Randolph Harris II International Institute

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Well, the Dream that was Walking and the Dream that was Talking and the Heaven in My Arms was You!

ImageFlowers have expression of countenance as much as humans and animals. Some seem to smile; some have a sad expression; some are pensive and diffident; others again are plain, honest and upright, like the broad-faced sunflower and the hollyhock. The greater thing in this World is not so much where we stand as in what direction we are going. Leaders know that while their position gives them authority, their behavior earns them respect. It is consistency between words and actions that builds a leader’s credibility. What matter most is not so much in what exterior events one has been involved, as what interpretation one’s conscience has given them. The genesis of thought should reveal the intentionality of its product. This product may indeed misrepresent the underlying intention. It acquires a life of its own, which may cut many of the strings that tie it to its origin. This may be the fault of the author. One may have been unfortunate in the expressions that one chose. Yet it may also be the responsibility of one’s readers. They have not paid one enough attention; they have misread one’s words; they have understood one’s writings in a situation that was totally foreign to one’s own. They only way to check the accuracy of our judgment is to trace the growing process in which one’s doctrine was shaped. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

ImageCounseling seems to have an effect on the way our clients experience their family relationships. The client discovers, often to one’s great surprise, that a relationship can be lived on the basis of the real feelings, rather than on the basis of a defensive pretense. There is a deep and comforting significance to this. To discover that feelings of shame and anger and annoyance can be expressed, and that the relationship still survives, is reassuring. To find that one can express tenderness and sensitivity and fearfulness and yet not be betrayed—this is a deeply strengthening thing. It seems that part of the reason this works out constructively is that in therapy the individual learns to recognize and express one’s feelings as one’s own feelings, not as a fact about another person. Thus, to say to one’s spouse “What you are doing is all wrong,” is likely to lead only to debate. However, to say “I feel very much annoyed by what you are doing,” is to state one fact about the speaker’s feelings, a fact which no one can deny. It no longer is an accusation about another, but a feeling which exists in oneself. “You are to blame for my feelings of inadequacy” is a debatable point, but “I feel inadequate when you do thus and so” simply contributes a real fact about the relationship. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

ImageHowever, it is not only at the verbal level that this operates. The person who accept one’s own feelings within one’s self, finds that a relationship can be lived on the basis of these real feelings. Sometimes we may feel that we are negatively affecting a person and their dependence on us may make us feel that we are being dominated and controlled. This could lead one to see that the part one is playing is cowardly. However, as one begins to better understand one’s self, one will come to an inward conclusion to try to live in the relationship according to what one believes is rights, rather than in terms of the other individual’s wishes. As a result this may lead to a stupendous discovery that as we accept ourselves more, we are much more able to meet some of our own needs as well as the needs of others. One can do the things one wants to do without allow others to hold them back by coming to an understanding that there are other people who can also share the responsibility of taking care of our loved ones. Yet it is unnecessary to allow our new found freedom to allow us to become callus and selfish. We should to be affectionate towards our loved ones and make a point to try to understand what they are saying and feeling. By listening and taking advantage of our freedom, one may actually be able to enjoy their loved ones more. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

ImageWhen they feel they have no rights of their own, people become resentful of their family. It may seem as though nothing but difficulty could result from letting these feelings exist openly in the relationship. Yet one will notice that by tentatively permitting them to enter the situation one will find one’s self acting with more assurance, more integrity. The relationship improves rather than deteriorates. Most surprising of all, when the relationship is lived on the basis of the real feelings, one finds that resentment and hate are not the only feelings one has toward one’s family member. Fondness, affection and enjoyment are also feelings which enter the relationship. It seems clear that there may be moments of discord, dislike, and anger between members in a family. However, there will also be respect and understanding and liking. Family members will seem to have learned what many other clients have also learned, that a relationship does not have to be lived on a basis of pretense, but can be lived on the basis of the fluctuating variety of feelings which actually exist. From our discussion, it may seem that it is only negative feelings which are difficult to express or live. This is far true. Mr. Schneider, a young professional man, found it fully as difficult to discover the beneficial feelings which lay beneath his façade as the negative. A brief excerpt will indicate the changed quality of his relationship with this three-year-old daughter. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

