Home » Harassment (Page 7)
Category Archives: Harassment
If a Photograph or a Diamond Ring is All You Have, it Means the World to You!
Not everyone can find the middle of a circle, but only a person who has the proper knowledge. Similarly, anyone can get angry—that is easy—or can give away money or spend it; but to do all this to the right person, to the right extent, at the right time, for the right reason, and in the right way is no longer something easy that anyone can do. It is for this reason that good conduct is rare, praiseworthy, and noble. This kind of spirituality, so ordinary and close to home, is especially nourishing to the soul. Without this caring incorporated of the sacred into life, the World can become so far removed from the human situation as to be irrelevant. An appreciation for vernacular spirituality is important because without it our idealization of the holy, making it precious and too far removed from life, can actually obstruct a genuine sensitivity to what is sacred. The word mercy has fallen out of common usage in our language. It derives from the antiquated French merci, which means compassion and forbearance toward someone in one’s power. In Latin, merces signifies pay or reward, and the root merc refers to aspects of commerce. The words merchant and mercenary at first seem antithetical to mercy, and one wonders at their common root, but when we have to give help or depend on others for help, we understand why the concept of exchange underlies both usages. Mercy is based entirely on exchange. #RandolphHarris 1 of 6
Giving help eventually embitters us, unless we are compensated at least by appreciation; accepting help degrades us, unless we are convinced that our helpers are getting something in return. As much as we might prefer to reject this stark accounting, we discover in living through situations of dependence that good will is not enough. There is a delicate balance at the heart of mercy, showing how reciprocation replenishes both the spirit if the helper and the person who is helped. Maturing in age is one of the ways the soul nudges itself into attention to the spiritual aspect of life. The body’s changes teach us about fate, time, nature, mortality, and character. Aging forces us to decide what is important in life. However, those who depend on others for daily survival often feel their very existence is an imposition. Some people engage in a relentless pressure to please—to prove themselves worth of the burdens they impose. Many people who suffer from ailments suppress complaints and avoid asserting themselves, believing that they owe every possible accommodation to those who help them survive. Taking care of a person does not have to entail having power over major aspects of his or her life, but frailty seems to invite invasion. My father used to tell me stories about how care givers would steal my great grandmother’s jewelry, money, wedding and engagement rings, pictures of her family and even her wedding pictures. “You cannot imagine how helpless I feel,” she would tell him.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 6
So long as we still possess it, the power to carry out simple intentions is one of the many unnoticed pleasures of life. When we lose it, we see what it means to do the most ordinary things our own way. People cut off from inner thoughts and feelings, caught up in pain and suffering and loss cannot get very far when they try to understand themselves consciously. Some people make rebellious bids for control that they then keep secret from their helpers. One woman had a fall down the basement stairs and her daughter was so upset. She hired a woman to come in and do her laundry once a week, so she would never have to go down there. However, the senior citizen still when down there. He daughter did not know, and she is very careful about it. She feels like it is her house, her basement, her washing machine and her life. Submission does not come easily to people who have spent decades running their own lives. Going down those steps made that woman’s basement her own again, just as choosing to violate her daughter’s restrictions made her life her own again. Seizing freedom can be as unreasonable as it is gratifying. #RandolphHarris 3 of 6
People who have had restriction places on their lives by ailments, injuries, or from aging often feel the need to do something to regain their independence as a means of reminding themselves that they are still able to exert influence over their own domain or their own body. Many people with physical limitations feel their social environment is gradually diminished until all that remains of their power resources is the humble capacity to comply. They feel that they may be required to give up their legal rights and are required to comply or approve in exchange for the room and board they can afford or for the retirement and medical benefits. The managers of their buildings often disrespect them and the analysis often harass them and no one seems to care. The seniors and disabled feel if they complain about the abusive treatment, they will lose their housing, be physically attacked, or their medical and financial benefits will be discontinued, which would mean they would not be able to afford their medication or living expenses and be left on the streets to die. Psychological symptoms, too, often manifest themselves in weight gain or loss, in allergies to various foods, or in idiosyncratic eating habits. And they become more and more isolated emotionally. When people who have disempowered relatives and they become depressed, they mistake this despondency for an accusation that they are not doing a good job. Hoping for appreciation, they instead get quietly hostile acquiescence. #RandolphHarris 4 of 6
Once families acknowledge the presence and important of power in situations of power in situations of dependency, they tend to have little difficulty taking stock of its distribution and beginning to remedy imbalances on either side. The belief that we do not have the ability to heal arises out of the mistaken idea that our power does the healing, or that the intellect does the healing. All that the will and the intellect could do is to behold or watch the process. The mind fixes its gaze steadfastly upon the principle and then declares that this principle is operative in human affairs, and particularly in the affairs of the one being treated. There is but one healer. This is the spirit of truth. There is but one life principle. This is God in us. There is but one final law. This is the law of good. There is but one ultimate impulsion. This impulsion is love. That which really does the healing can never fluctuate, can never change in its nature. It is not more one day and less the next. It is at this moment absolutely all thee is and it is ever available. We must forever rid ourselves of the idea that it is the personal person who does the healing. We must know that it is not us, but the Father that dwells in us, he does the works. Principle operated irrespective of personal opinion, and when through acquiescence we agree that it is operating, then it must operate. #RandolphHarris 5 of 6
Sure, an elderly person might not like how you just put water in the sink, swish it around with some suds and call it clean; he or she used to scrub it first with cleanser and then rinse it with disinfectant. Someone might not like how you haphazardly ruin their checkbook by just dashing off the bills, not bothering to mark down the dates, check numbers, who it was to, all that stuff. Especially sometimes when someone does not even mark down the amount of the check. Therefore, it is important to find small, but specific concessions to help meet the preferences of the elderly and disabled, which will yield large satisfactions. There is no formula for this process, but it helps to build an edifice of faith that the Lord will help make crooked paths straight. One must not only know that God is all there is, but one must know that God exists right where the need is—not in the form of the need but in the form of an answer to the need. And I can tell when, when all you have is pictures of your family, who you have never met, they mean the World to you, as well as gold and diamond trinkets. People like connections to their heritage. Grandparents get great joy of seeing pictures of their grandbabies. And child love to have pictures of their ancestors. #RandolphHarris 6 of 6
What You Believe is Greater than What is in Your Bank Account
If you believe, you can fulfill your God-given destiny. There is incredible power in what we believe. There can be misperceptions about personal pain and people can have problems conveying their feelings, as they try to find a balance point in the center of chaotic emotions and unpredictable circumstances. To a greater or lesser degree, we are always dependent on others but these contacts are usually voluntary. According to our inclinations, we can approach or avoid other people. However, we can no longer get our own groceries, prepare our own meals, or take care of other necessities on our own, we enter into a period of life that is distinct from all the others. The chief consequence of dependency is that we are forced to count on the kindness of others. The vulnerability aroused by this situation awakens the basic questions of our lives: Am I worthy of love and loyalty? Are people capable of true generosity, or do they live mostly for themselves? Accident or illness can, at any moment, remove anyone’s capacity to function independently. Illness and disability can be a wasteland of degradation. We see only the loss of the freedoms and satisfactions that make life bearable, and we expect disappointing answers to these questions, which is not only a threat to spirituality as such, but also deprives the soul of valuable symbolic and reflective experience. #RandolphHarris 1 of 6
Sometimes people feel angry and helpless in response to dependency, making the transition from an active life to confinement, handling thoughts and reflections about the past, noticing shifts in key relationships, realizing that time it sunning out and options are shrinking, and finding ways to live well in spite of all these changes. Often times, individuals may feel so degraded by the idea of being beholden to helpers that they conceal their disabilities and risk injuring themselves in order to avoid asking for help or appearing to be in need. Through surrender or concealment, they sacrifice much of what formerly made their lives worthwhile. Illness and disability alter our lives in basic ways. As soon as our mobility becomes impaired, changes occur in our we spend our times and conduct our relationships. Self-esteem often erodes along with one’s physical capacities, and we may be further hurt with degrading reactions that others have to our frailty. Regret for wasted time and unfulfilled dreams may nag at us, causing us to question the priorities around which we had previously organized our lives. To be starved for motion and exercise is yet another depletion. Some people’s bodies hurt, and they will just not go and even going to a doctor’s appointment on somedays might be extremely difficult. #RandolphHarris 2 of 6
