often willing—and able—to risk one’s self-interest, one’s fortune, one’s freedom, and one’s life in the pursuit of love, truth, and integrity—or for hate, greed, sadism, and destructiveness. In this very difference is possessed the reason conditioning cannot be a sufficient explanation for human behavior. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

The discovery of unconscious processes and of the dynamic concept of character were radical because they went to the roots of human behavior; they were disquieting because nobody can hide any longer behind one’s good intentions; they were dangerous, because if everybody were to know what one could know about oneself and others, society would be shaken to its very foundations. Psychoanalysts is essentially a theory of unconscious strivings, of resistance, of falsification of reality according to one’s subjective needs and expectations (transference), of character, and of conflicts between passionate strivings embodied in character traits and the demands for self-preservation. Thus far, feelings of inferiority have nothing to do with any factual inferiority, but have been discussed only as the effects of a tendency to recoil from competition. Do they then have nothing to do with existing shortcomings, with a realization of actual flaws? They are in fact the result of both actual and imagined inadequacies: feelings of inferiority are a combination of anxiety-motivated belittling tendencies and a realization of existing defects. As I have emphasized several times, we cannot ultimately fool ourselves, though we may be successful in shutting certain impulses out of awareness. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

And therefore a neurotic person of the character we have been discussing will know, deep down, that one has anti-social tendencies which one must conceal, that one is far from genuine in one’s attitudes, that one’s pretenses are quite different from the undercurrents below the surface. One’s registering of all these discrepancies is an important cause for one’s feelings of inferiority, even though one never recognizes clearly the source of the discrepancies because they arise from repressed drives. Not recognizing their source, one gives to oneself reasons for feeling inferior which are rarely the real reasons, but only a renationalization. There is another reason why one feels that one’s inferiority feelings are the direct expression of an existing deficiency. On the basis of one’s ambition one has built up fantastic notions of one’s own value and importance. One cannot help measuring one’s realistic accomplishments against one’s notions of being a genius or a perfect human being, and in this comparison one’s real acts or one’s real possibilities appear inferior. The total result of all these recoiling tendencies is that the neurotic incurs real failures, or at most does not get on as well as one should, considering one’s opportunities and one’s gifts. Others who started with one get ahead of one, have better careers, greater success. This lagging behind does not concern only external success. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

The older one becomes the more one feels the discrepancy between one’s potentialities and one’s achievements. One feels keenly that one’s gifts, whatever they may be, are going to waste, that one is blocked in the development of one’s personality, that one does not mature as time goes on. The problem of persons around the age of forty is that they become blocked in their development. However, one has not recognized the conditions leading up to such a situation, and therefore has not found any satisfactory solution. And one reacts to the realization of this discrepancy with a vague discontent, a discontent which is not masochistic but real and proportionate. A discrepancy between potentialities and achievement may be due, as I have already pointed out, to external circumstances. However, the discrepancy which develops in a neurotic person, and which is a never-failing character of neuroses, is due to one’s internal conflicts. One’s actual failures and the consequent increasing discrepancy between potentialities and achievements inevitably give even greater force to one’s existing inferiority feelings. Thus one not only believes oneself to be, but actually is inferior to what one might be. The impact of this development is all the greater since it puts the inferiority feelings on a realistic basis. Meanwhile the other discrepancy which I have mentioned—that between high-flown ambitions and the comparatively poor reality—becomes so unbearable that it demands a remedy. As such a remedy fantasy offer itself. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

More and more the neurotic substitutes grandiose ideas for attainable goals. The value they have for one is obvious: they cover up one’s unendurable feelings of nothingness; they allow one to feel important without entering into any competition and thus without incurring the risk of failure or success; they allow one to build up a fiction of grandeur far beyond attainable goal. It is this blind-alley value of grandiose fantasies that makes them dangerous, because the blind alley has a definite advantage for the neurotic when compared with the straightforward road. These neurotic ideas of grandeur should be distinguished from those of the normal person and those of the psychotic. Even the normal person will at times think oneself wonderful, attribute undue importance to what one is doing, or indulge in fantasies of what one might do. However, these fantasies and ideas remain decorative arabesques and one does not take them too seriously. They psychotic person with ideas of grandeur is at the other end of the line. One is convinced that one is a genius, the Emperor of Japan, Napoleon, Christ, and will reject all evidence of reality which tends to disprove one’s conviction; one will be wholly unable to comprehend any reminder that one is actually a less affluent doorman, or patient in an asylum or the object of disrespect and ridicule. If one become aware of the discrepancy at all one will decide in favor of one’s grandiose ideas, and will believe that the others do not know any better, or that they are deliberately treating one with disrespect in order to hurt one. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

However, if therapy enables the individual to reorient one’s pattern of life and to reduce the tension and anxiety one feels regarding one’s personal problems, then the reactions of one’s automatic nervous system in, for example, a situation of stress, should also be altered. Essentially, if a change in life pattern and in internal tension occurred in therapy, this should show up in organismic changes in autonomic functioning, an area over which the individual has no conscious control. Individual who have experienced therapy develop a higher frustration threshold during their series of therapeutic contacts, and are able to recover their homeostatic balance more rapidly following frustration. After therapy, the individual is able to meet, with more tolerance and less disturbance, situations of emotional stress and frustration or stress was never considered in therapy; the more effective meeting of frustration is not a surface phenomenon but is evident in autonomic reactions which the individual cannot consciously control and of which one is completely unaware. Thus, it is predicted that if therapy enabled the individual to better handle stress at the psychological level, then this should be evident also in one’s autonomic functioning. Therefore, do not major in the minors. Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes. Remember to breathe not weak, snatched gasps, but deep riveting drafts. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

Another point in which the impossibility of the theory of addition of love and justice becomes visible is the relation of love and justice to the concrete situation. Justice is expressed in principles and laws none of which can ever reach the uniqueness of the concrete situation. Every decision which is based on the abstract formulation of justice alone is essentially and inescapably unjust. Justice can be reached only if both the demand of the universal law and the demand of the particular situation are accepted and made effective for the concrete situation. However, it is love which created participation in the concrete situation. It would be completely wrong to say that love must be added to justice if the uniqueness of the situation is to be reached. For this would mean that justice as such is impossible. Actually the situation shows that justice is just because of the love which is implicit in it. However, this can e understood fully only in the context of an ontological analysis of the root meanings of both love and justice. The weight of the problems and the dangerous character of the confusions is equally obvious when we finally confront power and justice. It is in this realm of problems that the relation of law and order to justice and of all of them to power is discussed and more often confused than illuminated. The first questions is: Who gives the law in which justice is supposed to be expressed? #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

To give a law is the basic manifestation of power. However, if a group which has power gives laws, how are they related to justice? Are they not simply the expression of the will to power of this group? The Marxist theory of the State asserts that the laws of the State are tools which give social control to a ruling group. The origin of its power may be military invasion or it may be socioeconomic stratification. In both cases justice is possible only if the State has withered away and has been replaced by an administration without political power. The justice of the ruling class is injustice and, if defended, ideology. The laws it gives preserve a social order, and as long as there is no alternative social order, the laws of the ruling classes are better than chaos. The more cynical representatives of this theory interpret justice exclusively as a function of power and in no way as its judge. They accept the Marxist analysis without the Marxist expectation, and reduce justice completely to a function of power. In reaction against this removal of justice as an ultimate principle a theory has been developed which tries to separate justice from power and completely and to establish it as a self-contained system of valid judgements. Justice is an absolute, without any relation to structures of power. The absolute law, derived from the principles of the natural or rational law, does not express wat is, but it demands what should be. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

Irrespective of power it commands and expects obedience because of its intrinsic validity. It does not express but it judges power. The contrast of these two theories about the relation of power to justice reveals the difficulty of the problem and the necessity of an ontological research into the rot meanings of power and justice. As announced before, I have led you into a jungle of problems and confusions, and, at every point, I have indicated the way out; namely, the ontological analysis of love, power, and justice. When the God we love chose to reveal Himself, He did so in creation itself and in more specific, special ways—most importantly, in the Scriptures and Jesus Christ. When we affirm that the Bible is a revelation from God, we do not simply assert that God as a person is known in and through it. We also mean that God has revealed understandable, objectively true propositions. The Lord’s Word is not only practically useful, it is also theoretically true (John 17.17). God has revealed truth to us and not just Himself. This truth is addressed to our minds and requires an intellectual grasp to understand and then apply. Because of the Bible’s nature, serious study is needed to grasp what it says. Of course, the Scripture contains easily grasped portions that are fairly straightforward. However, some of it is very difficult, intellectually speaking. In fact, Peter one said that some of Paul’s writings were intellectually challenging, hard to understand, and easily distorted (that is, uneducated in Christian theology) and unstable people (2 Peter 3.16). #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

The more a person develops the mind and the understanding of hermeneutics (the science of interpreting the Scriptures), the more one will be able to understand the meaning and significance of the Scriptures. Unfortunately, many today apparently think that hard intellectual work is not needed to understand God’s propositional revelation to us. Instead, they believe that the Holy spirit will simply make know the meaning of a text if it is implored to do so. Tragically, this represents a misunderstanding of the Spirit’s role in understanding the Scriptures. In my view, the Spirit does not help the believer understand the meaning of Scripture. Rather, He speaks to the believer’s soul, convicting, comforting, opening up applications of His truths through His promptings. On the evening Christ gave Himself up for us, John 17 tells us, He prayed in succession for Himself, for His twelve disciples, and for all of us who would later believe. When He finished praying for His future bride, He went to the cross. Then came Hos death, His resurrection, His ascension, and His enthronement at the right hand of the Father, where He constantly makes intercession for us. Thus we understand that giving ourselves for our brides involves prayerful intercession. Men, do you pray for your wives with something more than, “Bless good Meghan in all she does”? If not, you are sinning against her and against God. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

Most Christian men who claim to love their wives never offer more than a perfunctory nod to their wives’ needs before God. Men, you ought to have a list of her needs, spoken and unspoken, which you passionately hold up to God out of love for her. Praying is the material work of a Christian husband! The most basic command is, “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave up himself for her.” Men, we are divinely called to die for our brides, to take on her sufferings as our own, and to make intercession for her. You are supposed to be her ride or die man. When it is said that the readiness of the seeker determines the appearance of the master, this applies to the first fundamental initiation of one’s spiritual life. It does not mean that a master will come into one’s own town and seek one out, but that one will come into one’s life. And this may be brought about in various ways—as by the seeker oneself being led, either by Worldly circumstances or by one’s own seeking, out of one’s own town to the town or country where the master is living. The location of one’s spiritual guide will in part be the accident of one’s own geographical situation, for one will obviously be limited in one’s selection to possibilities and reputations in one’s own country or nation or race. The sheer physical and financial difficulties of traveling throughout the World—not to mention the obstacles of personal circumstance, family obligations, and ignorance of where to search and whom to approach in foreign lands, combine to set this limitation upon one’s inquiry and hence upon one’s opportunity. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

It is foolish to seek holiness geographically or holy beings in particular places. I have found that one being may live in a Himalayan abode and be a scoundrel and another being may live in a Bowery slum and be a saint. Wherever the live, people always carry their own thoughts and their own selves with them. The Soul, which is the object of our quest, is within us. The Master, who is to guide us upon our quest, will appear whenever we are ready for one and wherever we happen to live—or else we will be led to one. There are beings in the New World and the Old World, not less wise and noble than each other. If we have not met them, “the fault, Dear Brutus is…in ourselves,” primarily in our unworthiness, and secondarily in our incapacity to recognize what is beneath the surface. All speculation upon the motives and the methods of the illuminate will avail little. The light by which one works is denied to ordinary beings. We should not try to bind one down to qualities which fit only those who grope in the dark or move in twilight. We should trust where we cannot see and wait patiently for the day of revilement, when we will find all made clear and all riddle solved to our satisfaction. It is an old truism in the Old World that it takes an adept to understand an adept, but the New World will have to learn this truth by bitter experiences with pseudo-adepts. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

