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Lord, I Have Done this Sacrificial Service for You, and Now I am in Need of this Special Answer to Prayer!
Absence of occupation is not rest, a mind quite vacant is a mind distressed. “The Lord bless thee, and keep thee. The Lord make his face shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee,” reports Numbers 6.24. The illumined being gives oneself, the unenlightened one gives one’s possessions. If they are judged by appearances only, the truth of the situation will become reserved, and falsity will appear as truth. That is, the illumined being will seem the most uncharitable. They master’s motive may easily remain unknown to others, especially when one has a mission to fulfill for them, and by this unenlightenment they may just as easily misunderstand one’s actions. If this happens and they turn away from one, an opportunity for their higher growth will be missed. The distorted reading of one’s actions will also cause them to judge one unfairly and incorrectly. One will accept this injustice as part of the price of descending into an evil World where one does not really belong. T expect from such a being at all times and in all places, as both sceptics and followers often expect, a pharisaical propriety of conduct simply shows how little they have comprehended the perfect selflessness and utter purity of one’s character. For they expect ne to behave rigidly according to the patterns of conventional morality, although these are not always sincere or generous or wise. #RandolphHarris 1 of 10
Because one’s guidance must come from within, from one’s diviner consciousness and not from outside, from a society led by its ego consciousness, these will be occasions when one’s actions will not conform to these patterns. And this is so in spite of the fact that one knows well, and obeys where possible, the requirement that one shall set an example to others. One’s nonconformity will then be denounced or misunderstood, reviled or viewed with bewilderment. There are those who lightly appraise such a being’s spiritual worth by the superficial signs which accident throws their way or by the stories gossip brings to their ears. They are wasting their time. To offer no contradiction to false or slanderous statements made by others in their presence about a Spiritual teacher, is silently to consent to such criticism. It is such a being who most serves one’s fellows yet who least receives the recognition of one’s service. This is because humanity fails to understand where its true interests are possessed, what its true goal is, and why it is here at all. One will be the victim on one side of friendly enthusiasts who credit one with powers and adorn one with virtues which one does not possess, and on the other side of prejudiced enemies who malign one with motives and besmirch one with weaknesses which are wholly foreign to one’s temperament. #RandolphHarris 2 of 10
One’s illusionless life may not seem attractive to the mass of people who cannot afford the high cost of truth. Why do so many people stumble over this parable in the Holy Bible, Matthew 20.12-15, about the labours who did less work being paid as much as the one who worked twelve hours, and consider the landowner to be unfair? I believe it is because we Christians instinctively identify with the workers who had worked all day. We place ourselves in their shoes instead of in the shoes of those who worked only one hour. We look at society around us, instead of at Jesus Christ, and we begin to feel pretty good about ourselves. We consider ourselves to be twelve-hour workers, and we expect to be rewarded accordingly. That is the way Peter felt and that is the way many people feel today. I was talking one day with a man whose mother, a faithful servant of God for over forty years, was dying of painful cancer. He said, “After all she has done for God, this is the thanks she gets.” Such a statement sounds irreverent to us, but the man did not intend it to be that way. He simply thought God owed hos mother a better life. He only verbalized what many people feel in their hears. There are other occasions when we remind God of the sacrifices we have made to serve him. “Lord, I have done this sacrificial service for You, and now I am in need of this special answer to prayer.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 10
When we assume such an attitude, we are putting ourselves in the position of the twelve-hour workers. We suggest to God that we deserve this answer to prayer because of our sacrificial service. With such an attitude we may grumble about blessings not received instead of being grateful for those we have received. We need to adopt the attitude of the Roman centurion described in Luke 7. The man sent some of the Jewish elders to Jesus asking Him to come and heal his sick servant. When the elders came to Jesus, they pleaded earnestly with Him: “This man deserves to have you do this, because he loves our nation and has built our synagogue” (verses 4-5). Notice the Jewish elders’ emphasis on deserving. The centurion surely was a remarkable man. He was an officer in the Roman occupation army, yet he served the occupied people by building a synagogue for them. Think of an occupying army in today’s culture and ask yourself how many “enemy” officers would do such a thing. However, the centurion’s attitude about oneself is even more remarkable than one’s deeds. Instead of thinking of what one should receive because of what one deserved, one freely confessed one did not deserve anything. He sent word to Jesus, saying, “I do not deserve to have you come under my roof. That is why I did not even consider myself worthy to come to you” (verses 6-7). #RandolphHarris 4 of 10
The centurion placed oneself in the shoes of the eleventh-hour workers. Because of this he not only experienced the joy of having one’s request granted, but also the added joy of knowing he had received what he did not deserve. He experienced the joy of knowing he had received a gift—not a repayment of a debt. Thus no one chooses in the abstract to go to hell or even to be the kind of person who belongs there. However, their orientation toward self leads them to become the kind of person for whom away-from-God is the only place for which they are suited. It is a place they would, in the end, choose for themselves, rather than come to humble themselves before God and accept who he is. Whether or not God’s will is infinitely flexible, the human will is not. There are limits beyond which it cannot bend back, cannot turn or repent. One should seriously inquire if to live in a World permeated with God and the knowledge of God is something they themselves truly desire. If not, they can be assured that God will excuse them for his presence. They will find their place in the “outer darkness” of which Jesus spoke. However, the fundamental fact about them will not be that they are there, but that they have become people so locked into their own self-worship and denial of God that they cannot want God. #RandolphHarris 5 of 10
A well-known minister of other years used to ask rhetorically, “You say you will accept God when you want to?” And then he would add, “How do you know you will be able to want to when you think you will?” The ultimately lost person is the person who cannot want God. Who cannot want God to be God. Multitudes of such people pass by every day, and pass into eternity. The reason they do not find God is that they do not want him or, at least, do not want him to be God. Wanting God to be God is very different from wanting God to help me. Is it insulting to suggest that someone is or may be lost? That his or her soul is ruined? There are so many fine-looking people all about us! Well, is it insulting to say, in appropriate circumstances, that someone has poor social hygiene and it could be fatal, when you know it to be true? Perhaps treatment depends upon coming to know it. Say it is cancer or worst? No doubt, in our hypersensitive, egotistical age, that could be insulting to some people. However, that merely illustrates the delusional human condition that has been described earlier. If I am god, people should not say such things to me. Lostness is a factual condition of the self, of the ruined soul. You either have it or not, just as you either have or do not have a certain physical disease that can kill you. #RandolphHarris 6 of 10
If you have that condition of lostness, you may not know it. Indeed, it is most likely you will not know it, because it is inherently a condition of self-blindness. You need treatment nevertheless, if you are not to be lost forever; and being informed of your condition and what to do about it can help you find relief. Should I say nothing to you merely because you might find it insulting? I must think more highly of you than that. The reality of evil in the human heart is not something to be ignored or treated lightly. God is supremely immutable, it supremely belongs to Him to be eternal. Nor is He eternal only; but He is His own eternity; whereas, no other being is its own duration, as no other is its own being. Now God is His own uniform being; and hence as He is His own essence, so He is His own eternity. The “now” that stands still, is said to make eternity according to our apprehension. As the apprehension of time is causes in us by the fact that we apprehend the flow of the “now,” so the apprehension of eternity is caused in us by our apprehending “now” standing still. God is the author of eternity, and this is to be understood of participated eternity. For God communicate His eternity to some in the way as He communicates His immutability. God is before eternity, according as it is shared by immaterial substances. That is why intelligence is equal to eternity. #RandolphHarris 7 of 10
In the words of Exodus, “The Lord shall reign for eternity, and beyond,” eternity stands for age, as another rendering has it. Thus it is said that the Lord will reign beyond eternity, inasmuch as He endures beyond every age, for instance, beyond every kind of duration. For age is nothing more than the period of each thing. Or to reign beyond young eternity can be taken to mean that is any other thing were conceived to exist forever, as the movement of the Heavens according to some philosophers, then God would still reign beyond, inasmuch as His reign is simultaneously whole. Eternity is noting else but God Himself. Hence God is not called eternal, and if He were in any way measured; but the idea of measurement is there taken according to the apprehension of our mind alone. Words denoting different times are applied to God, because His eternity includes all times; not as if He Himself were altered through present, past, and future. “And again, behold I say unto you that one cannot have faith and hope, save one shall be meek, and lowly of heart. If so, one’s faith and hope is vain, for none is acceptable before God, save the meek and lowly in heart; and if a human be meek and lowly in heart, and confess by the power of the Holy Ghost that Jesus is the Christ, he must needs have charity; for if her have not charity he is nothing; wherefore he must needs have charity,” reports Moroni 7.43-45. #RandolphHarris 8 of 10
O Lord, the Saviour and Guardian of such as fear Thee, turn away from Thy Church the deceitful allurements of this World’s wisdom; that under the teaching of Thy Spirit, we may find pleasure in the prophetic delineations and the apostolic instructions, rather than in the terms of philosophy; lest the vanity of falsehoods should deceive those whom the teaching of truth illuminates; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Blessed and glorious Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, thanks be to Thee, very and one Trinity, one perfect Godhead. Thee, God the Father Unbegotten; Thee, the Only-begotten Son; Thee, the Holy Spirit the Paraclete; the Holy and Undivided Trinity, do we confess and praise with heart and mouth; to Thee by glory forever Alleluia. O God, the Strength of all Thy Saints, Who hast granted them in Thine abundant bounty the grace to come to their present glory; vouchsafe, we beseech Thee, pardon to our sins, that we may be able worthily to celebrate their solemnities; through Jesus Christ our Lord. O God of unsearchable greatness, before thee I am nothing but vanity, iniquity, perishing; sin has forfeited thy favour, stripped me of thy image, banished me from thy presence, exposed me to the curse of thy law; I cannot deliver myself, and am in despair. However, a resource is found in thee, for without my desert or desire thou didst devise an everlasting plan, honourable to thy perfections, and which Angels desired to look into. #RandolphHarris 9 of 10
And the word which announces all the glory of this goodness is nigh me, invite me, beseeches me. May I, a convinced and self-despairing sinner, find Jesus as the power unto salvation, his death the centre of all relief, the source of all gospel-blessings. Help me to repair to that cross, be crucified to the World by it, and in it find deepest humiliation, motives to patience and self-denial, grace for active benevolence, faith to grasp eternal life, hope to lift up my head, love to bind me forever to him who died and rose for me. May his shed blood make me more thankful for thy mercies, more humble under thy correction, more zealous in thy service, more watchful against temptation, more contented in my circumstances, more useful to others. The seeker whose preconceived picture of what constitutes a master is correct—but this is uncommon—will be able to recognize one at their first meeting. One will feel with absolute certainty the inner greatness of the master of the master. Yet it does not follow that this is one’s particular master. There must also be a feeling of personal affinity as well as an intellectual appeal f the doctrines taught. Without this feeling of affinity and the considerable satisfaction which derives from it, one would be prudent to look elsewhere and not accept this person as guru. Take that person as your teacher whose character mentality approach the ideal you have formed, and with whose doctrine and personality you feel in sympathy. #RandolphHarris 10 of 10
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Watch and Pray that Ye Enter Not into Temptation: that Spirit Indeed is Willing, but the Flesh is Weak!
Plots, true are false are necessary things, to raise up commonwealths, and ruin kings. One’s power of keeping one’s knowledge a secret from those who are unready for or uninterested in it is perfect. Nothing in one’s words or manner may lead them to think that the self-actualized knows immensely more than one tells them. One knows how to protect one’s status well. In the presence of sceptics and scoffers, or the unevolved and unready, neither one’s outward manner nor one’s uttered talk will give any hint of it. With all one’s reclusive habits, the self-actualized is compassionate in temperament, benevolent in personality. Even when one avoids people, one does not hate them. They feel tense, uneasy, and unsure in the presence of a superior class of beings. This one knows by experience and this is one reason why one keeps apart and alone; yet paradoxically it is also why one is kinder to them than a situation calls for, why one then behaves as if one were an equal and not on a different level. In one sense, the self-actualized consciousness is insulated by its own superior quality from that of others, but in another sense it fleetingly registers or lengthily holds their states through one’s compassion, sympathy, or understanding. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
The self-actualized has no intention of meddling in other people’s personal lives, no conceit that one’s duty is to change them, no willingness to take on responsibility for them. One commits them to God and commends them to it. However this it done, if intuitively or rationally one is led to suggest a purpose or remind them of a truth or point to a beneficial course or utter a warning, one will bey the leading—but always in response to their approach. If fate will let the self-actualized being, one is happier to move through this World incognito, than celebrated. Most people are always more impressed by outward show than by inner worth. However, when the show is philanthropic service and benevolent activity dramatically performed, they are even more impressed. The recognition and appreciation are immediate. The being whose inner stillness admit spiritual forces into one’s surroundings remains unnoticed. Nor is the people’s judgment always true; the most may err as grossly as the few. Beware the fury of a patient person. Experience is something you do not get until just after you need it. I maintain that there is a desperate social need for the creative behavior of creative individuals. It is this which justifies the setting forth of a tentative theory of creativity—the nature of the creative act, the conditions under which it occurs, and the manner in which it may constructively be fostered. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
Such a theory of creativity may serve as a stimulus and guide to research studies in this field of therapy. Many of the serious criticisms of our culture and its trend may best be formulated in terms of a dearth of creativity. Let us state some of these briefly: In education we tend to turn out conformists, stereotypes, individuals whose educations is “completed,” rather than freely creative and original thinkers. In our leisure time activities, passive entertainment and regimented group action are overwhelmingly predominant while creative activities are much less in evidence. In the sciences, there is an ample supply of technicians, but the number who can creatively formulate fruitful hypotheses and theories is small indeed. In industry, creation is reserved for the few—the manager, the designer, the head of the research department—while for the many life is devoid of original or creative endeavor. In individual and family life the same picture holds true. In the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the books we read, and the idea we hold, there is a strong tendency toward conformity, toward stereotypy. To be original, or different, is felt to be “dangerous.” Why be concerned over this? If, as a people, we enjoy conformity rather than creativity, shall we not be permitted this choice? In my estimation such a choice would be entirely reasonable were it not for one great shadow which hangs over all of us. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
In a time when knowledge, constructive and destructive, is advancing by the most incredible leaps and bounds into a fantastic atomic age, genuinely creative adaptation seems to represent the only possibility that beings can keep abreast of the kaleidoscopic change in the World. With scientific discovery and invention proceeding, we are told, at the rate of geometric progression, a generally passive and culture-bound people cannot cope with the multiplying issues and problems. Unless individuals, groups, and nations can imagine, construct, and creatively revise new ways of relating to these complex changes, the lights will go out. Unless beings can make new and original adaptations to one’s environments as rapidly as one’s science can change the environment, our culture will perish. Not only individual maladjustment and group tensions, but international annihilation will be the price we pay for a lack of creativity. Consequently it would seem to me that investigations of the process of creativity, the conditions under which this process occurs, and the ways in which it may be facilitated, are of the utmost importance. It is in the hope of suggestion a conceptual structure under which such investigations might go forward will help facilitate necessary changes. “Be watchful, stand firm in your faith, be courageous, be strong. Let all that you do be done in love,” reports 1 Corinthians 16.13-14. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
Out of this well-known passage, I chose two word on which I want you to center your attention in this hour—be strong! They are surrounded in our text by other qualities that makes strength possible—watchfulness, faith, courage, love. All together, they describe the strong Christian personality. How can we attain strength? This is a question asked in all ages of a being’s life and in all periods of human history. It is a question asked with passion and despair in our time, and most impatiently by those who are no longer children and not yet adults. In our texts Paul uses the word “be” several times: “be strong,” he says to the Corinthians. We easily slip over it. However, it should arrest our attention as fully as, and perhaps even more than, the main words of our text. Fore the word “be” contains in its two letters the whole riddle of the relation of beings to God. Paul does not ask of the Christians in Corinth something that is strange to them. He asks them to be what they are, Christian personalities. All the imperatives he uses are descriptions of something that is, before they are demands for what ought to be. Be what you are—that is the only thing one can ask of any being. One cannot ask of a being to be something it was not before. It is as if life in all its forms desires to be asked, to receive demands. However, no life can receive demands for something which it is not. It wants to be asked to become what it is and nothing else. This seems surprising, but a little thought shows us that it is true. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
We know that one cannot ask fruits from thorns, or grain from weeds, or water from a dry fountain, or love from a cold heart, or courage from a cowardly mind, or strength from a weak life. If we ask such things from beings who do not have them, we are foolish; and either they will laugh at us or condemn us as unjust and hostile towards them. We can ask of anything or anyone only to bring forth what one has, to become what one is. Out of what is given to us, we can act. Receiving precedes acting. “Be strong,” says Paul. He says it to those who have received strength as he himself received strength when the power of a new reality grasped him. Now some of us will ask—“what about us who feel that we have not received, and that we do not have faith and courage and strength and love? We are wanting in all these, so the commanding ‘be’ of Paul is not said to us. Or if it is said to us we remain unconcerned or become hostile towards one who says it. We are not strong, so nobody should ask us to be strong! We are weak. Shall we remain weak? Shall we fall into resignation, and become cynical about your demands? They may be for others. They are not for us.” I hear many people, more than we imagine, saying this. I hear whole classes of young people speaking thus. I hear many individuals in older generation repeating these words. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
And I do not find any consolation in the Bible There is the parable of the different soils on which the seed of the divine message falls and of which only one brings fruit. There is the word of the many who are called and few who are elected. There is the terrifying, realistic statement of Jesus that those whom much is given will receive more, and that from those who little is given, even this will be taken away. There is the contrast between those who are born of light and have become its children and those who are born out of darkness and have become its children. There is the parable of the man as clay which cannot revolt against God the potter, no matter what the potter does to the clay. We would like to revolt, when we hear this. However, if we look around us into the lives of beings we are forced to say—“So it is, the Bible is right!” We would like to say in a god democratic phrasing—“Everyone has a God-given chance to reach fulfillment, but not everybody uses it. Some do, some do not. Both have their ultimate destiny in their own hands.” We would like that to be so. However, we cannot escape the truth that it is not so. The changes are not even. There is only a limited number of human beings to whom we can say—“Be strong,” because they are strong already. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
And the only honest thing I could say to the others, to whom many of us belong, is—“Accept that you are weak. Do not pretend that you are strong. And perhaps if you dare to be what you are, your weakness will become your strength. Accept that you are weak”—that is what we should say to those who are weak. “Accept that you are a coward”—that is what we should say to those who are cowardly. “Accept that you are wavering in the faith—that is what we should say to those who are not firm in it. And to those who do not love, we should say—“Accept that you are not able to love.” This sounds strange! However, everyone who knows the human soul, and knows one’s own soul above all, will understand what is meant. One will understand that the first step in becoming strong is to acknowledge and accept one’s weakness. One who does so will cease to deceive oneself by saying to oneself—“I have at least something of what the apostle demands. One can demand it from me, for somehow I have it.” There are people who could rightly speak so to themselves. Yet there are others for whom such a judgment would be a self-deception. To them we must say—“Accept that you are weak; be honest towards yourselves.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
Let me say to those who are responsible for others, as parents, teachers, ministers, counselors, friends: do not say the demanding “be” to anybody without fear and hesitation. If you use it, you approach the mystery of the divine election and you may destroy a life by demanding something of a person that one is not! There are various ways of defining creativity. In order to make more clear the meaning of what is to follow, let me present the elements which, for me, are part of the creative process, and then attempt a definition. In the first place, for me as a scientist, there must be something observable, some product of creation. Though my fantasies may be extremely novel, they cannot usefully be defined as creative unless they eventuate in some observable product—unless they are symbolized in words, or written in a poem, or translated into a work of art, or fashioned into an invention. These products must be novel constructions. This novelty grows out of the unique qualities of the individual in one’s interaction with the materials of experience. Creativity always has the stamp of the individual upon its product, but the product is not the individual, nor one’s materials, but partakes of the relationship between the two. Creativity is not, in my judgment, restricted to some particular content. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
I am assuming that there is no fundamental difference in the creative process as it is evidenced in painting a picture, composing a symphony, devising new instruments of killing, developing a scientific theory, discovering new procedures in human relationships, or creating new formings of one’s own personality at in psychotherapy. (Indeed it is my experience in this last field, rather than in one of the arts, which has given me special interest in creativity and its facilitation. Intimate knowledge of the way in which the individual remolds oneself in the therapeutic relationship, with originality and effective skill, gives one confidence in the creative potential of all individuals.) My definition, then, of the creative process is that it is the emergence in action of a novel relational product, growing out of the uniqueness of the individual on the one hand, and the materials, events, people, or circumstances of one’s life on the other. Let me append some negative footnotes to this definition. It makes no distinction between “good” and “bad” creativity. One being may be discovering a way of relieving pain, while another is devising a new and more subtle form of torture for political prisoners. Both these actions seem to me creative, even though their social value is very different. Though I shall comment on these social valuations later, I have avoided putting them in my definition because they are so fluctuating. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
Galileo and Copernicus made creative discoveries which in their own day were evaluated as blasphemous and wicked, and in our day as basic and constructive. We do no want to cloud our definition with terms which rest in subjectivity. Another way of looking at this same issue is to note that to be regarded historically as representing creativity, the product must be acceptable to some group at some point of time. This fact is not helpful to our definition, however, both because of the fluctuating valuations already mentioned, and also because many creative products have undoubtedly never been socially noticed, but have disappeared without ever having been evaluated. So this concept of group acceptance is also omitted from our definition. In addition, it should be pointed out that our definition makes no distinction regarding the degree of creativity, since this too is a value judgment extremely variable in nature. The action of the child inventing a new game with one’s playmates; Einstein formulating a theory of relativity; the housewife devising a new sauce for the meat; a young author writing one’s first novel; all of these are, in terms of our definition, creative, and there is no attempt to set them in some order of more or less creative. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
The motivation for creativity—the mainspring of creativity appears to be the same tendency which we discover so deeply as the curative force in psychotherapy –human’s tendency to actualize oneself, to become one’s potentialities. By this I mean the directional trend which is evident in all organic and human life—the urge to expand, extend, develop, mature—the tendency to express and activate all the capacities of the organism, or the self. This tendency may become deeply buried under layer after layer of encrusted psychological defenses; it may be hidden behind elaborate facades which deny its existence; it is my belief however, based on my experience, that it exists in every individual, and waits only the proper conditions to be released and expressed. It is this tendency which is the primary motivation for creativity as the organism forms new relationships to the environment in its endeavour most fully to be itself. Let us now attempt to deal directly with this puzzling issue of the social value of a creative act. Presumably few of us are interested in facilitating creativity which is socially destructive. We do not wish, knowingly, to lend our efforts to developing individuals whose creative genius works itself out in new and better ways of robbing, exploiting, torturing, killing, other individuals. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
Nor do we wish to lend our efforts to developing individuals whose forms of political organization or art forms which lead humanity into paths of physical or psychological self-destruction. Yet how is it possible to make the necessary discriminations such that we may encourage a constructive creativity and not a destructive? The distinction cannot be made by examining the product. The very essence of the creative is its novelty, and hence we have no standard by which to judge it. Indeed history points up the fact that the more original the product, and the more far-reaching its implications, the more likely it is to be judged by contemporaries as evil. The genuinely significant creation, whether an idea, or a work of art, or a scientific discovery, is more likely to be seen at first as erroneous, bad, or foolish. Later it may be seen as obvious, something self-evident to all. Only still later does it receive its final evaluation as a creative contribution. It seems clear that no contemporary mortal can satisfactorily evaluate a creative product at the time that it is formed, and this statement is increasingly true the greater the novelty of the creation. Nor is it of any help to examine the purposes of the individual participating in the creative process. “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are the Caesar’s; and into God the things that are God’s,” reports St. Matthew 22.21. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
Many, perhaps most, of the creations and discoveries which have proved to have great social value, have been motivated by purposes having more to do with personal interest than with social value, while on the other had history records a somewhat sorry outcome for many of those creations (various Utopias, Prohibitions, and so forth) which has as their avowed purpose the achievement of the social good. No, we must face the fact that the individual creates primarily because it is satisfying to one, because this behavior is felt to be self-actualizing, and we get nowhere by trying to differentiate “good” and “bad” purposes in the creative process. Must we then give over any attempt to discriminate between creativity which is potentially constructive, and that which is potentially destructive? I do not believe this pessimistic conclusion is justified. It is here that recent clinical findings from the field of psychotherapy give us hope. It has been found that when the individual is “open” to all of one’s experience (a phrase which will be defined more fully), then one’s behavior will be creative, and one’s creativity may be trusted to be essentially constructive. The differentiation may be put very briefly as follows. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
To the extent that the individual is denying to awareness (or repressing, if you prefer the term) large areas of one’s experience, then one’s creative formings may be pathological, or socially evil, or both. To the degree that the individual is open to all aspects of one’s experience, and has available to one’s awareness all the varied sensings and perceivings which are going on within one’s organism, then the novel products of one’s interaction with one’s environment will tend to be constructive both for oneself and others. To illustrate, an individual with paranoid tendencies may creatively develop a most novel theory of the relationship between oneself and one’s environment, seeing evidence for one’s theory in all sorts of minute clues. One’s theory has little social value, perhaps because there is an enormous range of experience which this individual cannot permit in one’s awareness. Sokrates, on developed novel ideas which have proven to be socially constructive. Very possibly this was because he was notably nondefensive and open to one’s experience. The reasoning behind this will perhaps become more clear in the remaining sections of this paper. Primarily however it is based upon the discovery in psychotherapy, that as the individual becomes more open to, more aware of, all aspects of one’s experience, one is increasingly likely to act in a manner we would term socialized. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
If one can be aware of one’s hostile impulses, but also of one’s desire for friendship and acceptance; aware of the expectations of one’s culture, but equally aware of one’s own purposes; aware of one’s selfish desires, but also aware of one’s tender and sensitive concern for another; then one behaves in a fashion which is harmonious, integrated, constructive. The more one is open to one’s experience, the more one’s behavior makes it evident that the nature of the human species tends in the direction of constructively social living. The eros quality of love is in a polar way related to what could be called the philia quality of love. While eros represents the transpersonal pole, philia represents the personal pole. Neither of them is possible without the other. There is eros quality in philia. And there is philia quality in eros. They are in a polar way interdependent. This implies that without the radical separation of the self-centered self neither the creative nor the religious eros is possible. Beings without a personal centre are without eros, although they are not without epithymia. One cannot relate oneself as an “I” to a “thou” cannot relate oneself to the true and the good and to the ground being in which they are rooted. One who cannot love the friend cannot love the artistic expression of ultimate reality. Stages of the aesthetical and the ethical and the religious are not stages but qualities which appear in structural interdependence. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Conversely, philia is dependent on eros. Concepts like participation and communion point to the eros quality in every philia relation. It is the desire to unite with a power of being which is both most separated and mist understandable and which radiates possibilities and realities of good and the true in the manifestation of its incomparable individuality. However, eros and philia are not only united in the individual relation. They are also united in the communion of social groups. In families, and national groups, the desire for participation is directed towards the power of being which is embodied in the group, even if special relations of the philia type are lacking. The very fact that such groups consist of individual with whom an I-thou relation is potentially given, distinguishes the eros within a group from the eros which is effective, for instance, in artistic creations. Love as a philia presupposes some amount of familiarity with the object of love. For this reason Aristotle asserted that philia is possible only between equals. This is true if “equal” is defined in a sufficiently large way and not in terms of an esoteric group. “For behold, the Spirit of Christ is given to every being, that one may know good from evil; wherefore, I show unto you the way to judge; for every thing which inviteth to do good, and to persuade to believe in Christ, is sent forth by the power and gift of Christ; wherefore ye may know with a perfect knowledge of it is of God,” reports Moroni 7.16. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
Be present, O Lord, to our supplications; that as we trust that the Saviour of humankind is seated with Thee in Thy Majesty, so we may feel that, according to His promise, He abideth with us unto the end of the World; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Almighty and everlasting God vouchsafe unto us, by the gift of this day’s festival, that the aims of Thy children may thither be directed, where our substance, in Thine Only-begotten Son, is with Thee; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Thou blessed spirit, author of all grace and comfort, come, work repentance in my soul; represent sin to me in its odious colours that I may hate it; melt my heart by the majesty and mercy of God; show me my ruined self and the help there is in Him; teach me to behold my Creator, His ability to save, His arms outstretched, His heart big for me. May I confide in His power and love, commit my soul to Him without reserve, bear His image, observe His laws, pursue His service, and be through time and eternity a monument to the efficacy of His grace, a trophy of His victory. Make me willing to be saved in His way, perceiving nothing in myself, but all in Jesus: Help me not only to receive Him but to walk in Him, depend upon Him, commune with Him, be conformed to Him, follow Him, imperfect, but still pressing forward, not complaining of labour, but valuing rest, not murmuring under trials, but thankful for my state. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
Give me that faith which is the means of salvation, and the principle and medium of all Godliness; may I be saved by grace through faith, live by faith, feel the joy of faith, do the work of faith. Perceiving nothing in myself, my I find in Christ wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, redemption. Hear us, O merciful God, and grant our minds to be lifted up, whither our Redeemer hath ascended; that at the second coming of the Mediator we may receive from Thy manifested bounty what we now venture to hope for as promised gift; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Grant, we beseech Thee, Almighty God, that the faithful members of Thy Son may tither follow, whither our Head and Chief has gone before, Who with Thee, we shall be blessed with eternal life and everlasting grace. O God, Who, to show forth the wonders of Thy Majesty, didst after Thy Resurrection from the dead ascend this day into Heaven, in the presence of Thine Apostles, grant us the assistance of Thy loving kindness; that according to Thy promise Thou mayest ever dwell with us on Earth, and we with Thee in Heaven; where with the Father, we shall live in his mansions and have an abundance of blessings. “Though I speak with the tongues of humans and of Angles, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal,” Reports 1 Corinthians 13.1. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
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Knowledge of the HOLY One is Understanding—I Know that is a Secret, for it is Whispered Everywhere!