When physical problems enclose us in daily life in which everything has been mastered and repeated, the pull to keep returning to bed becomes more and more compelling. Life starts to echo the stasis of the body. When we feel we have nothing to say, we tend to shun the company of others. With little going on in our lives beyond eating and sleeping, we fear that other people’s contrasting vitality would shame us even as it momentarily revived us. When company leaves, we expect to be left emptier for having been so briefly filled. The more dependent we are on the mercy of others, the more waiting we have to endure. Dependence and waiting eventually become synonymous. We cannot cancel arrangements to secure the necessities of life. Waiting emphasizes the inferior status of the person who is being helped. Each minute of waiting that accumulates speaks this inferiority more loudly. These disparate conditions can evoke bitterness in the most loving relationships. Anyone who has ever endured an incapacitating illness knows that the feelings evoked by days of waiting can be harder to bear than the aliment itself. We wish to be self-sustained. We somehow hate the meat which we eat, because there seems something of degrading dependence in living by it. #RandolphHarris 3 of 6
The freedom to come and go as we please, the wish to be self-sustained, is as fundamental to most of us as breathing. When this part of our human endowment is frustrated, a subterranean anger is stirred. The longer an illness or incapacity lasts, the harder it becomes for us to maintain faith in our others. We begin to imagine the possibility of abandonment. Days of waiting can crack the confidence of the most secure people, given enough time and the wearing effects of doubt. In situations of dependence, we are asked to believe that we have accumulated vast stores of good will from our own acts of generosity in the past. In truth, most of us carry reservoirs of guilt from the many occasions when we failed to be as generous as we could have been. To then depend upon those whom we once disappointed opens up fears of retribution. We begin to wonder, “Is my life really worth all of this stress?” The answer lies in realms that are invisible to those who still retain control over their own progress in life. You go because you have to, because you want to be in charge of your own life. Walking can be viewed as a major metaphor, representing a continued ability to live independently, to control events, and to be active. “Otherwise, I would be sitting in the lobby straight ahead like all those other people in my building. They look like they died ten years ago. If I stayed in there, I would start looking like them.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 6
Health requires this relaxation, this aimless life. This life in the present. We live too fast and coarsely, just as we eat too fast and do not know the true savor of our food. People who are able to live well in spite of illness are those who allow divine leisure to crowd their physical hardships out of center stage. Turning the nothing of empty time into the essence of good days is the alchemy of successful frailty. At first, having too much time on our hands can feel like a daily humiliation in our making so little of it. Waiting for help emphasizes all the dignities and freedoms that have been ripped away from us. Gradually, if we do not become hardened in out disappointment, we can turn the insults of illness into privileges of being. Care of the soul might include a recovery of formal religion in a way that is both intellectually and emotionally satisfying. One obvious potential source of spiritual renewal is the religious traditions in which we were brought up. Some people are fortunate in that their childhood tradition is still relevant and likely to them, but others have to search. We must be careful to avoid thinking that we are unimportant in the scheme of things. We are the most important persons living, as far as we are concerned. This is not a statement of conceit; it is a simple statement of the conviction that each one of us is rooted in the living spirit, that we have access to the mind of God and the love and the power and the peace of the spirit. #RandolphHarris 5 of 6
It is a simple conviction that no matter how humble our walk in life may appear to be, it must of necessity influence its own environment. We may not be important to people, but we certainly are necessary to God. Placing our entire trust, our complete faith, our whole conviction in this simple thought, we should walk in confidence and speak our spiritual convictions with complete assurance, knowing that there is a presence and power with us and for us and operating through us—a presence and power that knows no defeat. Sometimes people prey on the sick, elderly, and vulnerable, and that can make them feel devalued. However, at the center of every person’s being there is an absolutely perfect life, a complete wholeness, and an eternal and immortal principle. Our work is to mentally uncover this ever-present reality, this changeless and eternal perfection. We must remove every obstruction of thought which denies God’s presence. Spiritual mind healing is a revelation even though we go through a process to arrive at it. Each person must work at our own method and pursue our own logic. If this method and logic lead us to the right conclusion, we will be rewarded by an affirmative answer. #RandolphHarris 6 of 6
God Promises He Will Renew Your Strength
In darkness there is to be found a precious brilliance, our essential nature, distilled by depression as perhaps the greatest gift of melancholy. The one and only way to know what fear, anger, joy, or remorse is, is to actually experience those feelings. If we persist in our modern way of treating depression, as an illness to be cured only mechanically and chemically, we may lose the gifts of soul. Our identity is located deeply in the soul, rather than on the surface of personality. Identity is felt as one’s soul finding its weight and measure. Some people who are experiencing depression or sadness related to a situation that they have no way of controlling, and are not suffering from a behavioral problem or a chemical imbalance need to be careful. Recovery from depression can be a lot like recovering from a dangerous and deadly narcotic addiction. People who go into rehabilitation programs, to save their lives, from drug addiction often have to terminate relationships with the people that helped power and fuel their addiction. And after they are released from a rehabilitation program, they are most vulnerable. That is why it is advised that they stay away from their friends and family, who make hang out with people who use drugs. Even if only one or two people in the group use drugs, a recovering addict has to avoid them. #RandolphHarris 1 of 10
When a person is released from a rehabilitation program, their systems are pure and they may not be able to handle any drugs at all in their system, but may not be aware and could die much easier from an overdose. Correspondingly, people who are suffering from a situation they find intolerable and it has been going on a long time, and there is nothing the individual can do to change their circumstances, they have to do whatever they can to avoid the people who intentionally harassing them and using them as a source pleasure by humiliating them and reminding them of painful aspects of their lives and doing things to hurt that individual to make themselves feel better. People like that are wicked, and beyond help. Recovering from trauma is a lot like recovering from a drug addiction, in that sense. You have to stay away from the group, even if there is only one bad person in the group because depression can lead to suicide, and you have endured so much that you may not know how much more you can take before you end your own life. A sad or depressed mood is just part of the soul’s cycle. The depressed person sometimes thins that the good times are all past, that there is nothing left for the present or the future. #RandolphHarris 2 of 10
Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem, but sometimes the problem seems to be permanent. At the clinic, the patient states that he or she feels young and wants to live; and claims that one had no serious intention of killing oneself, but was only singing the lyrics of an operetta. One admits that, in retrospect, one might have been a little careless in showing oneself in a theater loge in the company of. Therefore, it is important to save yourself from this temporary problem, before you do something you may not be able to recovery from. These thoughts and feelings, sad as they are, favor the soul’s desire to be both in time and in eternity. Sometimes we associate depression with literal aging. Having been identified with youth, the soul now takes on important qualities of age that are beneficial and helpful. If age is denied, soul becomes lost in an inappropriate clinging to youth. However, there are also people who are mature, but have not been able to grow and experience adult life as they would like to, and that can also make them sad. It is like one has been promised straight whiskey, but fearing that one is being fed weak tea. Not everyone is clinging to youth, some people are trying to grow beyond their life circumstances. #RandolphHarris 3 of 10
It would be wrong to believe that all the foul deeds in this World are caused by corruption, as if baseness operated automatically with the insertion of a coin. There are people who gladly place the misuse of their knowledge and skills at the disposal of the ruling classes, in the expectation that they will be rewarded by positions, titles, medals, and riches. As we age, we get a sense of having lived through something, of being older and wiser. We know that life is suffering, and that knowledge makes a difference. Your life may not matter to others, it may be a joke to them, but that life is precious, it is all you have. One cannot enjoy the bouncy, carefree innocence of youth any longer, and there is a pleasure in a new feeling of self-acceptance and self-knowledge. Our age and maturity is a measure of nobility. Scholars can become easily depressed and have to find ways to counter their dark moods. However, there are also dangers of living without study and speculation, and without reflection on our lives. Some detest psychiatry because it feeds the individual’s hunger for power, and because, like journalism, it carries within itself vast potentialities for its abuse. The psychiatrist, whose capacity for well-considered action and hence one’s talent for corruptibility some consider slight, as essentially feebleminded. #RandolphHarris 4 of 10
The genius of insanity is thus opposed by the feeblemindedness of psychiatry. This psychiatric stupidity often turns into malice and even a maniacal desire to persecute. However, what is scary to people who do not believe in God is that there is a being, there is something, there is a force vastly more powerful than human beings. Do not allow people to box you in and make you feel that you make never break free of the chain that you are bound by. They do not know what God has planned for your life. If you allow depression to visit, you will feel the change in your body, in your muscles, and on your face—some relief from the burden of youthful enthusiasm and the unbearable lightness of being. Aging brings out the flavors of a personality. The individual emerges over time, the way fruit matures and ripens. Depression, aging, and individuality all go together: the sadness of growing old is part of becoming an individual. Melancholy thoughts carve out an interior space where wisdom can take up residence. As we age, our ideas, formerly light, rambling, and unrelated to each other, become more densely gathered into values and a philosophy, giving our lives substance and firmness. #RandolphHarris 5 of 10