There are many signs of one’s spiritual status in the dignity and composure of one’s bearing, the deliberateness and truthfulness of one’s speech, and the impressiveness of one’s tension-free face. Helter Skelter is a phrase taken from a song performed by a well-known rock music group. Charles Manson used it to characterize that state of confusion in which he kept his followers, and himself as well. In the state of helter-skelter nothing makes sense, and everything makes as much sense as anything else. Manson was able to use this ideology to brainwash his followers and make them believe they were not responsible for their actions and they were not doing anything wrong when the ended the life of an individual. He taught them they if harm came to a person by means of his follower’s hands, then it was meant to be, it was in divine order and they did no really harm the individual and the individual was still alive on a different plane of existence. Aldous Huxley, in one of his retrospective writings, commented on how, among the associates of his youth, the endless talk of meaninglessness—the meaninglessness of life and therefore of everything in it—was merely an excuse to permit them to do whatever they wanted. Their life was organized (or, more properly, disorganized) around their feelings and wayward thoughts, with their will in two. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

However, resolute action for the good requires that things make sense. You would not want someone caught up in helter-skelter to work on your lawn mower, do your gastrointestinal examination, nor work on your computer. Life makes sense only if you understand its basic components and how they interrelate to form the whole. Evil, on the other hand, thrives on confusion. God is not the author of confusion (1 Corinthians 14.33). Frankly, our visible Christian World is not too far from helter-skelter with reference to its understanding of the makeup of the person and therefore of the spiritual life and spiritual formation. We need to access the fullness of biblical teachings on these matters. We suffer far too much from the influence of a surrounding culture that thrives on confusions. (And therefore its denial that human beings have a nature.) This may seem like a harsh thing to say about our “Christian World,” and I am sorry to day it; but the issues here are too important to mince words. Accordingly, much of what we do in Christian circles with very good intentions—hoping, we say, to see steady, significant growth in Christlikeness—simply makes no sense and lead nowhere so far as substantive spiritual formation is concerned. What a brutal thing to say! However, we need to recognize this, or show why it is not the case. I hope we have taken significant first steps toward a clarity that can serve as a foundation for the effectual practice of Christian spiritual formation. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

You live longer once you realize that any time spent being unhappy is wasted. “As far as the East is from the West, so far has he removed our transgression from us,” reports Psalm 103.12. How far is the East from the West? If you start due north at any point on Earth, you would eventually cross over the North Pole and start going south, but that is not true when you go East or West. If you start West and continue in that direction you will always be going West. North and South meet at the North Pole, but East and West never meet. In a sense, they are an infinite distance apart. So when God says He removes our transgressions from us as far as the East is from the West, He is saying they have been removed an infinite distance from us. However, how can we get a handle on this rather abstract truth in such a way that it becomes meaningful in our lives? When God uses this metaphorical expression describing the extent of His forgiveness of our sin, He is saying His forgiveness is total, complete, and unconditional. God is saying He is not keeping score with regard to our sins. “He does not treat us as our sins deserve or repay us according to our iniquities,” reports Psalm 103.10. Yes, God actually says that! I know it seems too good to be true. I confess I almost hesitate to write those words because they are so foreign to our innate concepts of reward and punishment. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

However, those gracious words are right in the Bible, and they are God’s words. How can God possibly do this? How can He so completely disregard our transgressions as to say He removes them an infinite distance from us? The answer is by His grace through Jesus Christ. God laid our sins on Christ and He bore the penalty we should have borne. Because of Christ’s death in our place, God’s justice is now completely satisfied. God can now, without violating His justice or His moral law, forgive us freely, completely and absolutely. He can now extend His grace to us; He can show favor to those who, in themselves, deserve only wrath. O Loving Wisdom of the living God, O living everlasting Word and everlasting Power of God the eternal Father—for everlasting is Thy birth, Who art the everlasting Son of God the everlasting Father, and art God; without Whom is nothing, by Whom are all things; in Whom consisteth whatever is; Who art God above us, and Man for our sakes; for Thou hast willed for us to be what we are: grant us what Thou hast promised; give to us, although unworthy, what Thou hast offered to all alike; that is, that Thy Passion may be our deliverance, and Thy Death our life, and Thy cross our redemption, and Thy Wound our healing; that being crucified with Thee, we may by Thy gift be lifted up on high to Thy Father, with Whom in bliss Thou livest and reignest. “And it is by faith that my fathers have obtained the promise that these things should come unto their brethren through the Gentiles; therefore the Lord hath commanded me, yea, even Jesus Christ,” reports Ether 12.22. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

O Source of All Good, what shall I render to three for the gift of gifts, then own dear Son, begotten, not created, my redeemer, proxy, surety, substitute, his self-emptying incomprehensible, his infinity of love beyond the heart’s grasp. Herein is wonder of wonders: he came below to rise me above, was born like me that I might become like him. Herein is love; when I cannot rise to him he draws near on wings of grace, to raise me to himself. Herein is power; when Deity and humanity were infinitely apart he untied them in indissoluble unity, the uncreated and the created. Herein is wisdom; when I was undone, with no will to return to him, and no intellect to devise recovery, he came, God-incarnate, to save me to the uttermost as man to die my death, to shed satisfying blood on my behalf, to work out a perfect righteousness for me. O God, take me in spirit to the watchful shepherds, and enlarge my mind; let me hear good tidings of great joy, and hearing, believe, rejoice, praise, adore, my conscience bathed in an ocean of repose, my eyes uplifted to reconcile Father; place me with ox, mule, camel, goat, to look with them upon my redeemer’s face, and in him account myself delivered from sin; let me with Simeon clasp the new-born child to my heart, embrace him with undying faith, exulting that he is mine and I am his. In him thou hast given me so much that Heaven can give no more. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

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Please Plant this Heart of Mine Underneath the Lonesome Pine on the Hill When it is Twilight on the Trail!

December 29, 2019 4:51 am

Almost one hundred years ago, in October and November of 1929, the stock market crashed and the World entered the Great Depression. The Roaring Twenties came to an end. Wealthy people everywhere lost their fortunes. Multimillionaires jumped out of windows. My grandparents told me they even cut back on eating meat. So, why does Paul in the Bible attack conformism? Why does he not call the Christian the perfectly adjusted being? Why does he not describe the Christian way as the way to a complete acceptance of the moral and religious standards of society? His thought is far from this, and according to the certain criteria of adjustment, certainly he could not have been called a good educator. However, he knew why he rejected conformism. He knew that all conformism is a state of being conformed to this eon. So let us try to understand the meaning of this strange assertion. This eon means the state of things in which we are living, which is, according to Paul, a state of corruption. Being conformed to it, therefore, means to participate in its corruptedness. Where there is conformism there is acceptance of corruption, subject to the present questionable state of things. In our English Bibles, the Greek word for eon is translated “World.” This is somehow misleading. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

When we speak of World we think of the Universe. However, the Universe, including our Earth and everything in it, is the product of incessant divine creativity here and now. It is good in its created form, and it is the place to which the kingdom of God shall come, as we pray in the Lord’s Prayer. It is one of those most dangerous misunderstandings of the Christian message to deny this World and its created glory, and to direct our eyes to a Superworld, unrelated to the original creation. The Bible speak of a new Heaven and a New Earth in contrast to the Old Heaven and the Old Earth. And now we understand what Paul means when he speaks of conformity to this eon: he means the untransformed Old Earth and the untransformed Old Heaven. He means the corrupted state of the Universe, and especially of our Universe—the Universe of beings—when he warns us not to become conformed to it. The attitude towards this eon, toward ourselves, and towards our World that the apostle demands is threefold: judgment, resistance, and transformation. However, one may ask—must I judge, must I resist, must I transform everything I encounter? Ought we not to adjust to that which is borne out of the wisdom of the ages, bestowed upon us by the generations before us through their experience and insights? #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

Could one not say—be conformed to what has been proved to be good and noble and in conformity with the spirit of love? We must ask this question with great seriousness and self-criticism. However, we must not forget that we are living in this eon, under the control of its forms and ways, where the uncorrupted is mixed with corruption, and the acceptable with the unacceptable, and good with evil. This is what makes conformity so dangerous. If the corruption of this eon were obvious, very few would be tempted to be conformed to it. Not many people, in reality or in literature, make a pact with the devil. However, there are many who are lured by elements of goodness, indeed of real goodness, into a pact with this eon, into the state of being conformed to it. And certainly, there are strong arguments for accepting conformity. We all are conformed to the family into which we are born whether we want to be or not. Shall we try to be non-conformists in our family because conformism would mean adjustment to this eon, to the corrupted state of things? Would that not bring much suffering to the other members of the family, and deprive us of the many blessings that an intimate and ordered family life can provide? How can the commandment to honor father and mother be combined with the warning of the apostle not to be conformed to this eon? #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

Jesus says—“I have come to set a man against his father and a daughter against her mother and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man’s foes will be those of his own household. One who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and one who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me,” reports Matthew 10.35-37. There are the most radical statements of non-conformity. And even Paul’s radicalism sounds conservative in comparison with them. It is astonishing that a faith based on words like these has been used throughout its history as a most successful instrument of conformity inside and outside family relations. How did this happen? Why is it the predominant attitude within Western culture even today, in spite of all the forces of disintegration? It is because it is infinitely difficult to find the point where the state of being conformed contradicts love as it is manifest in the Christ. It would be easy to notice the point where separation becomes unavoidable, if our family, as often was the case in early Christianity, tried to make us reject the Christ and what he stands for. However, this is not so today. Instead of it, the question of conforming or not conforming arises in innumerable small moments of our daily life. And in each moment, our answer is a risk, burdened with struggles within our own conscience. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

We do not know with certainty whether our non-conformity is based on a wrong conformity to ourselves or whether it is our awareness of corruption that drives us to non-conformity. And we do not know with certainty whether our non-resistance is based on a wrong surrender or whether it is an element of love and wisdom that keeps us conformed to the family group. We do not know these things with certainty, and we can act only at the risk of being wrong. However, act we must. Most people try to avoid the risk by being conformed to the state of things into which they have been thrown by destiny. However, those who have transformed our World risked wrong decisions. And the greater beings they were, the more conscious were they of the risk. They did not cease to doubt in spite of the depth and the passion of their faith. For when they refused to be conformed to themselves, but were renewed in their own being and could thus renew other things. And precisely for this reason they never became self-assured—they took upon themselves the risk of not being conformed and the anxiety and doubt and glory of this risk. Paul demands this of every Christian. Every Christian must be strong enough to risk non-conformity, even in the radical sense that Jesus describes with respect to one’s family. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

The situation in the family is an example, and more than an example. For all conformity is rooted in it. And resistance to conformity is first of all resistance to the family. However, there are other larger groups in which we breathe the air of conformity day and night, and where the resistance is sometimes easier, yet often more difficult, than in the family. I am thinking of educational, social, political, and religious groups. Let us look at each of them in the light of the apostolic word. It seems that an educational group is least exposed to conformity. Those who are learning are usually more inclined to resist than to accept their teachers and what they are taught by them. And the teachers are chosen on the basis of the independence of their judgments and the freedom of their scholarly questioning. This seems to make the institutions of higher learning the representative places of non-conformity. I do not think that this is so, however. One needs to ask the students two questions: Do not you often build, out of your resistance to what you are taught, a new conformity of rebellion? And do you resist the group or gang to which you belong as strongly as you resist your teachers, or are you conquered by gang conformity and all the elements of this eon, and the corruption implied in such conformity? How would you answer? #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