ImageMr. Schneider says, “The thing I was thinking about as I rode down here was—how differently I see our little girl—I was playing with her this morning—and—we just, ah, well—why is it so hard for me to get words out now? This was a really wonderful experience—very warm, and it was a happy and pleasant thing, and it seems that I saw and felt her so close to me. Here is what I think is significant—before, I could talk about Jill. I could say good things about her and funny little things she would do and just talk about her as though I were and felt like a real happy father, but there was some unreal quality…as thought I was just saying these things because I should be feeling this stuff and this is the way a father should talk about his daughter but somehow this was not really true because I did not have these negative and mixed up feelings about her. Now I do thing she is the most wonderful kid in the World.” Therapist: “Before, you felt as though ‘I should be a happy father’—this morning you are a happy father.” Mr. Schneider: “It certainly felt that way this morning. She just rolled around on the bed…and then she asked me if I wanted to go to sleep again and I said okay and then she said well, I’ll go get my blankets and then she told me a story about three stories in one, all jumbled up and it just felt like this is what I really want. I want to have this experience. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

Image“It felt that I was, I felt grown up, I guess. I felt that I was a man…now this sounds strange, but it did feel as though I was a grownup responsible loving father, who was big enough, and serious enough, and also happy enough to be the father of this child. Whereas before I did feel weak and maybe almost undeserving, ineligible to be that important, because it is a very important thing to be a father.” Mr. Schneider has found I possible to accept his warm and loving feelings toward himself as a good father, and to fully accept this warm love for his little girl. He no longer has to pretend he loves her, fearful that some different feeling may be lurking underneath. I think it will not surprise you that shortly after this he told me how he could be much more free in expressing anger and annoyance at his little daughter, also. He is learning that the feelings which exist are good enough to live by. They do not have to be coated with a veneer. Experience in therapy seems to bring about another change in the way our clients live in their family relationships. They learn something about how to initiate and maintain real two-way communication. To understand another person’s thoughts and feelings thoroughly, with the meanings they have for one, and to be thoroughly understood by this other person in return—this is one of the most rewarding of human experiences, and all are too rare. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

ImageIndividuals who have come to us for therapy often report their pleasure in discovering that such genuine communication is possible with members of their own families. In part this seems to be due, quite directly, to their experience of communication with the counselor. It is such a relief, such a blessed relaxation of defenses, to find oneself understood, that the individual wishes to create this atmosphere for others. To find, in the therapeutic relationship that one’s most awful thoughts, one’s most bizarre and abnormal feelings, one’s most ridiculous dreams and hopes, one’s most evil behaviors, can all be understood by another, is a tremendously releasing experience. One begins to see it as a resource one could extend to others. However, there appears to be an even more fundamental reason why these clients can understand members of their families. When we are living behind a façade, when we are trying to act in ways that are not in accord with our feelings, then we dare not listen freely to another. We must always have our guard up, lest one pierce the pretense of our façade. However, when a client is living in the way I have been describing, when one tends to express one’s real feelings in the situation in which they occur, when one’s family relationships are lived on the basis of the feelings which actually exist, then one is no longer defensive and one can really listen to, and understand, another member of one’s family. One can let oneself see how life appears to this other person. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

ImageAll seeking and finding of spiritual instruction through a spiritual teacher becomes real, in the end, on a mental plane only. Therefore one should direct one’s efforts in that direction with complete faith. The difficulty which you mention about finding a teacher need not be overrated. You have within yourself a ray of God, which is your own soul. If you pray to and beseech it constantly for guidance, it will surely lead you to all that you really need to know. Those whose quest of God through a master has failed them should take this very failure as instruction on the quest itself. Let them remember that God is everywhere present, that there is no spot where God is not. Therefore, God is in them too. This indwelling presence of the Soul. Let them turn to it directly, no longer seeking someone else to act as an intermediary, no longer running here and there in search of one. Just where they are now is precisely where they may establish contact with God through their own Soul. Let them pray to it alone, mediate on it, obey its intuitive behests, and they will not need any human agent. From this moment they should look to no one else, should depend on their own forces. However, since these are lying latent within and need to be aroused, the aspirants need to exert themselves through physical regimens that will provide the energies needed for this great effort. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