A journalist is a person without any ideas but with an ability to express them; a writer whose skill is improved by a deadline: the more time they have, the worse the write. Depression is sometimes described as a condition in which there are no idea—nothing to hang on to. However, maybe we have to broaden our vision and see that feelings of emptiness, the loss of familiar understandings and structures in life, and the vanishing of enthusiasm, even though they seem negative, are elements that can be appropriate and used to give life fresh imagination. We can initiate a new creative series by the definite and deliberate contemplation of our own minds, and out of the new thoughts will some new things, for the law is a reflector only. We shall discover that the very law that bound us will now free us; the power that seemed to stifle us will bring emancipation. The very power which appeared to produce evil will produce the opposite if, as, and when we change our thought patterns. The changing of these thought patterns is more than a thing of the intellect; it is also a thing of feeling, of a deep, inner conviction. We must feel that we are one with the eternal reality, and that our word is spoke in complete reliance on it; therefore it cannot fail. #RandolphHarris 6 of 10
Sometimes, of course, depression, like any emotion, can go beyond ordinary limits, becoming a completely debilitating illness. However, in extreme cases, too, even in the midst of strong treatments, we can still look at the core of depression and find ways to overcome it. One of the greatest stressors associated with depression is that it will never end, that life will never be joyful and active. This is one of the feelings that is part of the pattern—the sense of being trapped, forever to be held in the remote of a labyrinth of haunts. One may feel constrained, with nowhere to go. This stress seems to decrease when we stop fighting it. We must get control of our thoughts, feelings, and emotions. Gradually, as we re-form our thoughts they will become subjective; they will sink into that place in mind which is the power within us and which must constitute the meeting place between the absolute cause and the relative effect which it projects. It may take time to do this, but think of the reward, the gift, the outcome. Keeping the goal in mind, refusing to be baffled or defeated, with uplifted thought and calm but definite purpose, we cannot fail. This is a starting point for a more grounded, open-ended kind of knowledge that never closes up in fixed opinions. #RandolphHarris 7 of 10
The emptiness and dissolution of meaning that are often present in depression show how attached we can become to our ways of understanding and explaining our lives. Often our personal philosophies and our values seem to be all too neatly wrapped, leaving little room for mystery. Depression comes along then and opens up a hole. Depression makes holes in our theories and assumptions, but even this painful process can be honored as a necessary and valuable source of healing. At first, we are prone to treat everything and everyone around us, in an attempt to influence our environment and other people, and to exercise control over things to our own liking. Most of us pass through this phase. As we progress in this science we come to realize that the aim of scientific treatment is not control of people and things. We treat ourselves, our own mind, our own consciousnesses, no matter what the desired end may be, and gradually we learn to include a larger and a more harmonious field of action. We learn that when we get our own consciousness straightened out, things in our external World adjust themselves to meet our new and better inward awareness. The final mystery is oneself. #RandolphHarris 8 of 10
Depression’s devaluation of human life, shows that cold remorse and self-judgment do not have to be seen as clinical syndromes, but as a necessary humility in human life that actually accomplishes something for the soul. We know who we are because we have uncovered the stuff of which we are made. It has been sifted out by depressive thought, reduced, in the chemical sense, to essence. Months or years focused on God and his love and healing power has allowed us to understand that everything bends back upon itself, even time, space, and light. This is divine intuition that teaches that everything which goes out will come back again. “All of you that are pure in heart, lift up your heads and receive the pleasing word of God, and feast upon his love; for you may, if your minds are firm, forever (Jacob 3.2).” If we deny or cover up anything that is home in the soul, then we cannot be fully present to others. Hiding the dark places results in a loss of soul; speaking for them and from them offers a way toward genuine community and intimacy. Even after you uncover piece after piece of the sacrifices you have made, and feel an intense regret, but discover the real core of your being and the loyalty to the things you love. #RandolphHarris 9 of 10
As you reflect on your core the feeling of guilt and depression will be replaced by a stronger individual, who is no longer manipulated. Do not focus on thoughts and experiences the sad feelings and turmoil is waiting in the for you. Especially when the first time around was so painful and apparently unsuccessful. Care of the soul does not mean wallowing in the symptom, but it does mean trying to learn from depression what qualities the soul needs. Allow the Angel of God to carry your soul out of the coldness, isolation, darkness, and emptiness away to its remote places where it is no longer quarreling and where it finds unique insight and enjoys a special vision. Experience teaches us what is best. We learn that God alone is eternal and that loves overcomes hate. We have brought chance into compliance with love, reason, and faith. We have caught the lightning and made it turn the wheels of industry. We have engaged the laws of nature and harnessed their energy to our purposes. Truth will enter into a new Heaven and a new Earth, a different consciousness. When consciousness is changed, experience automatically changes. Now in the thing we do rejoice. When you become weary and feel like quitting, there is a way to have your strength renewed—wait on the Lord. The reward is in the attempt. #RandolphHarris 10 of 10
God Expects Us to be Especially Mindful of the Bounteous Blessings
It has a very long history, dating back to our origins, has a momentum that shows little indication of slowing down. The word violence comes from the Latin word vis, meaning “life force.” Its very roots suggest that in violence the thrust of life is making itself visible. If that fundamental vitality is not present in the heart, it nevertheless seems to appear distorted by our representations and compromises, our fears and our narcissistic manipulations. There may be talk of honor, but it is mostly just more fuel for the fires of violence and has nothing to do with real honor. God, we can make something out of that! Perhaps humankind will get down on its knees and, fearing for its own sanity, will beg the Creator for more madness! It would be a mistake to approach violence with any simple idea of getting rid of it. Chances are, if we try to eradicate our violence, we will also cut ourselves off from the deep power that sustains creative life. Besides, psychoanalysis teaches, repression never accomplishes what we want. The repressed always returns in monstrous form. The life current of the soul, vis, is like the natural force of planet life, like the grass that grows up through cement and in a relatively short time obliterates grand monuments of culture. This land where confusion between the real and false reigns supreme. A magic enchantment now attaches itself to neurotic symptoms. #RandolphHarris 1 of 8
How did all this fakery and moral insanity come about? There are plenty of views about what constitutes and causes violence, but nay deep understanding of violence has to include our own capacity for extreme aggression and the dehumanizing of others, especially toward those who offend us. So simple a thing as new food can be threatening, and it is well known that fashions in dress can be statements of either conformity or anarchy. Political groups have identified themselves through their gender, ethnic background, hair colour and style, and citizenship status. Such choices in everyday life have genuine power, and a society concerned about order and smooth functioning may gradually and unconsciously flatten itself out of the apparent good of the whole. If we try taming and boxing in this innate power, it will inevitably find its way into the light. The more intimate we are with our own violent urges and their roots, the less likely we are to be irresponsible with such urges, and the deeper our understanding will be of others’ violence. Repression of the life force is a diagnosis that fits most of the emotional problems, and people have suffered serious injury to their bodies as well as their own souls. When people let their minds be colonized by revengeful or retaliatory or first-strike fantasies, they create enemies and have an undue anticipation of unleashing their aggression. #RandolphHarris 2 of 8
People freed from onerous taxes and humiliating restrictions on their property rights, professional choices, and religious practices, could realistically harbour hopes for economic advancement, political participation, and a measure of social acceptance. Countless individuals whose life is in bankruptcy clamor for relief through the court of psychoanalysis, because the public now expects, and indeed demands, help through this channel. We have personally analyzed many psychopathic personalities whose treatment we were unable to bring to proper conclusion because of their impregnable moral insanity. We were sorry to learn, from reports in the newspapers, that many of these people continue to occupy positions of public trust. Humankind has no choice but to learn to resist this sort of bedazzlement. If one were to question how central violence is in contemporary culture, one would find the answer in the frequency with which violence occurs in film, news, and television. These mediums do not just feature plenty of violence, but also conjures violence as acceptable reactions until these fantasies become crystallized in a thing that has the power of lure of a fetish. In this sense people’s arsenals with their mystery and threat are dark carries of what has been ignored in the soul. #RandolphHarris 3 of 8
Because so many people are walking around with open emotional wounds that have never been resolved, they have refused to associate themselves with the dark forces lurking in their mind, heart, and soul. That rage and violence is them forced into fetishistic form, where they remain, fascinating and lethal. When people to not care for their wounds and souls, the dysfunction is forced to appear in fetish ad in violent behavior. Moreover, it is an integral part of mental diseases. There is nothing neutral about the soul. It is the seat and the source of life. Either we respond to what the soul presents in its fantasies and desires, or people will suffer from neglect of themselves. The power of the soul can hurl a person into ecstasy or into depression. It can be creative or destructive, gentle or aggressive. Power incubates within the soul and then makes it influential move into life as the expression of soul. If there is no soulfulness, then there is no true power, and if there is no power, then there can be no true soul. When the soul’s power is neglected, usurped, or toyed with, then it breaks down into violence and victimization, controller and subject. Whenever one person victimizes another, real power has been lost and replaced by a literalistic drama that is dangerous for both parties. #RandolphHarris 4 of 8