War is an invention of the human mind. The human mind can invent peace. You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late. The trouble with most of us is that we would rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism. Today’s pressures on the principalship show no signs of decreasing their intensity. Future challenges include encouraging dispersed yet centered leadership, creating a cohesive community out of increasingly diverse populations, being responsible without being in charge, changing rapidly in response to social needs without leaving people behind, building trust and confidence in an openly cynical society, and caring for people while challenging them to grow. Together, these challenges will continue to fill every day with problems to solve, puzzles to unravel, and paradoxes to manage and endure. The whole ask of psychotherapy is the task of dealing with a failure in communication. The emotionally maladjusted person, the “neurotic,” is in difficulty first, because communication within oneself has broken down, and second because, as a result of this, one’s communication with others has been damaged. If this sounds somewhat strange to you, then let me put it in other terms. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
In the “neurotic” individual, parts of oneself which have been termed unconscious, or repressed, or denied to awareness, become blocked off so that they no longer communicate themselves to the conscious or managing part of oneself. As long as this is true, there are distortions in the way one communicates oneself to others, and so one suffers both within oneself, and in one’s interpersonal relationships. The task of psychotherapy is to help the person achieve, through a special relationship with a therapist, good communication within oneself. Once this is achieved one can communicate more freely and more effectively with others. We may say then that psychotherapy is good communication, within and between people. We may also turn that statement around and it will still be true. Good communication, free communication, within or between beings, is always therapeutic. It is, then, from a background of experience with communication in counseling and psychotherapy, that I want to present to you tonight two ideas. I wish to state what I believe is one of the major factors in blocking or impeding communication, and then I wish to present what in our experience has proven to be a very important way of improving or facilitating communication. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
I would like to propose, as an hypothesis for consideration, that the major barrier to mutual interpersonal communication is our very natural tendency to judge, to evaluate, to approve or disapprove, the statement of the other person, or the other group. Let me illustrate my meaning with some very simple examples. As you leave the meeting tonight, one of the statements you are likely to hear is, “I did not like that man’s talk.” Now what do you respond? Almost invariably your reply will be either approval or disapproval of the attitude expressed. Either you respond, “I did not either. I thought it was terrible,” or else you tend to reply, “Oh, I thought it was really good.” In other words, your primary reaction is to evaluate what has been said to you, to evaluate it from your point of view, your own frame of reference. Or take another example. Suppose I say with some feeling, “I think the Republicans are behaving in ways that show a lot of good sound sense these days,” what is the response that arises in your mind as you listen? The overwhelming likelihood is that it will be evaluative. You will find yourself agreeing, or disagreeing, or making some judgment about me such as “He mist be a conservative,” or “He seems solid in his thinking.” Or let us take an illustration from the international scene. Russian says vehemently, “The treaty with Japan is a war plot on the part of the United States.” We rise as one person to say “That is a lie!” #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
This last illustration brings in another element connected with my hypothesis. Although the tendency to make evaluations is common in almost all interchange of language, it is very much heightened in those situations where feelings and emotions are deeply involved. So the stronger our feelings the more likely it is that there will be no mutual element in the communication. There will be just two ideas, two feelings, two judgments, missing each other in psychological space. I am sure you recognize this from your own experience. When you have not been emotionally involved yourself, and have listened to a heated discussion, you often go away thinking, “Well, they actually were not talking about the same thing.” And they were not. Each was making a judgment, an evaluation, from one’s own frame of reference. There was really nothing which could be called communication in any genuine sense. This tendency to react to any emotionally meaningful statement by forming an evaluation of it from our own point of view, is, I repeat, the major barrier to interpersonal communications. However, is there any way of solving this problem, of avoiding this barrier? I think that we are making exciting progress toward this goal and I would like to present it as simply as I can. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Real communication occurs, and this evaluative tendency is avoided, when we listen with understanding. What does this mean? It means to see the expressed idea and attitude from the other person’s point of view, to sense how it feels to one, to achieve one’s frame of reference in regard to the thing one is talking about. Stated briefly, this may sound absurdly simple, but it is not. It is an approach which we have found extremely potent in the field of psychotherapy. It is the most effective agent we know for altering the basic personality structure of an individual, and improving one’s relationships and one’s communications with others. If I can listen to what one can tell me, if I can understand how it seems to one, if I can see its personal meaning for one, if I can sense the emotional flavor which it has for one, then I will be releasing potent forces of change in one. If I can really understand how one hates one’s father, or hates the university, or hates corruption—if I can catch the flavor of one’s fear or of insanity, or one’s fear of atom bombs, or of Russia—it will be of the greatest help to one in altering those very hatreds and fears, and in establishing realistic and harmonious relationships with the very people and situations toward which one has felt hatred and fear. We know from our research that such empathic understanding—understanding with a person, not about one—is such an effective approach that it can bring about major changes in personality. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
Some of you may be feeling that you listen well to people, and that you have never seen such results. The changes are very great indeed that your listening has not been of the type I have described. Fortunately I can suggest a little laboratory experiment which you can try to test the quality of your understanding. The next time you have words with your wife, or your friend, or with an experiment, institute this rule. “Each person can speak up for the previous speaker accurately, and to that speaker’s satisfaction.” You see what this would mean. It would simply mean that before presenting your own point of view, it would be necessary for you to really achieve that other speaker’s frame of reference—to understand one’s thoughts and feelings so well that you could summarize them for the individual. Sounds simple, does it not? However, if you try it you will discover it is one of the most difficult things you have ever tried to do. However, once you have been able to see the other’s point of view, your own comments will have to be drastically revised. You will also find the emotion going out of the discussion, the differences being reduced, and those differences which remain being of a rational and understandable sort. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
If it were projected into larger areas, can you imagine what this kind of an approach would mean? What would happen to a labor-management dispute if it was conducted in such a way that labor, without necessarily agreeing, could accurately state management’s point of view in a way that management could accept; and management, without approving labor’s stand, could state labor’s case in a way that labor agreed was accurate? It would mean that real communication was established, and one could practically guarantee that some reasonable solution would be reached. If then this way of approach is an effective avenue to good communication and good relationships, as I am quite sure you will agree if you try the experiment I have mentioned, why is it not more widely tried and used? I will try to list the difficulties which keep it from being utilized. In the first place it takes courage, a quality which is not too widespread. If you really understand another person in this way, if you are willing to enter one’s private World and see the way life appears to one, without any attempt to make evaluative judgments, you run the risk of being changed yourself. You might see it one’s way, you might find yourself influenced in your attitudes or your personality. This risk of being changed is one of the most frightening prospects most of us can face. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
It I enter, as fully as I am able, into the private World of a neurotic or psychotic individual, is not there a risk that I might become lost in that World? Most of us are afraid to take that risk. Or if we had a Russian communist speaker here tonight, or Senator Joseph McCarthy, how many of us would, after the shock of him being alive wore off, dare to try to see the World from each of these points of views? The great majority of us could not listen; we would find ourselves compelled to evaluate, because listening would seem too dangerous. So the first requirement is courage, and we do not always have it. However, there is a second obstacle. It is just when emotions are strongest that it is most difficult to achieve the frame of reference of the other person or group. Yet, if communication is to be established, this is the time the attitude is most needed. We have not found this to be an insuperable obstacle in our experience in psychotherapy. A third party, who is able to lay aside one’s own feelings and evaluations, can assist greatly by listening with understanding to each person or group and clarifying the views and attitudes each holds. We have found this very effective in small groups in which contradictory or antagonistic attitudes exist. When the parties to a dispute realize that they are being understood, that someone sees how the situation seems to them, the statements grow less exaggerated and less defensive, and it is no longer necessary to maintain the attitude, “I am 100 percent tight and you are 100 percent wrong.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
The influence of such an understanding catalyst in the group permits the members to come closer and closer to the objective truth involved in the relationship. In this way mutual communication is established and some type of agreement becomes much more possible. So we may say that though heightened emotions make it much more difficult to understand with an opponent, our experience makes it clear that a neutral, understanding, catalyst type of a leader or therapist can overcome this obstacle. This last phrase, however, suggests another obstacle to utilizing the approach I have described. Thus far all our experience has been with small face-to-face groups—groups exhibiting industrial tensions, religions tensions, racial tensions, and therapy groups in which many personal tensions are present. In these small groups our experience, confirmed by a limited amount of research, shows that a listening, empathic approach leads to improved communication, to greater acceptance of others and by others, and to attitudes which are more beneficial and more problem-solving in nature. There is a decrease in defensiveness, in exaggerated statements, in evaluative and critical behavior. However, these findings are from small groups. What about trying to achieve understanding between larger groups that are geographically remote? Or between face-to-face groups who are not speaking for themselves, but simply as representatives of others, like the delegates at the United Nations? #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
Frankly we do not know the answers to these questions. I believe the situation might be put this way. As social scientists we have a tentative test-tube solution of the problem of breakdown in communication. However, to confirm the validity of this test-tube solution, and to adapt it to the enormous problems of communication breakdown between classes, groups, and nations, would involve additional funds, much more research, and creative thinking of a high order. Even with our present limited knowledge we can see some steps which might be taken, even in large groups, to increase the amount of listening with, and to degrease the amount of evaluation about. To be imaginative for a moment, let us suppose that a therapeutically oriented international group went to the Russian leaders and said, “We want to achieve a genuine understanding of your views and even more important, of your attitudes and feelings, toward the United State of American. We will summarize and resummarize these views and feelings if necessary, until you agree that our description represents the situation as it seems to you.” Then suppose they did the same thing with the leaders in our own country. If they then gave the widest possible distribution to these two views, with the feelings clearly described but not expressed in name-calling, might not the effect be very great? It would not guarantee the type of understanding I have been describing, but it would make it much more possible. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
We can understand the feelings of a person who hates us much more readily when one’s attitudes are accurately described to us by a neutral third party, than we can when one is shaking one’s fist at us. However, even to describe such a first step is to suggest another obstacle to this approach of understanding. Our civilization does not yet have enough faith in the social sciences to utilize their findings. The opposite is true of the physical sciences. During the war when a test-tube solution was found to the problem of synthetic rubber, millions of dollars and an army of talent was turned loose on the problem of using that finding. If synthetic rubber could be made in milligrams, it could and would be made in the thousands of tones. And it was. However, in the social science realm, if a way is found of facilitating communication and mental understanding in small groups, there is no guarantee that the finding will be utilized. If may be a generation or more before the money and the brains will be turned loose to exploit that finding. Our research and experience to date would make it appear that breakdowns in communication, and the evaluative tendency which is the major barrier to communication, can be avoided. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
The solution is provided by creating a situation in which each of different parties comes to understand the other from the other’s point of view empathically, and who thus acts as a catalyst to precipitate further understanding. This procedure has important characteristics. It can be initiated by one party, without waiting for the other to be ready. It can even be initiated by a neutral third person, provided one can gain a minimum of cooperation from one of the parities. This procedure can deal with the insincerities, the defensive exaggerations, the lies, the “false fronts” which characterize almost every failure in communication. These defensive distortions drop away with astonishing speed as people find that the only intent is to understand, not judge. This approach leads steadily and rapidly toward the discovery of truth, toward a realistic appraisal of the objective barriers to communication. The dropping of some defensiveness by one party leads further dropping of defensiveness by the other part, and truth is thus approached. This procedure gradually achieves mutual communication. Mutual communication tends to be pointed toward solving a problem rather than toward attacking a person or a group. It leads to a situation in which I see how the problem appears to you, as well as to me, and you see how it appears to me, as well as to you. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
Thus accurately and realistically defined, the problem is almost certain to yield to intelligent attack, or if it is in part insoluble, it will be comfortably accepted as such. This then appears to be a test-tube solution to the breakdown of communication as it occurs in small groups. Can we take this small scale answer, investigate it further, refine it, develop it and apply it to the tragic and well-nigh fatal failures of communication which threaten the very existence of our modern World? It seems to me that this is a possibility and a challenge which we should explore. When my first wife—who is not with the Lord—and I were married, we asked that the following Scripture, which we felt God had given us as a promise, be read at our wedding: “They will by my people, and I will be their God, I will give them singleness of heart and action, so that they will always fear me for their own good and the good of their children after them. I will make an everlasting covenant with them: I will never stop doing good to them and I will inspire them to fear me, so that they will never turn away from me. I will rejoice in doing them good and will assuredly plant them in this land with all my heart and soul,” reports Jeremiah 32.28-41. Note the expression of God’s goodness. He will give us singleness of heart for our own good of our children. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
God will never stop doing good to us, in fact He will rejoice in doing us good. This sounds appropriate, does it not, for two young people committed to service in full time? However, this assurance of God’s goodness was not originally given to people who were serving God or who “deserve” His goodness. Instead it was given to a group of people who were described by God as those who “have done nothing but evil in my sight from their youth” (verse 30). These people were in captivity in Babylon because of their sins over many generations. Just a few chapters before in Jeremiah, God has said to these people: This is what the LORD says: “When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will come to you and fulfill my gracious promise to bring you back to this place. For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future,” reports Jeremiah 29.10-11. The goodness of God is demonstrated in His assurance of plans to prosper them and not to harm them. Note in verse 10 that God refers to His gracious promise, that is, a promise given freely without regard to the fact that they obviously did not deserve it. Here we see a vivid illustration of the truth of Samuel Storms’ statement that grace is no longer grace if God is compelled to withdraw it in the present of human demerit. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
If anyone qualified for demerits, surely the Israelites in captivity did. Yet God promised to prosper them, to rejoice in doing them god. Another insight into God’s gracious disposition is found in the prophecy of Joel. Joel prophesied judgment through a tremendous invasion of locusts that would devour all the trees and plants, resulting in widespread famine in the land. Then Joel looked forward to a day of restoration, a day when the trees would again bear fruit, the threshing floors would again be filled with grain, and the vats overflow with new wine and oil. In the midst of the prophecy of restoration, God made the following promise: “I will replay you for the years the locusts have eaten—the great locust and the young locust, the other locust and the locust swarm—my great army that I sent among you,” reports Joel 2.25. Consider the amazing generosity of God. He does not limit His promise merely to restoring the land to its former productivity. He says He will repay them for the years the locusts have eaten, years that they themselves forfeited to the judgment of God. God could well have said, “I will restore your land to its former productivity, but it is too bad about those years you lost. They are gone forever. That is the prince you pay for sin.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
God would have been generous just to have restored them, but He went beyond that. God would cause their harvests to be so abundant they would recoup the losses from the years of famine. God says He will repay them, though He obviously owes them nothing. From time to time I have opportunity to minister individually to people who in some way have really “blown it” in life. For some, it may have been before they became Christians; for others it occurred while they were believers. Usually these people lament their “lost” years, the years when they served sin instead of God, or years that were wasted as Christians. I try to encourage these people about the grace of God. I cannot promise them God will “repay” those lost years as He did for the Israelites, but I can assure them that it is God’s nature to be gracious. I encourage them to pray to this end and to realize, as they pray, that they are coming to a God who does not withhold His grace because of demerits. “For behold, if a person being evil giveth a gift, one doeth it grudgingly; wherefore it is counted unto one the same as if one had retained the gift; wherefore one is counted evil before God. And likewise also is it counted evil unto a being, if one shall pray and not with real intent of heart; yea, and it porfiteth one nothing, for God recevieth none such,” reports Moroni 7.8-9. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
Almighty and everlasting God, Who hast vouchsafed the Paschal mystery in the covenant of a being’s reconciliation; grant unto our souls, that what we celebrate by our profession we may imitate in our practice; through Jesus Christ our Lord who will bless us with everlasting love and eternal life. O God the Holy Spirit, Thou who dost proceed from the Father and the Son, have mercy on me. When thou didst first hover over chaos, order came to birth, beauty robed the World, fruitfulness sprang forth. Move, I pray thee, upon my disordered heart; take away the infirmities of unruly desires and hateful lusts; life the mists and darkness of unbelief; brighten my soul with the pure light of truth; make it fragrant as the garden of paradise, rich with every goodly fruit, beautiful with Heavenly grace, radiant with rays of divine light. Fulfill in me the glory of thy divine offices; be my comforter, light, guide, sanctifier; take of the things of Christ and show them to my soul; through thee may I daily learn more of God’s love, grace, compassion, faithfulness, beauty; lead me to the cross and show me His wounds, the hateful nature of evil, the power of Satan; may I there see my sins as the nails that transfixed him, the cords that bound him, the thorns that tore him, the sword that pierced him. Help me to find in his death the reality and immensity of his love. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
Open for me the wondrous volumes of truth in his, “It is finished.” Increase my faith in the clear knowledge of atonement achieved, expiation completed, satisfaction made, guilt done away, my debt paid, my sins forgiven, my person redeemed, my soul saved, hell vanquished, Heaven opened, eternity made mine. O Holy Spirit, deepen in me these saving lessons. Write them upon my heart, that my walk be sin-loathing, sin-fleeing, Christ-loving; and suffer no devil’s device to beguile or deceive me. O God, Who by Christ’s Resurrection restores us to life eternal; raise us up to the Author of our salvation, Who is seated at Thy right hand that He Who came to be judged for our sake, may come to judge in our favour, Jesus Christ Thy Son our Lord, Who with thee we may enter he shrine of Heaven, and that we may abandon bleak despair and hard cynicism. Lord, please keep us from becoming engulfed in the agency of moral wickedness. Let us take your unseen hand and may you be our personal saviour or spiritual guide, whether dead or alive—someone who we believe to have come to enlighten human kinds. Lord, become our secret refuge, and may we deserve your grace. May our intellectual effort be sustained beyond the stage of ordinary beings in which we now rest. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
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Tell Me that I Will Always be the One that You Want, Do Not Know What I Would do if I Ever Lose You!