ImageIf you can find someone whose person attracts you most, or whose teachings appeal to you more than those of others, or whose writings inspire you above all other people’s writings, then make one your spiritual guide. You do not have to apply for one’s permission for it is to be done within the privacy of your own inner life. You are not dependent on one’s personal acceptance or rejection for the idea of one which you believe in and the image of one which you form to become alive and effectual. However, you will object, is not the whole process a self-deceptive one and does it not lead to worthless hallucination? We replay, it could become that if you misuse it and misinterpret it results, but it need not if you work it aright. For telepathy is a fact. Your faith in, and remembrance of, the other being lays a cable from your inner being to one’s own and there will follow back along it a response to your attitude. However, sometimes many people naively expect their teachers to be what one cannot be; too many look for a materialization of a highly imaginary fairy-tale figure of their own creation; too many wrongfully demand a miracle-working, supernaturally saint-like and sentimentally loving creature from another World. They unreasonably and unrealistically want one to look like a spectacular Angel and behave like a god untroubled by human needs. It is a surprise that they are disappointed when they find one to be just a human being, a real person. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

ImageA vision without a task is a dream. A task without a vision is drudgery. However, a task with vision can change the World. All problems concerning the relation of love to power and justice, individually as well as socially, become insoluble if love is basically understood as emotion. Love would be a sentimental addition to power and justice, ultimately irrelevant, unable to change either the law of justice or the structures of power. Most of the pitfalls in social ethics, political theory, and education are due to a misunderstanding of the ontological character of love. On the other hand, if love is understood in its ontological nature, its relation to justice and power is seen in a light which reveals the basic unity of the three concepts and the conditioned character of its conflicts. Life is being in actuality and love is the moving power of life. In these two sentences the ontological nature of love is expressed. They say that being is not actual without the love which drives everything that is towards everything else that is. In human’s experience of love the nature of life becomes manifest. Love is the drive towards the unity of the separated. Reunion presupposed separation of that which belongs essentially together. It would, however, be wrong to give to separation the same ontological ultimacy as to reunion. For separation presupposes an original unity. Unity embraces itself and separation, just as being comprises itself and non-being. It is impossible to unite that which is essentially separated. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

ImageWithout an ultimate belongingness no union of one thing with another can be conceived. The absolutely strange cannot enter into a communion. However, the estranged is striving for reunion. In the loving joy about the other one the joy about one’s own self-fulfillment by the other is also present. That which is absolutely strange to me cannot add to my self-fulfillment; it can only destroy me if it touches the sphere of my being. Therefore love cannot be described as the union of the strange but as the reunion of the estranged. Estrangement presupposes original oneness. Love manifests its greatest power there where it overcomes the greatest separation. And the greatest separation is the separation of self from self. Every self is self-related and a complete self it completely self-related. It is an independent centre, indivisible and impenetrable, and therefore is rightly called an individual. The separation of a completely individualized being from any other completely individualized being is itself complete. The centre of a completely individualized being, and it cannot be made into a mere part of a higher unity. Even as a part it is indivisible and it is as such more than a part. Love reunited that which is self-centered and individual. The power of love is not something which is added to an otherwise finished process, but life has love in itself as one of its constitutive elements. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

ImageIt is the fulfillment and the triumph of love that it is able to reunite the most radically separated beings, namely individual persons. The individual person is both most separated and the nearer of the most powerful love. God is in all things by His presence. He is in all things by His essence. Therefore, God is in all things by His power, inasmuch as all things are subject to His power; He is by His essence, inasmuch as He is present to all as the cause of their being. God’s substance is present to all thing as their cause. Knowledge and will require that the thing known should be in the one who knows, and the thing willed in the one who wills. Hence by knowledge and will things are more truly in God than God in things. However, power is the principle of acting on another; hence by power the agent is related and applied to an external thing; thus by power an agent may be said to be present to another. No other perfection, except grace, added to substance, renders God present in anything as the object known and loved; therefore only grace constitutes a special mode of God’s existence in things. There is, however, another special mode of God’s existence in beings by union, which will be treated in its own place. If appetite among physical things is of this nature, it clearly includes the mechanism of sympathy and antipathy. All concords and discords of music are (no doubt) sympathies and antipathies of sound. And so likewise in that music which we call broken music, or consort music, some consorts of instruments are sweeter than others… as the Irish harp and base viol agree well…organs and the voice agree well. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