People who turn to violence are visibly controlling; what is less obvious are their weakness and feeling of powerlessness. On the other hand, those who habitually play the submissive may be quite unaware of their own more subtle methods of control. This is why issues of power are so difficult to deal with; things are not as they appear to be. Weaklings puff themselves up and try to act strong; tough people hide their vulnerabilities; many fail to look past the surface. People assume that the fabrications of power all around them are genuine, and they all fall prey to them. Fear is never far removed from power and genuine innocence is always to be found in the vicinity of blood-guilt. Guns are dangerous not only because it threatens lives, but also because it concretizes and fetishizes a person’s desire for power, keeping power both in sight and also removed from its soulful presence in our daily lives. However, guns are also a source of protection. Many people turn to violent gun violence because they may feel they have no power or because they want to be famous. If we want to stop school shootings, perhaps we need to look beyond mental help, and help people who are targets of bullies and encourage them to join groups where they know that they are loved and accepted. #RandolphHarris 5 of 8
Sometimes healthy people seek mental help or are forced into it and the healthy often emerge from the analyst’s office sick. The soul is explosive and powerful. If we do not claim the soul’s power on our own behalf, we become its victims. We suffer our own emotions rather than feel them working for us. We suffer our emotions rather than feel them working for us. We hold our thoughts and passions inward, disconnecting them from life, and then they stir trouble within, making us feel profoundly unsettled or, it seems, turning into illness. We all know what it feels like to hold anger in our hearts, as it builds and transmuted into corrosive resentment and rage. Even unexpressed love creates a pressure that demands release in come kind of expression. Therefore, if violence is the repressed life force showing itself symptomatically, then cure for violence is care of the soul’s power. God teaches us to love our enemies because we do not hurt the people we love, it is a way to keep society civil and save your soul. God always says that vengeance is his and he will get revenge for the wrongs that others have done to you, so it is best to follow the laws of the land so your hands stay clean and the guilty can be punished by the law so they can be taken off the streets where their violence cannot escalate. #RandolphHarris 6 of 8
People who teach love and virtue, like Socrates and Plato, were condemned by the wicked because of the “unsettling” and “threatening” power of their soul, which was reveled in their personal lives and in their works. They did not carry guns, but they were still considered a problem because there is nothing more powerful than peace, love, harmony, and education, which leads to the true passion and revelation of one’s own soul. My past is your present. What embarrasses me in my dreams, amuses you in your interpretations, but I insist on the privacy of my dreams, and on embarrassing you with your foul waking life. In the presence of deep power, life becomes robust and passionate, signs that the soul is engaged and being given expression. When God is honored in our lives, everything we do becomes more genuine, quickening our lives with intensity, passion, power, and courage. One the scale of our individual lives we reproduce the divine order in its entirety. Our thought is creative, but in our ignorance, we use it destructively, and that is why people suffer the onslaughts of uncontained violence. To learn to think in the right manner is to learn to create that which is good, and which gives compete expression to the self without ever containing anything destructive or negative. The only lasting joy and happiness we will ever find during our mortal experience will come by following the Savior. #RandolphHarris 7 of 8
The Lord has blessed us with lands of promise to enjoy during our mortal probation. In the doctrine of progression, we learn that all people were born into the spirit World—prior to taking on Earthly bodies. Our lives did not begin at birth and will not end at death. We are here on Earth to learn and progress for a while; in the process there will be joy and pain. This mortal probation is the period of testing and demonstrating character or abilities. “If people have sought to do wickedly during days of probation, they will be found unclean before judgment (1 Nephi 10.21).” The chief reward of surrendering innocence, so that the soul may be fully expressed, as an increase of power. That is why we must “Continue in the straight and narrow path until end of the day of probation (2 Nephi 33.9).” Therefore, instead of being confused by the situations around us we should be calm, tranquil, and confident that through reforming our word and changing our whole body of thinking, we can as easily change the existing conditions as perpetuate them. The nations of Earth, if they would continue to follow the ways of God, could be a blessing to his children here. We need complete assurance, an inner determination, faith, and confidence to know that we can proceed with definite, deliberate determination and that there can be no question about the result; they will be inevitable. Be better than smart, be thoughtful. #RandolphHarris 8 of 8
People Who Excel in Life Tend to be Emotionally Intelligent
It is God’s will that we be free men and women enabled to rise to our full potential both temporally and spiritually. People who excel in life tend to be emotionally intelligent. The recipe for handling relationships smoothly is to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way. Indeed, the costs of poor emotional skills can be high. They range from problems in marriage and parenting to poor physical health. A lack of emotional intelligence (self-control, self-awareness, sensitivity to the feelings of others, persistence, and self-motivation) can ruin careers and sabotage achievement. Perhaps the greatest toll falls on children and teenagers. For them, poor emotional skills can contribute to depression, eating disorders, unexpected pregnancy, aggression, and violent crime. We should promote emotional competence as well as intellectual skills. The result would be greater self-control, altruism, and compassion—all basic capacities needed if our society is to thrive. What means does civilization employ in order to inhibit the aggressiveness which it opposes it, to make it harmless, to get rid of it, perhaps? We have already become acquainted with a few of these methods, but not yet with the one that appears to be most important. #RandolphHarris 1 of 11
What happens in an individual to render his or her desire for aggression innocuous? Civilization obtains mastery over the individual’s dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within one to understand why they feel the way they feel. The tension people feel in jealousy may be that of much greater Worlds colliding than can be seen by looking only at our personal situations. Its pain comes, at least in part, from opening up to unexplored territory and letting go of old familiar truths in the face of unknown and threatening new possibilities. It is not unusual for a jealous person to feel so altruistic and reasonable about one’s own life, so clean of the vice of selfishness, that one finds the loved one self-serving. Many people experience jealousy because the soul wants complete openness and freedom. That leaves a sense of order and limit in the darkness of repression, where it stirs and becomes wild and unreasonable, and potentially violent. It also may be time for one to reevaluate one’s beliefs. People who feel rage and suspicious call for some kind of adjustment and reflection. To begin with, if we ask how a person comes to have a sense of guilt after unjustifiably hurting another person, we arrive at an answer which cannot be disputed: a person feels guilty (maybe even sinful) when he or she has done something bad. #RandolphHarris 2 of 11
When your jealousy, with or without your conscious consent, is setting limits on your life it is because your jealousy is drawing out a strange cast of characters—the moralist, the detective, the paranoid, the archconservative. People often feel jealous because they assume that something threatening and dangerous is near. They believe that they are hard on the trail of facts, but they behave as if they do not know any details. Then aggressiveness is introjected, internalized. It expresses itself as a need for punishment. Since a person’s own feelings would not have led one along this path, one must have had a motive for submitting to this extraneous influence. Such a motive is easily discovered in one’s helplessness and one’s dependence on other people, and it can best be designated as fear of loss of love. If one losses the love of another person upon whom one is dependent, one also ceases to be protected from a variety of dangers. Above all, the individual feels they are exposed to the danger that this stronger person will show his or her superiority in the form of punishment. At the beginning, therefore, what is bad is whatever causes one to be threatened with the loss of love. For fear of that loss, one must avoid it. #RandolphHarris 3 of 11
Feelings of violence can show how slit off one is from the power of one’s knowledge. Blinded by a cloud of innocence, people seem not to know their friend or oneself or the complexity of relationships in general. They plead for simple attention and care. When one does not get these things, one feels controlled and toyed with. Then, in place of a more genuine power, violent rage pours out of the individual. The paranoid element in one’s jealousy both keeps the possibility of deeper knowledge within reach, but also dissociates itself from will and intentionality. It makes little difference whether one has already done the bad things or only intends to do it. In either cause the danger only sets in if and when the individual discovers it. This state of mind is called a bad conscience; but actually it does not deserve this name, for at this stage the sense of guilt is clearly only a fear of loss of love, social anxiety. Consequently, such people habitually allow themselves to do any bad things which promises them enjoyment, so long as they are sure that the authority will not know anything about it or cannot blame them for it; they are afraid only of being found out. For instance, when people vandalize cars of someone they are jealous of, they usually do so when they know people are in deep sleeps so they will not be held accountable for their crimes. #RandolphHarris 4 of 11
The obsessive side of jealousy seems in part to be a function of its hiddenness, arising when it is not being revealed and given place. When jealous feelings and images penetrate the heart and mind, a kind of initiation takes place. Their souls become profoundly disturbed. Sometimes people also become jealous of other person, who they do not know, because some people might appear to have a lot of talent, or be an insanely inspired artist or seem to possess the power of a politician graced with the charisma that might make him or her a World leader. How can anyone compete with a person who has desire of cosmic proportions without always feeling threatened? They become fitful, outrageously infuriated, betrayed, and offended. If one did not become jealous, they feel that too many events would take place, too much life would be lived, too many connections would be made. Therefore, jealousy serves the soul by pressing for limits on an individual one does not have control over, but deeply desires to control or possess their absolute beauty and fulfilling absolute power. From the jealousy person’s point of view, not only is their possessiveness right, it is required that one be outraged. This serves to compensate for a sense of union that does not exist or is not terribly deep. #RandolphHarris 5 of 11