Well, now, there is a remedy for everything except death. Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to stay in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that! It is not what name others call you that matters, but name you respond to that truly determines who you are. If asked in a poll, although most people would say they believe in God, and though church attendance still remains high and confessions of atheism are relatively rare, it is still perfectly clear that the crisis in modern society has also had a negative effect on religion. Theologians themselves have realized this and have spoken quite openly about the anguish religion as we know it is currently going through. The development began centuries ago, but the closer we come to the present, the greater its rate of acceleration has been. Because religion fulfills a double function, its collapse leaves us with a double loss. Our religion, based primarily on the Judeo-Christian tradition, provides us with both an explanation of the natural World and moral principles—an ethic. Those two functions have nothing to do with each other, for how you explain the natural World is one thing, and what moral principles and values you have is quite another. However, the two functions were not originally separated, and there are a number of reasons why not. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
First of all, the idea that the World was created by a God who incorporated in Himself the highest intelligence, wisdom, and power was a plausible, indeed, a rational hypothesis. And even if you are a convinced Darwinist who sees the development of the World and of humans as a consequence of natural selection or mutation, you may still feel that the population of God the Creator is much easier to understand and accept than the rather complex alternative; for evolutionary theory claims that humans in their present form are the product of certain principles that went into effect hundreds of millions of years ago and that are to some degree subject to pure chance or, at best, to the laws of natural selection. Dr. Darwin’s explanation of the natural World seems altogether logical and plausible, but despite that it remains alien to our minds. Here is a story illustrating the profound corruption of the soul. It is a story about a church that would generally be regarded as successful or prosperous. Whether real or imagined, I leave you to ponder. In actuality you will find many churches that are a close fit to this description. The church in question was founded out of conflict in another church. It called its first pastor, and things seemed to be going well until that pastor committed adultery, and used to church funds to buy a brand new Mercedes Benz because one of the young women in the church had the most expensive Mercedes-Benz. The pastor also committed various other improper financial acts. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
The congregation dismissed the pastor, and a second pastor was appointed. He was very popular and the church grew, but he resigned after four years from stress, or an episode of neurosis, depending on whom you believed. A third pastor came and was quite popular. Again, the church grew, but after a while he started giving himself salary raises, which the congregation did not knowingly approve. After ten years he left, started another church within ten miles of his former church, and took three hundred members with him. A fourth pastor was called. Everything seemed fine. Then he has an affair involving pleasures of the flesh with another man, which he eventually disclosed to his board and staff, after being caught in the church bathroom with his britches down around his ankles in the throes of passion, and he expected them to cover it up. In the midst of much lying and discord in the board and staff, the church seemed to go on as before. Of course the people in the community came to know about the affair anyway. A year or so later the pastor received a call from a larger church a two-hour drive away. He took the position, leaving behind a congregation, board, and staff full of strife and anger. This all happened in cone congregation over a period of thirty-six years. I use this story because, in the language of Peter, “judgment must begin at the house of God.” It is there we see soul ruin at its greatest. If we cannot simply do what is right there, where can we? #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
The story is also illustrative of the extent to which sin, in a form everyone plainly recognizes as such, undermines even the efforts of Christ’s own people to be his people. That is its power. Although the degree and details differ, the story of this church is—in spite of come very fine exceptions—all too common. (Leading Christian magazines now feature regular sections where the sad story is told month by month.) I have also chosen the story as an illustration because a major part of the response by Christians to manifest sin, in this case, was to cover it up. This is not uncommon. No doubt it was “for the sake of the ministry,” as is usually said. The “confessions” of various pastors were often half-truths or less and were clearly matters of a formality which would, supposedly, allow the pastors and staff members to “get on with God’s business.” The exist of the last pastor left the church board and staff bitterly divided over the issues of loyalty to the former pastor and over whether or not the truth of what had happened should be publicly stated. A long period followed in which almost every meeting was filled with anger and tension and in which people retreated into their various camps, hardly speaking to each other. The words of James ring true: “Where you have envy and selfish ambition, there you find disorder and every evil practice,” reports James 3.16. Most Christians have never been in an intimate fellowship where the corrupted condition of the human soul did not in fact prevail—that is, in a fellowship in which they could assume that everyone would do what everyone knew to be right. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
And many people in our culture have, on the basis of their experiences, simply given up on the church—many of them in the name of God and righteousness. However, it is still a known fact that you have had church members who have tried to kill others by poisoning them and stating that they have a right to do so. What kind of God are those type of people serving? Satan. In a period of a few weeks, some years back, three nationally known pastors in California were publicly exposed for sins involving pleasures of the flesh. That is wat is now called “news.” However, pleasures of the flesh are far from being the only problem. The presence of vanity, egotism, hostility, fear, indifference, racism, homophobia, class discrimination, and down right meanness can be counted on among professing Christians. Maybe the need artificial sweetener in their sweet tea to add a little more Southern charm and pleasantness to their personality? Their opposites cannot be counted on or simply assumed in the “standard” Christian group; and the rare individual who exemplified them—genuine purity and humility, death to selfishness, freedom from rage and depression, and so on—will stand out in the group with all the obtrusiveness of a sore thumb. He or she will be a constant hinderance in the group process and will be personally conflicted by those processes, for he or she will not be living on the same terms as the others. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Now for the rest of the verse from Peter: “If judgment first begins at the house of God, what shall be the outcome for those who give no heed to the gospel of God? And if it is difficult for the righteous to be saved, what will happen to the Godless and rebellious,” reports 1 Peter 4.17. It really may be about the same outside as within. The daily news, courts, law offices, community, family, and educational and penal institutions provide a constant outpouring of wrongness and wrongdoing that wells up from the malformed human spirit, mind, soul, body, and social context. Diogenes, the ancient Greek, lit a lantern and walked the streets of Athens at noonday looking for an honest man. He never found one, it is said. However, as in the church, so in life generally, a few ready to deal with the realities of the deeper self, in themselves or in others. And those few are not exactly welcomed by others. Sokrates tried to deal with the realities of the soul Athens and was killed for it. This is the customary fate of the “prophet.” Jesus was not crucified for saying, “Behold the lilies of the field, how they toil not, neither do they spin,” but for saying, “Behold the Pharisees, how they steal.” Humans have always had a need, even in their earliest, most primitive stages, to form a picture of the World and of its creation. One version of the creation that goes back in time claims that human beings were made out of blood that flowed from someone who had been killed. Not everyone was made of that blood, however. Only the brave were. Cowards and women were made from the flesh of the two legs. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
That is an ancient version of the theory that Konrad Lorenz has put forward, namely, that human beings have n inborn instinct to kill, a blood lust. It was nice, of course, of the people who believed in the myth to exempt women from that blood lust, but it was not so nice of them then to throw women in with the cowards. Things have not changed much even today. According to the prejudices of modern society, women have less conscience, are more vain and cowardly, and are less realistic than men. Now all those claims are notoriously false. In many cases the shoe could easily be put on the other foot. Most women know what a pathetic figure a man can cut when he is unwell. He is much more given to self-pity and much less secure than a woman, in some cases. However, no one admits that for fear of destroying the myth. We see the same thing happening here that we see in racial stereotypes. What men say about women has no more basis in fact that what democrats say about republicans. Even Dr. Freud claimed that women have less conscience than men. Now I find it hard to imagine how anybody could have less conscience than men. What those claims, are, of course, is nothing more than propaganda about the inferiority of an enemy, which is a tactic the main stream media uses against anyone they do not like these days. The news should actually be called the propaganda department, much of what they report is sleezy gossip and malicious lies. The meteorologist used to be considered the biggest liars and unreliable, now it is the anchors and field reporters who are consider liars and incompetent. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
That kind of propaganda turns up whenever one group dominates another and discourages rebellion by holding the self-confidence of the dominated group down to an absolute minimum. That is by way of a little footnote to one of the functions of religion I mentioned above, to wit, an explanation of the natural World. Everything went along just fine until sin and dysfunction became acceptable. Dr. Darwin taught us that if we looked at creation of the World and of humans from a rational and scientific point of view we could dispense with the idea of God and explain those phenomena by the laws of evolution. It is easier for the average person to grasp the idea of God, but for science after Dr. Darwin the creation was no longer a mystery. In the light of the theory of evolution, “God” was reduced to a working hypothesis and the story of the creation of the World and of humans to a myth, a poem, a symbol, which clearly expressed something but could no longer be regarded as scientific truth. We have rejected the attempt to restrict love to its emotional element. However, there is no love without the emotional element, and it would be a poor analysis of love which did not take this element into consideration. The question is only how to relate it to the ontological definition of love. One can say that love as an emotion is the anticipation of the reunion which takes place in every love-relation. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
Love, like all emotions, is an expression of the total participation of the being which is in an emotional state. In the moment in which one is in the fulfillment of the desire for reunion is anticipated and the happiness of this reunion is experienced in imagination. This means that the emotional element in love does no precede the others ontologically but that the ontologically founded movement to the other one expressed itself in emotional ways. Love is a passion: this assertion implies that there is a passive element in love, namely the state of being driven towards reunion. Infinite passion for God, no less then the passion of the flesh, a consequence of the objective situation, namely of the state of separation of those who belong together and are drive towards each other in love. The ontology of love is tested by the experience of love fulfilled. There is a profound ambiguity about this experience. Fulfilled love is, at the same time, extreme happiness and the end of happiness. The separation is overcome. However, without the separation there is no love and no life. It is the superiority of the person-to-person relationship that it preserves the separation of the self-centered self, and nevertheless actualizes their reunion in love. The highest form of love and that form of it which distinguishes the Old World and the New World cultures is the love which preserves the individual who is both the subject and the object of love. In the loving person-to-person relationship Christianity manifests its superiority to any other religious tradition. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
To be everywhere primarily and absolutely, is proper to God. Now to be everywhere primarily is said of that which in its whole self is everywhere; for if a thing were everywhere according to its parts in different places, it would not be primarily; thus if a being has white teeth, whiteness belongs primarily not to the man but to his teeth. However, a thing is everywhere absolutely when it does not belong to it to be everywhere accidentally, that is, merely on some supposition; as a grain of millet would be everywhere, supposing that no other body existed. It belongs therefore to a thing to be everywhere absolutely when, on any supposition, it must be everywhere and this properly belongs to God alone. For whatever number of places be supposed, even if an infinite number be supposed besides what already exist, it would be necessary that God should be in all of them; for nothing can exist except by Him. Therefore to be everywhere primarily and absolutely belongs to God and is proper to Him: because whatever number of places be supposed to exist, God must be in all of them, not as to a part of Him, by as to His very self. The universal, and also primary matter are indeed everywhere; but not according to the same mode of existence. Number, since it is an accident, does not, of itself, exist in place, but accidentally; neither is the whole but only part of it in each of things numbered; hence it does not follow that it is primarily and absolutely everywhere. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
The whole body of the Universe is everywhere, but not primarily; forasmuch as it is not wholly in each place, but according to its parts; nor again is it everywhere absolutely, because, supposing that other places existed besides itself, it would not be in them. If an infinite body existed, it would be everywhere; but according to its parts. Were there one animal only, its soul would be everywhere primarily indeed, but only accidentally. When it is said that the soul sees anywhere, this can be taken in two senses. In one sense the adverb “anywhere” determines the act of seeing on the part of the object; and in this sense it is true that while it sees the Heavens, it sees in the Heavens; and in the same way I feels in the Heavens; but it does not follow that it lives or exists in the Heavens, because to live and to exist do not import an act passing to an exterior object. In another sense it can be understood according as the adverb determines the act of the seer, as proceeding from the seer; and thus it is true that where the soul feels and sees, there it is, and there it lives according to this mode of speaking; and thus it does not follow that it is everywhere. Once the religious explanation of the natural World lost its power to convince, religion lost some authority. All that remained for it to stand on was the propagation of moral postulates. “Love thy neighbor,” the Old Testament says. “Love the stranger.” The New Testament says, “Love your enemies.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
How can anyone who takes those instructions seriously be successful in modern society? Anyone who follows those precepts is a fool. One will fall behind, not get ahead. We preach the moral precepts of the Bible but do not practice them. We run on two separate tracks. Altruism is praised; we are supposed to have love for our neighbors. However, at the same time the pressure to succeed keeps us from practicing these virtues. In my opinion it is altogether possible in our society to be a good Christian or a good Jew, that is, a loving human being, without starving to death. What matters is your level of competence and the courage needed to adhere to the truth and persist in love rather than give yourself up for the sake of your career. However, all that notwithstanding, it remains a fact that Christian or Jewish morality maybe incompatible with the morality of success, of ruthlessness, of selfishness, of not giving, of not sharing. Since that point will be obvious to anyone who reflects on it, I need not dwell on it here. Anyway, this double standard in our morality has been described and criticized often. To sum up, then, the ethic that dominates in modern capitalism has amputated religion’s others foundation of authority. Religion no longer functions as a promulgator of values, for people no longer trust it in that role either. God has abdicated both as the creator of the World and as the spokesperson for values like love of neighbor and the overcoming of greed. However, humanity does not seem either willing or able to do without religion entirely. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Humans do not live by bread alone. One has to have a vision, a faith, that awakens one’s interest and elevates one above mere animal existence. A regression to earlier heathenism and worship of idols holds no attraction for modern humans, but I think we can say that our century is developing a new religion, one I would like to call the religion of technology. There are two particular aspects of this religion I would like to mention here. One is the promise the Trump Tower, the dream of unlimited and instant gratification. New needs are being produced every minute; there is no end to them; and humankind, like an eternal suckling babe, waits with an open heart, expecting to receive consideration and concern and unconditional love, and expecting to be fed more and more delicious food and sweet, nourishing nectar. This is a paradise of total gratification, a paradise of superfluity that makes us lazy and passive. Technology’s goal becomes the elimination of effort. The other aspect of this religion is more complex. Ever since the Renaissance, humanity has concentrated its intellectual efforts on penetrating and understanding nature’s secrets. However, nature’s secrete were, at least to some extent, also the secrets of nature’s creator. For four hundred years humans have invested their energies in plumbing nature’s mysteries so that one will be able to control nature. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
One’s most deep-seated motive was to cease being a mere spectator of the natural World and to become able to create that World oneself. It is difficult to express precisely what I want to say here, but if I were to state what I mean in its most radical form, I would have to say: Humans wanted to become God. What God was able to do, humans wanted to be able to do, too. I think the spectacle and the enthusiasm we witnessed when the astronauts first set foot on the Moon had the quality of a pagan religious ceremony. That moments represented the human’s first step on the way to overcoming one’s human limitations and becoming God. Even Christian newspapers were saying that the conquest of the Moon was the greatest thing to happen since the creation of the Universe. Now it is a bit imprudent of Christians to say that—after the creation itself—there is another event more important tan the Incarnation. However, that was all forgotten in the moment when people were themselves witness to the fact of human’s stepping outside the laws that hard limited one before, overcoming the force of gravity, and setting on a path to infinity. It is God making the impossible possible, much like he may one day allow humans to discover the secrete to resurrection and immortality. I mean, in the 1970s, liver transplants where not possible, in the 1800s, humans could not fly into space and now they can. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
Technology emerging as a new God, perhaps an extension of God’s power. That is why scientists have to coverup what they are doing and humans rationalize their advancements because there are things most people do not have the mental ability to recreate. Technology is becoming the Great Mother who will feed all her children and satisfy all their demands. Technological capability has become a moral obligation, and has become the very source of our morality. If God is dead, then anything would be permitted, but then the World He created would also cease to exist. If people no longer believe in God, if God was no longer a reality that forms their thoughts and actions, then we have a good reason to ask whether they will not become totally immortal, whether they will not stop looking to any kind of moral principles for guidance. That is a question we have to take seriously, and if we are feeling pessimistic, we may conclude that it is exactly what has happened and that our morality is continuing to decline all the time. There are significant differences between now and earlier times. In 1914, for example, the warning nations adhered to two internationally accepted rules. Civilians were not killed, and no one was tortured. Today it is taken for granted that civilians will be killed in the course of any and all hostilities, because warring parties no longer accept any limitations on their use of forces. Then, too, technology cannot make allowances for that kind of differentiation. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Technology kills anonymously, like Agent Orange, which was manufactured by Dole, the same people you buy fruits and vegetables from. And if you did not know, Agent Orange not only killed people, but it caused cancer and alter army’s DNA and some of them passed on birth defects to their children. Leaders kill these days with sprays or by pressing a button, and unlike people impacted by 9/11 or other weed killer, Dole has never had to compensate their victims. Because people do not see their opponent of their fighter supporting them, they are not moved by sympathy or compassion. Some people actually find it funny to tease people who have cancer or who have been injured because of war, because it makes them feel better about their pathetic lives, unattractiveness and lack of success. And torture is the rule today, not the exception. Everyone tries to deny that, but it is generally known fact. The use of torture to obtain information is widespread and even used by politics like Jerry Brown, Kevin Johnson, Gavin Newsom and Darrel Steinberg. We would be astonished to know in how many counties, cities, states, and countries of the World torture is used. Perhaps we need not say that cruelty is on the increase, but it would be hard to deny that humanity and the moral prohibitions that go with it are declining. That has brought about a great change in the World, but on the other hand we can see that new moral principles are coming to the fore; we find them in the younger generation, for example, in their struggle for peace, for life, against destruction and war. They are not just mouthing empty phrases. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
Many people and not just young ones are insisting that we learn to live in a World of law and order, kindness and fairness, love and harmony. They are reestablishing their allegiance to God. Billions of people have become sensitive to the destruction of life on so many fronts, to inhumane wars in which there is not even a pretense of self-defense. We see a new mortality of love taking shape, too, in opposition to the consumer society. The new morality may have its flaws, but it remains impressive in its protest against empty forms and words. We see evidence of a new morality, too, in the self-sacrifices made in the political realm, in the numerous struggles for liberation and self-determination that are going on today. Those are encouraging developments. God and other religions like Buddhism provide us with a glowing example of how come cultures develop moral principles. Those principles are rooted and flourish in humane soil. Human beings cannot live and be happy without God because when they do not acknowledge His authority, they seem to lose sight of what is good and righteous. We cannot, however, force God on people, he granted them free will. To be of God is something that has to emerge from them. People have to be deeply rooted in need to act morally. Immortality cases them to lose their inner harmony and balance. And it is immortality going under the guise of mortality if people are told that they have to kill, that they have to obey, that they should pursue only their own selfish interests, that sympathy will be a hindrance to them, and so forth. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
If voices of that kind grow too loud they can drown out a person’s own inner voice, the voice of one’s humanistic conscience. That it why so many people are turning the news and radio off. It is evil mixed in with entertainment. Otherwise they will get the idea that God is dead, politicians are their only hope, and everything is permitted. “And the church did meet together off, to fast and to pray, and to speak one with another concerning the welfare of their souls. And they did meet together oft to partake in nourishment in remembrance of the Lord Jesus,” reports Moroni 6.5-6. It is very meet and right, with all powers if heart and mind, and with the service of the lips, to praise the invisible God, the Father Almighty, and His Only-begotten Son our Lord Jesus Christ, Who paid the debt of Adam for us to the eternal Father, and effaced the bond of the ancient guilt by the Blood poured forth in loving-kindness. For this is the Paschal festival in which that true Lamb is slain, and the door-posts hallowed by His Blood: in which first Thou didst bring our fathers, the children of Israel, out of Egypt, and madest them to pass over the Red Sea dry-shod. This then is the night which cleared away the darkness of sin by a pillar of radiance. This is the night which now throughout the World restores to grace and unties to holiness believers in Christ, separated from Worldly vices and from the gloom of sin. This is the night in which Christ broke the bonds of death, and ascended a Conqueror from the grave. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
For to be born had been no blessing to us, unless we could have been redeemed. O the wonderous condescension of Thy loving-kindness towards us! O the inestimable tenderness of Thy love! To redeem the servant, Thou gavest up the Son. This holy night, then, puts to flight offences, washes away sins, and restores innocence to the fallen, and joyousness to the sad. O truly blessed night which spoiled the Egyptians and enriched the Hebrews—the night in which Heaven and Earth are reconciled! We pray Thee therefore, O Lord, that Thou wouldest preserve Thy servants in the peaceful enjoyment of this Eternal happiness, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Lord Jesus, if I love thee my soul shall seek thee, but can I seek thee unless my love to three is kept alive to this end? Do I love thee because thou art good, and canst alone do me good? It is fitting thou shouldest not regard me, for I am vile and selfish; yet I seek thee, and when I find thee there is no wrath to devour me, but only sweet love. Thou dost stand as a rock between the scorching Sun and my soul, and I live under the cool lee-side as one elect. When my mind acts without thee it spins nothing but deceit and delusion; when in my affections act without thee noting is seen but dead works. O how I need thee to abide in me, for I have no natural eyes to see thee, but I live by faith in one whose face to me is bright than a thousand Suns! #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
When I see that all sin is in me, all shame belongs to me; let me know that all good is in thee, all glory is thine. Keep me from the error of thinking thou dost appear gloriously when some strange light fills my heart, as if that were the glorious activity of grace, but let me see that the truest revelation of thyself is when thou dost eclipse all my personal glory and all the honour, pleasure and good of this World. The Son breaks out in glory when he shows himself as one who outshines all creation, makes people poor in spirit, and helps them to find their good in one. Grant that I may distrust myself, to see my all in thee. It is my experience of World-wandering that those who most know truth are themselves the least known among people. This is partly because so few seek that kind of truth which is theirs—the highest—partly because it is their own wish to remain inaccessible to all except these few seekers, and partly because their completely ego-free character is utterly without any ambition to put themselves forward in public under any pretext whatsoever, whether to gain the benefits and advantages of such a position or to practise so-called service. However, eager a Master may be to reveal truth, one is forced, by indifference and miscomprehension of the World, to conceal it. It is not an isolation due to arrogance, to too high a notion of one’s own status. It is the others who are really apart, by their animalism or egotism. One is not alien to humanity but only alien to what is low and bestial in humanity. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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Sometimes an Angel Has to Fall to Know One Was in Heaven—Are You Living?