ImageAs we become keenly aware of the phenomenon of sympathetic vibration, in which one vibrating body will set a similar body into vibration, we will start to equate this sympathy with similitude. It seems, both in ear and eye, the instrument of sense hat a sympathy or similitude with that which gives the reflexion for as the sight of the eye is like a crystal, or glass, or water; so is the ear a sinuous cave, with a hard bone to stop and reverberate the sound; which is like to the places that report echoes. Such useful and sound inferences as may be drawn from observing the resemblances of objects in motion might well be handled as consents and aversions. Operations that are deeply hid, as sympathies often are, invite superstition and abuse by magicians and alchemists. I am almost weary of the words sympathy and antipathy on account of the superstitions and vanities associated with them. Furthermore, what are called occult and specific properties, or sympathies and antipathies, are in great part corruptions of philosophy. Strife and friendship in nature are the spurs of motions and the keys of work. From them are derived the union and repulsion of bodies, the mixture and separation of parts, the deep and intimate impressions of virtues [exempli gratia, innate forces and strengths], and that which is termed the junction of actives with passives; in a word, the magnolia nature. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

ImageThe power of correlative forces—what is active is potentially passive and what is passive is potentially active—was widely accepted, and is to be seen among the presuppositions of grammar, logic, and the nature of the intellect. There cannot be, however much hope of discovering the consent of things before the discovery of Forms and Simple Configurations. All natural bodies exercise a sort of choice in receiving what is agreeable, and avoiding what is hostile and foreign. The magnet attracts iron, the body assimilates food and rejects wastes, humours and juices course up and down the body, the heart and pulse beat—all thee and many other things are done without sense. Some bodies and substances near each other seem to feel or perceive each other’s presence. They move in relation to each other only if a reciprocal perception precede the operation. A body perceives the passages by which it enters; it perceives the force of another body to which it yields; it perceives the removal of another body which held it fast, when it recovers itself; it perceives the disruption of its continuity, which for a time it resists; in short there is Perception everywhere. These illustrations of perception are also illustrations of consent, and we focus on the aspect of experience that is at least close to touch and feeling. It is difficult to see that perception calls attention to anything that has not already been described under sense activity, consent, and appetite. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

ImageCertainly, we cannot mean to endow all nature with universal sensation, for we censure persons who, with perception in mind have gone too far, and attributed sense to all bodies. “He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?” reports Romans 8.32. The fact that God deals with His children on the basis of grace without regard to merit or demerit is a staggering concept. It is opposed to almost everything we have been taught about life. We have been generally conditioned to think that if we work hard and “pay our dues” in life, we will be rewarded in proportion to our work. “You do so much, you deserve so much” is a commonly accepted principle in life. However, God’s grace does not operate on a reward for works basis. It is much better than that. God is generous beyond all measure or comparison. The Scripture says, “God so love the World that he gave his one and only Son;” and Paul spoke of this as God’s “indescribable gift” (John 3.16, 2 Corinthians 9.15). God’s inexpressible generosity, however, does no stop at saving us; it provides for all our needs and blessings throughout our entire lives. As Paul said in Romans 8.32, “He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?” Paul used the argument of the greater to the lesser to teach us God’s generosity. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

ImagePaul said if God gave His Son for our salvation (the greater), will He not also give us all blessings (the lesser)? No blessing we will ever receive can possibly compared with the gift of God’s Son to die for us. God demonstrated Hid gracious generosity to the ultimate at the cross. And Paul based the assurance that we can expect God to meet all our other needs throughout life on the fact that God has already met our greatest need. Note that Paul said God will graciously or feely give us all things. Just as salvation is given freely to all who trust in Christ, so all blessings are given freely to us, also through faith in Christ. Just as you cannot earn your salvation but must receive it as a gift, so you cannot earn the blessings of God but must receive them also as gifts given through Christ. When a man commits himself to love his wife “as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her,” he will ever be faithful to her. One thing the Church can count on is the fidelity of the Bridegroom. And this is the one thing a wife whose husband loves like Christ can rest on. Above all let him [the groom] preserve towards her an inviolable faith, and an unspotted chastity, for this is the marriage ring, it ties two hearts by an eternal band; it is like the cherubim’s flaming sword set for the guard of paradise. Chastity is the security of love, and preserves all the mysteriousness like the secrets of a temple. Under this lock is deposited security of families, the union of affections, the repairer of accidental breaches. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

ImageThe 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 the nations are as nothing before God, they are counted as less than nothing. 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 one does not receive justice from God, the answer is that God acts beyond human expectations. He gives power to the faint and to one that hath no might God increaseth strength. God acts paradoxically; He acts beyond human understanding. “I urge you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship. And do not be conformed to this World, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect,” reports Romans 12.1-2. We all want to know God’s will, but this text is telling us we cannot unless we present our bodies, including our soul and minds, to the Lord for transformation and renewal! By “presenting our bodies,” Paul means we must be available to do the hard work of understanding what God has said in His Word and take the time to study it in order to have our minds transformed. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