When a jealousy person’s feelings come upon them, they feel alien and do not know what to do with them. When some part of one longs for more experience, new people, and starting over, jealousy remembers attachment and feels the unending pain of separation and divorces. These types of people become tormented by jealousy. They sense tension between attachment to what is and the promise of a new passion. How does one care for the soul when it is presenting itself through jealousy? Can we perceive that the soul wants when it wrenches us with longing for what another person has? Jealousy can be consuming. It can crowd out every other thought and emotion with its pungency. It can make a person distracted, touched, aching for the life, position, and possession of others. My neighbors have happiness, money, success, children—why do I not? My friend has a great career, good looks, luck—what is wrong with me? There may be a good dose of self-pity in jealousy, but it is the longing that is so bitter. Jealousy eats away at the heart, soul, and mind. It has a corrosive power. In jealousy, desire and self-denial work together to create characteristic sense of frustration and obsessiveness. #RandolphHarris 6 of 11
The jealous person thinks he or she is the victim of bad fortune it also involves strong willfulness in the form of resistance to fate and character. When misfortune befalls an individual, one must search one’s soul, acknowledge sinfulness, heighten the demands of one’s conscience, impose abstinences on oneself and they often punish themselves with penances. Whole people have behaved in this way and still do. Fate is regarded as a substitute for the parental agency. If any person’s unfortunate it, they sometimes take it to mean that they are no longer loved by their higher power; and threatened by such a loss of love, they become more conservative, and no longer neglect their religion. However, a person with a jealous nature fights fervently against the deal fate has handed them. They feel deprived and cheated. Because jealous people are so out of touch with the potential value of his or her own fate, one has elaborate fantasies about others being blessed with good fortune that belongs to them. The point of caring for the envious soul is not to get rid of the jealousy, but to be guided back by it into one’s own fate. The pain in jealousy is like pain in the body: it makes one stop and take notice of something that has gone wrong and needs attention. Jealous people simply fail to see the necessity and value in their own lives. #RandolphHarris 7 of 11
When things turn bad, there is a tendency to blame others or even God. Sometimes a sense of entitlement arises, and individuals or groups try to shift their responsibility to others. Some people allow their jealousy to allow them to have a preoccupation with the lives of others and then neglect their own. Their angry explanations for their misfortune distract them from the pain of their past and dealing with it productively. Symptoms are often obviously painful, but at the same time they may protect against a deeper pain associated with awareness and facing the fundamental realities of fate. It is through their jealousy that they suck all that pain into itself and in an odd way keeps them from owning their past. The problem is not the individual’s ability to have a good life, it is his or her capacity not to have one. Jealous people need to be taught to care for their soul. If in jealousy the person wishes life were better, then maybe it is a good idea to feel that emptiness deeply. People must take more responsibility for their situations, and over time eventually improve it. And it is important to be honest with oneself. In jealousy, fantasies are potent and utterly captivating, yet floating in an atmosphere somehow removed from actual life. These fantasies are illusions, images kept at bay so they cannot touch life directly. Dwelling in an imaginary life is a way of avoiding soul. #RandolphHarris 8 of 11
Jealousy is resistance to reason. If a jealous person is met with a misfortune or denial of a desire, they do not throw the blame on oneself, but on one’s fetish, which has obviously not done its duty, and one gives it a thrashing instead of punishing oneself. When one has a sense of guilt after having committed a misdeed, and because of it, the feeling should more properly be called remorse. It relates only to a deed that has been done, and, of course, it presupposes that a conscience—the readiness to feel guilty—was already in existence before the deed took place. Remorse of this sort can, therefore, never help one to discover the origin of conscience and of the sense of guilt in general. What happens in these everyday cases is usually this: an instinctual need acquires the strength to achieve satisfaction in spite of the conscience, which is, after all, limited in its strength; and with the natural weakening of the need owning to it having been satisfied, the former balance of power is restored. The task is to care for the soul, but it is also true that the soul cares for us. #RandolphHarris 9 of 11
We must do our best to honor whatever the soul presents to us. It suffering can only be relieved by the reestablishment of the will placed on us by the Heavenly Powers. And we may well heave a sigh of relief at the thought that it is nevertheless vouchsafed to a few to salvage without effort from the whirlpool of their own feelings the deepest truths, toward which the rest of us have to find our way through tormenting uncertainty and with restless groping. God wishes only good for everyone. We are all rooted in pure spirit, in perfect life, and at any moment we can so unify ourselves with the power of good that evil will disappear from our experience. We have to live each day as though all the joy there is in the Universe were ours now. And we have to live each day as though all the joy we ever expect to experience were ours now. If we make every day a day of praise and thanksgiving, a day in which we recognize the divine bounty and the eternal goodness, and if we live today as though God were the only presence and the only power there is, we would not have to worry about tomorrow. We are all human and have all made mistakes. The starting point for creating a better future for ourselves is to deliberately free our minds from the mistakes of the past and feel they no longer be held against us; they need no longer be a liability. #RandolphHarris 10 of 11
Suppose we have had a deep sense of animosity toward others and because of this we find that we are not meeting people in the right spirit; they, naturally, respond to us the way we meet them, and out whole set of human relations is out of harmony. We cannot go back over the past and relive it. We cannot make adjustments in the past. We have to make them in the present. It is not going to do us any good to sit around and cry over the past and bemoan our fate, because in the very day in which we are living we are creating our future, which will become monotonous repetitions of the past. The one who is suffering from one’s past mistakes of resentment and animosity merely turns quietly to oneself and prays: I have decided to change al this. I want to like people and I want them to like me. I want to get along happily with others. I forgive myself for everything that has happened up until now. I lose it and let it go. I not only forgive myself, I forgive everyone who I feel has held anything against me. I forgive and I am forgiven. Furthermore, the power of the Universe conspires to help us. We should feel that we live in an eternal presence of pure spirit whose whole purpose is good, whose whole desire is constructive, and whose whole feeling toward us is one of love and compassion. #RandolphHarris 11 of 11
God Never Made a Promise that was too Good to be True!
My Love is something valuable to much which I ought not to throw away without reflection. It imposes duties on me for whose fulfillment I must be ready to make sacrifices. If I love someone, he or she must deserve it in some way. Love is one of the most powerful of human impulses. My love is valued by all my own people as a sign of my preferring them, and it is an injustice to them if I put a stranger on part with them. In order to appreciate the mystery of love, we have to give up the idea that love is a psychological problem and that with enough understanding and guidance we can finally do it right, without illusion and folly. Granted that loyalty is whole hearted devotion to an object of some kind, what kind of thing is this object? Is it an abstract entity, such as an idea or collective being? Or is it a person or group of persons? The idealist contends that loyalty is the willing and practical and thoroughgoing devotion to a person to a cause. Its object is a cause beyond your private self, greater than you are, it is impersonal and superpersonal. As a cause it is something that transcends the individual, an eternal reality. Apart from familiar metaphysical and logical objections to this concept of a superpersonal reality, this view has the ethical defect of postulating duties over and above our duties to individual people and groups of people. #RandolphHarris 1 of 6
The individual is submerged and lost in this superperson not only ontologically but also morally, for it tends to dissolve our specific duties and obligations to others into a superhuman good. Loyalty is a component of love and there are a range of emotions, giving us strong images of the saturation of the soul. God, being rational, will ordain what is good, but what God ordains is good in its own nature, not because God ordains it. Innate knowledge (notitia innata) is cognition through self-presence and belongs to the very essence of the soul; acquired knowledge (notitia illata) is the soul’s cognition of external things. Innate knowledge is superior to, and more certain than, acquired knowledge; for the soul cannot be mistaken about what belongs to its nature. Knowledge of the external World can be obtained either by intuition or by abstraction. By intuition one grasps a thing immediately in its concrete reality, so that nothing immediately in its concrete reality, so that nothing of the object escapes the penetrating and all-embracing act of the intellect. God knows all our thoughts, and they are made known by his spirit. The manifestation of love, charity personified, comes through the grace of Christ himself. May the joy of our fidelity to the highest and best within us be ours as we keep our love and our marriages, our society and our souls, as pure as they were meant to be. #RandolphHarris 2 of 6
Each individual is a unique institution in the Universe. Care of the soul is to recognize the necessity of love and loyalty. We can find some hints of how to care for the soul in times of love. Loyalty is a virtue that hold less of reason, than of bigotry and superstition. Loyalty is taken to refer to a relationship between persons—for instance, between a lord and his vassal, between a parent and his or her children, or between friends. Thus, the object of loyalty is ordinarily taken to be a person or group of persons. Loyalty is conceived as interpersonal, and it is also always specific; a person is loyal to their lord, their parents, or his or her comrades. When love is in control, the elements form compounds out of which arise more complex units, and eventually, animate beings. It is a door that opens out from the human reason into divine mystery. When we reflect on the tragedies of our own loves, when we slowly find our way through their miseries, we are being initiated into the mysterious ways of the soul. Love is the means of entry and our guide. There is a doorway or an entrance through which the mind must pass on its way to spiritual realization, and that door can be opened by none but the one who is to enter. Every person must discover God in one’s own way, but always within oneself. #RandolphHarris 3 of 6