As we read some of the passages from the prophets, we might easily imagine that we were reading the reports of eye-witnesses from Warsaw or Hiroshima, Tokyo (2011) Sri Lanka, Berlin, San Francisco (1906), Oakland (1989) on New York (11 September 2001). Isaiah says: “Behold, the Lord maketh the Earth empty and maketh it waste, and turneth it upside down and scattereth its inhabitants…Towns fall to pieces; each being bolts one’s door; gladness has gone from the Earth and pleasure is no more. The cities are left desolate; their gates are battered down; and few are left. For Earth has been polluted by the dwellers on its face…breaking the Eternal Covenant. Therefore, a curse is crushing the Earth, and the guilty people must atone.” Every one of these words describes the experience of the peoples of Europe and Asia. The most primitive and most essential foundations of life have been shaken. The destruction is such that we, who have not experienced it, cannot even imagine it. We have not experienced it; we cannot believe that we could be caught in such a destruction and see busses dancing, bridges collapsing, oceans swallowing up 200,000 people and entire cities. And yet, I see American soldiers walking through the ruins of these cities, thinking their own country, and seeing with visionary clarity the doom of its towns and cities. I know that this has happened, and still is happening. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

There are soldiers who have become prophets, and their message is not very different from the message of the ancient Hebrew prophets. It is the message of the shaking of the foundations, and not those of their enemies, but rather those of their own country. For the prophetic spirit has not disappeared from the Earth. Decades before the World wars, people judged the European civilization and prophesied its end in speech and print. There are among us people like these. They are like the refined instruments which register the shaking of the Earth on far-removed sections of its surface. These people register the shaking of their civilization, its self-destructive trends, and its disintegration and fall, decades before the final catastrophe occurs. They have an invisible and almost infallible sensorium in their souls; and they have an irresistible urge to pronounce what they have registered, perhaps against their own wills. For no true prophet has ever prophesied voluntarily. It has been forced upon the by a Divine Voice to which they have not been able to close one’s ears. No being with a prophetic spirit likes to foresee and foreasy the doom of one’s own period. It exposes them to a terrible anxiety within oneself, to serve and often deadly attacks from others, and to the change of pessimism and defeatism on the part of the majority of the people. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

People desire to hear good tidings; and the masses listen to those who bring them. All the prophets of the Old and New Testaments, and others during the history of the Church had the same experiences. They all were contradicted by the false prophets, who announced salvation when there was no salvation. “The prophets prophesy falsely, and my people love to have it so,” cries Jeremiah in despair. They called him a defeatist and accused him of being an enemy of his country. However, is it a sign of patriotism or of confidence in one’s people, its institutions and its way of life, to be silent when the foundations are shaking? Is the expression of optimism, whether or not it is justified, so much more valuable than the expression of truth, even if the truth is deep and dark? Most human beings, of course, are not able to stand the message of the shaking of the foundations. They reject and attack the prophetic minds, not because they really disagree with them, but because they sense the truth of their words and cannot receive it. They repress it in themselves; and they transform it into mockery or fury against those who know and dare to say that which they know. In which of these two groups do you consider yourselves to be? Among those who respond to the prophetic spirit, or among those who close their ears and hearts against it? #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

I have always felt that there might be few who are able to register the shaking of the foundations of the Earth as such, but God Who laid the foundations and would shake them; and that they did not speak of the doom of the nation as such, but of God Who brings doom for the sake of His eternal justice and salvation. As the 102^nd Psalm says: “Thy years are foundations of the Earth, and the Heavens are the work of thy hands. They vanish, but thou shalt endure; they wear out like a robe, thou changest them like garments. However, thou art the same and thy years shall have no end.” When the Earth grows old and wears out, when nations and cultures die, the Eternal changes the garments of God’s infinite being. God is the foundation on which all foundations are laid; and this foundation cannot be shaken. There is something immovable, unchangeable, unshakeable, eternal, which becomes manifest in our passing and in the crumbling of our World. On the boundaries of the finite the infinite becomes visible; in the light of the Eternal the transitoriness of the temporal appears. The Greeks called themselves “the mortals” because they experienced that which is immortal. This is why the prophets were able to face the shaking of the foundations. It is the only way to look at the shaking without recoiling from it. Or is it possible to be conscious of the approaching doom, and yet to regard it with indifference and cynicism? Is it humanly possible to face the end cynically? #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

There are certainly some among us who are cynical toward most of that which beings create and praise. There are some among us who are cynical about the present situation of the World and the leaders of the World. We may be cynical, of course, about the true motives behind all human action; we may be cynical about ourselves, our inner growth and our outer achievements. We ay be cynical about religion and about our Churches, their doctrines, their symbols and their representatives. There is scarcely one thing about which we may not be cynical. However, we cannot be cynical about the shaking of the foundations of everything! I have never encountered anyone who seriously was cynical about that. I have seen much cynicism, particularly among the younger people in Europe before the war. However, I know from abundant witness that this cynicism vanished when the foundations of the World began to shake at the beginning of the European catastrophe. We can be cynical about the end only so long as we do not have to see it, only so long as we feel safety in the place in which our cynicism can be exercised. However, if the foundations of this place and all places begin to crumble, cynicism itself crumbles with them. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

And only two alternatives remain—despair, which is the certainty of eternal destruction, or faith, which is the certainty of eternal salvation. “The World itself shall crumble, but my salvation knows no end,” says the Lord. This is the alternative for which the prophets stood. This is what we should call religion, or more precisely, the religious ground for all religion. How could the prophets speak as they did? How could they paint these most terrible pictures of doom and destruction without cynicism or despair? It was because, beyond the sphere of destruction, they saw the sphere of salvation; because, in the doom of the temporal, they saw the manifestation of the Eternal. It was because they saw the manifestation of the Eternal. It was because they were certain that they belonged within the two spheres, the changeable and the unchangeable, bot bound within it alone, can face the end. All others compelled to escape, to turn away. How much of our lives consist in nothing but attempts to look away from the end! We often succeed in forgetting the end. However, ultimately we fail; for we always carry the end with us in our bodies and our souls. And often whole nations and cultures succeed in forgetting the end. However, ultimately they fail too, for in their lives and growth they always carry the end with them. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

Often the whole Earth succeeds in making its creatures forget its end, but sometimes these creatures feel that their Earth is beginning to grow old, and that its foundations are beginning to shake. For the Earth always carries its ends within it. We happen to live in a time when very few of us, very few nations, very few sections of the Earth, will succeed in forgetting the end. For in these days the foundations of the Earth do shake. May we not turn our eyes away; may we not close our ears and our mouths! However, may we rather see, through the crumbling of a World, the rock of eternity and the salvation which as no end! Music, the greatest good that mortals know, and all of Heaven we have below. “And in the mouth of three witnesses shall these things be established; and the testimony of three, and this work, in the which shall be shown forth the power of God and also his word, of which the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost bear record—and all this shall stand as a testimony against the World at the last day. And if it so be that they repent and come unto the Father in the name of Jesus, they shall be received into the kingdom of God. And now, if I have no authority for these things, judge ye’ for ye shall know that I have authority when ye shall see me, and we shall stand before God at the last day. Amen,” reports Ether 5.4-6. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

Receive my confession, O my only Hope of Salvation, Jesus Christ, my Lord and God. For in the mortal World I am lost, and altogether in thought, word, and deed, and in all evils, I am overwhelmed. Thou Who justifiest the ungodly and quickenest the dead, Lord my God, justify me and revive me. Save me, O Lord, King of eternal glory, Who canst save. Grant me to will and to do, and to accomplish, what is pleasing to Thee, and profitable to myself; give me assistance in distress, consolation in persecution, and strength in all temptation; vouchsafe me pardon for past evils, amendment of present evils, and be pleased to send me protection against evils to come. Thine it is to give the sinner a stricken heart and a fountain of tears. It is mine, if Thou shalt vouchsafe it, to weep for my sins; it is Thine to efface them speedily, as a cloud. I beseech Thee, O Lord, to forget my sins, and to remember Thy mercies. O Christ, spare me, pity me, not according to Thy word, that I may live, and not be disappointed of my hope. Give me a fountain of tears, O Fountain of life. My hope of salvation is in no works of mine; but my soul hangs simply on the boundlessness of Thy love, and confides in the multitude of Thy mercy. Hear our Prayer, O Lord, and listen to our groanings, for we acknowledge our iniquities, and lay open our sins before Thee. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

Against Thee, O God, have we sinned; to Thee we make our confession, and implore forgiveness. Turn Thy face again, O Lord, upon Thy servants whom Thou hast redeemed with Thine own Blood. Spare us, we pray Thee, and vouchsafe pardon to our sins, and be pleased to extend to us Thy loving-kindness and Thy mercy. Thou eternal God, thine is surpassing greatness, unspeakable goodness, super-abundant grace; I can as soon count the sands of ocean’s ‘lip’ as number thy favours towards me; I know but a part, but that part exceeds all praise. I thank thee for personal mercies, a measure of health, preservation of body, comforts of house and home, sufficiency of food and clothing, continuance of mental powers, my family, their mutual help and support, the delights of domestic harmony and peace, the seats now filled that might have been vacant, my country, church Bible, faith. However, O, how I mourn my sin, ingratitude, vileness, the days that to my guilt, the scenes that witness my offending tongue; all things in Heaven, Earth, around, within, without, condemn me—the Sun which sees my misdeeds, the darkness which is light to thee, the cruel accuser who justly charges me, the good Angels who have been provoked to leave me, thy countenance which scans my secret sins, thy righteous law, thy holy word, my sin-soiled conscience, my private and public life, my neighbours, myself—all write dark things against me. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

I deny them not, frame no excuse, but confess, Father, I have sinned; yet still I live, and fly repenting to thy outstretched arms; thou wilt not cast me off, for Jesus brings me near, thou wilt not cast me off, for Jesus brings me near, thou wilt not condemn me, for he died in my stead, thou wilt not mark my mountains of sin, for he levelled all, and his beauty covers my deformities. O my God, I bid farewell to sin by clinging to his cross, hiding in his wounds, and sheltering in his side. O Good Jesus, Who didst enable Lazarus at the sound of Thy voice to rise from the tomb, grant us to hear Thy voice in our souls, and to rise through grace from the depth of our own sin. Cleanse, O Lord, our consciences by the sincere confession of the Catholic Faith, and by continual contrition of heart; that we may always be heard by Thee in Heaven, when we call to Thee for pardon of sins on Earth! Let us live then and be glad, while young life is before us. “Though I speak with the tongues of humans and of Angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal,” reports 1 Corinthians 13.1. “And if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand,” reports St. Mark 3.25. I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—and I will be heard! I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice. Our country is the World; our country people are all humankind. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

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

December 23, 2019 5:14 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Corned Beef is Lost Without Cabbage, a Husband Should Have a Wife, and You Know that Life is so Peculiar!