ImageHear us, O never-failing Light, Lord our God, our only Light, the Fountain of light, the Light of Thine Angles, Thrones, Dominions, Principalities, Powers, and of all intelligent beings; Who has created the light of Thy Saints. May our souls be lamps of Thine, kindled and illuminated by Thee. May they shine and burn with the truth, and never go out in darkness and ashes. May we by Thy house, shining from Thee, shining in Thee; may we shine and fail not; may we ever worship Thee; in Thee may we be kindled, and not be extinguished. Being filled with the splendor of Thy Son our Lord Jesus Christ, may we shine forth inwardly; may the gloom of sins be cleared away, and the light of perpetual faith abide within us. “O God, the Eternal Father, we ask thee in the name of thy Son, Jesus Christ, to bless and sanctify this bread to the souls of all those who partake of it; that they may eat in remembrance of the body of thy Son, and witness unto thee, O God, the Eternal Father, that they are willing to take upon them the name of thy Son, and always remember him, and keep his commandments which he hath given them, that they may always have his Spirit to be with them. Amen,” reports Moroni 4.3. O Father of Jesus, help me to approach thee with deepest reverence, not with presumption, not with servile fear, but with holy boldness. Thou art beyond the grasp of my understanding, but not beyond my love. Thou knowest that I love thee supremely, for thou art supremely adorable, good, perfect. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

ImageMy heart melts as the love of Jesus, my brother, bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh, married to me, dead for me, risen for me; God is mine and I am His, given to me as well as for me; I am never so much mine as when I am his, or so much lost to myself until lost in him; then I find my true humanity. However, my love is frost and cold, ice and snow; let His love warm me, lighten my burden, be my Heaven; may it be more revealed to me in all its influences that my love to Him maybe more fervent and glowing; let the might tide of His everlasting love cover the rocks of my sin and care; then let my spirit float above those things which had else wrecked my life. Make me fruitful by living to that love, my character becoming more beautiful every day. If traces of Christ’s love-artistry be upon me, may he work on with his divine brush until the complete image be obtained and I be made perfect copy of Him, my Master. O Lord Jesus, some to me, O Divine Spirit, rest upon me, O Holy Father, look on me in mercy for the sake of he well-beloved. O God, the Eternal Father, we ask thee, in he name of thy Son, Jesus Christ, to bless and sanctify our souls, so that we make remember Christ and his Spirit always be with us. May we truly repent of all our sins and be cleansed by the power of the Holy Ghost. And God keep us in the right way, keep us continually watchful unto prayer, relying alone upon the merits of Christ, who is the author and the finisher of our faith. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

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

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And I Want Just to Call You ‘Cause We Go Together Just Like Jam and Bread or Maybe Birds of a Feather!

ImageAccept the pain, cherish the joys, resolve the regrets; then can come the best of benedictions. As you simplify your life, the laws of the Universe will be simpler. There is only a slight difference between keeping your chin up and sticking your neck out, but it is a difference worth knowing. All of us try to feel, and pretend to feel, but we seldom do so alone. Most often we do it when we exchange gestures or signs of feelings with others. Taken together, emotion work, feeling rules, and interpersonal exchange make up our private emotional system. We bow to each other not only from the waist but from the heart. Feeling rules set out what is owed in gestures of exchange between people. They enable us to assess the worth of an outward tear or an inward attempt to feel sad for people who are inappropriate behavior. Looking at a bright light to make a tear glisten is a mark of homage, a way of paying respect to those who proclaim that sadness is owed. More generally, it is a way of paying respects to a rule about respect paying. In psychological “bowing,” feeling rules provide a baseline for exchange. There are two types of exchange—straight and improvisational. In straight exchange, we simply use rules to make an inward bow; we do not play with them. In improvisational exchange, as in improvisational music, we presuppose the rules and play with them, creating irony and humor. However, in both types, it is within the contact of feeling rules that we make our exchange and settle our accounts. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