Now there are many approaches to the door, and no doubt many entrances to the door way to God. Every great spiritual leader has found a door through which God has entered. As we study the spiritual systems of the ages we discover that, though the approach has been varied, the temple of the spirit is one. God is all there is, and there is none beside him. This statement includes everything. In all the kingdoms that exist, in all the planes that exist, and deep within the self, hidden and yet felt, there is a High Priest ready to conduct us to the sacred and secret chamber of the self, where God and humans are one. The search for union passes into the realization, not that we are just with or in, but that we are of God. Love keeps us on the labyrinthine path. If we can honor love as it presents itself, taking shapes and directions we never have predicted or desired, then we are on the way toward discovering the lower levels of soul, where meaning and value reveal themselves slowly and paradoxically. There we are sailing trustingly toward fate, while plucking the strings of our own resources. Many have found entrance to this door through deep spiritual prayers, some through high inspirational enlightenment. True love and loyalty endure. #RandolphHarris 4 of 6
Righteous love and truth are never shaken. True love must include the idea of permanence. Love makes us instinctively reach out to Go and other people. Love comes with open hands and open heart. Since life cannot be lost, the whole purpose of our study is not for the salvation of the individual life, but the discovery of the self which the scripture tells us is hid with Christ in God. We have studied our techniques and we have come to understand something about how the science of mind works and how to use it, what to do and why. The opening of the door to the temple often calls for patience and waiting, painstaking and watchful prayer, for continual communion with God will allow us to discover knowledge of the divine. We have a need for perfection—this is, the fulfillment of both our intellectual and our emotional powers, which indeed are not existentially separate. The more adequate an idea, the more it is pleasing, liberating, and intrinsically human. The culmination of the ethical life—that is, the life devoted to freedom of the intellect—is found in the intellectual love of God. One must lose oneself in order to find oneself, but in so doing, one finds that what one had really discovered is God. #RandolphHarris 5 of 6
Are we dreaming of success or failure? Of happiness or misery? Of aliments or Health? Our dreams are mental patterns that can lead us into a fuller and richer life, or can create phantom monsters that makes out lives a nightmare, whether we are asleep or awake. Dreams have meaning and psychic value, we must nevertheless allow for the possibility that this meaning may not be the same in every dream. One dream may have consideration of the fulfillment of a wish; another may turn out to be the realization of an apprehension; another may have a reflection as its content; other dreams may simply reproduce a reminiscence. Every person is the dreamer of one’s own dreams, and within each is the spiritual power to choose the patterns that one wishes to experience in life. You may be in pain today. Maybe you have suffered a loss, been through a disappointment. That is not the end. God still has a plan. Do not sit around nursing your wounds. Do not let bitterness and discouragement set the tone for your life. When you become weary and feel like quitting, there is a way to have your strength renewed—wait on the Lord. God wants us to arise. Wipe away the tears and take control of your life. God promises to make the rest of your life the best of your life. #RandolphHarris 6 of 6
Growth and Development of the Green Grass
Give careful thought to your ways. Although the emotion of love is one of the strongest of which the mind is capable, it can hardly be said to have any proper or peculiar name of expression. The boundaries of a sentiment vary in their permeability by public observation and involvement in one’s feeling. Sentiments expressed in a public or community setting become conventionalized as the individual makes social comparisons about the sentiment’s quality and intensity. Private feeling, secret and isolated from social involvement, is less manageable and loses social significance for lack of validation by others. For example, medieval customs required mourners to show sorrow for a fixed period of time. Public ceremonies tamed grief, shielding mourners from extreme or prolonged sorrow. With privatization of grief, however, the sentiment became idiosyncratic, often insurmountable as the mourner languished persistently. For 350 years medical science ignored relationships between emotions and physical illness because science ignore the study of emotions (since emotions were a reflection of the human soul) and instead focused exclusively on the physical cause of aliments. #RandolphHarris 1 of 9
Expression is part and parcel of the feeling. It is believed to be a general law of the mind that along with the fact that inward feeling or consciousness, there is a diffusive action or excitement over the bodily members. A very considerable number of the facts may be brought under the principle. States of pleasure are connected with an increase, and the states of pain with an abatement, of some, or all, of the vital function. Ideas about physical health have been rigidly fixed. Germs are seen as being outside and they somehow get inside the body, leading people to believe that they were the passive victims of external forces in nature. It was widely held that human behavior did not cause disease; rather, humans were victimized by it. In some primitive cultures, even today, people assume that spirits control all their behavior and they have little choice in their own destiny, because it is controlled by good and evil spirits and by fate. Once you were stricken by these foreign invaders, the only logical course of action was to go to a physician and be purged of your illness. Until the late nineteenth century, most people did not believe that they were responsible for their own physical health, a belief that has lingered on into the late twentieth century. #RandolphHarris 2 of 9
Even today, many people still resist the idea that there is a connection between their overeating, their lack of exercise, their smoking, or their loneliness and their health. They still believe that human disease is caused by germs out there and that nothing they do matters. Very similar beliefs about mental disease dominated the nineteenth century thinking. Mental illness was thought to be caused by something foreign to the human body. Since it was a mental problem, it had to involve the human soul, and so the source of these problems was attributed to an invasion of evil spirits or possession by dark emotions. Since the mind was a reflection of the human soul, mental disturbance could only be caused by agents which troubled the soul, namely dark emotions. The attitude toward human emotions followed precisely the same line of thought. Emotions were viewed as a quality of the human soul; they were nonmaterial, and therefore had little to do with physical disease. Like mental disorders, emotional disorders were viewed as an indication of a disturbed soul and show how caused by evil spirits or dark emotions. If a person was emotionally upset, then he or she prayed for spiritual guidance. #RandolphHarris 3 of 9
Feeling management through public rituals allows the discharge of traumatic emotions. In some cultures, is in considered normal for hostile sentiments to be expressed publicly, like a short of live theater play, in noisy but mostly harmless encounters in which antagonists play to their audience, who intervene if a fight becomes too serious. These exaggerated dramas make hostility appear so intense as to be avoided when possible, and provide support for folk beliefs, such as a particular group of people are terrible when they fight. However, as you may know, anger, grief, fear, and embarrassment are unavoidable experiences in social life, but often cannot be discharged or resolved immediately because social controls. Rituals provide a dramatic frame that restimulates distressful emotion but also gives the person a sense of control or distance from the feeling, so that it may be discharged through catharsis. Most modern rituals are insufficiently involving emotion, however, and participants are overdistanced from their distress. An emotional emptiness has developed from a poverty of identifying rituals. Rituals have become and impersonal because we lack agreement on symbols as collective reference points. #RandolphHarris 4 of 9
We only have shallow feelings for romantic love, religious reverence, and esthetic sentiments. Because we do not sense that others share the same feeling and meaning. Emotions are serviceable habits and are expressed in a manner designed to effectively communicate to others what is being felt inside. Emotional expression serves definite purposes: they mobilize people into some definite course of actions, and/or they communicate a specific message to other people which leads them to behave in a certain fashion. The emotion of love is an exception to all the general rules—it is the strongest of all emotions, and yet it is the only one that has no peculiar means of expression. And, as you may know, emotions can significantly affect our physical and mental well-being. It is not betwixing that men and women, beset by emotional stresses, turn and go to faith healers and to others who recognize the reality of these unsettling states. Fear, when strong, expresses itself in cries, in efforts to hide or escape, in palpitations and trembling and these are just the manifestations that would accompany an actual experience of the evil feared. #RandolphHarris 5 of 9
The destructive passions are shown in a general tension of the muscular system, in gnashing of the teeth, beating on the chest like a bongo, clapping of the hands, and protrusion of the claws, in dilated eyes and nostrils in growls; and these are weaker forms of the actions that accompany killing of prey. The general law is that feeling passing a certain pitch, habitually vents itself in bodily action, and an overflow of nerve-force undirected by any motive, will manifestly take first the most habitual routes. If these emotions are to expressed and resolved, they start affecting the internal system. I grew up in a small farming town where water is the lifeblood of the community, and 30 percent of our water came from the snow melt, which was declining. The people in our society are constantly watching, worrying, and praying over the rain, irrigation rights, and water in general. People in our community are so preoccupied with the rain because it is a matter of survival. Under the stress and strain of our climate, sometime people were not always at their best. The city council, mayor and governor squabble over people who water their lawns, and they turned to the television news media to request that people report and confront their neighbors over water waste. #RandolphHarris 6 of 9