December 22, 2019 4:43 am

We judge ourselves by what we are capable of doing: others judge us by what we have done. If you want to take your mission in life to the nest level, if you are stuck and you do not know how to rise, do not look outside yourself. Look inside. Do not let your fears keep you mired in the crowd. Abolish your fears and raise your commitment level to the point of no return, and I guarantee you that the Champion Within will burst forth to propel you toward victory. The old adage that “you do not really know what something is like until you experience it” holds for the subtle as well as the obvious and overt. You can no longer rely upon anyone to magically save you, only you can ultimately save yourself. It is not so much the kind of experience that matters, but its capacity to absorb, inspire, and enliven. Let your imagination go or throw your judgments aside for a time. See what happens when you trace that thought or feeling out. See if you can envision involving yourself in all those activities you dream about. What would such a scenario feel like in your stomach, chest, and throat? The more deeply one can describe one’s wish or fantasy, the more one can immerse oneself in its possibilities. And if envisioning the entire scenario seems difficult, then think about portions of that scenario. Like if buying a house is frightening to you, then just go tour a model home and see how you feel. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

I believe life is constantly testing us for our level of commitment, and life’s greatest rewards are reserved for those who demonstrate a never-ending commitment to act until they achieve. This level of resolve can move mountains, but it must be constant and consistent. As simplistic as this may sound, it is still the common denominator separating those who live their dreams from those who live in regret. Practice being present and aware, especially in problematic situations. See if you can stay with the thoughts and feelings thar come up, even for the briefest moment. Also, sort through what is operating on you in stressful situations—what assumptions you make, how you approach or avoid certain things, and what inner vices you hear. Sometimes it may be helpful to observe how readily you give your power away in certain circumstances; or you may be impressed by your passive aggressive behavior. Virtually anything you perceive from this standpoint can be revelatory. As nonjudgmentally as possible, just watch the flow of your inner experiences, and neither try to categorize nor figure out those experiences. Simply from the time you take for yourself, and the needs, fears, and desires you feel will be unveiled. It may also help to try to make contact with and reflect on your own childhood, and visit the places and things that your children value. This may give you new opportunities to live. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

Capitalism as a system in which harmony is created by ruthless competition between all individuals would appear to be a natural order if one could prove that the most complex and remarkable phenomenon, humans, are a product of the ruthless competition among all living beings since the emergence of life. The development of life from monocellular organisms to humans would seem to be the most splendid example of free enterprise, in which the best win through competition and those who are not fit to survive in the progressing economic system are eliminated. Cybernetic capitalism, with its gigantic centralized enterprises and its capacity to provide the workers with amusements and bread, is able to maintain control by psychological manipulation and human engineering. It needs a human who is very malleable and easily influences, rather than one whose instincts are controlled by fear of authority. At one time the ideal—at least for the middle classes—was independence, private initiative, to be “pilot of my airplane.” The contemporary vision, however, is that of unlimited consumption and unlimited control over nature. People are fired by the dream that one day they will completely control nature and thus be like God; why should there by anything in human nature cannot be controlled? #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

Unless you have the will to prepare, the will to win is worth nothing. There is a sense of fear and hopelessness that pervades many people because of the ever-increasing dangers and that nothing is done to avert them. Many who have had faith in progress and had hoped for basic changes in human’s fate, instead of carefully analyzing the social process which led to their disillusionment, are taking refuge in the explanation that human’s nature must be responsible for this failure. Potentialities for conflict and suffering are inherent in human affairs, and attempts to completely abolish or mitigate suffering may appear to be a hopeless undertaking, at least a far more complicated one than the social revolutionaries had fancied them to be, partially due to competing addends, different political views and nature. However, the power to hold on in spite of everything, the power to endure—this is the winner’s quality. Persistence is the ability to face defeat again and again without giving up—to push on in the face of great difficulty, knowing that victory can be yours. Persistence mean taking pain to overcome every obstacle, and to do what is necessary to reach your goals. The direct outcome of the anxiety involved in neurotic competitiveness is a fear of failure and a fear of success. The fear of failure is in part an expression of the fear of being humiliated. Any failure becomes a catastrophe. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

A girl who had failed to know something she was expected to know at school not only felt inordinately ashamed, but felt also that the other girls in the class would despise and turn against her altogether. This reaction carries all the more weight since frequently occurrences of failures which factually have no connotation of failure, or are at mist immaterial—such as not getting the highest marks at school, or failing in some part of an examination, or giving a party which is not an extraordinary success, or not having been brilliant in conversation, in brief anything that falls short of excessive expectations. A rebuff of any kind, which, as we have seen, the neurotic reacts to with intense hostility, is likewise felt as a failure and therefore as a humiliation. This fear of the neurotic person may be greatly intensified by one’s apprehension that others will gloat over a failure because they know of one’s relentless ambition. What one dreads more than failure itself is failure after having shown in any way that one is competing, that one does indeed want success and has made efforts to attain it. One feels that a mere failure can be forgiven, might even arouse sympathy rather than hostility, but that once one has shown an interest in success one is surrounded by a horde of persecuting enemies, who lie in wait to crush one at any sign of weakness or failure. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

The resulting attitudes vary according to the content of the fear. If the emphasis lies on the fear of failure as such, one will redouble one’s efforts or even become desperate in one’s attempts to avoid failure. Acute anxiety may emerge before crucial tests of one’s strength or ability, such as examinations or public appearances. If, however, the emphasis lies on the fear of others recognizing one’s ambition the resulting picture is exactly the opposite. The anxiety that one feels will make one appear to be disinterested and will lead one to make no efforts of any kind. The contrast in these two pictures is noteworthy, because it shows how two types of fear, which after all are akin, may produce two entirely different sets of characteristics. A person conforming to the first pattern will work frantically for examinations, but one of the second pattern will work very little and will perhaps conspicuously indulge in social activities or hobbies, thus showing to the World one’s lack of interest in the task. Usually the neurotic is not aware of one’s anxiety and is conscious only of its consequences. One may, for example, be unable to concentrate on work. Or one may have hypochondriacal fears, such as a fear of heart trouble from physical exertion, or of a nervous breakdown from mental overwork. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

Or one may become exhausted after any exertion—when anxiety is involved in an activity it is likely to be exhausting—and will use this exhaustion to prove that efforts are injurious to one’s health and hence must be avoided. In one’s recoil from making any effort the neurotic may lose oneself in all sorts of diverting activities, from playing solitaire to giving parties, or one may take on an attitude that looks like laziness or indolence. A neurotic woman may dress badly, preferring to give the impression of no caring to dress well than to make the attempt to do so, because she feels the attempt would only expose her to ridicule. A girl who was unusually pretty, but was convinced that she was homely, did not dare to powder her nose in public because she expected people to think, “How ridiculous of that ugly duckling to make an attempt to look attractive!” Thus in general the neurotic will consider it safer not to do the things one wants to do. One’s maxim is: Stay in the corner, be modest, and most of all, do not be conspicuous. As Veblen has emphasized, conspicuousness—consumption—plays an important role in competition. Accordingly a recoil from competition has to put emphasis on the opposite, on the avoidance of conspicuousness. This implies sticking to conventional standards, staying out of the limelight, being no different from others. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

If this recoiling trend is a predominant characteristic it results in not taking any risk. Needless to say, such an attitude brings with it a great impoverishment in life and a warping of potentialities. For, unless circumstances are usually favorable, the attainment of happiness or any kind of achievement presupposes taking risks and making efforts. Thus far we have discussed the fear of possible failure. However, this is only one manifestation of the anxiety involved in neurotic competitiveness. The anxiety may also take the form of a fear of success. In many neurotics anxiety concerning the hostility of others is so enormous that they are afraid of success, even if they feel certain of attaining it. The tendency to assume that the spiritual being was perfect in one’s youth and never made a mistake in one’s maturity, is common among one’s followers and passed on by them to the public—with the result that the latter stares at one with great awe as a rare phenomenon but does not dream that it is possible to follow in one’s footsteps to the same achievement. The truth is that one has one’s share of struggles and failures, that one was born with one’s own particular imperfections, and that one had to make the character and expand the consciousness which adored one’s later years. No one is perfectly fulfilled, completely virtuous, totally enlightened, on this physical plane. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

The best enlightened beings and saints are so because of their inspiration’s source, which is beyond other being’s. However, the channel is still human, still limited, and still liable to colour what flows through. The body of every enlightened being is still human and shares the same limitations as other human bodies. This is why one suffers from the infirmary and pains to all flesh is heir. We may admire, respect, and pay homage to these beings without falling into the extravagance of regarding them as gods. It is a common error to believe that such a being is free from all limitations whatsoever and that the deliberate performance of miracles is not beyond one. However, the truth is that not only is one not allowed by the nature of circumstances to help but one is also surrounded by barriers in what one is able to do for those whom one does try to help. The belief that the adept can explain everything is a false one. It would be in better harmony with the facts, and mysticism would lose nothing not worth losing by it, if the representation of great mystics as demi-gods and infallible entities ceased. They are human beings and sometimes they make mistakes. No teacher can be all-knowing or all-powerful. Such attributes belong to God, not to humans. Most teachers commit errors and possess frailties. There is too often a tendency to regard one as more than human. It is true that in one sense and in one part of one’s inner being, one is. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

However, this is no reason to lose all balance and lavish adulation indiscriminately upon one. For in a number of ways one is still an ordinary being. Even the greatest of prophets may have one’s lesser moments, one’s lighter moods. Why not look at discoverable realities rather than unrealizable expectation? These beings, however high in development and however worthy of reverence, are still only mortals. They die like us, they get ill and suffer. They do not know everything. They are even fallible. Some hold views which are arguable at least, which have been dictated or influenced by local traditions, custom, or belief rather than by God. The presence of insight does not exempt a self-actualized person from one’s human needs. One continues one’s daily functions as before. It is great to seek out spiritual direction. One should find an authoritative source to instruct one in spiritual truth and to clear up one’s questions. Contrary to common belief, the teacher is not found in the inner psychic life first and then the discovery reflected in the outer physic fact before any real relationship can be established between the two. One must be found unshakably established in the innermost depths of the heart as a presence and in the background of the mind as a picture. There has arisen too much hard and exploitation from the teacher-seeking attitude to some. Firstly, the request for a teacher should arise from a deep, sustained, and urgent sense of needing such help—not merely for the sake of having one. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

And just as thought and feeling are inseparable, so volition is closely intertwined with them. To choose, one must have some object or concept before the mind and some feeling for or against it. There is no choice that does not involve both thought and feeling. On the other hand, what we feel and think is (or can and should be) to a very large degree a matter of choice in competent adult persons, who will be very careful about what they allow their mind to dwell upon or what they allow themselves to feel. This is crucial to the practical methods of spiritual formation. Unfortunately, the fact that feelings and thoughts are largely a matter of choice is not widely understood—especially as it concerns feelings. We speak of feelings as passions, and that is a word that implies passivity. However, we are in fact active in inviting, allowing, and handling our passions. So, what we have before us in our study of spiritual formation is the whole person, and the various basic dimensions of the human self are not separable parts. They are aspects thoroughly intermingled with each other in their natures and in their actions. Especially, on the present point, human life as a whole does not run by will alone. Far from it. Nevertheless, if it is to be organized at all, life must be organized by the will. It can only be pulled together from the inside. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

That is the function of the will or heart: to organize our life as a whole, and, indeed, to organize it around God. And of course, if one’s existence is to be even fairly tolerable to one’s self or those around, life must be organized, and organized well. Every civilization of any type has recognized this. A great part of the disaster of contemporary life is possessed in the fact that it is organized around feelings. People nearly always act on their feelings, and think it only right. The will is then left at the mercy of circumstances that evoke feelings. Christian spiritual formation today must squarely confront this fact and overcome it. “This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus,” reports Romans 3.22-24. Ryan and Sue, could not afford to buy a house, and they found one for sale by a wealth man, who they owed a lot of money. The man knew their situations, cancelled their debt and gave them the house they desired, completely furnished, with utilities and maintenance paid for life. That is a picture of how God’s grace operates. The currency of our morality and good deeds is worth a lot in God’s eyes. Spiritual discipline means putting oneself back under the Law with a series of Draconian rules which we must try to life up to. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

The legalistic heart says, “I will do this thing to gain merit with God.” The disciplined heart says, “I will do this thing because I love God and want to please Him.” There is an infinite difference between the motivation of legalism and discipline! We must train [discipline] ourselves to be Godly! If we confuse legalism and discipline, we do so to our soul’s peril. When we are fixed after God’s heart, it is imperative that we do not become dirty, leering people. Do not let a lustful fixation come over you that you cannot deny. When lust takes control, at this moment God loses all reality. Satan does not fill us with hatred of God, but with forgetfulness of God. We will also lose awareness of who we are—our holy call, our frailty, and the certain consequences of sin. This is what lust does! It has done it millions of times. God disappears to lust-glazed eyes. The truth demands some serious questions: Has God faded from view? Did you once see God in bright hues, but now His memory is blurred like an old sepia photograph? So you have an illicit fixation which has become all you can see? It the most real thing in your life your desire? If so, you are in deep trouble. The mind controlled by lust has an infinite capacity for rationalization. Progressive desensitization, relaxation, fixation, and rationalization can set one up for one of the great falls in history—and one’s degeneration. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