ImageIn our society, some unmeant gestures occur in such a wide variety of performances and convey impressions that are in general so incompatible with the ones being fostered that these inopportune events have acquired collective symbolic status. First, performer may accidentally convey incapacity, impropriety, or disrespect by momentarily losing muscular control of oneself. One may trip, stumble, fall; one may belch, yawn, make a slip of the tongue, scratch oneself, or be flatulent; one may accidentally impinge upon the body of another participant. Secondly, the performer may act in such a way as to give the impression that one is too much or too little concerned with the interaction. One may stutter, forget one’s lines, appear nervous, or guilty, or self-conscious; one may give way to inappropriate outbursts of laughter, anger, or other kinds of affect which momentarily incapacitate one as an interactant; one may show too much serious involvement and interest, or too little. Thirdly, the performer may allow one’s presentation to suffer from inadequate dramaturgical direction. The setting may not have been put in order, or may have become readied for the wrong performance, or may become deranged during the performance; unforeseen contingencies may cause improper timing of the performer’s arrival or departure or may cause embarrassing lulls to occur during the interaction. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

ImagePerformances differ, of course, in the degree of item-by-item expressive care required of them. In the case of some international cultures, we are ready to see a high degree of expressive coherence. Granet, for example, suggests this of filial performances in China: Their fine toilet is in itself a homage. Their good deportment will be accounted an offering of respect. In the presence of parents, gravity is requisite: one must therefore be careful not to belch, to sneeze, to cough, to yawn, to blow one’s nose nor to spit. Every expectoration would run the risk of soiling the paternal sanctity. It would be a crime to show the lining of one’s garments. To show the father that one is treating him as a chief, one ought always to stand in his presence, the eyes right, the body upright upon the two legs, never daring to lean upon any object, to bend, nor to stand on one foot. It is thus that with the low and humble voice which becomes a follower, one comes night and morning to pay homage. After which, one waits for orders. Wen we commence a relationship with somebody for some purpose, we begin in a role, as teacher, or as customer, or as helper. In that sense each participant has a role to fulfill. A third party looking at this transaction can watch it and say, “You are fulfilling the role of the helper, and he or she is fulfilling the role of the helpee.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

Image  I may be aware I am supposed to fulfill the role of helper, but I can do this in a way that expressed my genuine commitments and intentions and in my idiosyncratic way. It is the difference between taking a role and playing a role. To take a role is a commitment to a task; to play a role is a charade. Some people lose zest when they feel they can only work in a cut-and-dried, stereotyped way. In due time one outgrows that stereotype way. If one feels one must stick to that stereotyped way, it makes one sick. This is why many nurses, psychotherapists, doctors, and teachers ultimately get fed up with their professions. They lose zest because they feel that they have got to keep up the appearance of the role of a teacher, a nurse, a doctor, a therapist in some stereotyped way. When they do that, what they are telling you is that they are more committed to imitating the role than they are carrying out their professional commitment, that is [to] bring about results. When your commitment is to goals, and not means, you cannot help but be eccentric, idiosyncratic, offbeat, oddball, and creative. In contrast, in persons in whom the craving for prestige is uppermost, hostility usually takes the form of a desires to humiliate others. This desire is paramount in those persons whose own self-esteem has been wounded by humiliation and who have thus become vindictive. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

ImageUsually they have gone through a series of humiliating experiences in childhood, experiences that may have had to do either with the social situation in which they grew up—such as belonging to a underrepresented group, or being themselves poor but having wealthy relatives—or with their own individual situation, such as being discriminated against for the sake of other children, being spurned, being treated as a plaything by the parents, being sometime privileged, and other times shamed and snubbed. Often experience of this kind are forgotten because of their painful character, but they reappear in awareness if the problems concerning humiliation are clarified. In adult neurotics, however, never the direct but only indirect results of these childhood situations can be observed, results which have been reinforced by passing through a “vicious circle”: a feeling of humiliation; a desire to humiliate others; enhanced sensitivity to humiliation because of a fear of retaliation; enhanced wish to humiliate others. The tendencies to humiliate are deeply repressed, usually because the neurotic, knowing from one’s own sensitivity how hurt and vindictive one feels when humiliated, is instinctively afraid of similar reactions in others. Nevertheless some of these tendencies may emerge without one’s being conscious of it: in an inadvertent disregard of others, such as letting them wait, in inadvertently bringing others into embarrassing situations, in letting others feel dependent. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