Make sustained rapid improvement a way of life. Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task. If it is in the right direction, there is nothing wrong in change. To improve is to change, so to be perfect is to have changed often. Start by doing what is necessary; then do what is possible; and suddenly you are doing this impossible. God moves in a mysterious way, his wonders to perform; God plants his foot steps in the sea, and rides upon the storm. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance. Some people think that it seems God does not exist because if one of two contraries be infinite, the other would be altogether destroyed. And the word “God” means that He is infinite goodness. They say, if God existed, there would be no evil discoverable; but there is evil in the World. Therefore, God does not exist is their thought. However, it is said in the person of God: “I am Who am,” reports Exodus 3.14. We know God exists. It is certain, and evident to our senses that in the World some things are in motion. Now whatever is in motion is put in motion by another, for nothing can be in motion except it is in potentiality to that towards which it is in motion; whereas a thing moves inasmuch as it is in act. For motion is noting else than the reduction of something in a state of actuality. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
However, nothing can be reduced from potentiality to actuality, except by something in a state of actuality. Thu that which is actually hot, as fire, makes wood, which is potentially hot, to be actually hot, and thereby moves and changes it. Now it is not possible that the same thing should be at once in actuality and potentiality in the same respect, but only in different respects. For what is actually hot cannot simultaneously be potentially hot; but it is simultaneously potentially cld. It is therefore impossible that in the same respect and in the same way a thing should be both mover and moved, exempli gratia that it should move itself. Therefore, whatever is in motion must be put in motion by another. If that by which it is put in motion be itself put in motion, then this also must needs be put in motion by another, and that by another again. However, this cannot go on to infinity, because then there would be no first mover, and, consequently, no other mover; seeing that subsequent movers move only inasmuch as they are put in motion by the first mover; as the staff moves only because it is put in motion by the hand. Therefore it is necessary to arrive at a first mover, put in motion by no other; and this everyone understands to be God. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
The second way is from the nature of the efficient cause. In the World of sense we find there is an order of efficient causes. There is no case known (neither is it, indeed, possible) in which a thing is found to be the efficient case of itself; for so it would be prior to itself, which is impossible, Now in efficient causes it is not possible to go on to infinite, because in all efficient cases following in order, the first is the cause of the intermediate cause, and the intermediate is the cause of the ultimate cause, whether the intermediate cause be several, or only one. Now to take away the cause is to take away the effect. Therefore, if there be no first cause among efficient cases, there will be no ultimate, nor any intermediate cause. However, if there be no first cause it is possible to go on to infinity, there will be no first efficient cause, neither will there be an ultimate effect, nor any intermediate efficient causes; all of which is plainly false. Therefore it is necessary to admit a first efficient cause, to which everyone gives the name Go. The third way is taken from possibility and necessity, and runs thus. We find in nature things that are possible to be and not to be, since they are found to be generated, and to corrupt, and consequently, they are possible to be and not to be. However, it is impossible for these always to exist, for that which is possible not to be at some time is not. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
Therefore, if everything is possible not to be, then at one time there could have been noting in existence. Now if this were true, even now there would be nothing in existence, because that which does not exist only begins to exist by something already existing. Therefore, if at one time nothing was in existence, it would have been impossible for anything to have begun to exist; and thus even now nothing would be in existence—which is absurd. Therefore, not all beings are merely possible, but there must exist something the existence of which is necessary. However, every necessary thing either has its necessity caused by another, or not. Now it is impossible to go out to infinite in necessary things which have their necessity caused by another, as has been already proved in regard to efficient causes. Therefore we cannot but postulate the existence of some being having of itself its own necessity, and not receiving it from another, but rather causing in other their necessity. This all beings speak of as God. The fourth way is taken from the gradation to be found in things. Among beings there are some more and some less good, true, noble and the like. But “more” and “less” are predicated of different things, according as they resemble in their different ways something in which is the maximum, as a thing is said to be hotter according as it more nearly resembles that which is uttermost being; for those things that are greatest in truth are greatest in being. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
Now the maximum in any genus is the cause of all in that genus; as fire, which is the maximum heat, is the cause of all hot things. Therefore there must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection; and this we call God. The fifth way is taken from the governance of the World. We see that things which lack intelligence, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain the best result. Hence it is plain that not fortuitously, but designedly, do they achieve their end. Now whatever lacks intelligence cannot move towards an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence; as the arrow is shot to its mark by the archer. Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God. Since God is the highest good, He would not allow any evil to exist in His works, unless His omnipotence and goodness were such as to bring good even out of evil. This is part of the infinite goodness of God, that He should allow evil to exist, and out of it to produce good. Since nature works for a determinate end under the direction of a higher agent, whatever is done by nature must needs be traced back to God, as to its first cause. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
So also whatever is done voluntarily must also be traced back to some higher cause other than human reason or will, since these can change or fail; for all things that are changeable and capable of defect must be traced back to an immovable and self-necessary first principle. The human situation is one of finiteness—all flesh is grass and the grass withereth. It is one of sin—we receive double for all our sins. It is one of vanity and pride—we are brought to nothing and fall utterly. However, in spite of one’s realistic knowledge of human nature and density, darkness and light follow each other; after the depth of sin and punishment, the prophet announces forgives and liberation. However, the wave falls, and the prophet asks himself how he could have made such an announcement, when all the goodness of mortal beings is as the flower of the field, which faces because the breath of God blows upon it. However, he does not remain in the depths of his melancholy: over against human mortality the word of God shall stand forever. There is something eternal to which we can cling: Be not afraid, the Lord God shall come with strong hand. So the wave rises, and then again it falls: the nations are as a drop of water and a piece of dust; all nations are as nothing before God, they are counted as less than nothing. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
Again the wave rises: God stands above the circle of the Earth, above all created things, above the highest and the lowest! And when once more the wave falls and the servant of God complains that he does not receive justice from God, the answer is that God acts beyond human expectation. He gives power to the faint and to one that hath no might God is increaseth strength. God acts paradoxically; He acts beyond human understanding. How shall we interpret these words? Is there a way to unite the heights and depths contrasted in this essay? Shall we understand the words of consolation and hope as vain promises, never fulfilled in the past and never to be fulfilled in any future? Shall we understand then as an escape from the realization of Human’s real situation, through mysticism and poetic elevation? If so, what about the probing realism of the prophet’s analysis of the human situation? One saw history as it is, but at the same time one looked beyond history to the ultimate power and meaning and majesty of being. One knew two orders of being: the human, political, historical order, and the divine, eternal order. Because one knew these two orders, one could speak as one did, moving continually between the depth of human nothingness and the great height of divine creativity. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
Let us look at these orders, these different natures, and their interrelation. In speaking of them we speak of ourselves, because we belong to both of them in every moment of our life and history. The human order, the order of history, is primarily the order of growing and dying. “Surely the people is grass.” Human’s experience of melancholy, awakened by fading and perishing nature, is symbolic of one’s transitoriness. Generations after generations grow up, struggle, suffer, enjoy and disappear. Should we take all this seriously? Should we take it more seriously than the growing and fading of the grass? He prophet, when one was asked to speak one’s nation, raised the question: Why speak to them? They are grass. We could continue: Why write and work and struggle for them? They are grass. What matter, when after a few years all those for whom we wrote and spoke and struggled will have vanished? They were grass, the grass withered, the flowers faded. That is the order of history. However, the other appears at the horizon: the word of God shall stand forever. Second, the order of history is an order of sin and punishment. The exile, following the destruction of Jerusalem, was, as all the prophets said, the punishment of the people for their sins. We do not like words such as “sin” and “punishment.” They seem to us old-fashioned, barbaric, and invalid in the light of modern psychology. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
However, whenever I have met exiles of high moral standards and insights, I have discovered that they feel responsible for what has happened within their own countries. And very often I have met citizens who democratic countries, citizens of this country, who have expressed a feeling of guilt for the situation of the World today. They were right, and the exiles were right: they are responsible, as are you and I. Whether or not we call it sin, whether or not we call it punishment, we are beaten by the consequences of our own failures. That is the order of history. However, at the horizon the other order appears, saying that our struggles are not in vain, that our iniquity is pardoned. There is a third element in the order of history, uniting finiteness and sin: the tragic law which controls the historical process, the law which ordains that human greatness utterly fall. There is human greatness in history. There are great and conquering nations and empires; there are even nations and empires which manifest a certain righteousness. There are princes and even good princes; there are judges and even just judges. There are states and constitutions and even states and constitutions which provide a certain amount of freedom; there are social orders and even some which provide a certain amount of equality. There are creative spirits and even some which have the power of knowledge and understanding. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
However, just in being great and powerful and righteous they touch the divine sphere, and they become arrogant, and they are brought to nothing. They are without roots; they wither; the divine storm blows over them, and they vanish. That is the subject of Greek tragedy. That is the message f the prophet to the nations of the World. They are all subject to the law of tragic self-destruction—the bad and the good, individuals and nations, the weak and the heroic. And again the other order, the order beyond history and tragedy, appears at the horizon: He gives power to the faint and their strength is renewed, so that they shall mount up with wings as eagles. The order beyond the order of history is the divine order. And it is paradoxical: humans are like grass, but the word of God spoken to them shall stand forever. Humans stand under the law of sin and punishment, but the divine order breaks through it and bring forgiveness. Humans faint, falling from the height of their moral goodness and youthful power, and just when they have fallen and are weakest, they run without weariness and rise up with wigs as eagles. God acts beyond all human assumptions and valuations. He acts surprisingly, unexpectedly, paradoxically. The negative character of the historical order is the beneficial character of the divine order. The weak and despairing, the sinful and tragic in the historical order are the strong and victorious in the divine order. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
The prophet speaks of the paradoxical destiny of the servant, the elected nation. Described as a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief, it is despised and rejected in the human order. Who does not think, hearing these words, of the exiles not only of Israel but of all nations of the World? However, the divine order appears. The exiled nation, or (as the Christians later, historically wrong, spiritually right, interpreted it) the Man on the Cross, represents another order, an order in which the weakest is the strongest, the most humiliated, the most victorious. The historical, human order is overcome by the suffering servant, the crucified Saviour. If we doubt this paradox, if we despair about our human situation, if our exile is without hope or meaning for us, the prophet should fill us with shame for the arrogance of our rationalism and the narrowness of our moralism, of history. He asks, “Who has directed the Spirit of God? With whom took He counsel and who instructed Him and taught Him the path of Justice?” We always wish to teach God the path of justice. We tell Him that He must punish the bad and reward the good, especially in relation to ourselves. However, He accepts no counsel concerning the course of history, as He took no counsel concerning the structure of the World, with all its natural destruction, cruelty, and transitoriness. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
The divine order cannot be judged according to the measures of the historical order, the measures of human comfort and morality, democracy and civilization. That was the answer Job received from God when he struggled with Him about the unintelligible injustice of his historical fate. God did not justify Himself in moral categories; He triumphantly pointed to the unexplorable greatness of nature which cannot be measured according to the measure of human righteousness. However, if the divine order and the historical order have nothing to do with each other, how can the divine order concern us at all? How can eternity and forgiveness and divine help concern us if we are in the other order, the historical order, standing under the law of finiteness and weakness and punishment? How can the divine order comfort us in our misery? How can we listen to the words of the prophets which tell us of the end of our warfare? There are three answers to this question. First, the divine order is not the historical order; and we should not confuse these two orders. No life is able to overcomes finiteness, sin, and tragedy. The illusions of our period have been that modern civilization can conquer them, and that we can achieve security in our own existence. Progress seemed to have conquered tragedy; the divine order seemed to be embodied in the progressive, historical order. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
However, for nearly three decades our generation has received blow after blow, destroying that illusion, and driving to despair and cynicism those who wanted to transform, and thought they could transform the historical order into a divine order. Let us learn from the catastrophe of our tie at least the fact that no life and no period are able to overcome finiteness, sin, and tragedy. The second answer is that there is another order to which we, as human beings, belong, an order which makes beings always dissatisfied with what is given to one. Humans transcend everything in the historical order, all the heights and depts of one’s own existence. One passes, as no other being is able to pass, beyond the limits of one’s given World. One participates in something infinite, in an order which is not transitory, not self-destructive, not tragic, but eternal, holy, and blessed. Therefore, when one listen to the prophetic word, when one hears of the everlasting God and of the greatness of His power and the mystery of His acts, a response is awakened in the depth of one’s soul; the infinite within one is touched. Every being knows, in some depth of one’s soul, that is true. Our despair itself, our inability to escae ourselves in life and in death, witnesses to our infinity. The third answer is that the two orders, the historical and the eternal, although they can never become the same, are within each other. The historical order is not separated from the eternal order. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
What is new in the prophets and in Christianity, beyond all paganism, old and new, is that the eternal order reveals itself in the historical order. The suffering servant of God and the enemies because of whom one suffers, the Man on the Cross and those who fainted under the Cross, the exiled and persecuted in all periods of history, have all transformed history. The strong in history fall; the strength of each of taken from us. However, those who seem weak in history finally shape history, because they are bound to the eternal order. We are not a lost generation because we are a suffering, destroyed generation. Each of us belongs to the eternal order, and the prophet speaks to all of us: Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people! I have learned that there are not different types but qualifications of love, since the different qualities are presented, by efficiency or deficiency, in every act of love. This insight, however, does not make the distinction of the qualities of love less important. If, as I shall suggest, one has to distinguish the libido, the philia, the eros, the agape qualities of love we must ask: how are they related to each other? What is meant if one speaks of love without qualification? Which quality of love is adequate to the Great Commandment? Which to its emotional quality? #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
Whenever the word love is used one also speaks of self-love. How is self-love related to the qualities of love, to its ontological and to its ethical character? First of all one must ask whether self-love is a meaningful concept at all. Considering that love presupposes a separation of the loving subject, and the loved object, is there such a separation in the structure of the self-consciousness? I am very doubtful about using the term self-love, and if it is used, abut using the term self-love, and if it is used, about using in it any except a metaphorical sense. Besides this terminological question, one must ask how the different qualities of love are related to what is metaphorically called self-love, and how it is related to the ethical and to the ontological nature of love. This survey of the problems and confusion, connected with the use of the term love is equaled by a survey of the confusions and problems connected with the public discussion of the concept of power. I may tell an anecdote which has more symbolic than analytical meaning. I have been warned not to announce a lecture on “Love, Power, and Justice” in the Untied States, because power would be understood as the product of the electrical power companies, and justice as the fight against the policy of the Federal Government to provide for affordable electrical power by the regulation of rivers according to the pattern of the Tennessee Valley Authority. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
Power in the sense presupposed by this story is electrical power. In the same way the term power can be applied to all physical causes, although theoretical physics has got rid of this anthropomorphic symbol and has replaced it by mathematical equations. However, present-day physics speaks of power-fields in order to describe the basic structures of the material World. This is at least an indication of the significance the term power has even in the most abstract analysis of physical occurrences. Physicists are usually conscious of the fact that they use an anthropomorphic metaphor when they use the term power. Power is a sociological category and from there it is transferred to nature (just as is law). However, the term metaphor does not solve the problem. We must ask, how is it possible that both physics and social science use the same word, power? There must be a point of identity between the structure of the social and the structure of the physical World. And this identity must be manifest in the common use of the term power. There is, however, only one way of discovering the root meaning of power, namely to ask about its ontological foundation. And this, of course, is one of the purposes of these lectures. Within the social realm the meaning of power is burdened by another ambiguity, the relation of power and force. This duality is almost exclusively restricted to the human sphere. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
For only in humans, that is in the being whose nature is finite freedom, the distinction of power and force is meaningful. One speaks of power politics, and one often does so with moral indignations. However, this is the consequence of mere confusion. Politics and power politics are one and the same thing. There are no politics without power, neither in a democracy nor in a dictatorship. Politics and power politics point to the same reality. It does not matter which term you are using. Unfortunately, however, the term power politics is used for a special type of politics, namely that in which power is separated from justice and love, and is identified with compulsion. This confusion is possible because there is indeed a compulsory element in the actuality of power. However, this is only one element, and if power is reduced to it and loses the form of justice and the substance of love, it destroys itself and the politics based on it. Only penetration into the ontological roots of power can overcome the ambiguities in the relation of power and compulsion. If power is distinguished from compulsion the question arises whether there is a power which is neither physical nor psychological, but spiritual. Compulsion uses both physical and psychological means in order to exercise power, must conspicuously in the terror methods of dictatorships. No compulsion at all is presupposed in spiritual power. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
Nevertheless, one assumes that spiritual power is the greatest, that it is the ultimate power. One does so whenever one says that God is Spirit. It is meet and right that we should give thanks to Thee, O Lord God, through Jesus Christ Thy Son, Who, being God Eternal, was pleased to becomes Man for our salvation. O the one, peerless, manifold Mystery of our Saviour! For He, being one and the same, God mist high, and perfect Man, both supreme High priest and most scared Sacred Sacrifice, according to His Divine power created all things, according to His human condition delivered humans; by virtue of His Sacrifice He atoned for the polluted, in right of His Priesthood He reconciled the alienated. O the peerless Mystery of redemption! Wherein those ancient wounds were healed by the Lord’s new medicine, and the judgment passed before on the first human rescinded by the privileges of our Saviour. The one in self-indulgence extended one’s hands to the tree, the other patiently fitted His to the Cross; therefore deservedly did the punishment borne by innocence become the discharge of the debtor, for with good right are debts remitted to debtors when discharged on their behalf by Him Who owed nothing. “And it came to pass that they began to spread upon the face of the land, and to multiply and to till the Earth; and they did wax strong in the land,” reports Ether 6.18. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
Creator and Redeemer God, Author of all existence, source of all blessedness, I adore thee for making me capable of knowing thee, for giving me reason and conscience, for leading me to desire thee; I praise thee for the revelation of thyself in the gospel, for thy heart as a dwelling place of pity, for thy thoughts of peace towards me, for thy patience and thy graciousness, for the vastness of thy mercy. Thou hast moved my conscience to know how the guilty can be pardoned, the unholy sanctified, the poor enriched. May I be always amongst those who not only hear but know thee, who walk with and rejoice in thee, who take thee at they word and find life there. Keep me always longing for a present salvation in Holy Spirit comforts and rejoicings, for spiritual graces and blessings, for help to value my duties as well as my privileges. May I cherish simplicity and Godly sincerity of character. Help me to be in reality before thee as in appearance I am before humans, to be religious before I profess religion, to leave the World before I enter the church, to set my affections on things above, to shun forbidden follies and vanities, to be a dispenser as well as a partaker of grace, to be prepared to bear evil as well as to do good. O God, make me worthy of this calling, that the name Jesus may be glorified in me and I in him. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
BRIGHTON STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH
Rancho Cordova, CA |
Now Selling!
NOW SELLING! Brighton Station at Cresleigh Ranch is Rancho Cordova’s newest home community! This charming neighborhood offers an array of home types with eye catching architecture styles such as Mid-Century Modern, California Modern, Prairie, and Contemporary Farmhouse. Dining rooms are perhaps the best evidence of the revolution that took place in society in the middle of the nineteenth century. The Industrial Revolution not only made all the furniture, dishes, and silver plate possible, but also created a new class of people to use them. Early in the nineteenth century, the existence of a dining room at all was the mark of gentry. The landed gentry of the South and the merchant shippers of the North might boast a separate room just for eating, but they represented only a very small part of the population. By the 1860s, a separate dining room was considered de rigueur (prescribed or required by fashion, etiquette, or custom) for even a cottage.
When the guest filed into a Victorian dinner in the late nineteenth century, they found small menus on the table describing what cuisine they would be served. Staff set and removed plate for every course, and no one used fingers to touch the food. There were special forks and ladles and knives for every conceivable food: oyster ladles and forks; tomato servers; fish knives and forks; cake knives and servers forks; different spoons for clear sup, for cream soup, for dessert, for fruit, for breakfast coffee, for dinner coffee, and for tea. The volume and variety of silver-plated flatware and hollowware would baffle any modern dinner. What is so amazing about Victorian table manners is how successful they were. We may no longer use all the cutlery, but we have internalized their whole system of suppressing bodily functions and being proper. Cresleigh homes residence 4 osfer a formal dining room. Have your cake and eat it with whipped cream!
Style is displayed in exquisite proportions in residence 4, of Cresleigh homes, at Brighton Station. This 3,501 square foot home has a superb floor plan, which has a cache of thoughtful amenities. The chef inspired kitchen has a huge island, and opens up to the large great room, with an optional fireplace. Notice the abundance of storage in the butler’s pantry, and walk-in pantry. There is also a cozy home management office on the first floor, along with a formal dining room, coat closet, and a master suite with its own bathroom. The first floor also boast of a powder room for guest, a mud room and a 3-car tandem garage, which easily holds a family fleet, or a portion of it that can be converted into an optional workshop.
An elegant stairway leads to the master suite on the second floor, which offers both conviences and quiet seclusion. Included are many special features: a coffee bar, bathroom with deep soaker tub, multiple vanities, and walk-in closet. There are two more bedrooms, complimented by a charming loft, which could be converted into a 5th bedroom with only a little rearranging, and there is another full bathroom that comes standard. This come contains 3.5 bathrooms and up to five bedrooms. There is also outdoor livability with a large covered porch with an optional outdoor fireplace, and extended patio. How will you customize your home?
Located off Douglas Road and Rancho Cordova Parkway, the residents of Cresleigh Ranch will enjoy, being just minutes from shopping, dining, and entertainment, and quick access to Highway 50 and Grant Line Road providing a direct route into Folsom. Residents here also benefit from no HOA fees, two community parks and the benefits of being a part of the highly-rated Elk Grove Unified School District. These chic residences (1-4) reflect Cresleigh Ranch’s exuberant spirit, varied architectural traditions, and incomparable landscape. Happy Exploring! https://cresleigh.com/brighton-station/residence-4/
There I Will be Just to Make Sure You Keep Your Heart Alone and Fancy and Free—No One Else Can Have it!