Some sense activity is directly pleasing and displeasing quite apart from effects that are stored in experience and learned through behavior. The spirits possess something analogous to a sensing power and this power initiates some kinds of movement and governs them. Sensible heart is correctly defined as merely the effect of heat on the terrestrial spirits. Because air expands and contracts with changes of temperature, that air may have sense of heat and cold, a sense so subtle and exquisite as far to exceed the perception of the human touch. I think that the terrestrial spirits have a sense of heat and cold more exquisite still, were it not that it is impeded and deadened by the grossness of the body. All animate things internal motion not attributable to the influence of the external senses is controlled by the sensory power of spirit. The living spirit seems to have a sense of its own. All national things are endowed with powers of sensation. Because a sense is required to initiate any and all kinds of motion, nature is alive with senses. Sense and motion seems always to go together in the animate World, and this doctrine infers that there are senses in sticks and stones, which is why places have energy and vibrations. There are motions in inanimate things. Necessarily, there are many more motions in inanimate bodies than there are senses in animate, on account of the paucity of organs of sense. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

Living beings, including animals, experience many kinds and varieties of pain and each involves motion. It is almost certain that there are as many motions in inanimate substances, though they do not enter the senses for want of animal spirit. Those things that are taught metaphorically in one part of Scripture, in other parts are taught more openly. They very hiding of truth in figures is useful for the exercise of thoughtful minds and as a defense against the ridicule of the impious, according to the words “Give not that which is holy to dogs,” reports Matthew 7.6. It is more fitting that divine truths should be expounded under the figure of less noble than of nobler bodies, and this for three reasons. Firstly, because thereby human’s minds are the better preserved from error. For then it is clear that these things are not literal descriptions of divine truths, which might have been open to doubt had they been expressed under the figure of nobler bodies, especially for those who could think of nothing nobler than bodies. Secondly, because this is more befitting the knowledge of God that we have in this life. For what God is nor is clearer to us than what He is. Therefore similitudes drawn from things farthest away from God form within us a truer estimate that God is above whatsoever we may say or thing of Him. Thirdly, because thereby divine truths are the better hidden from the unworthy. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

Every person has a need for Christ’s forgiveness and power, whether or not that person feels that need. However, anti-intellectualism has drained the church of its boldness in witnessing and speaking out about important issues in the places where ideas are granted. And for those who do have such courage, anti-intellectualism has created a context in which we Christians come off as shallow, defensive, and reactionary, instead of thoughtful, confident, and articulate. One evening a couple came to our home for dinner. During the meal the husband said almost nothing (except “Pass the lobster thermidor!”). Despite repeated attempts to engage him, the conversation took place primarily among the two wives and me. However, as the pumpkin cheesecake was being served, the topic of conversation turned to Victorian mansions, and from that point on we could hardly get a word in edgewise. Why? Victorian mansions were the man’s hobby. He owned two of them, knew how to build one from scratch, and truly was an expert on the subject. He had courage to speak up because he knew what he was talking about; he did not need to be defensive when someone differed with his viewpoint because he was confident about his knowledge. When people learn what they believe and why, they become bold in their witness and attractive in the way they engage others in debate or dialogue. When people take classes on Christian faith they feel more confident they are able to answers questions and are more comfortable talking about it. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

Being a Christian is no different than caring about Victorian architecture. There is nothing magic about being confident, articulate, and bold in either area. Knowing what you are talking about may be hard work, but it clearly pays off. Anti-intellectualism has not merely impacted the lives of believers within the heart of Christ. It has had has serious repercussion in the culture at large. As anti-intellectualism has softened out impact for Christ, so too has it contributed to the secularization of the culture. If the salt loses its saltiness, the meat will be impacted. In the aftermath of the Scopes trial in 1925, conservative Christianity was largely dismissed as an embarrassment among intellectual and cultural movers and shakers. As a result, we now live in one of the most secular cultures in history. We beseech Thee, O Lord, give a salutary effect to our fasting, that the mortification of our flesh may prove the nourishment of our souls; through Jesus Christ our Lord. O God, Who didst spare the Ninevites when they fasted for their sins; we humbly beseech Thee that in this our fast Thou wouldest, of Thine accustomed mercy, vouchsafe to us also Thy forgiveness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. O God, if Thou shouldest determine to render to us what we deserve, we must sooner perish than endure our served punishment; we therefore pray Thee mercifully to forgive our wanderings; and that we may be able to be converted to Thy commandments, do Thou go before us with abundant mercy; through Jesus Christ our Lord. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

Three in one, one in three, God of my salvation, Heavenly Father, blessed Son, eternal Spirit, I adore thee as one Being, one Essence, one God in three distinct Persons for bringing sinners to thy knowledge and to thy kingdom. O Father, thou hast loved me and sent Jesus to redeem me; O Jesus, thou hast loved me and assumed my nature, shed thine own blood to wash away my sins, wrought righteousness to cover my unworthiness; O Holy Spirit, thou hast loved me and entered my heart, implanted there eternal life, revealed to me the glories of Jesus. Three Persons and one God, I bless and praise thee, for loved so unmerited, so unspeakable, so wondrous, so mighty to save the lost and raise them to glory. O Father, I thank thee that in fullness of grace thou hast given me to Jesus, to be his sheep, jewel, portion; O Jesus, I thank thee that in fullness of grace thou hast accepted, espoused, bound me; O Holy Spirit, I thank thee that in fullness of grace thou hast exhibited Jesus as my salvation, implanted faith within me, subdued my stubborn heart, made me one with him forever. O Father, thou art enthroned to hear my prayers, O Jesus, thy hand is outstretched to take my petitions, O Holy Spirit, thou art willing to help my infirmities, to show me my need, to supply words, to pray within me, to strengthen me that I faint not in supplication. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

O Triune God, who commandeth the Universe, thou hast commanded me to ask for those things that concern thy kingdom and my soul. Let me live and pray as one baptized into the threefold Name. “And never have I showed myself unto humans whom I have created, for never have humans believed in me as thou hast. Seest thou that ye are created after mine own image. Behold, this body, which ye now behold, is the body of my spirit; and humans have I created after the body of my spirit; and even as I appear unto thee to be in the spirit will I appear unto my people in the flesh,” reports Ether3.15-16. We beseech Thee, O Lord, in Thy forgiving love, turn away what we deserve for our sins, nor let our offences prevail before Thee, but let Thy mercy always rise up to overcome them; through Jesus Christ our Lord. O, God, Who sufferest not that offenders should perish without being enabled to be converted and live, we beseech Thee to suspend the vengeance due to our sins, and mercifully grant that no dissembling on our part may increase our punishment, but rather that amendment may avail for our pardon; though Jesus Christ. Be present, O Lord, to our supplications; nor let Thy Merciful clemency be far away from Thy servants. Heal our wounds, forgive our sins, that being served from Thee by no iniquities, we may be able evermore to cleave to Thee our Lord. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

MILLS STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH

Rancho Cordova, CA

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

December 18, 2019 2:11 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CRESLEIGH MEADOWS AT PLUMAS RANCH

Plumas Lake, CA | from the mid $300’s

Coming Soon!

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

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A Great Soul Contains the Diary of the Human Race and Changes Lives for the Better!

December 11, 2019 3:18 am

It must have been midnight when I awoke. I do not recall the face of the clock; only the feeling of deep night, and that it was spring and that I wanted walk outside and talk to the Moon and Stars for a while. Were it possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, perhaps we would endure our sadness with greater confidence than our joys, for they are the moments when something new has entered us, something unknown. People learn to listen to silence. We can hear the infinite number of sounds we never hear at all—the unending crystalline sounds of the cockatiels, a breeze blowing lightly through the golden hay, a thrush singing in the low bushes beyond the meadow. And we suddenly realize that this is something—the World of silence is populated by a myriad of creatures and a myriad of sounds. European existentialists, finally, succinctly characterize presence as dasein, which means, literally, to “be there.” Hell is other people. From the beginning humans have served the appetites of one another in the most varying ways, but these were always reducible to a single theme: the need for fuel for one’s own aggrandizement and immunity. Human use one another to assure their personal victory over death. The death fear of the ego is lessened by the killing, the sacrifice, of the other; through the death of the other, one buys oneself free from the penalty of dying, of being killed. No wonder people are addicted to war. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

When it comes to enemies and strangers, the ego can consign them to the limbo of death without even a second thought. Because they deny that they want control over their environment, others beings, and also deny their wish for immortality, modern beings live in illusion; and it is precisely because of this illusion that humankind cannot get control over social evils like war. This is what makes war irrational: each person has the same hidden problem, and as antagonists obsessively work their cross purposes, the result is truly demonic; the film Queen of the Damned summed this up beautifully. Not only enemies but even friends and loved ones are fair fuel for our own perpetuation. In our unconscious we daily and hourly deport all who stand in our way, all who have offended or injured us, if pressured, would be unwilling to sacrifice someone else in our place. The exception to this is of course the hero. We admire him or her precisely because he or she is willing to give one’s life for others instead of taking theirs for his or hers. Heroism is an unusual reversal of routine values, and it is another thing that makes war so uplifting, as humankind has long known: war is a ritual for the emergence of heroes, and so for the transmutation of common, selfish values. In war beings live their own ennoblement. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

However, what we are reluctant to admit is that the admiration of the hero is a vicarious catharsis of our own fears, fears that are deeply hidden; and this is what plunges us into uncritical hero worship: what the hero does seem so superlative to us. Thus from another point of view we see that it is true that beings are enslaved by their own illusions based on their repressions. The logic of scapegoating, then, is based on terrestrial narcissism and hidden fear. If luck is when the arrow hits the fellow next to you, then scapegoating is pushing the fellow into its path—with special alacrity if one is a stranger to you. A particularly pungent phrasing of the logic of scapegoating one’s own death is as though the sacrifice were to say to God after appraising how nature feeds voraciously of life, “If this is what you want, here, take it!—but leave me alone. If anyone still think that this is merely cleaver phrasing in the minds of alienated intellectuals trying to make private sense out of the evil of their World, let one consult the daily papers. Almost every year there is a recorded sacrifice of human life in remote areas of Chile to appease the Earthquake gods. There have been fifteen recent officially reported cases of human sacrifice in India—one being that of a four-year-old boy sacrificed to appease a Hindu goddess, and another involving a west Indian immigrant couple in England who sacrificed their 16-year-old son, following prayer and meditation, to ward off the death of the mother. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

In the narcissism of Earthly bodies, where each is imprisoned fatally in one’s own finite integument, everyone is alien to oneself and subject to the status of scapegoat for one’s own life. The logic of ending the lives of others in order to affirm our own life unlocks much that puzzles us in history, much that with out modern minds we seem unable to comprehend, such as the Roman arena games. If the terminating of a captive affirms the power of your life, how much does the actual massive staging of life-and-death struggles affirm a whole society? The continual grinding sacrifice of animal and human life in the arenas was all of a piece with the repressions of a society that was dedicated to war and that lived in the teeth of death. It was a perfect pastime to work off anxieties and show the ultimate personal control of death: the thumbs up or thumbs down on the gladiators. The more death you saw unfold before your eyes and the more you thrust your thumbs downward, the more you bought off your own life. And why was the crucifixion such a favorite form of execution? Because, I think, it was actually a controlled display of dying; the small seat on the cross held the body up so that dying would be prolonged. The longer people looked at the death of someone else, the more pleasure they could have in sensing the security and good fortune of their own survival. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

The whole meaning of a victory celebration is that we experience the power of our lives and the visible decrease of the enemy: it is a sort of staging of the whole meaning of war, the demonstration of the essence of it—which is why the public display, humiliation, and execution of prisoners is so important. They are weak and die: we are strong and live. The Roman arena games were, in this sense, a continued staging of victory even in the absence of war; each civilian experienced the same power that one otherwise had to earn in war. If we are repulsed by the bloodthirstiness of those games, it is because we choose to banish from our consciousness what true excitement is. For beings, maximum excitement is the confrontation of death and the skillful defiance of it by watching others fed to it as one survives transfixed with rapture. Today only those such as racing-car drivers and sports parachutists can stage these kinds of dramas in civilian life. It seems that the Nazis really began to dedicated themselves to their large-scale sacrifices of life after 1941 when they were beginning to lose and suspected at some dim level of awareness that they might. They hastened the infamous final solution of the Jewish people toward the closing days of their power, and executed their own political prisoners—like Dietrich Bonhoeffer—literally moments before the end. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