ImageEven if the neurotic is completely unaware of wishing to humiliate others or of having done so, one’s relations with them will be pervaded by a diffuse anxiety which is revealed in a constant anticipation of rebuke or humiliation for oneself. Inhibitions resulting from this sensitivity to humiliation often appear in the form of a need to avoid anything which might possibly seem humiliating to others; such a neurotic, for example, may be incapable of criticizing, of refusing an offer, of dismissing an employee, with the result that one often appears overconsiderate or over-polite. Finally, a tendency to humiliate may be hidden behind a tendency to admire. Since inflicting humiliation and bestowing admiration are diametrically opposed, the latter offers the best means of eradicating or concealing tendencies toward the former. This is the reason also why both these extremes are frequently to be found in the same person. There are several ways in which the two attitudes may be distributed, the reasons for the distribution being dependent on the individual. They may appear separately in different periods of life, a period of a general contempt for people succeeding a period of hero-worship; there may be admiration for men and contempt for women, or vice versa; or there maybe blind admiration for one or two persons, and just as blind a contempt for the rest of the World. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

ImageIt is in the process of analysis that one can observe that the two attitudes in reality exist together. A patient may at the same time blindly admire and despise the analyst, either suppressing one of the two feelings or vacillating between them. In the striving for possession hostility usually takes the form of a tendency to deprive others. The wish to cheat, steal from, exploit or frustrate others is not in itself neurotic. It may be culturally patterned, or it may be warranted by the actual situation, or it may normally be considered a question of expediency. In the neurotic person, however, these tendencies are highly charged with emotion. Even if beneficial advantages one derives from them are sight or irrelevant one will feel elated and triumphant if one meets with success; in order to find a bargain, for example, one may spend time and energy entirely disproportionate to the amount saved. One’s satisfaction at success has two sources: a feeling that one has outwitted others, and a feeling that one has injured others. This tendency to deprive others takes many forms. The neurotic person will feel resentment toward a physician if one is not treated gratuitously, or for less than one is able to pay. One will feel anger toward one’s employees if they are not willing to work overtime without pay. In relations with friends and children the exploiting tendency is often justified by alleging that they have an obligation toward one. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

ImageThe ordinary aspirant, whose intuition is not sufficiently developed, should test the person one proposes to accept as one’s master. This will require one to watch the other closely for a period of time. In some cases a week will give the answer, in others three months will be needed. In all cases, the aspirant ought not to commit oneself until one has enough evidence that one is committing oneself rightly. Those who lack the innate discernment or wide experience needed to detect the real character and true capacity of a master, should wait sufficiently long an seek outside advice before entrusting themselves to one. The faith that God is working through a particular being can be tested for its validity by watching one, for a sufficient length of time, what happens to those who reject one utterly or respond to one ardently. In their excessive eagerness to discover a master, they fail to practice discernment. However, wait for the true master requires a certain patience and strength. A true self-actualized person is hard to find. A  false one, drooling one’s plagiarism or one;s platitudes, is easy to find. Do not fear failure so much that you refuse to try new things. The saddest summary of a life contains three descriptions: could have, might have, and should have. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

ImageParents may actually destroy their children’s lives by demanding sacrifices on such a basis, and even if the tendency does not appear in such destructive forms, any mother who acts according to the belief that the child exist to give her satisfaction is bound to exploit the child emotionally. A neurotic of this kind may also tend to withhold things from others, withhold money which one ought to pay, information which one could give, pleasures of the flesh which one has led another to expect. The presence of robbing tendencies may be indicated by repeated dreams of stealing or one may have conscious impulses to steal, which one checks; one may actually have been a kleptomaniac at some period. Persons of this general type are often unaware that they purposely deprive others. The anxiety connected with their wish to do so may result in an inhibition as soon as something is expected of them, so that, for example, they forget to buy an expected birthday present, or they become impotent if a woman is willing to yield to them. This anxiety, however, does not always lead to an actual inhibition, but may become apparent in a lurking fear that they are exploiting or depriving others, as indeed they are, though consciously they would indignantly repudiate such an intention. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

ImageA neurotic may even have this fear concerning certain of one’s activities in which these tendencies are actually not present, at the same time remaining unaware that in other activities one does exploit or deprive other people. These tendencies to deprive others are accompanied by an emotional attitude of begrudging envy. Most of us will feel some envy if others have certain advantages which we should like to have ourselves. With the normal person, however, the emphasis lies on the fact that one wishes to have these advantages oneself; with the neurotic the emphasis lies on the fact that one begrudges them to others, even if one does not want them at all. Mothers of this kind often begrudge the gaiety of their children and tell them that “those who sing before breakfast will cry before supper.” The neurotic will try to disguise the crudity of one’s begrudging attitude by putting it on the basis of a justified envy. The advantage of others, whether it concerns a doll, a girl, leisure or a job, appears so glorious and desirable that one feels entirely justified in one’s envy. This justification is possible only with the help of some inadvertent falsification of facts: an under-estimation of what one has oneself, and an illusion that the advantages of others are the really desirable ones. The self-deception may go so far as to make ne actually believe that one is in a miserable state because one fails to have the one advantage in which another person surpasses one, completely forgetting that in all other respects one would not like to change with the other. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