The World we have created is a product of our thinking; it cannot be changed without changing our thinking. Experience has shown each one of us that reality is very easily able to deceive ourselves to believe something which later experience shows us is not so. How can I tell whether this tentative belief has some real relationship to observed facts? I can use, not one line of evidence only, but several. I can surround my observation of the facts with various precautions to make sure I am not deceiving myself. I can consult with others who have also been concerned with avoiding self-deception, and learn useful ways of catching myself in unwarranted beliefs, based on misinterpretations of observations. I can, in short, begin to use all the elaborate methodology which science has accumulated. I discover that stating my hypothesis in operational terms will avoid my blind alley and false conclusions. If, as a scientist, I like the way I have gone about my investigation, if I have been open to all the evidence, if I have selected and sued intelligently all the precautions against self-deception which I have been able to assimilate from others or to devise myself, then I will give my tentative belief to the findings which have emerged. I will regard them as a springboard for further investigation and further seeking. It has been suggested that one can rely upon one’s audience to accept minor cues as a sign of something important about one’s performance. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
If in the last few years, you have not discarded a major opinion or acquired a new one, check your pulse, you may need to be give the kiss of life. Feedback is a convenient fact that has an inconvenient implication. By virtue of the same sign-accepting tendency, the audience may misunderstand the meaning that a cue was designed to convey, or may read an embarrassing meaning into gestures or events that were accidental, inadvertent, or incidental and not meant by the performer to carry any meaning whatsoever. In response to these communication contingencies, performers commonly attempt to exert a kind of synecdochic responsibility, making sure that as many as possible of the minor events in the performance, however instrumentally inconsequential these events may be, will occur in such a way as to convey either no impression or an impression that is compatible and consistent with the over-all definition of the situation that is being fostered. When the audience is known to be secretly skeptical of the reality that is being impressed upon them, we have been ready to appreciate their tendency to pounce on trifling flows as a sign life we have been less ready to appreciate that even sympathetic audiences can be momentarily disturbed, shocked, and weakened in their faith by the discover of a picayune discrepancy in the impressions presented to them. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
Some of these minor accidents and unmeant gestures happen to be so aptly designed to give an impression that contradict the one fostered by the performer that the audience cannot help but be startled from a proper degree of involvement in the interaction, even though the audience may realize that in the last analysis the discordant event is really meaningless and ought to be completely overlooked. The crucial point is not that the fleeting definition of the situation caused by an unmeant gesture is itself so blameworthy but rather merely that it is different from the definition officially projected. This difference forces an acutely embarrassing wedge between the official projection and reality, for it is part of the official projection that it is the only possible one under the circumstances. Perhaps, then, we should not analyze performances in terms of mechanical standards, by which a large gain can offset a small loss, or a large weight a smaller one. Artistic imagery would be more accurate, for it prepares us for the fact that a single note off key can disrupt the tone of an entire performance. You are what you are and where you are because of what has gone into your mind; you change what you are and where you are by changing what goes into your mind. To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
In regard to the findings of science, the subjective foundation is well shown in the fact that at times the scientist may refuse to believe one’s own findings. “The experiment showed thus and so, but I believe it is wrong,” is a theme which every scientist has experiences at some time or other. Some very fruitful discoveries have grown out of the persistent disbelief, by a scientist, in one’s own findings and those of others. In the last analysis one may place more trust in one’s total organismic reactions than in the methods of science. There is no doubt that this can result in serious error as well as in scientific discoveries, but it indicates again the leading place of the subjective in the use of science. Wading along a coral reef in the Caribbean this morning, I saw a large blue fish—I think. If you, quite independently, saw it too, then I feel more confident in my own observation. This is what is known as intersubjective verification, and it plays an important part in our understanding of science. If I take you (whether in conversation or in print or behaviorally) through the steps I have taken in an investigation, and it seems to you too that I have not deceived myself, and that I have indeed come across a new relationship which is relevant to my values, and that I am justified in having a tentative faith in this relationship, then we have the beginnings of Science with a capital S. It is at this point that we are likely to think we have created a body of scientific knowledge. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
Actually there is there is no such body of knowledge. There are only tentative beliefs, existing subjectively, in a number of different persons. If these beliefs are not tentative, then what exists are strict and rigid doctrines, not science. If on the other hand, no one but the investigator believes the finding then this finding is either a personal and deviant matter, an instance of pathology, or else it is an unusual truth discovered by a genius, which as yet no one is subjectively ready to believe. When one repeats oneself in a redundant way, one is revealing one’s desire to be seen as a member of some group. However, others may not care. Reflections and interpretations may be experienced by other individuals as expressions of the message, “I do not really care about you, I care about my expense, or my comfort, or the rightness of my theories or reflections or interpretations.” Or, these same reflections and interpretations, whether awkward or apt, may be heard as repetitions of, “I wan you to be healthier, I want to help you, I am trying to be helpful.” I believe that trust and hope are not contributors to healing. Rather, they are the experienced aspect of a total organismic healing, or reintegration process. Trust and hope are indications that the healing or reintegration or transcendence process has been set in motion. Trust and hope do not cause healing. They are healing. We can look at healing from various perspectives. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
From a psychological standpoint, healing appears as a state of trust and hope. At a physiological level, it is revealed as changes in white-cell count or in some endocrinological changes. At a behavioral level, healing is manifested in growing vigor and relevance of responding. Continued distrust and hopelessness in a patient undergoing any kind of therapy may be regarded as indications that the disintegration process is unremitting. The patient’s acquiescence to determiners of one’s existence is persisting and may culminate in death or total withdrawal into psychosis. Anything a therapist does which invites an unwell person to trust, to be self-revealing, and to have hope that a better life is possible is therapeutic. The onset of these psychological states signifies that the healing process or desirable personality reorganization has already begun. For people in the healing, the helping, and the teaching professions, here is something most neglect. The most valuable experience I have had finding opportunities to grow and to have my growth confirmed, beyond training, that has maintained my growth edge, is contact with colleagues who are of goodwill and before whom I have not be afraid to be myself; that is, be like a patient, a pupil, a teacher, or a groping, bungling, well-intentioned person trying to make sense of what one is doing and wanting to benefit from somebody else’s experience. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
Out of informal friendships and informal workshop meetings, more formal workshops such as those held by the American Academy of Psychotherapist evolved. At Academy workshops 50 or 75 therapists spend five days and nights, at each other—liking one another, hating one another, and sharing with one another what we do, what we do not do, why do we do it, and so on. If they do not have of this sort available to them, I think therapists stultify. If such are not available, then a therapist has to find someone one can trust, to tangle with, in order to avoid becoming smug, pompous, rude, and convinced that one has “the word.” One of the greatest dangers of being a teacher, a psychotherapist, a nurse, a minister, or anybody else involved in trying to help others change is the delusion that one “has made it,” that all-American fantasy. There is no one like a self-disclosing colleague to prod one out of such smug pomposity, and invite one back to the task. Change is an inevitable journey. All things are constantly changing, transforming, becoming, something different. Guiding change so that it is successful is what leadership is all about. Indeed, the measure of a leader may well be one’s capacity to understand and deal successfully with change—to stimulate it, shape it, guide it, manage it, and keep it going in the right direction. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly. Seek the rapids, not the calm of the lake. Take the calm to reflect and prepare for the rapids. If we face permanent white water, we will see the need for and experience change. People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those of us who are doing it. Americans always do the right thing after they try everything else first. When there is a discrepancy between an individual’s actual social identity and one’s virtual one, it is possible for this fact to be known to us before we normal contact one, or to be quite evident when one presents oneself before us. One is a discredited person, and it is mainly one I have been dealing with until now. As suggested, we are likely to give no open recognition to what is discrediting one, and while this work of careful disattention is being done, the situation can become tense, uncertain, and ambiguous for all participants, especially the stigmatized one. The cooperation of a stigmatized person with normal in acting as if one’s known differentness were irrelevant and not attended to is one main possibility in the life of such a person. However, when one is differentness is not immediately apparent, and is not known beforehand (or at least known by one to be known to others), when in fact one’s is a discreditable, and not a discredited, person, then the second main possibility in one’s life is to be found. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
The issue is not that of managing tension generated during social contacts, but rather that of managing information about one’s failing. To display or not to display; to tell or not to tell; to let on or not to let on; to lie or not to lie; and in each case, to whom, how, when, and where. For example, while the mental patient is in the hospital, and when one is with adult members of one’s own family, one is faced with being treated as insane, when one knows this is not just. However, for the ex-mental patient the problem can be quite different; it is not that one must face prejudice against oneself, but rather that one must face unwitting acceptance of oneself of individuals who are prejudiced against persons of the kind one can be revealed to be. Wherever one goes one’s behavior will falsely confirm for the other that they are in the company of what in effect they demand but may discover they have not obtained, namely, a mentally untainted person like themselves. By intention or in effect the ex-mental patient conceals information about one’s real social identity, receiving and accepting treatment based on false suppositions concerning oneself. It is this second general issues, the management of undisclosed discrediting information about self, that I am focusing on in these notes, in brief, “passing.” He concealment of creditable facts—reverse passing—of course occurs, but is not relevant here. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
There are many other examples. Sometimes only a change of viewpoint is needed to convert a tiresome duty into an interesting opportunity. I knew a physician who was careful to refrain from using external symbols of her status, such as car-license tags, her only evidence of profession being an identification carried in her wallet. When faced with a public accident in which medical service was already being rendered the victim, or in which the victim was past helping, she would, upon examining the victim at a distance from the circle around one, quietly go her way without announcing her competence. In these situations, she was what might be called a female impersonator. Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the World. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. The traditional view point is neither scientifically testable nor easily compatible with evolution. Unfortunately, this traditional understanding of the good life, freedom, community, and tolerance is not scientifically testable. Moreover, Dr. Darwin’s theory of evolution caused many to lose their belief in the existence of natures, human or otherwise. The concepts of unchanging essences and of complete discontinuities between every eidos (type) and all others make genuine evolutionary thinking impossible. I agree with those who claim that the essentialist philosophies of Aristotle and Plato are incompatible with evolutionary thinking. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
The implications of moving species from the metaphysical category that can appropriately be characterized in terms of natures t a category for which such characterizations are inappropriate are extensive and fundamental. If species evolve in anything like the way that Dr. Darwin thought they did, then they cannot possibly have the sort of natures that the traditional philosophers claimed they did. If species in general lack natures, then so does Homo Sapiens as a biological species. If Homo sapiens lacks a nature, then no reference to biology can be made to support one’s claims about human nature. Perhaps all people are persons, share the same personhood, and so forth, but such claims must be explicated and defended with no reference to biology. Because so many moral, ethical, and political theories depend on some notion or other of human nature, Dr. Darwin’s theory brought into question these theories. The implications are not entailments. One can always dissociate Homo sapiens from human being, but the result is a much less plausible position. Things remain the same because it is impossible to change very much without changing most of everything. Nothing in the World is so powerful as an idea whose time has come. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
Success is a journey, not a destination. A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step. When we think about the idea that is a person or group dissociates the species-specific designation Homo sapiens from the designation human being, with all of its attendant moral and theological implications (a being might presuppose a creator), then that person or group has a less plausible position. Why? Why should that which we see, hear, feel, taste, or touch (or observe through scientific method) have sway over any cultural debate, since the entire conclusion in the debate rests on a giant “if”—if a species evolved in anything like the way Dr. Darwin thought they did? Well, if naturalistic evolution is the story of how we came to be, then there is no human nature answering to a divine blueprint and no good life that expresses that nature. There are only accidentally formed individual human beings who are free to create whatever versions of happiness they wish. According to the modern view, the good life is the satisfaction of any pleasure or desire that someone freely and autonomously chooses for oneself. The successful person is the individual who has a life of pleasure and can obtain enough consumer goods to satisfy one’s desires. Freedom the right to do what I want, not the power to do what I by nature ought to. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Community gives way to individualism with the result that narcissism—an inordinate sense of self-love and self-centered involvement—is an accurate description of many people’s lives. If I am free to create my own moral Universe and version of the good life, and there is no right or wrong answer to what I should create, then morality—indeed, everything—ultimately exists to make me happy. When a person considers ending a pregnancy prematurely or physician-assisted suicide, the person’s individual rights are all that matter. Questions about virtue or one’s duty to the broader community simply do not arise. However, as a colleague informed me, death by suicide reflects poorly on the community, perhaps even more so than a murder. Tolerance has come to mean that no one is right and no one is wrong and, indeed, the very act of stating that someone else’s views are immoral or incorrect is now take to be intolerant (of course, from this same point of view, it is all right to be intolerant of those who hold to objectively true moral or religious positions). Once the existence of knowable truth in religion and ethics is denied, authority (the right to be believed and obeyed) gives way to rhetoric, the speech writer is replaced by the makeup man, and spirited but civil debate in the culture wars is replaced by politically correct special-interest groups who have noting left but political coercion to enforce their views on others, which has been the job of the TV news media especially in the twenty-first century. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
While the Christian faith clearly teaches that believers are to be involved as good citizens in the state, nevertheless, it is obvious why so many secularists are addicted to politics today because political power is a surrogate for a Higher Power. Once God died in the New World—that is, once the concept of God no longer informed the major idea—generating the centers of society turned secular—there would be turmoil and horrible secular wars unchecked by traditional morality because the state would come to be a surrogate god for many. Finally, individual rights have come to dominate our public discussion of mortal issues. The public square—those aspects of society where all citizens must interface regardless of personal views; for example, public schools, and government—has become unveiled: religious, moral, and political debate therein is no longer informed by a clear, robust vision of the moral life shared by most citizens and taken to be true and rational. Once objective duty, goodness, and virtue were abandoned under the guise of scientism and secularism, the only moral map that could replace objective morality is called minimalistic ethics—anything whatever is morally permissible provided only that you do not harm someone else. Many schools resist change while others avidly seek it. If we do not want our schools to atrophy and die, we need educational leaders who can bring about progress by daring to be change managers. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
Not doing more than the average is what keeps the average down. The World changes faster than the people in it. Individual rights are important, and, for the Christian, they are grounded in the image of God and not in the state. In other words, the Christian believes that human rights are derived from the image of God in us; they do not ultimately come from the state. However, there are more fundamental questions of virtue and duty that are relevant to the overall development of a moral outlook. For example, the abortion debate should not be framed primarily as a debate about the right to life versus the right to choice Basically, it should be discussed in terms of this question: When faced with the question of abortion, what does a woman or a community committed to moral virtue and duty do? When issues of virtue and duty to others is brought to the foreground and rights are relegated to a secondary position in the moral context, the tenor of the debate changes drastically. How then was the Devil dressed? O, he was in his Sunday best; his coast was red, and his breeches were blue, and there was a hole where his tail came through. Until Christians can do a better job of seeing these issues and articulating them in terms of objective duty, the Jack Kevorkians will continue to win the debate (if that is what we should call the media rhetoric that surrounds the framing of moral dilemmas), precisely because the Kevorkians are on the side of individual rights. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
If the only morally relevant question to ask a patient is whether or not one freely and competently chooses physician-assisted suicide, then we are left with no moral categories in which to introduce more basic questions of duty and virtue. And this is where our secular society is at present, given its commitment to scientism that emerged into no small measure because a marginalized and inarticulate church withdrew into privatized religion as she welcomed the Torjan horse of anti-intellectualism within her walls. “I look out on Earth…lo, all is chaos; I look at Heaven…its light is gone; I look out on the mountains…they are trembling; and all the hills are swaying! I look out…lo, the sown land lies a desert; and the towns are all razed by the Lord’s rage. For thus has the Lord said: The whole land shall be desolate…and for this shall the Earth mourn and the Heavens above be black…I have purposed it and will not repent; neither will I turn back from it. At the noise of the horsemen and the archers the land is all in flight, beings taking refuge within woods and caves, and climbing upon the rocks. Every city shall be abandoned, and not a being dwell therein. You ruined creature, what will you do!” reports Jeremiah 4.23-30. From the moment when the divine soul succeeds in taking full possession of a being’s thought and feeling, will and flesh, one’s motives, words, acts, and desires become obscure and mysterious to other beings. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
The World changes faster than the people in it. “For the mountains shall depart, and the hills be removed. However, my kindness shall not depart from thee; neither shall the covenant of my peace be removed, saith the Lord that has mercy on thee!” reports Isaiah 54.10. A ship in port if safe, but that is not what ships are built for. “The foundations of the Earth do shake. Earth breaks to pieces, Earth is split in pieces, Earth shakes to pieces, Earth reels like a drunken man, Earth rocks like a hammock; under the weight of its transgression Earth falls down to rise no more! Life up your eyes to Heaven and look upon the Earth beneath: For the Heavens shall vanish away like smoke. And the Earth shall grow old like a robe; the World itself shall crumble. However, my righteousness shall be forever, and my salvation knows no end,” reports Isaiah 24.18-20. It is hard to speak after the prophets have spoken as they have in these pronouncements. Every word is like the stroke of a hammer. There was a time when we could listen to such words without much feeling and without understanding. There were decades and even centuries when we did not take them seriously. Those days are gone. Today we must take them seriously. For they describe with visionary power what the majority of human beings in our period have experienced, and what, perhaps in a not too distant future, all humankind will experience abundantly: “The foundations of the Earth do shake.” #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
The phrase, “Earth is split in pieces,” is no merely a poetic metaphor for us, but a hard reality. That is the religious meaning of the age into which we have entered. The Bible has always told us of the beginning and the end of the World. It speaks of eternity before the World was founded; it speaks of the time when God laid the foundations of the Earth; it speaks of the shaking of these foundations of the Earth; it speaks of the shaking of these foundations and of the crumbling of the World. In one of the later books, Second Peter, it says that “the Heavens will vanish with a crackling roar, and the elements will melt with fervent heat, the Earth also and the works therein shall be burnt up.” This is no longer vision; it has become physics. We know that in the ground of our Earth, and in the ground of everything in the World that has form and structure, destructive forces are bound. Laying the foundations of the Earth means binding these forces. When the unruly power of the smallest parts of our material World was restrained by cohesive structure, a place was provided in which life could grow and history develop, in which words could be heard and love be felt, and in which truth could be discovered and the Eternal adored. All this was possible because the fiery chaos of the beginning was transformed into the fertile soil of the Earth. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
However, out of fertile soil of the Earth a being was generated and nourished, who was able to find the key to the foundation of all beings. That being was human. One has discovered the key which can unlock the forces of the ground, those forces which were bound when the foundations of the Earth were laid. One has begun to use this key. One has subjected the basis of life and thought and will to one’s will. And one’s willed destruction. For the sake of destruction one used the forces of the ground; by one’s thought and one’s work one unlocked and untied them. That is why the foundations of the Earth rock and shake in our time. Oh God of the Trinity, Whose Name is ineffable, Who purifies the cavern of human’s heart from vices, and makest it whiter than the snow; bestow on us Thy compassions; renew in our inward parts, we pray Thee, Thy Holy Spirit, by Whom we may be able to show forth Thy praise; that being strengthened by the righteous and princely Spirit, we may attain a place in the Heavenly Jerusalem; through Jesus Christ our Lord. An old man is not necessarily much wiser than a young one. Wisdom cannot be measured by the calendar. We should not respect the years, but their fruit. However, we are still supposed to respect our elders. If a being has found wisdom at the cost of one’s years, we should respect one. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
However, we should not fall into the concealed if persuasive fallacy of honoring advice when it comes from an elder and you know it is bad or unhealthy. When thinking of the self-actualized person, it also gives rise in many minds to the picture of a creature belonging to an extinct species, a boring creature with pompous speech and portentous manner. Yet the lack of the ability to laugh at oneself—and certainly the lack of any sense of humour at all—characterizes fools and not the self-actualized. “ And then shall my revelations which I have caused to be written by my servant john be unfolded in the eyes of all the people. Remember, when ye see these things, ye shall know that the time is at hand that they shall be made manifest in very deed. Therefore, when ye shall receive this record ye may know that the work of the Father has commenced upon all the face of the land. Therefore, repent all ye ends of the Earth, and come unto me, and believe in my gospel, and be baptized in my name; for one that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but one that believeth not shall be damned; and signs shall follow them that believe in my name. And blessed is one that is found faithful unto my name at the last day, for one shall be lifted up to dwell in the kingdom prepared for one from the foundation of the World. And behold it is I that hath spoken it. Amen,” reports Ether 4.16-19. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
O Supreme moving cause, may I always be subordinate to thee, be dependent upon thee, be found in the path where thou doest walk, and where thy Spirit moves, take heed of estrangement from thee, of becoming insensible to thy love. Thou dost not move beings like stones, but dost endue them with life, not to enable them to move without thee, but in submission to thee, the first mover. O Lord, I am astonished at the difference between my receivings and my deservings, between the state I am now in and my past gracelessness, between the Heaven I a bound for and the hell I merit. Who made me to differ, but thee? for I was no more ready to receive Christ than others; I could not have begun to love thee hadst thou not first loved me, or been willing unless thou hadst first made me so. O that such a crown should fit the head of such a sinner! such high advancement be for an unfruitful person! such high advancement be for an unfruitful person! such joys for so vile a rebel! Infinite wisdom cast the design of salvation into the mould of purchase and freedom; let wrath deserved be written on the door of hell, but the free gift of grace on the gate of Heaven. I know that my sufferings are the result of my sinner, but in Heaven both shall cease; grant me to attain this Heaven and be done with sailing, and may the gales of thy mercy blow me safely into harbour. Let thy love draw me nearer to thyself, wean me from sin, mortify me to this World, and make me ready for my departure hence. Secure me by thy grace as I sail across this stormy sea. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
ROCKLIN TRAILS
FINAL HOME REMAINS | Rocklin, CA | Mid $400,000’s

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Come to Me and You Will Find Rest in Your Souls–I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End!