Retreating Germans in Russian and Italy were especially apt to kill with no apparent motive, just to leave a heap of bodies. It is obvious they were offering last-minute hostages to death, stubbornly affirming in a blind, organismic way, “I will not die, you will—see?” It seems that they wanted some kind of victory over evil, and when it could not be the Russians, then it would be the Jews and even other Germans; any substitute scapegoat would have to do. In the recent Bengali revolt, the Western Pakistanis often killed anyone they saw, and when they did not see anyone, they would throw grenades into houses; they piled up a toll of over 3 million despised Bengalis. It is obvious that beings kill to cleanse the Earth of one’s the perceive as tainted ones, and that is what victory means and how it commemorates one’s life and power: humans are bloodthirsty to ward off the flow of their own blood. And it seems further, out of the war experiences of recent times, when humans see that they are trapped and excluded from longer Earthly duration, one says, “If I cannot have it, then neither can you.” Other things that we have found to understand have been hatreds and feuds between tribes and families, and continual butchery practiced for what seemed petty, prideful motives of personal honor and revenge. However, the idea of sacrifice as self-preservation explains these very directly. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

The characteristic of primitives and of family groups was that they represented a sort of soul pool of immortality-substance. If you depleted this pool by one member, you yourself became more mortal. It is my opinion that this ideology offers a basis for understanding both the bitter hatreds and feuds between North American Indian tribes, and the feuds or vendettas currently practiced in many European countries. Whether it was the theft of women under exogamy, of the murder of male members of the tribe, it was always a matter of avenging serious offenses upon the spiritual economy of the community which, being robbed of one of its symbols of spiritual revenue, sought to cancel or at least avenge the shortages created in the immortality account. This kind of action is natural to primitives especially, who believe in the balance of nature and are careful not to overly deplete the store of life-stuff. Revenge of equals the freeing of life-stuff into the common reservoir from which it can then be reassigned. The primitive notion of life-stuff right up to modern society is a motive for genocidal war and even the everyday secular process of justice: the guilty one is punished in order to return one’s life-stuff to the community. I do not know how much of a burden of explanation we would want to put on the pool of life-stuff in modern, secular society. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

For one thing, most people no longer believe in the balance of nature, they think that just curbing greenhouse gases, and electric cars are the solution to everything, but watering the trees in the forest, building more reservoirs, and desalinating water would be more effective. Yet, they are not a balancing economical force. Meaning politicians are pushing electric cars to get people off fossil fuels and make other car producers the big manufactures. Curbing greenhouses gases would help, but by planting trees, and grass is another way to do this. Furthermore, some electricity comes from coal, and many cities are already having problems providing electricity to communities and it is hard to find charging stations. Another issue is, we do not often grant to others the same life quality that we have. However, whether or not we believe in a steady pool of life-stuff, numbers are important to humans: if we buy off our own death with that of others, we want to buy it off at a good price. In wartime, we mourn our dead without undue depression because we are able to celebrate an equal if not greater number of deaths in the ranks of the enemy. This explains the obsessive nature of body counting of the enemy as well as the universal tendency to exaggerate one’s losses and minimize those of one’s own side. When their own lives are at stake is only when people can lie so blatantly and eagerly. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

The exaggerations expressed by people whose lives are in danger always seem silly to outsiders to the conflict precisely because their lives are not involved. We now have to believe that all warfare and revolutionary struggle are simply a development of feuding and vendettas, where the basic thing at stake is a dramatization of development of nationalism in our time—the fantastic bitterness between nations, the unquestioned loyalty to one’s own, the consuming wars fought in the nae of the fatherland or the motherland—unless we saw it in this light. Our nation and its allies represent those who qualify for eternal survival; we are the chose people. From the time when the Athenians exterminated the Melians because they would not ally with them in war to the modern extermination of the Africans, they dynamic has been the same: all those who join together under one banner are alike and so qualify for the privilege of immortality; all those who are different and outside that banner are excluded from the blessings of eternity. The vicious sadism of war is not only a testing of God’s favor to our side, it is also a proof that the enemy is mortal: “Look how we kill him.” Cruelty can arise from the aesthetic outrage we sometimes feel in the presence of strange individuals who seem to be making out all right. Have they found some secret passage to eternal life? It cannot be. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

If those unusual individuals with the unique fashion and behavior are acceptable, then what about my claim to superiority? Can someone like that be my equal in God’s eyes? Does he, that one, dare hope to live forever too—and perhaps crowd me out? I do not like it. All I know is, if he is right, I am wrong. So different and funny-looking. I think he is trying to fool the gods with his sly ways. Let us show him up. He is not very strong. For start, see what he will do when I out shine him. Sadism naturally absorbs the fear of death because by actively manipulating and hating people keep their organism absorbed in the outside World; this keeps self-reflection and the fear of death in a state of low tension. When people hold the fate of others in their hands, they feel they are masters over life and death. As long as they continue shooting, they think more of killing than of being killed. Or, as a wise gangster one put it in a movie, “When killers stop killing, they get killed.” This is already the essence of a theory of sadism. However, more than that it is the clinical proof of the natural wisdom of tyrannical leaders from the time of the divine kingship up to the present day. In times of peace, without an external enemy, the fear that feeds war tends to find its outlet within the society, in the hatred between classes and races, in the everyday violence of crime, of automobile accidents, and even the self-violence of suicide. War sucks much of this up into one fulcrum and shoots it outward to make an unknown enemy pay for our internal sins. How rotational this irrationality. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

To teach is to transform by informing, to develop a zest for lifelong learning, to help pupil become students—mature independent learners, architects of an exciting, challenging future. Teaching at its best is a kind of communion, a meeting and a merging of the minds. The library is not only there as a socially owned and governed institution, a true people’s information service; it is staffed by men and women who maintain high respect for intellectual values. Because they are also the traditional keeps of the books, the librarians have a healthy sense of the hierarchical relationship between data and ideas, facts and knowledge. The enlightened individual is no propagandist, never aggressively intrudes one’s views in conversation nor forces one’s conclusions on others in an argumentative manner. One accepts people as they mentally are. One enters the inner stillness as a learner, as one who is sensitive to the Interior. Word and capable of responding to it. Such response is as far beyond the guidance of the good religious being by a moral conscience as that in turn is beyond the primitive being’s instincts, appetites, and desires. If in some ways one is as human as everyone else, in other ways one is unlike other beings. This is inevitable because one has gone ahead and surpassed one’s fellows. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

Insofar as one is aware of other beings and of the objects which surround one, one expresses the Mind which is the Real. And insofar as one may be either lifted at times out of one’s little ego, or endowed with insight which sees beyond that ego, does one express it further still. The intellectual argues where the enlightened beings announces. It is the difference between arguing from theory and announcing from experience. To live in lonely contemplation of the secrets deep down in the heart, to place all ambitions and restless desires on a funeral pyre and burn them up in a heap—these things demand the highest courage possible to a being. Those who would denominate one who has achieved them as a coward, because one does not run with the crowd who fight for pelf and self, make a ghastly mistake. One will bear witness in thought and speech to the joy of this awakened consciousness. If a being deserts blood relation, it is only to take on spiritual ones. If one leaves one’s Earthly house, it is only to enter the monastery, a spiritual one. If one forsakes the society of wife and children, it is only to enjoy that of teacher and students. Thus absolute escape is a mirage and cannot be found. The kind of quality of one’s bounds can be changed and transformed but not really served. The only attainable freedom lies deep within. It is invisible and mental. This is what the enlightened being enjoys. One may be weighted with business responsibilities and surrounded by a family, but in one’s heart nothing holds. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

Is there then no real need of a master? The answer is “No!” for some people, but “Yes!” for most people. One is needed to wake up the sleeper by telling one the highest truth from the very first time, and then descend by degrees to the stages while still holding on to the truth. The master serves only by showing a seeking person one’s real self, one’s soul: or holding a mirror up to one. This can be called, also, giving one a glimpse, or, more truthfully, being used by God as a vehicle to do so. One who is working under the guidance of a master is not exempt from making mistakes, but one will make fewer and expose them sooner and correct them quicker than one who is not. I write all this in no sneering nor disparaging manner, but rather as one who understands sympathetically the need of most beginners and many intermediates to find guidance outside themselves for the all-sufficient reason that they cannot find it inside. Indeed it is because I have been a disciple that I myself know why others become one, and can approve of their actions. However, that experience is also why I know the limitations and disservices of a discipleship. To say that no teacher is necessary is to set oneself up as a teacher by that very statement. Self-instruction cannot be as correct and efficacious as instruction by an expert, a specialist, or a fully experienced person who can also communicate adequately as a teacher. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

It is an absolute necessity that whoever seeks to realize the spiritual Truth must seek out a guru. This injunction has hypnotized readers and hearers. We thank our teachers for exemplifying the best of the education profession. Teachers give the students hope and the means to fulfill their aspirations as they guide, nourish, encourage, discipline and love their students. The young and mature minds that teacher mold are our leaders of today and tomorrow. They are making a difference in preparing them for the challenges to come by encouraging them to make a lifelong commitment to learning. The master teacher that lurks within each of us is likelier to burst forth within the intellectual atmosphere that collegiality can create. We need to build up an intimate inner relationship with a being whose compassion is wide enough to understand us and whose power is developed enough to help us. It does not matter that one is in the afterlife. Those who know only a single mode of living, that of the extrovert, or a single mode of thinking, that which is sense-based, need to expose themselves for sufficient time to the influence of a spiritual master before they can begin to become even dimly aware that they have a soul. However, since a fully evolved master is hard to find, something else must act as one’s next best substitute. This must necessarily be an inspired writing produced by such a being. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

The truth is that nearly all aspirants need the help of expert human guides and printed books when they are actively seeking the Spirit, and of printed books at least when they are merely beginning to seek. It has long been clear to me that teaching is at once the most difficult and the most honorable of professions. We have all been touched by example, guidance, and motivation of a teacher whose often-reluctant pupil we were. We can recall a moment of insight or truth when caught in the act of learning. None of us may owe larger debts for whatever we may have become, for whatever we may have become, for whatever we may have been able to accomplish, than we owe to teachers in our past lives whose total devotion to young people and their discipline has been their chief reward and the reason we honor teachers. It is not essential to find a teacher in the flesh—one may be in print. A book may become a quite effective teacher and guide. The closest we will ever come to an orderly Universe is a good library. Information is a basic human right and the fundamental foundation for the formation of a republic institution. My childhood library was small enough not to be intimidating. And yet I felt the whole World was contained in those two rooms. I could walk any aisle and smell wisdom. However, the death of a library, any library, suggests that the community has lost its soul. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

In the absence of an enlightened individual’s personal society, one may have recourse to the best substitute—a enlightened being’s printed writings. Inspired texts, portions of scriptures, great being’s writings and sayings offer guidance on the course of action to be followed, the ethical considerations to be heeded, the decisions to be made under certain pressures, crises, or confrontations—decisions whose consequences are often quite grave. Who can price the value of such readings at such times? Spiritual formation is, in practice, the way of rest for the weary and overloaded, of the easy yoke and the light burden of cleaning the inside of the cup of the dish, of the good tree that cannot bear bad fruit. And it is the path along which God’s commandments are found to be not heavy, not burdensome. It is the way of those learning as disciples or apprentices of Jesus to do all things that I have commanded you, within the context of this I have been given say over everything in Heaven and Earth and look, I am with you every minute. However—I emphasize, because it is so important—the primary learning here is not about how to act, just as the primary wrongness or problem in human life is not what we do. Often what human beings do is so horrible that we can be excused, perhaps, for thinking that all that matters is stopping it. However, this is an evasion of the real horror: the heart from which the terrible actions come. In both cases, it is who we are in our thoughts, feelings, dispositions, and choices—in the inner life—that counts. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