Sentiments are not differentiated through innate bodily patterning, but through interpretation of feeling according to cultural vocabularies of labels and meanings. It was innocent enough at first, but over the years people started targeting people with green lawns and would quarrel over water. Two mean who lived in our community who I will call Sam and Dean had a disagreement over water, and the two men allowed their disagreement to turn into resentment and then arguments—even to the point of threats. One August morning both men felt they were short of water and that it was being stolen. Angry words were exchanged; a scuffle ensured. Dean was a great man with a lot of strength, and Sam was equally yoked and tenacious. In the heat of the moment, the men had a fist fight. The next morning, Sam called the city out to issue Dean a fine for wasting water. However, Dean was economically challenged and because the fines kept adding it, his water was shut off. These two neighbors and best friends had fallen captive to their anger and let it destroy their lives. We should learn to resolve our differences early on, lest the passions of them moment escalate into physical or emotional cruelty, and we fall captive to our anger. #RandolphHarris 7 of 9
The social processes that create and shape love, hatred, envy, and other sentiments only enhance the richness and meaning of life. Make full haste to reduce arguments, eliminate ridicule, do away with criticism, and remove resentment and anger. We cannot afford to let such dangerous passions ruminate—not even one day. The lack of human companionship, the sudden loss of love, and chronic human loneliness are significant contributions to serious diseases (including cardiovascular disease) and premature death. The Savior asks us to forsake and combat evil in all its forms, and although we must forgive a neighbor who injures us, we should still work constructively to prevent that injury from being repeated. Forgiveness does not require us to accept or tolerate evil. It does not require us to ignore the wrong that we see in the World around us or in our own lives. However, as we abstain from sin, we must not allow hatred or anger to control our thoughts nor actions. Good human contact can alter and even eliminate the usual cardiac responses to fear and physical pain, and it can significantly influence the human ability to resist infectious diseases. #RandolphHarris 8 of 9
Forgiveness means that problems of the past no longer dictate our destinies, and we can focus on the future with God’s love in our hearts. “I will give you honor and praise among all the peoples of the Earth, when I restore your fortunes, before your eyes,” says the Lord (Zephaniah 3.20). May the seeds of unforgiveness that haunted my neighbors never be allowed to take root in our homes. May we pray to our Heavenly Father to help us overcome foolish id, resentment, and pettiness. May God help us to forgive and love, so that we may be friends with our Savior, others, and ourselves. All knowing, God grieves even at the mere thought of evil. Dear Lord, we are sorry that we have been naughty and disobeyed. Please forgive us for disobeying and help us to listen to your commandments. Thank you for loving us and removing our sins that weigh heavily on our conscience. There is more righteousness in the World and thank you for your compassion, grace, and everlasting life. And please grant from your divine mysteries all your mercies. #RandolphHarris 9 of 9
Hope Preaches in the Soul
Beautiful objects arouse pleasure. Beauty relaxes, but the experience of sublimity is of great emotional intensity. Every sentiment is organized around a relationship to a social object, usually another person or a group such as a family. We associate a sentiment closely with particular persons or groups. If we try to recall love, pity, or other sentiments, we usually think of people by whom or toward whom these sentiments have been felt. We feel shame, pride, guilt, or embarrassment toward our selves as social objects when we imagine how other people judge our appearance to them. A sentiment may develop around a nonhuman object, such as love for a pet or reverence for a deity, but the object is usually personified with human qualities. The soul is said to strive toward beauty, which is a manifestation of the spiritual force that animates all of reality. Given that beauty is an objective property, attainable artistically and knowable critically, by reference to the rules, the question of the percipient’s response to it is usually scant. However, beauty can be expected to arouse the appropriate response, which is referred to briefly and loosely as pleasure or delight. It is the total object, the whole of form and expressiveness and what the form is of, that possesses the beauty. #RandolphHarris 1 of 7
Just as one can see the Sunlight without looking into the Sun itself, so can one have knowledge of divine ideas. A sentiment established a framework of meaning within which specific events, gestures, and sensations can be given a social interpretation. A sentiment is identified through an organization of responses toward a person, not through particular acts viewed separately. For example, a sentiment may be detected by others even when the individual does not acknowledge his or her feelings. One may deny being in love with a person, but may be imputed the love sentiment by observers who detect a pattern of protection and preoccupation with another person. We believe that we have detected a man’s love for a woman when he demonstrated joy in her presence, sorrow in her prolonged absence, fear when there is danger of losing her, and anger when she is criticized. The characteristic organization of hatred includes being sorry over the enemy’s good fortune, feeling anger at his or her very presence, being happy at their misfortune, and sensing anxiety over his or her possible success. We interpret, justify, and anticipate acts and feelings in relation to the sentiment’s overall pattern. #RandolphHarris 2 of 7
We attain these ideas in terms of the residual effects of the divine actions—effects which remain in the soul like habitual or buried memories. Our mind is simultaneously enlightened so that it is moved to judge correctly about the object and is hence in accord with God’s own mind on the subject. A sentiment sustains a relationship as an enduring, latent tendency to respond emotionally and overtly toward another person when the opportunity is given. Situational constraints often inhibit direct expression. One factor is over view of what the relationship means to the other person. Sentiments differ in the importance of reciprocal feeling. Reciprocation of hatred will magnify animosity. Failure by the other to reciprocate romantic love may simply heighten the lover’s passion as much as reciprocation. The other person may validate a sentiment with an appropriate but different pattern of gesture and feeling, such as showing gratitude for my kindness. The meaning of a sentiment depends on how the other responds to it. When people have a bad experience, they are often more concerned about how they feel about it, than the issue itself. #RandolphHarris 3 of 7
Timely and effective communications can help one manage negative sentiment, rebuild trust, and promote loyalty. We become highly aware of a sentiment when a controversial discrepancy arises. A single salient act can seem to contradict the whole pattern. Stealing from a loved one, helping an enemy, or cursing a deity are acts that call the sentiment into question. Most acts within a relationship, however, are assimilated into a sentiment and are anticipated and assessed as reflecting its meaning. Bodily sensations are an intermittent phase of every enduring sentiment. Arousal is more frequent and intense in passionate sentiments, such as romantic love, jealousy, and awe, than in others like kindness, loyalty, and gratitude. These visceral and muscular sensations are essentially autonomic arousal symptoms associated with the flow of adrenaline: heart palpitations, accelerated breathing, flushes, and tremor. However, they may be experienced simply as diffused, generalized excitement. Arousal does not persist unabated, even in passionate sentiments, but arises intermittently. Get involved with your business and reputation to reduce the risk of negative perceptions. #RandolphHarris 4 of 7
Bodily sensations do not define the nature of the sentiment. Even if regulatory issues make your company leery of social media, it is becoming riskier not to have a readily available, reassuring presence online because your people expect you to be there. As individuals often voice concerns online, you may receive double the negative feedback if you do not respond. Even a few thoughtful communications can show people that you are listening and ready to help, and that is a good thing. Listen to people’s concerns, admit any mistakes, and be clear about how you will improve their experience. There are no explicit patterns of arousal that correspond to different sentiments. Instead, we interpret our sensation in terms of the encompassing relationship. A feeling of excitement can be interpreted as indicating the continued vitality of a sentiment, whether love or hatred. We express sentiments more spontaneously when we are aroused. Of course, we feel bodily sensations of various types much of the time, and many of these—dizziness, fatigue, hunger, aches—have nothing to do with social relationships. We are socialized to attend selectively to our own sensations, however, and to sometimes attribute them a social meaning in terms of the course of interaction with another person. #RandolphHarris 5 of 7
A sentiment is expressed situationally through a person’s conventional gestures, such as kissing, and overt, involuntary bodily signs of arousal, such as trembling. A review of cross-cultural differences in gestures such as hand movements, laughter, crying, and posturing concluded that there is no natural language of emotional gesture. In dealing with negative sentiment, do not try to respond to everything. Focus on concerns to create the greatest optimistic response. Think beyond a simple apology or refund to what people might expect; what might delight them—perhaps a bonus gift or new benefit. By showings you care about your people and reputation, you may win loyalty and motivate them to praise your brand to others. For facial expressions of emotion, however, there is evidence that anger, disgust, fear, and several other emotions may be expressed and recognized similarly across very diverse cultures. Researchers admit however that in social situations, any natural, innate facial emotion is masked beneath culturally conventional expressions. Even when negative sentiment looms in social media, you can often find loyal customers who will defend your brand. Engage people directly to express appreciation, learn what they like about your company and how you might delight them. #RandolphHarris 6 of 7
Your personal attention might motivate more business and prompt people to help influence more beneficial sentiment online. Social media is a powerful channel to quickly address key concerns, clarify misconceptions, and offer reassurance. Showing people that you are listening and that you care about how they feel can help transform negative sentiment into a winning experience. We interpret a conventional gesture, such as a smile, in terms of situational factors, previous interactions with a person, subtle details in expressive style, and other social criteria. Human gestures are parts of social communication that become significant to symbols when they arouse the same meaning in the observer as in the expressing person. We indicate ourselves the meaning of our own gestures in terms of the perspective of the other person and shape our gestures in terms of the perspective of the other person and shape our gestures according to the meaning we intend them to have. Gestures become meaningful when interpreted as sentiments, which serve as significant categories or symbols held in common by group members. “Those who live without God in the World, judgment of an everlasting punishment is just upon them; and they shall quake, and tremble, and shrink beneath the glace of God’s all-searching eye (Mosiah 27.31).” #RandolphHarris 7 of 7
The Culture of Poverty—It Tends to Perpetuate itself from Generation to Generation!
Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty. The social structural conditions to which the poor are exposed (chronic unemployment and under-employment, low income, lack of property ownership, absence of saving and chronic shortage of food, money, medical care, and other necessities of life) give rise to distinctive patterns of community and family disorganization. These, in turn, produce a distinctive set of beliefs, attitudes, and values (that is, strong feelings of marginality, of helplessness, of dependence, and of inferiority, weak ego structure; confusion of sexual identification; lack of impulse control; strong present-time orientation, with relatively little ability to defer gratification and plan for the future. The cultural of poverty, however, is not only an adaptation to a set of objective conditions of the larger society. Once it comes into existence, it tends to perpetuate itself from generation to generation because of its effect on the children. By the time underprivileged children are age six or seven they have usually absorbed the basic values and attitudes of their subcultural and are not psychologically geared to take full advantage of the changing conditions or increased opportunities that may occur in their lifetimes. #RandolphHarris 1 of 6
Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe. Initially (time/generation I) structural conditions of poverty give rise to subcultural patterns (that is, family and community disorganization), and both of these create in children and adults the patterns of individual personality and behavior characteristic of the poor (for example, weak ego structure, inability to delay gratification). For persons who first become poor as adults (for example, as a result of migration, economic depression, drought, and so forth), this personality and behavior pattern is an adaptation to changed structural conditions. However, their children know nothing else and tend to recreate the same subcultural patterns and to pass on these same personality and behavior patterns to their children. And so on for succeeding generations—a shared set of individual beliefs, values, and attitudes (cultural of poverty) become self-perpetuating and may persist in spite of changes in the larger structural conditions. Saving our planet, lifting people out of poverty, advancing economic growth, these are one and the same challenge. #RandolphHarris 2 of 6
New generations resemble preceding ones because they confront the same structural conditions and hardships. A housing crisis is increasing poverty levels in California. As of now, 51 percent of adults live in middle-income households, and 29 percent live in lower-income households, while only 20 percent live in upper-income households. The lack of affordable housing, and apartments for middle class, and lower-income families is the reason so many people are struggling to make it. The median cost of a house is now $500,000.00, which is twice the national cost, and homelessness is rapidly increasing across the state. While the region’s median household income is $61,320.00 and the nationwide median is $53,291.00. In contrast the poor are bring in between $14,000.00 to $24,000.00 a year, and there is no place less than $1,000.00 a year for rent. As long as poverty, injustice and gross inequality persist in our World, none of us can truly rest. Poverty, including rates of unemployment, crime, school dropout rates, and drug use, are assumed to be the result of behavior preferred by individuals living within conditions of poverty. The culture of poverty theory presumes the development of a set of deviant norms, whereby behaviors like drug use and gang participation are viewed as the standard (normative) and even desired behaviors of those living in low-income neighborhoods. #RandolphHarris 3 of 6
Alternatively, individuals behave in ways that are nominally illegal, like participation in the underground economy or participation in gangs, not because they wish to do so or are following cultural norms, but because they have no choice, given the lack of educational and job opportunities available in their neighborhoods. In other words, individual living in poverty may see themselves as forced to turn to illegal methods of getting money, for example by selling drugs, simply to survive within the conditions of the hot economy. Poor children generally share the values, beliefs, and attitudes of the larger society, but as they experience the same lack of socioeconomic opportunity as their parents, they adopt the peculiar social and individual modes of response that characterize the culture of poverty. Also, some people who turn to selling drugs, for instance, to make a living, after they get started, they are not willing to turn to conventional means of earning a living because some of them can make $10,000.00 in a weekend, others have reported making $60,000.00 a month, and they are not willing to give that up to make $10 an hour, as they are making more than a lot of doctors. Hard core drug users spend approximately $60 billion a year on drugs. #RandolphHarris 4 of 6
Although the dealers are putting their lives and freedom in danger with every transaction they make, and many do get shot and beat up, they feel it is worth it because the money gives them something to live for. They can buy brand new cars, houses, and where there is money, there are a lot of beautiful women. If the set of structural conditions persist, they will recreate the same sociocultural and personality patterns in the new generation. Living in poverty and being unable to participate in the economy is oppressive. People are walking on eggshells. If they are accepted for affordable housing, it is a blessing, because most of the waiting lists in most cities are 20,000 people long. Then affordable housing is no way to live. The people are usually the undesirable people like criminals, uneducated, prostitutes, and drug attics. Also, because most people in affordable housing are on government assistance, they do not work due to physical disability or serious mental problems and tend to be dirty, loud, rude, and violent. They also attract a lot of homeless people and that is why people do not want affordable housing in their communities. The solution would be to give people vouchers, like a supplement to their rent, so they could spread out the undesirables, and they are not segregated to one apartment building or neighborhood. #RandolphHarris 5 of 6
When affordable housing is erected in high-income areas, the strong housing prices drop very locally and then it radiates outward over time. The new low-income building can lead to a loss of approximately $17 million, as the poverty values individual decrease by 15 percent. That is why education is to important. Education promotes equality and lifts people out of poverty. It teaches children how to become good citizens, how to work for a living, and the righteous values. Education is not just for the privileged few, it is for everyone. It is a fundamental human right. When people are educated it changes their culturally patterned ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving that will be passed on from one generation to the next. That is why a lot of people in the early 19th and 20th century enlisted in the armed services, it taught them discipline and provided education benefits, and helped them learn to deal with society. “The poor and the needy search for water, but there is none; their tongues are parched with thirst. However, if I the Lord will answer them; I, the God, will not forsake them. I will make rivers flow on barren heights, and springs within the valleys. I will turn the desert into pools of water, and the parched grounds into springs.” (Isaiah 41.17-18) #RandolpHarris 6 of 6
That there is an Invasion of my Privates
A new high in lowness. Prejudice is a social attitude propagated among the public by exploiting class for the purpose of stigmatizing some group as inferior so that the exploitation of either the group itself or its resources or both may be justified. People are generally exploited in hard economic times or competitive economic situations or in periods of major socioeconomic change—bringing special trouble; and corporations or individuals may have profited (commercially, agriculturally, economically, legally, and so on) at the expense of an underrepresented group or individual. The structure would produce the kind of alienation from human identity (alienation of human from human) that is expressed not only in economic terms and not only among the subjugated classes. The person is also estranged from the essential source of identity and if purpose for the human species by making one concerned for their safety and unable to trust former connections or new ones, as they tend to be frustrating and unsatisfying. Scapegoating (the practice of singling out any party for unmerited negative treatment or blame) is used to explain the flow of hostility toward the underrepresented individual under conditions of economic stress. #RandolphHarris 1 of 6
A wishing of misfortune upon an individual, is one step short of hating them. Ill will can manifest emotions like contempt, jealousy, envy, and schadenfreude (the emotion of taking pleasure in others’ suffering). When one is carrying ill will toward another, they may not look aggressive, but feel it and emanate it (however subtly), reducing the target to something less than human. Relative deprivation is another oppressive method used by oppressors. They make sure the person has a lack of resources to sustain the diet, lifestyle, activities and amenities that the individual is accustomed to or that is widely encouraged or approved in the society to which they belong. That makes the person not only feel alienated, but as if they not worthy because no matter what they do the individual cannot seem to advance in life. So, an individual is not only enduring poverty, but also facing social exclusions. Relative deprivation has important consequences for both behavior and attitudes, including fear, stress, political attitudes, and participation in collective action. People generally operate so as to maximize their own self-esteem. The individual’s sense of personal mastery over life circumstances is one important ingredient for the achiever. #RandolphHarris 2 of 6
The sense of low self-control is generated by extensive prejudice and discrimination and is a significant element in mobility behavior. One can have control over themselves and gain empowerment by having faith in God, and putting actions behind what one believes in. Demonstrate your faith by knowing that you are a child of God and no matter what circumstances you are facing, you are still worthy of life and worthy of achieving your dreams. God will open doors and create new opportunities and you will have the strength to do what you could not always do. God will show you his favor in unusual ways. Find the dreams in your heart, and keep them in mind every day knowing that they will become a reality. Know that God will comfort your souls, and give unto you success and also those who are with you will experience success. God will grant the strength to bear afflictions, whether they be internal or social. Our souls are precious to God and many people have things in common with us and we will eventually be encouraged and empowered in society. There is a natural power that comes from being a human being. Find your voice and authority to exercise the empowerment that you naturally have. #RandolphHarris 3 of 6
Keep a healthy attitude about life so that you have the requisite competence and clarity to make successful decisions. As we exercise our faith in God, he will lift us up and carry us through all our trials and, ultimately, save us in the celestial kingdom. Do not be sidetracked from achieving your new goals. Harness your faith in God and adopt a healthy lifestyle. The human mind is an exception to otherwise Universal natural laws, as a thing that is conscious, that is capable of good and evil, or that can be an uncaused cause of action. Humans strive to experience their desires, human freedom, and the expressions of the power of God. Patience preserves pace of the mind in the face of injury, suffering, and sadness. It prevents us from being discouraged—from losing courage. The patient person, therefore, possess a great freedom. One is free to stay in course with one’s life and fulfill one’s responsibility, even when things are difficult. Courage enables us to persist firmly against difficulties. The power of the subconscious mind, when it becomes aware of one’s goal, it provides the means to reject a particular characteristic or adopt it, if it is consistent with our goal attainment. #RandolphHarris 4 of 6
Our natural drive to achieve, along with our urge to move forward and be out front on the issues, tends to appeal to those who are leaders and bearing responsibility for their own visions, goals, objectives, and expected outcomes. Have a willing commitment, communicate with confidence, courage, and obvious intelligence characterized by determination and resilience. People are born with traits that can be cultivated in the direction of leadership. However, there is no doubt that leadership can be cultivated. The characteristics of leadership, necessarily has to have certain decisiveness and confidence comes from knowledge based on studies and training. The fundamental thing is your basic knowledge, the development of your mind, and your ability to apply this knowledge as you go along in life. There are no mistakes in life; there are only lessons. Great people are those who make others feel that they, too, can become great. With internal discipline there goes together a whole set of moral traits, among others perseverance, conscientiousness, and planning one’s actions. Perseverance enables one to reflect—at length strenuously, and patiently—on some selected issues. This reflection helps to overcome discouragement, apathy, self-indulgence, or laziness. #RandolphHarris 5 of 6
Be mentally awake! Every work – and especially a scholarly one—calls for a rationally thought-out regularity, planned action, correctness, order and harmony, to avoid sliding into chaos. Exactness and conscientiousness is important so one can finish all details without leaving any gaps or bundling, and as such is the opposite of superficiality. Dear God, thank you for all of our blessings and help us to welcome challenges in our lives. Please give us the strength to persevere in them. When we are feeling weak, tired or discouraged, please help us to remember we depend on you, God. God, also please bless this great nation, for its people and government as well. Bless humanity and the beautiful creatures and environment you have created. May we take better care of ourselves and our planet. We ask for forgiveness for any disobedience, laziness of spirit and lack of faith. God remembers the dreams he placed in our heart. Get your passion back and know that things will work out to your favor. God is going to finish what he started. Forgiveness is the economy of the heart. Forgiveness saves the expense of anger, the cost of hatred, the waste of spirits. Bless it be. #RandolphHarris 6 of 6
Randolph Harris II International 