We often worry about what we will be tomorrow, but do not take into account that we are somebody today. Life should be a place of learning suffused with excitement, engagement, passion, challenge, creativity, and joy. When we are in the minority, that is when the test of courage comes; when we are in the majority is when the test of acceptance comes. It is our destiny and the destiny of everything in the World that we must come to an end. Very end that we experience in nature and humankind speaks to us with a loud voice: you also will come to an end! It may reveal itself in the farewell to a place where we have lived for a long time, the separation from the fellowship of intimate associates, the death of someone near to us. Or it may become apparent to us in the failure of a work that gave meaning to us, the end of a whole period of life, the approach of old age, or even in the melancholy side of nature visible in autumn. All this tells us: you will also come to an end. Whenever we are shaken by this voice reminding us of our end, we ask anxiously—what does it mean that we have a beginning and an end, that we come from the darkness of the not yet, and rush ahead towards the darkness of the no more? When Augustine asked this question, he began his attempt to answer it with a prayer. And it is right to do so, because praying means elevating oneself to the eternal. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
In fact, there is no other way of judging time than to see it in the light of the eternal. In order to judge something, one must be partly within it, partly out of it. If we were totally within time, we would not be able to elevate ourselves in prayer, meditation and thought, to the eternal. We would be children of time like all other creatures and could not ask the question of the meaning of time. However, as human beings we are aware of the eternal to which we belong and from which we are estranged by the bondage of time. We speak of time in three ways or modes—the past, present, and future. Every child is aware of them, but no wise being has ever penetrated their mystery. We become aware of them when we hear a voice telling us: you also will come to an end. It is the future that awakens us to the mystery of time. Time runs from the beginning to the end, but our awareness of times goes in the opposite direction. It starts with the anxious anticipation of the end. In the light of the future we see the past and present. So let us first consider our going into the future and towards the end that is the last point that we can anticipate in out future. The image of the future produces contrasting feelings in beings. The expectation of the future gives one a feeling of joy. We may even learn to recapture the will to laugh and the art of laughing at will. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
It is a great thing to have a future in which one can actualize one’s possibilities, in which one can experience the abundance of life, in which one can create something new—be it new work, a new way of life, or the regeneration of one’s own being. Courageously one goes ahead towards the new, especially in the earlier part of one’s own life. However, this feeling struggles with other ones: the anxiety about what is hidden in the future, the ambiguity of everything it will bring us, the shortness of its duration that decreases with every year of our life and becomes shorter the nearer we come to the unavoidable end. And finally the end itself, with its impenetrable darkness and the threat that one’s whole existence in time will be judged as a failure. Therefore, it may be a good idea to think before one speaks, and read before one thinks. This may give one something to think about that we did not make up ourselves—a wise move at any age, but most especially at seventeen, when one is at the greatest danger of coming to annoying conclusions. We want to be in the pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in the pursuit of us. The goal is to fully realize the wealth of sympathy, kindness, and generosity hidden in our souls. The effort of every true education should be to unlock that treasure. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
How do beings, how do you, react to this image of the future with its hope and threat and inescapable end? Probably most of us react by looking at the immediate future, anticipating it, working for it, hoping for it, being anxious about it, while cutting off from our awareness the future which is farther away, and above all, by cutting off from our consciousness the end, the last moment of our future. Perhaps we could not live without doing so most of our time. However, perhaps we will not be able to die if we always do so. And if one is not able to die, is one really about to live? How do we react if we become aware of the inescapable end contained in our future? Are we able to bear it, to take its anxiety into a courage that faces ultimate darkness? Or are we thrown into utter hopelessness? Do we hope against hope, or do we repress our awareness of the end because we cannot stand it? Repressing the consciousness of our end expresses itself in several ways. Many try to do so by putting the expectation of a long life between now and the end. For them it is decisive that the end be delayed. Even old people who are near the end do this, for they cannot endure the fact that the end will not be delayed much longer. Many people realize this deception and hope for a continuation of this life after death. They expect an endless future in which they may achieve or possess what has been denied them in this life. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
This attitude that we will achieve our hearts desires in the after life is a prevalent attitude about the future, and also a very simple one. It denies that there is an end. It refuses to accept that we are creatures, that we come from the eternal ground of time and return to the eternal ground of time and have received a limited span of time as our time. It replaces eternity by endless future. However, endless future is without a final aim; it repeats itself and could well be described as an image of hell. This is not the Christian way of dealing with the end. The Christian message says the eternal stands above past and future. “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.” The Christian message acknowledges that time runs towards an end, and that we move towards the end of that time which is our time. Many people—but not the Bible—speak loosely of the “hereafter” or the “life after death.” Even in our liturgies eternity is translated by “World without end.” However, the World, by its very nature, is that which comes to an end. If we want to speak in truth without foolish, wishful thinking, we should speak about the eternal that is neither timelessness nor endless time. The mystery of the future is answered in the eternal of which we may speak in images taken from time. However, if we forget that the images are images, we fall into absurdities and self-deceptions. There is no time after time, but there is eternity above time. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
Time is like a jigsaw puzzle. Each edge piece of a puzzle interlocks with two others to form the puzzle’s framework and give structure and support to the puzzle as a whole. Each piece has a unique design and cut that ensures just the right place to fit within the puzzle. Each morning, people from the edge pieces that interlock to create a safe environment and give support to one another and the whole. Each morning, they provide just the right place for every individual to fit safely and securely. The community members are strength and stability, and like the edge pieces, they do not stand alone in this responsibility. There are always others to support and assist, ensuring that every person has a place. The spirits temper the movements of bodily parts. Some infectious diseases are chiefly in the spirits, and not so much in the humours. We have complex and contradictory feelings toward the freedom and independence and self-determination of the individuals and countries: we desire these and are proud of the past support we have given to such tendencies, and yet we are often frightened by what they may mean. We tend to value and respect the dignity and worth of each individual, yet when we are frightened, we move away from this direction. Suppose we presented ourselves in some such fashion, openly and transparently, in our foreign relations. We would be attempting to be the nation which we truly are, in all our complexity and even contradictoriness. What would be the result? #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
If we, as a country, were more open and transparent in our foreign relations, it seems the results would be similar to the experiences of a client when one is more truly that which he or she is. Let us look at some of the probable outcomes. We would be much more comfortable, because we would have nothing to hide. We could focus on the problem at hand, rather than spending our energies to prove that we are moral or consistent. We could use all of our creative imagination in solving the problem, rather than in defending ourselves. We could openly advance both our selfish interests, and our sympathetic concern for others, and let these conflicting desires find the balance which is acceptable to us as a people. We could freely change and grow in our leadership position, because we would not be bound by rigid concepts of what we have been, must, ought to be. We would find that we were much less feared, because others would be less inclined to suspect what lies behind the façade. We would, by our own openness, tend to bring forth openness and realism on the part of others. We would tend to work out the solutions of World problems on the basis of the real issues involved, rather than in terms of the facades being worn by the negotiating parties. In short what I am suggesting by this fantasied example is that nations and organizations might discover, as have individuals, that it is a richly rewarding experience to be what one deeply is. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
I am suggesting that this view contains the seeds of a philosophical approach to all of life, that it is more than a trend observed in the experience of clients. Feeling rules are what guide emotion work by establishing the sense of entitlement or obligation that governs emotional exchanges. This emotion system works privately, often free of observation. It is a vital aspect of deep private bonds and also affords a way of talking about them. It is a way of describing how—as parents and children, wives and husbands, friends and lovers—we intervene in feelings in order to shape them. What are feeling rules? How do we know they exist? How do they bear on deep acting? We may address these questions by focusing on the pinch between “what I do feel” and “what I should feel,” for at this spot we get our best view of emotional convention. Now, when we take a closer look at the whole person, we find that there are six basic aspects in our lives as individual human beings—six things inseparable from every human life. These together and in interplay make up human nature. Thought (images, concepts, judgments, inferences), feeling (sensation, emotion), choice (will, decision, character), body (action, interaction with the physical World), social context (personal and structural relations to others), and soul (the factor that integrates all of the above to form one life. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
Simply put, every human being thinks (has a thought life), feels, chooses, interacts with one’s body and its social context, and (more of less) integrates all of the foregoing as parts of one life. These are the essential factors in a human being, and nothing essential to human life falls outside of them. The ideal of the spiritual life in the Christian understanding is one where all of the essential parts of the human self are effectively organized around Go, as they are restored and sustained by him. Spiritual formation in Christ is the process leading to that ideal end, and its result is love of God with all of the hearts, soul, mind, and strength, and of the neighbor as oneself. The human self is then fully integrated under God. The salvation or deliverance of the believer in Christ is essentially holistic or whole-life. David the psalmist, speaking of his own experience but prophetically expressing the understanding of Jesus the Messiah, said, “I bless the LORD who gives me counsel; in the night also my heart instructs me. I keep the LORD always before me; because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved. Therefore my heart is glad, and my soul rejoices; my body also rests secure,” reports Psalm 16.7-9. Note how many aspects of the self are explicitly involved in this passage: the mind, the will, the feeling, the soul, and the body. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
A major part of understanding spiritual formation in the Christian traditions is to follow closely the way the biblical writings repeatedly and emphatically focus on the various essential dimensions of the human being and their role in life as a whole. We will draw from spiritual understanding the incentive to keep on with our quest and the courage to set higher goals. To learn from God in this total-life immersion is ow we seek first His kingdom and His righteousness. The outcome is that we increasingly are able to do all things, speaking or acting, as I Christ were doing them. As apprentices of Christ we are not learning how to do some special religious activity, but how to live every moment of our live from the reality of God’s kingdom. I am learning how to live my actual life as Jesus would if He were me. No matter what my profession is, I am in full-time Christian service no less than someone who earns his or her living in a specifically religious role. Jesus stands beside me and teaches me in all I do to live in God’s World. He shows me how, in every circumstance, to reside in His word and thus be a genuine apprentice of His—His disciple indeed. This enables me to find the reality of God’s World everywhere I may be, and thereby to escape from enslavement to sin and evil. We become able to do what we know to be good and right, even when it is humanly impossible. Our lives and words become constant testimony of the reality of God. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
When, for example, an architect facing a difficult architectural job, one must know how to integrate it into the kingdom of God as much as someone attempting to win another to Christ or preparing a lesson for a congregation. Until we are clear on this, we will have missed Jesus’ connection between life and God and will automatically exclude most of our everyday lives from the domain of faith and discipleship. Jesus lived most of His life on Earth as a blue-collar worker, someone we might describe today as an independent contractor. In His vocation He practiced everything He later taught about in life in the kingdom. It is important to move away from derogatory language against others, calling them twits, jerks, or idiots, and increasingly mesh with the respect and endearment for persons that naturally flows from God’s way. This in turn transforms all of my dealings with others into tenderness and makes the usual coldness and brutality of human relations, which lays a natural foundation for unspeakable actions, simply unthinkable. Our mind and heart will keep coming back to God’s grace. The grace of God is so inexhaustible and at times overwhelming. “Grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be glory both now and forever more! Amen,” reports 2 Peter 3.18. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
Growing in the grace of God allows one to become acquainted with elements of our experience which have in the past been denied to awareness as too threatening, too damaging to the structure of the self. One finds one’s experiencing these feelings fully, completely, in the relationship, so that for the moment one is one’s fear, or one’s anger, or one’s tenderness, or one’s strength. And as one lives these widely varied feelings, in all their degrees of intensity, one discovers that one has experienced oneself, that one is all these feelings. One finds that one’s behavior changing in constructive fashion in accordance with one’s newly experienced self. One approaches the realization that one no longer needs to fear what experience may hold, but can welcome it freely as a part of one’s changing and developing self. However, it seems to me that the good life is not any fixed state. It is not, in my estimation, a state of virtue, or contentment, or nirvana, or happiness. It is not a condition in which the individual is adjusted, or fulfilled, or actualized. It is not a state of drive-reduction, or tension-reduction, or homeostasis. I believe that all of these terms have been used in ways which imply that if one or several of these states is achieved, then the goal of life have been achieved. Certainly, for many people happiness, or adjustment, are seen as states of being which are synonymous with the good life. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
Social scientists have frequently spoken of the reduction of tension, or the achievement of homeostasis or equilibrium as if these states constituted the goal of the process of living. So it is with a certain amount of surprise and concern that I realize that my experience supports none of these definitions. If I focus on the experience of those individuals who seem to have evidenced the greatest degree of movement during the spiritual and therapeutic relationship, and who, in the years following this relationship, appear to have made and to be making real progress toward the good life, then it seems to me that they are not adequately described at all by any of these terms which refer to fixed states of being. I believe they would consider themselves insulted if they were described as adjusted, and they would regard it as false if they were described as happy or contented or even actualized. As I have known them I would regard it as most inaccurate to say that all their dive tensions have been reduced, or that they are in a state of homeostasis. So I am forced to ask myself whether there is any way in which I can generalize about their situation, any definition which I can give of the good life which would seem to fit the facts as I have observed them. I find this not at all easy, and what follows is stated very tentatively. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction, not a destination. The direction which constitutes the good life is that which is selected by the total organism, when there is psychological freedom to move in any direction. This organismically selected direction seems to have certain discernible general qualities which appear to be the same in a wide variety of unique individuals. The good life, from the point of view of my experience, is the process of movement in a direction which the human organism selects when it is inwardly free to move in any direction, and the general qualities of this selected direction appear to have a certain universality. Many people, however, seem to be morally bankrupt—completely devoid of any decent moral qualities. And it is just about the worst thing you can say about a person. A lot of people are also spiritually bankrupt. Spiritual bankruptcy is a most absolute state. It means we have nothing to give to God. Salvation is a gift from God; it is entirely by grace through faith—not by works. People living the good life are righteous and the process seems to involve an increasing openness to the experience. It is the polar opposite of defensiveness. Defensiveness is an organism’s response to experiences which are perceived or anticipated as threatening, as incongruent with the individual’s existing picture of oneself, or of oneself in relationship to the World. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
These threatening experiences are temporarily rendered harmless by being distorted in awareness, or being denied to awareness. I quite literally cannot see, with accuracy, those experiences, feelings, reactions in myself which are significantly at variance with the picture of myself which I already possess. A large part of the process of therapy is the continuing discovery by the client that one is experiencing feelings and attitudes which heretofore one has not been able to be aware of, which one has not been able to own as being a part of oneself. If a person could be fully open to one’s experience, however, every stimulus—whether originating within the organism or in the environment—would be freely relayed through the nervous system without being distorted by any defensive mechanism. There would be no need of the mechanism of subception whereby the organism is forewarned of any experience threatening to the self. On the contrary, whether the stimulus was the impact of a configuration of form, color, or sound in the environment on the sensory nerves, or a memory trace from the past, or visceral sensation of fear or pleasure or disgust, the person would be living it, would have it completely available to awareness. Thus, one aspect of this process which I am naming the good life appears to be a movement away from the pole of defensiveness toward the pole of openness to experience. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
The individual living the good life is becoming more able to listen to oneself, to experience what is going on within oneself. One is more open to one’s feelings of fear and discouragement and pain. One is also more open to one’s feelings of courage, and tenderness, and awe. One is free to live one’s feelings subjectively, as they exist in one, and also free to be aware of these feelings. One is more able fully to live the experiences of one’s organism rather than shutting them off. Almighty and everlasting God, Who hast made known the Incarnation of Thy Word by the testimony of a glorious star, which when the wise men be held, they adored Thy Majesty with gifts; grant that the star of Thy righteousness may always appear in our hearts, and our treasure consist in giving thanks to Thee; through Jesus Christ our Lord. O God, the Enlightener of all nations, grant Thy people to enjoy perpetual peace; and pour into our hearts that radiant light which Thou didst shed into the minds of the wise men; thought Jesus Christ Our Lord. “Behold, O Lord, thou hast smitten us because of our iniquity, and hast driven us forth, and for these many years we have been in the wilderness; nevertheless, thou hast been merciful unto us. O Lord, look upon me in pity, and turn away thine anger from this thy people, and suffer not that they shall go forth across this raging deep in darkness; but behold these things which I have molten out of rock,” reports Ether 3.3. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
CRESLEIGH MEADOWS AT PLUMAS RANCH
Plumas Lake, CA | from the mid $300’s
Coming Soon!
Cresleigh homes gives emphasis to detail and authenticity in their designs, remaining true to a style architecturally, while updating floor plans to create a modern, comfortable home. This combination of classic architectural style and easy livability add up to solid, long-lasting value. Today, there is a return to traditionalism and pure styles. People want the look and feel of an older home with the amenities and comforts of modern floor planning. Elaborate master bedroom suites, cozy country kitchens, libraries, media centers, and great rooms are all part of what makes a plan livable.
Cresleigh Meadows is coming soon! Found just north of Feather River Boulevard, Cresleigh Meadows is home of the largest neighborhood in Plumas Ranch as well as the popular Bear River Park. With four floor plans available, ranging from approximately 2,000 – 3,500 square feet offering, three to five bedrooms, we are certain you will find the home that fits your needs and lifestyle. Popular design elements include open floor plans, large kitchen islands, and flex spaces are staples in Cresleigh homes. Multi-generational living options also available in select homes. https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-meadows-at-plumas-ranch/

#CresleighHomes
There is One Place Where I Can Find Out Who I am and What I am Going to Become—And that is the Soul!
The cockatiels were singing a celestial melody in the early afternoon. Their rhythmic ditty mingled with the soft sweetness of the just-blooming Winter Jasmine, Snowdrops, and the air so crisp and cool you could snap it with your fingers. The lush shade of the evergreen trees was offset by the autumnal flashed of red, orange and yellow. Meghan breathed in the air that was full of the promise of the coming Winter. In the single matter of learning prayer alone one will encounter all sorts of obstacles within oneself and difficulties without. If one places oneself under the training of an expert preceptor, whose long experience in this matter and natural gift for guiding others makes one’s advice mentally enlightening and practically useful, the hardships will be much more easily and quickly overcome. The beginner cannot take one’s lessons from the skies. Even if only to impart the right atmosphere and inculcate the right ideas, one has to find a teacher. When they need to speak, you listen; when they need to listen, you speak; when they need to question, you answer; and when they need to answer, you question. Knowing when is just a part of what makes one a great teacher. Teachers inspire dreams, shape lives, and give us hope for the future. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
The use of a teacher is, firstly, suggestive. One’s influence is a definite assistance to incline us to travel along the proper path. It is, secondly, protective, for under one’s constant guidance we learn to be weary of pitfalls. More people need to spend as much time looking into their soul, as they spend on social media. When the lights go out in our brains, the Dark Ages are coming again! The illuminate stands on the very apex of the pyramid of knowledge. That is why one can understand the position of all others and sympathize with them, too. The being of the instinctivists lives the past of the species, as the being of the behaviorists lives the present of one’s social system. The former is a machine that can only produce social patterns of the present. Instinctivism and behaviorism have one basic premise in common: that beings have no psyche with its own structure and its own laws. For instinctivism, the same sense holds true. Some psychologist may criticize others dealing with humans (Humanpsychologen) who claim that anything psychic can only be explained psychologically, for instance, on the basis of psychological premises. (The “only” is a slight distortion of their position of the sake of a better argument). #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
On the contrary, if there is an area where we certainly cannot find the explanation for psychic events and experiences, it is the area of the psyche itself; this is so for the same reason that we cannot find an explanation for digestion in the digestive processes, but in those special ecological exposed a number of organisms to selective pressures which made them assimilate not only inorganic foodstuffs, but also those of an organic nature. In the same way psychical processes are also achievements which have come about as a result of selective pressures of life—and species—preserving value. Their explanation is in every sense pre-psychological. Put in simpler language, it is maintained that one can explain psychological data by the evolutionary process alone. The crucial point here is what is meant by “explain.” If, for instance, one wants to know how the effect of fear is possible as the result of the evolution of the brain from the lowest to the highest animals, then this is a task for those scientists who investigate the evolution of the brain. However, if one wants to explain why a person is frightened, the data on evolution will not contribute much to the answer: the explanation must be essentially a psychological one. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
Perhaps the person is threatened by a stronger enemy, or is coping with one’s own repressed aggression, or suffers from a sense of powerlessness, or a paranoid element in one makes one feel persecuted, or—many other factors that alone or in combination may explain one’s fright. To want to explain the fright of a particular person by evolutionary process is plainly futile. There is a premise that the only approach to the study of human phenomena is the evolutionary one, means that we understand the psychical process in a being exclusively by knowing how, in the process of evolution, one became what one is. Similarly, it is suggested that digestive processes are to be explained in terms of conditions as they existed hundreds of millions of years ago. If the physician was concerned with the evolution of digestion, rather than with the causes of the particular symptom in this particular patient, could a physician dealing with disturbances of the digestive tract help one’s patient? For some, evolution becomes the only science, and absorbs all other sciences dealing with humans. It seems that if humans understand the evolutionary process which made them become what they are now, humans understand themselves only and sufficiently. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
In spite of the great differences between instinctivistic and behavioristic theory, they have a common basic orientation. They both exclude the person, the behaving being, from their field of vision. Whether beings are the product of conditioning, or the product of terrestrial evolution, one is exclusively determined by conditions outside oneself; of has no part in one’s own life, no responsibility, and not even a trace of freedom. Humans are puppets, controlled by strings—instinct or conditioning. However, this theory holds some weight with corrupt politicians, the TV News media, the evil wealthy, and corrupt fractions of law enforcement influences individuals to spy on their neighbors, act out, and set people they do not like up, in lieu of dropping criminal charges against the aggressor, and/or illegally giving the aggressor government benefits and cash payments to target certain innocent individuals. Essentially, these aggressors are no longer operating through their own will, they are now puppets and slaves controlled by a tyrannical faction of beings or an organization. At this level, sacrifice is an admission of the pitiful finitude and powerlessness of humans in the face of mysterium tremendum (a mystery before which humanity both trembles and is fascinated, is both repelled and attracted. Thus, God can appear both as wrathful or awe-inspiring, on the one hand, and as gracious and loveable, on the other) of the Universe, the immensity of what transcends one and negates one’s significance. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
At this level sacrifice affirms reality, bows to it, and attempts to conciliate it. Sacrifice, then, is not an irrational aberration, but a basic human reflex of truth, a correct expiation of natural guilt. One basic motive of society is the symbolic expiation of guilt, which we see as a very complex phenomenon grounded in the truth of the human condition. Guilt is one of the serious motives of humans, not to be tossed off lightly. If we are to understand the happenings of history, these happenings have to be seen as resulting from the composite of human motives, not simply from the aberrations of power of the elusiveness of a dream. The new technology and the promise of abundance are the dream that keeps humankind mesmerized; oppressiveness of tyranny would not have been tolerated but for the beneficial goods that flowed out of the megamachines. However, people bear tyranny because of its rewards not only to their stomachs but also their souls. They support tyranny by willingly marching off to war not only because that reduces the frustration they feel at home toward authority, not only because it enables them to project their hatreds on the enemy, but also because it expiates their guilt. How else explain the parents that we read about during each war who, when told about the tragic death of their son or daughter, have expressed regret that they had not more to give? #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
This age-old essence of primitive gift giving; it chills us only by the nature of the sacrifice that they make so willingly and by the secondhand god to whom it is offered—the nation-state. However, it is not cynical or callous: in guilt one gives with a melting heart and with choking tears because one is guilty, one is transcended by the unspeakable majesty and superlativeness of the natural and cultural World, against which one feels realistically humbled; by giving one draws oneself into that power and merges one’s existence with it. Furthermore—and this takes us deeper into the problem—sacrifice and scapegoating are not technical tricks to overcome anxiety. The spilling of blood, because it is a life substance, may be a magical effort to grow crops. Of course. In one of its forms scapegoating is also magical in origin: a ritual is performed over a goat, by which all the tribe’s uncleanliness (sin) is transferred to the animal; it is then driven off or killed, leaving the village clean. It is the same way that Jesus was done and Queen Akasha in Anne Rice’s Queen of the Damned. This act not only represented an arrangement of life but a real spiritual purge that qualifies one to triumph over death. I doubt that enslaved people were sacrificed at an upper-class feast of the Maya merely to give it a properly genteel elegance. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
It is true that primitives have often spilled blood in order simply to gloat and strut over an enemy; but I think the motive is more elemental than merely to give to feasts a pleasant veneer. Humans spill blood because it makes their hearts glad and fills out their organisms with a sense of vital power; ceremoniously killing captives is a way of affirming power over life, and therefore over death. The sacrificer may seem nonchalant about it, but this is because beings like to experience their power effortlessly and smoothly, as though they were accustomed by nature to dispose of the strongest force she had to offer. (Detroit car makers who sell power and speed—with their business person’s realism about the truths of life—have long known this.) Also, consider gift giving, it relates not only to guilty but fundamentally to power. The sacrifice is a gift, a gift to the gods which is directed to the flow of power, to keeping the life force moving there where it has been blocked by sin. With the sacrifice humans feeds the gods to give them more power so that one may have more. The sacred food has the strength of life. The sacrifice of living things adds visible life power to the stream of life; the more living things sacrificed, the more extravagant release of power, and so forth. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
When a king died, the ancient custom of sacrificing wives, enslaved people, and cavaliers was not only that they should continue to serve the master in the in the invisible World—that was a matter of course. What they achieved by suffering and dying together as living sacrifices was to bring extravagant new life into being. The sacrifice was a means for establishing a communion with the invisible World, making a circle on the flow of power, a bridge over which it could pass. So, for example, in the simple building sacrifice when one took possession of a piece of ground: the sacrifice expulsed the demonic spirits in the soil and released powers that literally purged the place and made building upon it safe. Now this idea of flux and flow of power may not be so hard for us to understand today—as we saw Aaliyah was killed in a plane crash on 25 August 2001, and the 9 September 2001, the twin towers were taken down and nearly 4,000 lives were immediately lost. Some believe it is evidence of a primitive culture in American practicing rituals. The Nazi experience is also a grim refresher course on the metaphysics of mass slaughter. Nazis were animated by a spiritual concept: they had a whole philosophy of blood and soil which contained the belief that death nourishes life. We recognize the familiar archaic idea that the sacrifice of life makes life flow more plentifully. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
Because of this idea that death mystically replenishes life and the birth of insurance companies for people and other assets, it has required insurance companies to go a step further to prevent the loss of life by offering Kidnap and Ransom Insurance that also covers extortion. This is an effort to keep people from sacrificing innocent lives to collect a cash payout. These insurance companies offer for $2,000, for instance, $5 million in coverage to pay to have a person who is illegally detained released, pay their ransom or pay extortion demands. Furthermore, a death potlatch is what we discussed before when stated that people think death mystically replenishes life. Well, Dr. Karl Brandt, plenipotentiary in charge of all medical activities in the Reich, when asked about his attitude toward the killing of human beings in the course of medical experiments, replied, “Do you think that one can obtain any worthwhile fundamental results without a definite toll of lives? The same goes for technologic development. You cannot build a great bridge, a gigantic building—you cannot establish a speed record without deaths!” In similar vein, many SS men took a curious pride in the fact that even in peacetime they had many fatalities during “realistic” military training. Human bodies were encased in the concrete fortifications and bunkers, as though such bodies could give strength to inanimate matter. And a man was encased in the concrete of the original Bay Bride in Oakland, California USA, which was recently demolished. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