Profound transformations there is the only thing that can definitely conquer outward evil. It is very hard to keep this straight. Failure to do so is a primary cause of failure to grow spiritually. Love, we hear, is patient and kind. Then we mistakenly try to be loving by acting patiently and kindly—and quickly fail. We should always do the best we can in action, of course; but little progress is to be made in that arena until we advance in love itself—the genuine inner readiness and longing to secure the good of others. Until we make significant progress there, our patience and kindness will be shallow and short-lived at best. It is love itself—not loving behavior, or even the wish for intent to love—that has the power to always protect, always true, always hope, put up with anything, and never quit. Merely trying to act lovingly will lead to despair and to the defeat of love. It will make us angry and hopeless. However, taking love itself—God’s kind of love—into the depths of our being though spiritual formation will, by contrast, enable us to act lovingly to an extent that will be surprising even to ourselves, at first. And this love will then become a constant source of joy and refreshment to ourselves and others. Indeed it will be, according to promise, a well of water springing up to eternal life—not an additional burden to carry through life, as acting lovingly surely would be. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

The invitation to become healed—psychotherapy begins when a person cannot live one’s life further in the ways one has, and consults with somebody who intends to help one. The fact that a person would arrive at such an impasse should provoke wonder, since all of us are gifted with intelligence that could guide us out of existential cul-de-sac. However, people arrive at this point, and there are those who would be of help. How does the sufferer reach one’s stalemate? I believe one chooses it. I agree with the existentialist thinkers that every person chooses one’s ways of being in the World. However, I would go further and assert that people choose their ways of being for somebody. A being chooses one’s way of being for oneself, or for somebody else. One’s choices, naturally, yield consequences. The way a person has chosen to exist was selected from possible alternative ways. It was selected because it seemed to be a way to fulfill or preserve values. These values include, for example, survival, identity, status, the love of another person, money and so forth. If we look now at some particular being’s present condition, whether one be sick or well, we can ask, “Of what way of being is this condition an outcome? At whose invitation did the fellow choose this way of being and not some other? One’s own? One’s mother’s One’s teacher’s? And we can ask further, “What values were fulfilled, and which sacrificed, when the fellow chose and followed this way?” #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

Some people are skeptical of a natural spirit and some writers deny its being. However, Christopher Columbus has established it by argument, and believed that it was produced in the liver and feed the nourishing soule, which is seated in every part of the body. The spirit is supplied by the blood. The spirit whilest is shines in brightness and spreads itself though all the Theatre of the body, as the Sun over the Earth, it blesses all parties with joy and loyalty and dyes them with a rosy color; but the contrary when it is retracted, intercepted or extinguished, all things become horrid, wane, and pale, and finally do utterly perish. So wonderful are the powers of the soul. “Suffer not yourself to be led away by any vain or foolish thing; suffer not the devil to lead away your heart again after those wicked harlots. Behold, O my son, how great iniquity ye brought upon the Zoramites; for when they saw your conduct they would not believe my words. And now the Spirit of the Lord doth say unto me: Command thy children to do good, least they lead away the hearts of many people to destruction; therefore I command you, my son, in the fear of God, that ye refrain from your iniquities. That ye turn to the Lord with all your mind, might, and strength; that ye lead away the hearts of no more to do wickedly; but rather return unto them, and acknowledge your faults and that wrong which ye have done,” Alma 39.11-13. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

The enlightened does not wish to be regarded as other than one is; not for one the canonization of a saint or the adoration of a god. Insight, and its application to human living, is the final fulfilment for all of us, shall be our natural condition. Grant, we beseech Thee, Almighty God, that the new Birth of Thine Only-begotten Son in the flesh may set free those whom the old bondage detains under the yoke of sin; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord this compensating principle acts as a control and balance. He is not ruled by the reaction, as others are, nor blinded by it to an egoistic judgement. Christ looks out dispassionately upon the course of human life—which includes one’s own life—as if one were not personally involved in it, yet he does whatever ought to be done as if he were. Grant, we beseech Thee, O our God, that Thy family, which has been saved by the Nativity of Thy Son our Lord Jesus Christ, may also quietly repose on Him as a perpetual Redeemer, Who with we shall cling steadyfastly throughout our lives to the writings of our illumined master, returning to him again and again in prayer. His works are the truest of all, pure gold and not alloys. There are also wise beings whose thought goes deep and they understand clearly that our spiritual life is our way to salvation. Their record exists, their sayings and writings also. Their study is worthwhile, their precepts can be put to the test in practical everyday living. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

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There is One Place Where I Can Find Out Who I am and What I am Going to Become—And that is the Soul!

December 8, 2019 5:09 am

The cockatiels were singing a celestial melody in the early afternoon. Their rhythmic ditty mingled with the soft sweetness of the just-blooming Winter Jasmine, Snowdrops, and the air so crisp and cool you could snap it with your fingers. The lush shade of the evergreen trees was offset by the autumnal flashed of red, orange and yellow. Meghan breathed in the air that was full of the promise of the coming Winter. In the single matter of learning prayer alone one will encounter all sorts of obstacles within oneself and difficulties without. If one places oneself under the training of an expert preceptor, whose long experience in this matter and natural gift for guiding others makes one’s advice mentally enlightening and practically useful, the hardships will be much more easily and quickly overcome. The beginner cannot take one’s lessons from the skies. Even if only to impart the right atmosphere and inculcate the right ideas, one has to find a teacher. When they need to speak, you listen; when they need to listen, you speak; when they need to question, you answer; and when they need to answer, you question. Knowing when is just a part of what makes one a great teacher. Teachers inspire dreams, shape lives, and give us hope for the future. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

The use of a teacher is, firstly, suggestive. One’s influence is a definite assistance to incline us to travel along the proper path. It is, secondly, protective, for under one’s constant guidance we learn to be weary of pitfalls. More people need to spend as much time looking into their soul, as they spend on social media. When the lights go out in our brains, the Dark Ages are coming again! The illuminate stands on the very apex of the pyramid of knowledge. That is why one can understand the position of all others and sympathize with them, too. The being of the instinctivists lives the past of the species, as the being of the behaviorists lives the present of one’s social system. The former is a machine that can only produce social patterns of the present. Instinctivism and behaviorism have one basic premise in common: that beings have no psyche with its own structure and its own laws. For instinctivism, the same sense holds true. Some psychologist may criticize others dealing with humans (Humanpsychologen) who claim that anything psychic can only be explained psychologically, for instance, on the basis of psychological premises. (The “only” is a slight distortion of their position of the sake of a better argument). #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

On the contrary, if there is an area where we certainly cannot find the explanation for psychic events and experiences, it is the area of the psyche itself; this is so for the same reason that we cannot find an explanation for digestion in the digestive processes, but in those special ecological exposed a number of organisms to selective pressures which made them assimilate not only inorganic foodstuffs, but also those of an organic nature. In the same way psychical processes are also achievements which have come about as a result of selective pressures of life—and species—preserving value. Their explanation is in every sense pre-psychological. Put in simpler language, it is maintained that one can explain psychological data by the evolutionary process alone. The crucial point here is what is meant by “explain.” If, for instance, one wants to know how the effect of fear is possible as the result of the evolution of the brain from the lowest to the highest animals, then this is a task for those scientists who investigate the evolution of the brain. However, if one wants to explain why a person is frightened, the data on evolution will not contribute much to the answer: the explanation must be essentially a psychological one. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

Perhaps the person is threatened by a stronger enemy, or is coping with one’s own repressed aggression, or suffers from a sense of powerlessness, or a paranoid element in one makes one feel persecuted, or—many other factors that alone or in combination may explain one’s fright. To want to explain the fright of a particular person by evolutionary process is plainly futile. There is a premise that the only approach to the study of human phenomena is the evolutionary one, means that we understand the psychical process in a being exclusively by knowing how, in the process of evolution, one became what one is. Similarly, it is suggested that digestive processes are to be explained in terms of conditions as they existed hundreds of millions of years ago. If the physician was concerned with the evolution of digestion, rather than with the causes of the particular symptom in this particular patient, could a physician dealing with disturbances of the digestive tract help one’s patient? For some, evolution becomes the only science, and absorbs all other sciences dealing with humans. It seems that if humans understand the evolutionary process which made them become what they are now, humans understand themselves only and sufficiently. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

In spite of the great differences between instinctivistic and behavioristic theory, they have a common basic orientation. They both exclude the person, the behaving being, from their field of vision. Whether beings are the product of conditioning, or the product of terrestrial evolution, one is exclusively determined by conditions outside oneself; of has no part in one’s own life, no responsibility, and not even a trace of freedom. Humans are puppets, controlled by strings—instinct or conditioning. However, this theory holds some weight with corrupt politicians, the TV News media, the evil wealthy, and corrupt fractions of law enforcement influences individuals to spy on their neighbors, act out, and set people they do not like up, in lieu of dropping criminal charges against the aggressor, and/or illegally giving the aggressor government benefits and cash payments to target certain innocent individuals. Essentially, these aggressors are no longer operating through their own will, they are now puppets and slaves controlled by a tyrannical faction of beings or an organization. At this level, sacrifice is an admission of the pitiful finitude and powerlessness of humans in the face of mysterium tremendum (a mystery before which humanity both trembles and is fascinated, is both repelled and attracted. Thus, God can appear both as wrathful or awe-inspiring, on the one hand, and as gracious and loveable, on the other) of the Universe, the immensity of what transcends one and negates one’s significance. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

At this level sacrifice affirms reality, bows to it, and attempts to conciliate it. Sacrifice, then, is not an irrational aberration, but a basic human reflex of truth, a correct expiation of natural guilt. One basic motive of society is the symbolic expiation of guilt, which we see as a very complex phenomenon grounded in the truth of the human condition. Guilt is one of the serious motives of humans, not to be tossed off lightly. If we are to understand the happenings of history, these happenings have to be seen as resulting from the composite of human motives, not simply from the aberrations of power of the elusiveness of a dream. The new technology and the promise of abundance are the dream that keeps humankind mesmerized; oppressiveness of tyranny would not have been tolerated but for the beneficial goods that flowed out of the megamachines. However, people bear tyranny because of its rewards not only to their stomachs but also their souls. They support tyranny by willingly marching off to war not only because that reduces the frustration they feel at home toward authority, not only because it enables them to project their hatreds on the enemy, but also because it expiates their guilt. How else explain the parents that we read about during each war who, when told about the tragic death of their son or daughter, have expressed regret that they had not more to give? #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

This age-old essence of primitive gift giving; it chills us only by the nature of the sacrifice that they make so willingly and by the secondhand god to whom it is offered—the nation-state. However, it is not cynical or callous: in guilt one gives with a melting heart and with choking tears because one is guilty, one is transcended by the unspeakable majesty and superlativeness of the natural and cultural World, against which one feels realistically humbled; by giving one draws oneself into that power and merges one’s existence with it. Furthermore—and this takes us deeper into the problem—sacrifice and scapegoating are not technical tricks to overcome anxiety. The spilling of blood, because it is a life substance, may be a magical effort to grow crops. Of course. In one of its forms scapegoating is also magical in origin: a ritual is performed over a goat, by which all the tribe’s uncleanliness (sin) is transferred to the animal; it is then driven off or killed, leaving the village clean. It is the same way that Jesus was done and Queen Akasha in Anne Rice’s Queen of the Damned. This act not only represented an arrangement of life but a real spiritual purge that qualifies one to triumph over death. I doubt that enslaved people were sacrificed at an upper-class feast of the Maya merely to give it a properly genteel elegance. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