The psychological question is for most disputants the only question. When your ordinary doctor of divinity has proved to one’s own satisfaction that an altogether unique faculty called “conscious” must be postulated to tell us what is right and what is wrong; or when your popular-science enthusiast has proclaimed that “apriorism” (the doctrine that knowledge rests upon principles that are self-evident to reason or are presupposed by experience in general) is an exploded superstition, and that our moral judgments have gradually resulted from the teaching of the environment, each of these persons thinks that ethics is settled and nothing more is to be said. The familiar pair of names, Intuitionist and Evolutionist, so commonly used now to connote all possible differences in ethical opinion, really refer to the psychological questions alone. The discussion of this question hinges so much upon particular details that it is impossible to enter upon it all within the limits of this paper. So many of our human ideals must have arisen from the association with acts of simple bodily pleasures and reliefs from pain. Association with many remote pleasures will unquestionably make a thing significant of good ness in our minds; and the more vaguely the goodness is conceived of, the more mysterious will its source appear to be. However, it is surely impossible to explain all our sentiments and preferences in this simple way. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
The more minutely psychological studies human nature, the more clearly it finds there traces of secondary affections, relating the impressions of the environment with one another and with our impulses in quite different ways from those mere associations of coexistence and succession which are practically all that pure empiricism can admit. Take the love of stimulants; take bashfulness, acrophobia (the terror of high places), motion sickness syndrome, haemophobia (to faint at the sight of blood), the susceptibility to musical sounds; take the emotion of the comical, the passion for poetry, for mathematics, or for metaphysics—no one of these things can be wholly explained by either association or utility. They go with other things that can be so explained, no doubt; and some of them are prophetic of future utilities, since there is nothing in us for which some use may not be found. However, their origin is in incidental complications to our cerebral structure, a structure whose original features arose with no reference to the perception of such discords and harmonies as these. Well, a vast number of our moral perceptions also are certainly of this secondary and brain-born kind. They deal with directly felt fitness between things, and often fly in the teeth of all the prepossessions of habit and presumptions of utility. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
The moment you get beyond the coarser and more commonplace moral maxims, The Decalogues (The Ten Commandments) and Poor Richard’s Almanacs (a collection of periodicals, which contain humor, information, and proverbial wisdom), you fall into schemes and positions which to the eye of common-sense are fantastic and overstrained. The sense for abstract justice which some person have is as eccentric a variation, from the natural-history point of view, as is the passion for music or for the higher philosophical consistencies which consumes the soul of others. The feeling of the inward dignity of certain spiritual attitudes, peace, serenity, simplicity, veracity; and of the essential vulgarity of others, as querulousness, anxiety, egoistic fussiness, and so forth, are quite inexplicable except by an innate preference of the more ideal attitude for its own pure sake. The nobler thing tastes better, and what is all that we can say. Experience of consequences may truly teach us what things are wicked, but what have consequences to do with what is mean and vulgar? If a being has shot his wife’s paramour, by reason of what subtile repugnancy in things is that we are so disgusted when we hear that the wife and the husband have made it up and are living comfortably together again? Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a World in which Messrs (plural of MR. for example, Mr. Hollingsworth, Mr. Toth, Mr. Wallace). #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
Francois Marie Charles Fourier, Edward Bellamy, and William Morris’s utopias should all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torture, what except a specifical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain? To what, once more, but subtile brain-born feelings of discord can be due all these recent protests against the entire race-tradition of retributive justice? –I refer to Tolstoi with his ideas of non-resistance, to Mr. Bellamy with his substitution of the punitive ideal. All these subtileties of the moral sensibility go as much beyond what can be ciphered out from the laws of association as the delicacies of sentiment possible between a pair of young lovers go beyond such precepts of the etiquette to be observed during engagement as are printed in manuals of social form. No! Purely inward forces are certainly at work here. All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
Our ideals have certainly many sources. They are not all explicable as signifying corporeal pleasures to be gained, and pains to be escaped. And for having s constantly perceived this psychological fact, we must applaud the intuitionist school. Whether or not such applause must be extended to that school’s other characteristics will appear as we take up more questions. The vital spirit has a special affinity for the body; indeed, it abhors leaving the flesh, because it has no connaturals neat at hand. It may, perhaps, rush to the extremities of the body, to meet something that it loves, but it is loth to go forth. Novital spirits have two appetites. They desire to multiply. Unhappily finding nothing like: One drop of water moves towards another, and flame to flame; but much more does this appear in the escape of the spirit into the external air, because it is not carried to a particle like itself, but to a very World of connaturals…the going forth and escape of the spirit into the air is a double action arising partly from the appetite of the spirit, and partly from the appetite of the air; for the common air is a needy thing, and seizes everything with avidity, as spirits, odours, rays, sounds and the like. The vital spirit is held to exercise two functions that nonvital spirits do not reveal. First, it seems to play a controlling role in the governing the growth and decay of body parts and tissues. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
The lifeless spirit maintains itself by feeding on adjacent parts. The amount and rate of its feeding determine the time span of its host’s existence. Since inanimate things exist far longer than animate beings, the vital spirit, present only in things living, is in part responsible for the body’s growth, sustenance, and corruption. It disturbs and restrains and intensifies and increases the processes involved in the consumption or depredation of the human body and the repair or refreshment thereof. In the most direct of ways, then, the vital spirit is vital. The vital spirit, in the second place, seems to be the efficient cause of all actions and functions undertaken by the body’s principal organs and members. Digestion is the function of the stomach, seeing that of the eye, and so on. The action in each case is properly that of the organ and member involved. They can be regarded as the material cause of the action. However, no action, no matter how specific to a member, would come if the vital spirit were not present: The actions or functions of the individual members follow the nature of the members themselves; as attraction, retention, digestion, assimilation, separation, excretion, perspiration, and even the sense itself, depend upon the properties of the several organs, as the stomach, liver, heart, spleen, gall, brain, eye, ear, and the rest. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
However, yet none of these actions would ever be set in motion without the vigour, presence, and heat of the vital spirit. Thus, the vital spirit is some sort of force-carrying, or force-bearing, substance without which no animal or human activity is possible. Perhaps the notion of “vehicle” fits here. If so, we are reminded of the efficient cause and that it is nothing else than the vehicle of form. So spiritual transformation, the renovation of the human heart, is an inescapable human problem with no human solution. It is something that can be learned from a survey of World history, World cultures, and past and present efforts to deal with human life by religion, education, law, and medicine. And when we take into consideration the many techniques that are taught in the various psychologies and competing spiritualities of our own day, this observation unfortunately stands firm. Genuine transformation of the whole person into the goodness and power seen in Jesus and his Father, God—the only transformation adequate to the human self-remains the necessary goal of human life. However, it is possessed beyond the reach of programs of inner transformation that draw merely on the human spirit—even when the human spirit is itself treated and ultimately divine. And spiritual formation has now presented itself as a hopeful possibility for responding to the crying, unmet need of the human soul. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
The hope springs once again for a response to the need that is both deeply rooted in Christian traditions and powerfully relevant to circumstances of contemporary life. “And then shall ye know that I am an honest person, and that I am sent unto you from God,” reports Helaman 9.36. O, God, Who makest us glad with the yearly expectation of our redemption, grant that as we joyfully receive Thine Only-begotten Son as our Redeemer, we may also see Him without fears when He cometh as our Judge. Only through our Lord, who with Thee four things from which the Master is entirely free, we come to understand that God has no foregone conclusions, no arbitrary pre-determinations, no obstinacy, and no egoism. Grant, O merciful God, that for the reception of the transcendent mystery of Thy Son’s Nativity, the minds of believers may be prepared, and also the hearts of unbelievers subdued. Through the same Jesus Christ our Lord who is working for an infinite duration of time, peace will come. Therefore, we must be infinitely patient. O God, Who art pleased to save, by the Nativity of Thy Christ, the race of beings, which was mortally wounded in its chief, grant us this healing blessing. God we beseech Thee, that we may not cleave to the author of our perdition, but be transferred to the fellowship of our Redeemer, Who with Thee the plane of negative thoughts, emotions, and behaviour does not exist. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
CRESLEIGH MEADOWS AT PLUMAS RANCH
Plumas Lake, CA | from the mid $300’s
Coming Soon!
Cresleigh Meadows is coming soon! Found just north of Feather River Boulevard, Cresleigh Meadows is home of the largest neighborhood in Plumas Ranch as well as the popular Bear River Park. With four floor plans available, ranging from approximately 2,000 – 3,500 square feet offering, three to five bedrooms, we are certain you will find the home that fits your needs and lifestyle. The kaleidoscope of home designs parallel changes in American society. These are family-oriented households turned outward to involvement in social movements and to work outside the home. Homes designed by Cresleigh are clean and elegant, representing the most important aspects of American life.
These popular design feature clean lines of classical and early American architecture. The design elements include reflect the highest in moral and artistic merit. There are great technological advances for a nation of nesters with open floor plans, large kitchen islands, and flex spaces are staples in Cresleigh homes. Multi-generational living options also available in select homes. Cresleigh homes creates havens from the strain and bustle of the outside World. A number of these homes exist around the World and are seen as cozy retreats from the harsh clamor of daily life. Take a pictorial stroll through some of the glorious Cresleigh homes to learn about the architecture, furniture, and design that fascinates us all. Many of these houses are reminiscent of the Queen Anne era with, Eastlake, Stick and Shingle styles and the Arts and Crafts Movement. https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-meadows-at-plumas-ranch/
My Brain is My Harp and My Lyre, My Soul is My Garden and My Orchard!
People easily forget that they are locked in coevolution with the life-forms that sustain their thought. In particular, they often neglect the evolution of their soul as a vital aspect of their own survival. When life seems not worth living, ten minutes in prayer proves otherwise. The soul is that venerable place where beings preserve the history of their experience, their tentative experiments, their discoveries, and their plans. In the soul may be found the recipes for daily living—the prescriptions for the mind and the heart. Listening one evening to Bach’s “Passion according to St. Matthew,” I was struck by the text and music of the line, “Then all the disciples forsook hi and fled.” It anticipated the words of Jesus on the Cross, “My God, my god, why hast thou forsaken me?” One who is forsaken by all beings feels forsaken by God. And, indeed, all being left him, and those who were nearest him fled farthest from him. Ordinarily, we are not aware of this fact. We are used to imagining the crucifixion in terms of those beautiful pictures where, along with his mother and other women, at least one disciple is present. The reality was different. They all fled, and some women dared to watch from afar. Only an unimaginable loneliness remained during the hours His life and work were broken. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
How shall we think about these disciples? Our first reaction is probably the questions—how could they forsake him Whom they had called the Messiah, the Christ, the bringer of the new age, whom they had followed after leaving behind everything for his sake? However, this time, when I heard the words and tones of the music, I admired the disciples! For it is they whom we owe the words of our text. They did not hide their flight; they simply stated it in one short sentence, a statement that judges them for all time. The gospel stores contain many judgments against the disciples. We read that they misunderstood Jesus continuously, as did his mother and brothers, and that day by day, their misunderstandings intensified his suffering. We read that some of the most important among them demanded a place of exceptional glory and power in the World to come. We read that Jesus reproached them because their zeal made them fanatical against those who did not follow Him. And we read that Jesus had to call Peter “Satan,” because Peter tried to dissuade him from going to Jerusalem to his death, and that Peter denied his discipleship in the hour of trial. These reports are astonishing. They show what Jesus did to the disciples. He taught them to accept judgement, and not to present themselves in a favorable light. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
Without the acceptance of such judgement, they could not have been his disciples. And if the disciples had suppressed the truth about their own profound weakness, our gospels would not be what they are. The glory of the Christ and the misery of his followers would not be so clearly manifest. And yet even in the same records, human’s desire to cover up one’s own unattractiveness makes itself felt. Later traditions in the gospels try to smooth the hard and hurting edges of the original picture. Apparently, it was unbearable to established congregations that all the disciples fled, that none of them witnessed the crucifixion and the death of the master. They could not accept the fact that only far away in Galilee was their flight arrested by the appearance of him who they deserted in his hour of agony and despair. So, it was stated that Jesus himself had told them to go to Galilee; their flight was not a rea real flight. And still later, it was said that they did not flee at all, but remained in Jerusalem. From earliest times, the church could not stand this judgment against itself, its past and its present. It has tried to conceal what the disciples openly admitted—that we all forsook him and fled. However, this is the truth about all beings, including the followers of Jesus today. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
The flight from God begins in the moment we feel His presence. This feeling is at work in the dark, half-conscious regions of our being, unrecognized, but effective; in the restlessness of the child’s asking and seeking; of the adolescent’s doubts and despairs; of the adult’s desires and struggles. God is present, but not as God; He is present as the unknown force in us that makes us restless. However, in some moments He appears as God. The unknown force in us that caused our restlessness becomes manifest as the God in Whose hands we are, Who is our ultimate threat and our ultimate refuge. In such moments it is as though we were arrested in our hidden flight. However, it is not an arrest by brute force, but one that has the character of a question. And we remain free to continue our flight. This is what happened to the disciples: they were powerfully arrested when Jesus first called them, but they remained free to flee again. And they did when the moment of trial arrived. And so it is with the church and all its members. They are arrested in their hidden flight and brought into the conscious presence of God. However, they remain free to flee again, not only as individual beings, but also as bearers of the church, carrying the church itself on the road to Galilee, separating it as far away as possible from the point where the eternal breaks into the temporal. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
Beings flee from God even in the church, the place where we are supposed to be arrested by the presence of God. Even there we are in flight from him. If the ultimate cuts into life of a being, one tried to take cover in the preliminary. One runs for a safe place, fleeing from the attack of that which strike one with unconditional seriousness. And there are many places that look safe to us as Galilee looked to the feeling disciples. Perhaps the most effective refuge in our time from the threatening presence of God is the work we are doing. This was not always so. The attitude of ancient beings towards work is well summed up in the curse God pronounced over Adam—“In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread,” and in the words of the 90th Psalm concerning the short years of our life—“yet their span is but toil and trouble.” Later, physical labor with its toil and its drudgery was left to the slaves and serfs or uneducated classes. And it was distinguished from creative work that was based on leisure time, and hence, the privilege of the few. Medieval Christianity considered work a discipline, especially in monastic life. However, in our period of history, work has become the dominating destiny of all beings, if not in reality, at least by demand. It is everything—discipline, production, creation. The difference between labor and work is gone. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
The fact that it stands under a curse in the Biblical view is forgotten. Work has become a religion itself, the religion of modern industrial society. And it has all of us in its grip. Even if we were able to escape the punishment of starvation for not working, something within us would not permit an escape from the bondage to work. For most of us it is both a necessity and a compulsion. And as such, it has become the favored way of the flight from God. And nothing seems to be safer than this way. From it we get the satisfaction of having fulfilled our duty. We are praised by others and by ourselves for “work well done!” We provide support for our family or care for its members. We overcome daily the dangers of leisure, boredom and disorder. We acquire a good conscience out of it and, as a cynical philosopher said, at the end of it, a good sleep. And if we do the kind of work that is called creative, an even higher satisfaction results—the joy of bringing something new into being. Should somebody protest that this is not his or her way of fleeing from God, we might ask one: Have you not sometimes drawn a balance sheet of your whole being, and upon honestly discovering many points on the negative side, then not balanced the sheet by your work on the other? #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
The pharisee of today would boast before God not so much of one’s obedience to the law and of one’s religious exercises as of one’s hard work and one’s disciplined, successful life. And one would also find sinners with whom one could compare oneself favorably. Can these competing tendencies, the extroverting and the introverting, be brought together in a single life? Philosophy not only answers that they can, but also that they mist be integrated if the spiritual life is to reach its fullest bloom. It wisely mingles the two ideals without despoiling either. Here, it not only co-operates with human nature but also imitates the rhythmic pattern of Nature. It is in harmony with the way the Universe goes. It is not enough to develop any one of these parts of our being alone. It is a much more stupendous task to develop al three at the same time. Yet this is what philosophy asks for. Work completely done, the body effectively used, the mind capably directed—such a roundly developed personality is the ideal. If the whole truth is to be discovered, the whole being must be brought to its quest. If this is done, philosophy will be lived as well as known, felt a well as understood, experienced as well as intuited. Beings as a whole must enter on the Quest and then the complete organism will benefit when truth is found. If isolated functions alone enter on it then they alone will benefit by the truth. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
So long as one is an incomplete person, so long will one never be able to find more than an incomplete truth. It is not just one part of being which is to follow the quest but all parts of one. The whole truth can come only to the whole being. Other experiences and other goals demand the strength and activity of only a part of one’s being from one but this search for a higher life demands one’s all. One follows the quest somewhat hesitantly, discontinuously and cautiously, wary lest it demands more from one than one is prepared to give. There is no objection: one my set one’s own pace but in the end, of course, one must come into this quest with all of oneself. Why should one not be a human being as well as an enlightened soul? Why should one not bring all of one’s nature to this co-operative venture that is Life? The quest may become one’s central interest but this is no excuse for one to become unbalanced or disequilibriated. If one comes to the quest with one’s whole being, turning every side of it to the quest’s light and discipline, one may confidently expect the full insight, the full transformation and not a partial, incomplete result. The first reward is truth realized in every part of one’s being, the lower self becoming the instrument of the Soul. The second reward is peace, intense satisfying and joyous. A keen and constant longing after the Soul’s consciousness, a willingness to surrender all to it inwardly, are however necessary prerequisites. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
Let us have faith that right makes right; and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty as we understand it. The acceptance of these ideas can only benefit, and not harm, humanity. God does not want us to do extraordinary things; he wants us to do ordinary things extraordinarily well. When we do the best we can, we never know what miracle is wrought in our life, or in the life of another. The real World as it is given objectively at this moment is the sum total of all its beings and events now. The real World order—it is an order with which we have nothing to do but to get away from it as fast as possible, We break it: we break it into histories, and we break it into arts, and we break it into sciences; and then we began to feel at home. We make ten thousand separate serial orders of it, and on any one of these we react as though the others did not exist. We discover among its various parts relations that were never given to sense at all (mathematical relations, tangents, squares, and roots and logarithmic functions), and out of an infinite number of these we call certain one essential and lawgiving, and ignore the rest. Essential these relations are, but only for our purpose, the other relations being just as real and present as they; and our purpose is to conceive simply and to foresee. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
Are not simple conception and prevision subjective ends pure and simple? They are the ends of what we call science; and the miracle of miracles, a miracle not yet exhaustively cleared up by any philosophy, is that the given order lends itself to the remodeling. It shows itself plastic to many of our scientific, to many of our aesthetic, to many of our practical purposes and ends. When the being of affairs, the artist, or the being of science fails, one is not rebutted. One tried again. One says the impressions of sense must give way, must be reduced to the desiderated form. They are all postulate in the interest of their volitional nature a harmony between the latter and the nature of things. The theologian does no more. And the reflex doctrine of the mine’s structure, though all theology should as yet have failed of its endeavor, could but confess that the endeavor itself at least obeyed in form the mind’s most necessary law. Now, if he did not exist, what kind of a being would God be? The word “God” has come to mean many things in the history of human thought, from Venus and Jupiter to the “Idee” which figures in the pages of Hegel. Even the laws of physical nature have, in these positivistic times, been held worthy of divine honor and presented as the only fitting object of our reverence. Of course, if our discussion is to bear any fruit, we must mean something more definite the this. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
We must not call any object of loyalty a “God” without more ado, simply because to awaken our loyalty happens to be one of God’s functions. He must have some intrinsic characteristics of his own believes that the object of one’s loyalty has those other attributes, negative or positive, as the case may be. Now, as regards a great many of the attributes of God, and their amounts and mutual relations, the World has been delivered over to disputes. Not only such matters as his mode of revealing himself, the precise extent of his providence and power and their connection with our free-will, the proportion of one’s mercy to one’s justice, and the amount of his responsibility for evil; but also his metaphysical relation to the phenomenal World, whether causal, substantial, ideal, or what not—are affairs of purely sectarian opinion that need not concern us at all. Whoso debates them presupposes the essential features of theism to be granted already; and it is with these essential features, the care poles of the subject, that our business exclusively is possessed. The acceptance of these ideas can only benefit, and not harm, humanity. If one will consciously put oneself into line with this higher purpose of human living, one will not only become a better and wiser being but also a happier one. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
The pursuit of Truth is full of certainty. It rewards its own, even in apparent defeat. Out of the Quest will come a yearning for what is the best in life and the highest in Truth. This experience of feeling is really the discovery of unknown elements of self. The phenomenon is the fact that in our daily lives there are a thousand and one reasons for not letting ourselves experience our attitudes fully, reasons from our past and from the present, reasons that reside within the social situation. It seems too dangerous, too potentially damaging, to experience them freely and fully. Just as pain might make a person realize that there is something wrong with one’s body, so neurotic symptoms could draw attention to psychological problems of which the individual was unaware. Introverts are caught up in their inner Worlds; while extraverts lose themselves in the press of events. Because of the achievements of one’s culture, there is an especial tendency toward intellectual hubris; and overvaluation of thinking which could alienate a being from one’s emotional roots. Neurotic symptoms, dreams and other manifestations of the unconscious are often expressions of the “other side” trying to asset itself. There is, therefore, within every individual, a striving toward unity in which divisions would be replaced by consistency, opposites equally balanced, consciousness in reciprocal relation with the unconscious. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
Personalities are manifested by definiteness, wholeness and ripeness. In the safety and freedom of a therapeutic relationship, one can they can be experienced fully, clear to the limit of what they are. They can be and are experienced in a fashion that I like to think of as “pure culture,” so that for the moment the person is one’s fear, or one is one’s anger, or one is one’s tenderness, or whatever. In the first half of life, a person is, and should be, concerned with emancipating oneself from parents and with establishing oneself in the World as spouse, parent and effective contributor. In the modern World, especially, a certain one-sidedness might be needed to fulfill these conventional demands; but, once a person had done so, then one should look inwards. This is the journey toward the wholeness the process of individuation. Sometimes fear kind of seeps through, and people feel they need something to hold on to. Much like a student feels he or she wishes the World would let one have one’s thesis or one’s Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D) because they kind of need that little World. In adult life, we experience a feeling of being all the way to the limit. Being nothing but a pleading little child, supplicating, begging, dependent. At that moment one is nothing but one’s pleadingness, all the way through. Alchemists sought not only to make gold, but to perfect everything in its own nature. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
Moreover, alchemists linked change in matter with change in beings, so that alchemical “work” aimed at perfecting matter was, at the same time, a psychological process aimed at perfecting humans. Some of the alchemists undoubtedly thought of their work as a meditative development of the inner personality. Here we find parallels between the series of changes described by the alchemists and the process of individuation which is taking place within people who reach their limit and are trying to move beyond. Only the being who can consciously assent to the power of the inner voice becomes a personality. By paying attention to the voice within, the individual achieves a new synthesis between conscious and unconscious, a sense of calm acceptance and detachment, and a realization of the meaning of life. If the unconscious can be recognized as a co-determining factor alone with consciousness, and if we can live in such a way that conscious and unconscious demands are taken into account as far as possible, then the centre of gravity of the total personality shifts its position. It is then no longer in the ego, which is merely between conscious and unconscious. This new centre might be called the self. The new centre expressed itself in quaternity symbols and circular structures which are called mandalas. Mandalas symbolize an integrating factor. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
In cases where consciousness is confused, mandalas may appear as compensator attempts at self-healing by imposing an ordered structure. The self, of which the mandala is a symbol, is the archetype of unity and totality. This archetype is the underlying reality manifesting itself in the various systems of monotheism. The self, therefore, is God within; and the individual, in seeking self-relations and unity, becomes the means through which God seeks his goal. By fulfilling one’s own highest potential, the individual is no only realizing the meaning of life, but also fulfilling God’s will. People will feel it is such a wondrous thing to have these new things come out of them. It will amaze them so much each time, and then again there will be that same feeling, kind of feeling scared that one has so much of this that one has been keeping back something. Then one will realize that this has bubbled through, and that for the moment one is one’s dependency in a way which astonished him or her. It is not only dependency that is experienced in this all-out kind of fashion. It may be hurt, or sorrow, or jealousy, or destructive anger, or deep desire, or confidence and pride, or sensitive tenderness, or outgoing love. It may be anything of the emotions of which beings are capable. What I have gradually learned from experiences such as this, is that the individual in such a moment, is coming to be what one is. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
Only exception individuals reach the peeks of individual development. Individuation means parting company with the crowd; and this is first accentuates loneliness, and may seem alarming. Most human beings are content to remain safely with the majority, conforming to the conventions and beliefs shared by members of their family, church or political party. However, exceptional individuals are impelled by their inner nature to seek their own path; and, although human psyches, like human bodies, share a basic structure, the individual psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components. When a person has, throughout therapy, experienced in this fashion all the emotions which organismically arise in one, and has experienced them in knowing and open manner, then one has experienced oneself, in al the richness that exists within oneself. One has become what one is. Childhood discover is of the vital importance of remaining in touch with the inner World and is one factor accounting for it as an emphasis on healing and the growth of personality as essentially an inner process, concentrating upon the individual’s relation with the various aspects of one’s own psyche, rather than upon one’s relationships with other human beings. Individuals can neither be happy nor healthy unless they acknowledge their dependence upon God than that of the ego. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
When we think about what it means to become one’s self, it is a most perplexing question. Often times during the reflective process, various facades by which one has been living have somehow crumpled and collapsed, bring a feeling of confusion, but also a feeling of relief. It may seem as if all the energy that goes into holding the arbitrary pattern together is quite unnecessary—a waste. One might think that one has to make the pattern one’s self; but there are so many pieces, and it is so hard to see where they fit. Sometimes one may put them in the wrong place, and the more pieces mis-fitted, the more effort it takes to hold them in place, until at last you are so tired that even that awful confusion is better than holding on any longer. Then one will discover that left to themselves the jumbled pieces fall quite naturally into their own places, and a living pattern emerges without any effort at all one one’s part. Your job is just to discover it, and in the course of that, you will find yourself and your own place. One must even let their own experience tell one its meaning; the minute one tells it what it means, one is at war with one’s self. To be yourself means to find the pattern, the underlying order, which exists in the ceaselessly changing flow of one’s experience. Rather than trying to hold one’s experience into the form of a mask, or to make it be a form or structure that it is not, being one’s self means to discover the unity and harmony which exists in one’s own actual feelings and reactions. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
Being one’s self means that the real self is something which is comfortably in one’s experiences, not something imposed upon it. It seems that as we learn to self-actualize that gradually, painfully, the individual explores what is behind the masks one presents to the World, and even behind the masks which one has been deceiving oneself. Deeply and often vividly one experiences the various elements of oneself which have been hidden within. Thus, to an increasing degree one becomes oneself—not a façade of conformity to others, not a cynical denial of all feeling, nor a front of intellectual rationality, but a living, breathing, feeling, fluctuating process—in short, one becomes a person. We should be ruled by affirmation of individuality. A being who understands and comes to terms with the different aspects of one’s inner being is enabled to live life more completely. It is possible to look at one and the same event through two different frames of reference which, though mutually exclusive, are nevertheless complementary. You can learn anything you need to learn to achieve any goal you set for yourself. There are no limits except the limits you place on your imagination. So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbable and then, when we summon the will, they seem become inevitable. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
We must not, in trying to think about how we can make a big difference, ignore the daily small differences we can make which, over time, add up to big differences that we often cannot foresee. O Lord God, Who didst bow the Heavens, and come down for the salvation of humankind, look upon Thy servants and Thine inheritance. For to Thee, the awful and benignant Judge, Thy servants have bowed the head and stooped the neck, looking for no help of humans, but waiting for Thy pardon and salvation. Guard them at all times, and this evening, and in the ensuing night, from every foe, from every adverse working of the devil, from idle thoughts and wicked imaginations. “And if the time comes that the voice of the people doth choose iniquity, then is the time that the judgments of God will come upon you; yea, then is the time he will visit you with great destruction even as he has hitherto visited this land,” reports Mosiah 29.30. O Lord our God, refresh us with quiet sleep, when we are wearied with the day’s labour; that being assisted with the help which our weakness needs, we may be devoted to Thee both in body and mind; through Jesus Christ our Lord. “And I command you to do these things in the fear of the Lord; and I command you to do these things, and that ye have no king; that if these people commit sins and iniquities they shall be answered upon their own heads” reports Mosiah 29.30. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
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The Line Between Knowing and Loving is Impossible to Draw–Feelings are More Important than Anything Under the Sun!
“It is easy for us to make beings like you. We do it all the time. There is nothing to it. We can easily replace you. Understand, all the mental and physical equipment we have given you is for a purpose.” At this point, I knew my first real fear. I was afraid they were going to do away with Derek then and there. I could not bear it. The pain in me was so all-consuming that it took all the strength I possessed to stand by and say nothing. However, I did not feel that there was anything that I could do to prevent whatever the Parents would now do to Derek. What deep-seated fears and needs underly Derek’s delusional system? We were long in finding out, for Derek’s preventions effectively concealed the secret of his autistic behavior. In the meantime we dealt with his peripheral problems one by one. During his first year with us Derek’s most trying problem was toilet behavior. This surprised us, for Derek’s personality was not “anal” in the Freudian sense; his original personality damage had antedated the period of his toilet-training. Rigid and early toilet-training, however, had certainly contributed to his anxieties. It was our effort to help Derek with this problem that led to his first recognition of us as human beings. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Going to the toilet, like everything else in Derek’s life, was surrounded y elaborate preventions. We had to accompany him; he had to take off all his clothes; he could only squat, not sit on the toilet seat; he had to touch the wall with one hand, in which he also clutched frantically the vacuum tubes that powered his elimination. He was terrified lest his whole body would be sucked down. To counteract this fear we gave him a metal wastebasket in lieu of the toilet. Eventually, when eliminating into the wastebasket, he no longer needed to take off all his clothes, nor to hold on to the wall. He still needed the tubes and motor which, he believed moved his bowels for him. However, here again the all-important machinery was itself a source of new terrors. In Derek’s World the gadgets had to move their bowels, too. He was terribly concerned that they should, but since they were so much more powerful than men, he was also terrified that if his tubes moved their bowels, their feces would fill all of space and leave him no room to live. He was thus always caught in some fearful contradiction. Our readiness to accept his toilet habits, which obviously entailed some hardship for his counselors, gave Derek the confidence to express his obsession in drawings. Drawing these fantasies was a first step toward letting us in, however distantly, to what concerned him most deeply. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
Drawing was the first step in a year-long process of externalizing Derek’s anal preoccupations. As a result he began seeing feces everywhere; the whole World became to hm a mire of excrement. At the same time he began to eliminate freely wherever he happened to be. However, with this release from his infantile imprisonment in compulsive rules, the toilet and the whole process of elimination became less dangerous. Thus far it had been beyond Derek’s comprehension that anybody could possibly move his bowels without mechanical assistance. Now Derek took a further step forward; defecation became the first physiological process he could perform without the help of vacuum tubes. It must not be thought that he was proud of this ability. Taking pride in an achievement presupposes that one accomplishes it of one’s own free will. He still did not feel himself an autonomous person who could do things on his own. To Derek defecation still seemed enslaved to some incomprehensible but utterly binding cosmic law, perhaps the law his parents had imposed on him when he was being toilet trained. It was not simply that his parents had subjected him to rigid, early training. Many children are so trained. However, in most cases the parents have a deep emotional investment in the child’s performance. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
As a result of this deep emotional investment, the child’s response in turn makes training an occasion for interaction between them and for the building of genuine relationships. Derek’s parents had no emotional investment in him. His obedience gave them no satisfaction and won him no affection or approval. As a toilet-trained child he saved his mother labor, just as household machines saved her labor. As a machine he was not loved for his performance, nor could he love himself. So it has been with all other aspects of Derek’s existence with his parents. Their reactions to his eating or noneating, sleeping or wakening, urinating or defecating, being dressed or undressed, washed or bathed did not flow from any unitary interest in him, deeply embedded in their personalities. By treating him mechanically his parents made him a machine. The various functions of life—even the parts of his body—bore no integrating relationship to one another or to any sense of self that was acknowledged and confirmed by others. Though he had acquired mastery over some functions, such as toilet-training and speech, he had acquired them separately and kept then isolated from each other. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
Toilet-training had thus not gained Derek a pleasant feeling of body mastery; speech had not led to communication of thought or feeling. On the contrary, each achievement only steered him away from -self-mastery and integration. Toilet-training had enslaved him. Speech left him talking in neologisms that obstructed his and our ability to relate to each other. In Derek’s development the normal process of growth had been made to run backward. Whatever he had learned put him not at the end of his infantile development toward integration but, on the contrary, farther behind than he was a its beginning. Had we understood this sooner, his first years with us would have been less baffling. In order to explore more fully the relations among the several parts of social front, it will be convenient to consider here a significant characteristic of the information conveyed by front, namely, its abstractness and generality. However specialized and unique a routine is, its social front, with certain exceptions will tend to claim fact that can be equally claimed and asserted of other, somewhat different routines. It is unlikely that Derek’s calamity could befall a child in any time and culture but our own. He suffered no physical deprivation; he starved for human contact. Just to be taken care of is not enough. At the extreme where utter scarcity reigns, the forming of relationships is certainly hampered. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
However, in our society of mechanized plenty often makes for equal difficulties in a child’s learning to relate. Where parents can provide simple creature-comforts for their children only at the cost of significant effort, it is likely that they will feel pleasure, that gives children a sense of personal worth and sets the process of relating in motion. However, if comfort is so readily available that the parents feel no particular pleasure in winning it for their children, then the children cannot develop the feeling of being worthwhile around the satisfaction of their basic needs. Of course parents and children can and do develop relationships around other situations. However, matters are then no longer so simple and direct. If he is to feel loved and worthy of respect and consideration, the child must be on the receiving end of care and concern given with pleasures and without the exaction of return. This feeling gives him the ability to trust; he can entrust his well-being to persons to whom he is so important. Out of such trust the child learns to form close and stable relationships. For Derek relations with his parents were empty of pleasures in comfort-giving as in all other situations. His was an extreme instance of a plight that sends many schizophrenic children to our clinics and hospitals. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
Many months passed before he could relate to us; his despair that anybody could like him made contact impossible. When Derek could finally trust us enough to let himself become more infantile, he began to play at being a papoose. There was a corresponding change in his fantasies. He drew endless pictures of himself as an electrical papoose. Totally enclosed, suspended in empty space, he is run by unknown, unseen powers through wireless electricity. As we eventually came to understand, the heart of Derek’s delusional system was the artificial, mechanical womb he had created and into which he had locked himself. In his papoose fantasies lay the wish to be entirely reborn in a womb. His new experience in the school suggested that life, after all, might be worth living. Now he was searching for a way to be reborn in a better way. Since machines were better than men, what was more natural than trying to rebirth through them? This was the deeper meaning of his electrical papoose. As Derek made progress, his pictures of himself became more dominant in his drawings. Though still machine operated, he has grown in self-importance. Now he has acquired hands that do something, and he has had the courage to make a picture of the machine that runs him. Later still the papoose became a person, rather than a robot encased in glass. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Eventually Derek began to create an imaginary family at the school: the “Carr” family. Why the Carr family? In the car he was enclosed as he had been in his papoose, but at least the car was not stationary; it could move. More important, in a car one was not only driven but also could drive. The Carr family was Derek’s way of exploring the possibility of leaving the school, of living with a good family in a safe, protecting car. Derek at last broke through his prison. In this brief account it has not been possible to trace the painfully slow process of his first true relations with other human beings. Suffice it to say that he ceased to be a mechanical boy and became a human child. This newborn child was, however, nearly 12 years old. To recover the lost time is a tremendous task. That work has occupied Derek and us ever since. Sometimes he sets to it with a will; at other times the difficulty of real life makes him regret that he ever came out of his shell. However, he has never wanted to return to his mechanical life. One last detail and this fragment of Derek’s story has been told. When Derek was 12, he made a float for our Veteran’s Day parade. It carried the slogan: “Feeling are more important that anything under the Sun.” Feelings, Derek had learned, are what make for humanity; their absence, for a mechanical existence. With this knowledge Derek entered the human condition. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
Instead of having to maintain a different pattern of expectation and responsive treatment for each slightly different performer and performance one can place the situation in a broad category around which it is easy for one to mobilize one’s past experience and stereotypical thinking. Observers then need only be familiar with a small and hence manageable vocabulary of fronts, and know how to respond to them in order to orient themselves in a wide variety of situations. There are grounds for believing that the tendency for a large number of different acts to be presented from behind a small number of fronts is a natural development in social organization. In the descriptive kinship system which gives each persona a unique place, it may work for very small communities, but, as the number of persons becomes large, clan segmentation becomes necessary as a means of providing a less complicated system of identifications and treatments. As a compromise, the full range of diversity is cut at a few crucial points, and all those within a given bracket are allowed or obliged to maintain the same social front in certain situations. In addition to the fact that different routines may employ the same front, it is to be noted that a given social front tends to become institutionalized in terms of the abstract stereotyped expectations to which it gives rise, and tends to take on meaning and stability apart from the specific tasks which happen at the time to be performed in its name. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
The front becomes a collective representation and a fact in its own right. When an actor takes on an established social role, usually one finds that a particular front has already been established for it. Whether one’s acquisitions of the role was primarily motivated by a desire to perform the given takes or by a desire to maintain the corresponding front, the factor will find that one must do both. Further, if the individual takes on a task that is not only new to one but also unestablished in the society, of if one attempts to change the light in which one’s task is viewed, one is likely to find that there are already several well-established fronts among which one must choose. Thus, when a task is given a new front we seldom find that the front it is given is itself new. Since fronts tend to be selected, not created, we may expect trouble to arise when those who perform a given task are forced to select a suitable from for themselves from among several quite dissimilar ones. Thus, in military organizations, task are always developing which (it is felt) require too much authority and skill to be carried out behind the front maintained by one grade of personnel and too little authority and skill to be carried out behind the front maintained by the next grade in the hierarchy. Since there are relatively large jumps between grades, the task will come to carry too much rank or to carry too little. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
When Reese remarked to me that a man in her home town would not have committed suicide if one person had known him, what was she saying? I believe she was saying that this man had no person to whom he could open himself up, no one who was interested enough in him to listen, to pay attention to him. Se was saying that he lacked someone who had compassion for him, a compassion which would be the basis of his self-esteem. If he had had such a person, he would have counted himself too valuable to wipe out. She was also saying, although she did not know it, that the line between knowing and loving is impossible to draw. One merges into the other. If I know someone well I will tend to have compassion for one; and as I have compassion for one I will try to know one well. This is why it is next to impossible, when somebody you dislike is talking to listen to one, take in what you hear, and let it form itself into a comprehensible structure in your mind. If not our ears, the tendency is to close off our minds; to block out the person we do not like. The development of power is a prerequisite for compassion just as it is for communication. At the beginning of psychotherapy persons are normally so bereft of power in interpersonal relationships that they have very little compassion to give. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
Compassion requires that one have some security, some position of power from which one can give concern to another. Lack of self-esteem and self-affirmation makes it very difficult to have anything left over for others; an individual must have something with which to prime the pump before one can give to others. I cannot agree with some of my colleagues who hold that there are two kinds of people: those who operate by love, and those who operate by power. I believe this is a dichotomy which leaves the way open for the illusion of the past, namely that one can have powerless love and another (generally a person one does not like) loveless power. Do not protest, let love alone rule! Can you prove it true? However resolve: every morning I shall concern myself anew about the boundary between the love-deeds-Yes and the power-deed-No and pressing forward honor reality. If we are to honor reality, we must be aware that power and love can have a dialectical relationship, each feeding and nourishing the other. We must turn our attention to the interplay between love and power, and the fact that powers needs love if it is not to slide into manipulation. Power without charity ends up in cruelty. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
The destructive kind of power generally comes from persons who have suffered radical deprivation, like when Duke Harry, despairing over the lack of effect his protest had in Washington, fantasied firing all the people in the supermarket. The constructive forms of power, such as nutrient power and integrative power, come only when there has already been built up within the individual some self-esteem and self-affirmation. Having established the relationship between power and love, let me now state that there is an experience in which love does transcend power. This is shown in Goethe’s drama in which Faust has made his compact with Mephistopheles to gain infinite knowledge and infinite sensual experience. Mephistopheles can give him only power, and that he does. Faust has loved Margarete and Helen of Tory and thinks he will leave them easily and casually behind. However, when Faust experiences the moment when his soul should logically be surrendered to the devil, he is saved by Margarete’s love for him. The mothers re-enter the drama, carrying with them the ties that every being has with nature and humankind. This allegory of love conquering power reveals an archetype of human experience that speaks to us all in diverse ways: I do not know what would remain to us were love not transfigured power and power not staying love. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
We are the creatures whose love is continually straying into power, and whose power is occasionally transfigured by love. We all participate in some way or other in the power structure of our society. Compassion is the name of that form of love which is based on our knowing and our understanding each other. Compassion is the awareness that we are all in the same yacht and that we all shall either skin of swim together. Compassion arises from the recognition of community. It realizes that all being, men and women, are bothers and sisters, even though a disciplining of our own instincts is necessary for us even to being to carry out that belief in our actions. Compassion is the tie felt for another not because one fulfills one’s potentialities (as if anyone ever did!). Compassion is felt for another as much because one does not fulfill one’s potentialities—in other words, one is human, like you or me, forever engaged in the struggle between fulfillment and nonfulfillment. We then surrender the demand that we be divine in order to join humankind in its suffering and its destiny. We are all lonely….We have learnt to pity one another for being alone. And we have learnt that nothing remains to be discovered except compassion. Compassion is the acceptance of the conviction that nothing human is foreign to me. I can then understand that if my enemy is killed, humanity is reduced that much. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
Even if the sum total of cruelty has not greatly diminished in the last twenty-one centuries—children still suffer for the things which they have not the slightest responsibility—we shall not require a token of success. It is in the confronting of this dilemma—fighting cruelty without regard for tangible success—that beings discover what one is in the dept of one’s personality. An interesting illustration of the dilemma of selecting an appropriate front from several not quite fitting ones may be found today in American medical organization with respect to the task of administering anesthesia. In some hospitals anesthesia is still administered by nurses being the front that nurses are allowed to have in hospitals regardless of the task they perform—a front involving ceremonial subordination to doctors and a relatively low rate of pay. In order to establish anesthesiology as a specialty for graduate medical doctors, interested practitioners have had to advocate strongly the idea that administering anesthesia is a sufficiently complex and vital task to justify giving to those who perform it the ceremonial and financial reward given to doctors. The difference between the front maintained by a nurse and the front maintained by a doctor is great; many things that are acceptable for nurses are infra dignitatem for doctors. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Some medical people have felt that a nurse under-ranked for the task of administering anesthesia and that doctors over-ranked; were there an established status midway between nurse and doctor, an easier solution to the problem could perhaps be found. Similarly, had the Canadian Army had a rank halfway between lieutenant and captain, two and a half pips instead of two or three, then Dental Corps captains, any of them of underrepresented ethnic origin, could have been given a rank that would perhaps have been more suitable in the eyes of the Army than the captaincies they were actually given. I do not mean here to stress the point of view of a formal organization or a society; the individual, as someone who possesses a limited range of sign-equipment, must also make unhappy choices. Thus, in the crofting community studied by the writer, hosts often marked the visit of a friend by offering one a shot of hard liquor, a glass of wine, some home-made brew, or a cup of tea. The higher the rank or temporary ceremonial status of the visitor, the more likely one was to receive an offering near the liquor end of the continuum. Now one problem associated with this range of sign-equipment was that some crofters could not afford to keep a bottle of hard liquor, so that wine tended to be the most indulgent gesture they could employ. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
However, perhaps a more common difficulty was the fact that certain visitors, given their permanent and temporary status at the time, outranked one potable and under-ranked the next one in line. There was often a danger that the visitor would feel just a little affronted or, on the other hand, that the host’s costly and limited sign-equipment would be misused. In our middle classes a similar situation arises when a hostess has to decide whether or not to use the good silver, or which would be the more appropriate to wear, her best afternoon dress or her plainest evening gown. Compassion gives us a basis for arriving at the humanistic position which will include both power and love. Compassion occupies a position opposite to violence; as violence projects hostile images on the opponent, compassion accepts such daimonic impulses in one’s self. It gives us the basis for judging someone without condemning one. Although loving one’s enemies requires grace, compassion for one’s enemies is a human possibility. I have suggested that social front can be divined into traditional parts, such as settings, appearances, and manner, and that (since different routines may be presented from behind the same front) we may not find a perfect fit between the specific character of a performance and the general socialized guise in which it appears to us. #RandolphHarris #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
These two facts, taken together, lead one to appreciate that items in the social front of a particular routine are not only found in the social fronts of a whole range of routines, but also that the whole range of routines in which one items of sign equipment is found will differ from the range of routines in which another item in the same social front will be found. Thus, a lawyer may talk to a client in a social setting that one employs only for this purpose (or for a study), but the suitable clothes one wears on such occasions one will also employ, with equal suitability, at dinner with colleagues and at the theater with is wife. Similarly, the prints that hang on one’s wall and the carpet or hardwood on the floor may be found in domestic social establishments. Of course, in highly ceremonial occasions, settings, manner, and appearance may all be unique and specific, used only for performances of a single type of routine, but such exclusive use of sign equipment is the exception rather than the rule. Will our compassion be ignited by the wars in African and the Middle East? Many of us have no way out of despair at being unable to stop these cruel holocausts, noting effective to do, struggle as we might with the viable alternatives. Almost universally these wars are hated, and is they could, most people would like to forget. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Regardless of all our protests and prayers, it goes on and on, with the steady attrition of our sense of honesty, credulity, and even language. However, even as we continue all efforts to end the wars as soon as is humanly possible, it may be that the Middle East and Africa will be, in the long run, of service—if one may speak that way without blasphemy—to America. With all the evil the wars in Africa and the Middle East, daimonically indeed, represent an occasion in which American could achieve an insight into life that will be essential to its future. This could come about by our gaining a tragic sense, an awareness of our own complicity in evil, our own participation in automatized, dehumanized destructiveness. “All the violence you see amongst the mammals, all of it stems from the drive to live, to survive, and to have offspring to survive and to obtain all the food and drink necessary to survive and procreate. This is the basis of all life on Earth. And self-aware human mammals—intelligent mammals—are the most savage and cruel and vicious of all beings on the planet, or any planet in the ‘Realm of Worlds.’ They are always too deeply enmeshed in pain or pleasure, loneliness or suffocating sense of paralysis, a need for love, or a raging jealousy resulting from love, or a desire for vengeance due to personal defeat or injury. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
“And when they [humans] are physically wounded or experience disease, their suffering is unendurable for them. They are driven by it to terrible extremes. Peace, harmony, joy elude these creatures. (Pages 248-249 of Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis by Anne Rice.) The guilt we feel is surely a normal guilt and may be the beginning of America’s transformation from an adolescent posturing to the maturity of a responsible nation. So far we have kept our innocence, despite all lessons to the contrary. Let us hope that these sad events will constitute a farewell to war. Do not let the repetitiveness of pain and suffering make you callous to the endless torment. “There is hope. You have seen the human mammals of the planet weeping and sobbing and praying. They have hope, hope that the Maker (God) hears them and that when they die their spirits go up and away from Earth.” (Pages 254 of Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis by Anne Rice.) If the so-called powerful and practical persons and the self-confessed materialistic ones only knew how much nearer to realities the sage is than the they, how much more “practical” one is, they would be very much surprised. “Thus we nay see that the Lord is merciful unto al who will, in he sincerity of their hears, call upon his holy name. Yea, thus we see that the gate of Heaven is open unto all, even to those who will believe on the name of Jesus Christ, who is the Son of God,” reports Helaman 3.27-28. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
ROCKLIN TRAILS
FINAL HOME REMAINS | Rocklin, CA | Mid $400,000’s
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