It is true that primitives have often spilled blood in order simply to gloat and strut over an enemy; but I think the motive is more elemental than merely to give to feasts a pleasant veneer. Humans spill blood because it makes their hearts glad and fills out their organisms with a sense of vital power; ceremoniously killing captives is a way of affirming power over life, and therefore over death. The sacrificer may seem nonchalant about it, but this is because beings like to experience their power effortlessly and smoothly, as though they were accustomed by nature to dispose of the strongest force she had to offer. (Detroit car makers who sell power and speed—with their business person’s realism about the truths of life—have long known this.) Also, consider gift giving, it relates not only to guilty but fundamentally to power. The sacrifice is a gift, a gift to the gods which is directed to the flow of power, to keeping the life force moving there where it has been blocked by sin. With the sacrifice humans feeds the gods to give them more power so that one may have more. The sacred food has the strength of life. The sacrifice of living things adds visible life power to the stream of life; the more living things sacrificed, the more extravagant release of power, and so forth. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

When a king died, the ancient custom of sacrificing wives, enslaved people, and cavaliers was not only that they should continue to serve the master in the in the invisible World—that was a matter of course. What they achieved by suffering and dying together as living sacrifices was to bring extravagant new life into being. The sacrifice was a means for establishing a communion with the invisible World, making a circle on the flow of power, a bridge over which it could pass. So, for example, in the simple building sacrifice when one took possession of a piece of ground: the sacrifice expulsed the demonic spirits in the soil and released powers that literally purged the place and made building upon it safe. Now this idea of flux and flow of power may not be so hard for us to understand today—as we saw Aaliyah was killed in a plane crash on 25 August 2001, and the 9 September 2001, the twin towers were taken down and nearly 4,000 lives were immediately lost. Some believe it is evidence of a primitive culture in American practicing rituals. The Nazi experience is also a grim refresher course on the metaphysics of mass slaughter. Nazis were animated by a spiritual concept: they had a whole philosophy of blood and soil which contained the belief that death nourishes life. We recognize the familiar archaic idea that the sacrifice of life makes life flow more plentifully. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

Because of this idea that death mystically replenishes life and the birth of insurance companies for people and other assets, it has required insurance companies to go a step further to prevent the loss of life by offering Kidnap and Ransom Insurance that also covers extortion. This is an effort to keep people from sacrificing innocent lives to collect a cash payout. These insurance companies offer for $2,000, for instance, $5 million in coverage to pay to have a person who is illegally detained released, pay their ransom or pay extortion demands. Furthermore, a death potlatch is what we discussed before when stated that people think death mystically replenishes life. Well, Dr. Karl Brandt, plenipotentiary in charge of all medical activities in the Reich, when asked about his attitude toward the killing of human beings in the course of medical experiments, replied, “Do you think that one can obtain any worthwhile fundamental results without a definite toll of lives? The same goes for technologic development. You cannot build a great bridge, a gigantic building—you cannot establish a speed record without deaths!” In similar vein, many SS men took a curious pride in the fact that even in peacetime they had many fatalities during “realistic” military training. Human bodies were encased in the concrete fortifications and bunkers, as though such bodies could give strength to inanimate matter. And a man was encased in the concrete of the original Bay Bride in Oakland, California USA, which was recently demolished. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

The psychological question is for most disputants the only question. When your ordinary doctor of divinity has proved to one’s own satisfaction that an altogether unique faculty called “conscious” must be postulated to tell us what is right and what is wrong; or when your popular-science enthusiast has proclaimed that “apriorism” (the doctrine that knowledge rests upon principles that are self-evident to reason or are presupposed by experience in general) is an exploded superstition, and that our moral judgments have gradually resulted from the teaching of the environment, each of these persons thinks that ethics is settled and nothing more is to be said. The familiar pair of names, Intuitionist and Evolutionist, so commonly used now to connote all possible differences in ethical opinion, really refer to the psychological questions alone. The discussion of this question hinges so much upon particular details that it is impossible to enter upon it all within the limits of this paper. So many of our human ideals must have arisen from the association with acts of simple bodily pleasures and reliefs from pain. Association with many remote pleasures will unquestionably make a thing significant of good ness in our minds; and the more vaguely the goodness is conceived of, the more mysterious will its source appear to be. However, it is surely impossible to explain all our sentiments and preferences in this simple way. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

The more minutely psychological studies human nature, the more clearly it finds there traces of secondary affections, relating the impressions of the environment with one another and with our impulses in quite different ways from those mere associations of coexistence and succession which are practically all that pure empiricism can admit. Take the love of stimulants; take bashfulness, acrophobia (the terror of high places), motion sickness syndrome, haemophobia (to faint at the sight of blood), the susceptibility to musical sounds; take the emotion of the comical, the passion for poetry, for mathematics, or for metaphysics—no one of these things can be wholly explained by either association or utility. They go with other things that can be so explained, no doubt; and some of them are prophetic of future utilities, since there is nothing in us for which some use may not be found. However, their origin is in incidental complications to our cerebral structure, a structure whose original features arose with no reference to the perception of such discords and harmonies as these. Well, a vast number of our moral perceptions also are certainly of this secondary and brain-born kind. They deal with directly felt fitness between things, and often fly in the teeth of all the prepossessions of habit and presumptions of utility. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

The moment you get beyond the coarser and more commonplace moral maxims, The Decalogues (The Ten Commandments) and Poor Richard’s Almanacs (a collection of periodicals, which contain humor, information, and proverbial wisdom), you fall into schemes and positions which to the eye of common-sense are fantastic and overstrained. The sense for abstract justice which some person have is as eccentric a variation, from the natural-history point of view, as is the passion for music or for the higher philosophical consistencies which consumes the soul of others. The feeling of the inward dignity of certain spiritual attitudes, peace, serenity, simplicity, veracity; and of the essential vulgarity of others, as querulousness, anxiety, egoistic fussiness, and so forth, are quite inexplicable except by an innate preference of the more ideal attitude for its own pure sake. The nobler thing tastes better, and what is all that we can say. Experience of consequences may truly teach us what things are wicked, but what have consequences to do with what is mean and vulgar? If a being has shot his wife’s paramour, by reason of what subtile repugnancy in things is that we are so disgusted when we hear that the wife and the husband have made it up and are living comfortably together again? Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a World in which Messrs (plural of MR. for example, Mr. Hollingsworth, Mr. Toth, Mr. Wallace). #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

Francois Marie Charles Fourier, Edward Bellamy, and William Morris’s utopias should all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torture, what except a specifical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain? To what, once more, but subtile brain-born feelings of discord can be due all these recent protests against the entire race-tradition of retributive justice? –I refer to Tolstoi with his ideas of non-resistance, to Mr. Bellamy with his substitution of the punitive ideal. All these subtileties of the moral sensibility go as much beyond what can be ciphered out from the laws of association as the delicacies of sentiment possible between a pair of young lovers go beyond such precepts of the etiquette to be observed during engagement as are printed in manuals of social form. No! Purely inward forces are certainly at work here. All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

Our ideals have certainly many sources. They are not all explicable as signifying corporeal pleasures to be gained, and pains to be escaped. And for having s constantly perceived this psychological fact, we must applaud the intuitionist school. Whether or not such applause must be extended to that school’s other characteristics will appear as we take up more questions. The vital spirit has a special affinity for the body; indeed, it abhors leaving the flesh, because it has no connaturals neat at hand. It may, perhaps, rush to the extremities of the body, to meet something that it loves, but it is loth to go forth. Novital spirits have two appetites. They desire to multiply. Unhappily finding nothing like: One drop of water moves towards another, and flame to flame; but much more does this appear in the escape of the spirit into the external air, because it is not carried to a particle like itself, but to a very World of connaturals…the going forth and escape of the spirit into the air is a double action arising partly from the appetite of the spirit, and partly from the appetite of the air; for the common air is a needy thing, and seizes everything with avidity, as spirits, odours, rays, sounds and the like. The vital spirit is held to exercise two functions that nonvital spirits do not reveal. First, it seems to play a controlling role in the governing the growth and decay of body parts and tissues. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

The lifeless spirit maintains itself by feeding on adjacent parts. The amount and rate of its feeding determine the time span of its host’s existence. Since inanimate things exist far longer than animate beings, the vital spirit, present only in things living, is in part responsible for the body’s growth, sustenance, and corruption. It disturbs and restrains and intensifies and increases the processes involved in the consumption or depredation of the human body and the repair or refreshment thereof. In the most direct of ways, then, the vital spirit is vital. The vital spirit, in the second place, seems to be the efficient cause of all actions and functions undertaken by the body’s principal organs and members. Digestion is the function of the stomach, seeing that of the eye, and so on. The action in each case is properly that of the organ and member involved. They can be regarded as the material cause of the action. However, no action, no matter how specific to a member, would come if the vital spirit were not present: The actions or functions of the individual members follow the nature of the members themselves; as attraction, retention, digestion, assimilation, separation, excretion, perspiration, and even the sense itself, depend upon the properties of the several organs, as the stomach, liver, heart, spleen, gall, brain, eye, ear, and the rest. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

However, yet none of these actions would ever be set in motion without the vigour, presence, and heat of the vital spirit. Thus, the vital spirit is some sort of force-carrying, or force-bearing, substance without which no animal or human activity is possible. Perhaps the notion of “vehicle” fits here. If so, we are reminded of the efficient cause and that it is nothing else than the vehicle of form. So spiritual transformation, the renovation of the human heart, is an inescapable human problem with no human solution. It is something that can be learned from a survey of World history, World cultures, and past and present efforts to deal with human life by religion, education, law, and medicine. And when we take into consideration the many techniques that are taught in the various psychologies and competing spiritualities of our own day, this observation unfortunately stands firm. Genuine transformation of the whole person into the goodness and power seen in Jesus and his Father, God—the only transformation adequate to the human self-remains the necessary goal of human life. However, it is possessed beyond the reach of programs of inner transformation that draw merely on the human spirit—even when the human spirit is itself treated and ultimately divine. And spiritual formation has now presented itself as a hopeful possibility for responding to the crying, unmet need of the human soul. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

The hope springs once again for a response to the need that is both deeply rooted in Christian traditions and powerfully relevant to circumstances of contemporary life. “And then shall ye know that I am an honest person, and that I am sent unto you from God,” reports Helaman 9.36. O, God, Who makest us glad with the yearly expectation of our redemption, grant that as we joyfully receive Thine Only-begotten Son as our Redeemer, we may also see Him without fears when He cometh as our Judge. Only through our Lord, who with Thee four things from which the Master is entirely free, we come to understand that God has no foregone conclusions, no arbitrary pre-determinations, no obstinacy, and no egoism. Grant, O merciful God, that for the reception of the transcendent mystery of Thy Son’s Nativity, the minds of believers may be prepared, and also the hearts of unbelievers subdued. Through the same Jesus Christ our Lord who is working for an infinite duration of time, peace will come. Therefore, we must be infinitely patient. O God, Who art pleased to save, by the Nativity of Thy Christ, the race of beings, which was mortally wounded in its chief, grant us this healing blessing. God we beseech Thee, that we may not cleave to the author of our perdition, but be transferred to the fellowship of our Redeemer, Who with Thee the plane of negative thoughts, emotions, and behaviour does not exist. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

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

November 25, 2019 10:02 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cresleigh Homes

Mills Station at Cresleigh Ranch | Residence 3

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

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

November 15, 2019 4:54 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MILLS STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH

Rancho Cordova, CA |

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Randolph Harris II International Institute

Category Archives: evolution

A Well-Written Life is Almost as Rare as a Well-Spent One!

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

CRESLEIGH MEADOWS AT PLUMAS RANCH

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Coming Soon!

#CresleighHomes

A Great Soul Contains the Diary of the Human Race and Changes Lives for the Better!

Cresleigh Homes

There is One Place Where I Can Find Out Who I am and What I am Going to Become—And that is the Soul!

CRESLEIGH MEADOWS AT PLUMAS RANCH

Plumas Lake, CA | from the mid $300’s

Coming Soon!

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

MILLS STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH

Rancho Cordova, CA |

Now Selling!

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