ImageThe price one has to pay for this falsification is incapacity to enjoy and appreciate the possibilities for happiness that are available. This incapacity, however, serves to protect one from the much-feared envy of others. One does not deliberately keep oneself from satisfaction with what one has, as many normal persons who have good reason to protect themselves against the envy of certain persons, and therefore misrepresent their real situation; one does a thorough job of it, and really deprives oneself of any enjoyment. Thus one defeats one’s own ends: one wants to have everything, but in consequence of one’s destructive drives and anxieties one emerges at the end with empty hands. Love, power, and justice are metaphysically speaking as old as being itself. They preceded everything that is, and they cannot be derived from anything that is. They have ontological dignity. And before having received ontological dignity they had mythological meaning. They were gods before they became rational qualities of being. The substance of their mythological meaning is reflected in their ontological significance. Dike, the goddess of justice, receives Parmenides when he is introduced into truth itself. For there is no truth without the form of truth, namely justice. And being-itself, according to the same philosopher, is kept within the bondage of eternal laws. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

ImageThe logos of being is the power which keeps the World going and the city alive, according to Heraclitus, and Mind is the divine power which swings the wheel of being, according to Xenophanes. According to Empedocles, it is hate and love, separation, and reunion which determine the movements of the elements. Love, power, and justice are ever repeated subjects of ontology. There is hardly a leading philosopher who does not put them into they very foundations of one’s thought. In Plato we find the doctrine of eros as the power which drives to the union with the true and the good self. In his interpretation of ideas as the essences of everything, he sees them as the power of being. And justice for him is not a special virtue, but the uniting form of the individual and the social body. In Aristotle we find the doctrine of the universal eros which derives everything towards the highest form, the pure actuality which moves the World not as a cause (kinoumenon) but as the object of love (eromenon). And the movement he describes is a movement from the potential to the actual, from dynamis to energeia, two concepts which include the concept of power. Marriage under the Lordship of Christ is a mutually sanctifying relationship—it moves us toward holiness. Most of us, by the time we get married, are like a well-furnished home—and a lot of furniture needs to be tossed out to make room for the other person. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

ImageMarriage helps empty those rooms. Genuine marital love reveals rooms of self-centeredness. Beyond these are autonomy and self-will—an ongoing house cleaning. Marriage certainly did that for me. I had no idea how self-centered I was until I married! In fact, marriage is the one institution which tames the inveterate barbarianism of man. Over the years a good marriage can change us for the better—almost beyond recognition. There is indeed a mutual sanctification in marriage. However, the emphasis in the Scriptures is on the responsibility of a husband’s love for his wife: “to make her holy, cleansing her by he washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless,” reports Ephesians 5.21-6.9. This is what Christ will do through our divine married to Him, for at His return the washed and regenerated Church will be presented to Him in absolute perfection. This is the dealing of the romance of the ages. Meanwhile, these divine nuptials are a parable of what ought to be the loving husband’s elevating effect on his wide. He is to be the man ff the Word who lives a Godly life, praying and sacrificing for his wife. His authentic spirituality is meant to buoy her onward and upward toward the image of Christ. The man who sanctifies his wife understands that this is his divinely ordained responsibility. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

ImageMen (ignoring for the moment our wives’ spiritual responsibility to us), do you realize it is your responsibility to seek your wife’s sanctification? Even more, honestly, do you accept it? Marriage will reveal something about her which you already know about yourself—that she is a sinner. Marriage reveals everything: her weaknesses, her worst inconsistencies, the things others never see. Loving your spouse is not to love as a saint, but as a sinner. If we love her for her saintliness, we do not love her at all. You see your wife as you see yourself, and you love her as yourself. You realize your mutual need, and you delve into God’s Word, to listen to it with your heart and try, by His grace, to love out so that she will be encouraged by your life—and thus become an even more beautiful bride for Christ. This brings up some hard questions: Is my wife more like Christ because she is married to me? Or is she like Christ in spite of me? Has she shrunk from His likeness because of me? Do I sanctify her or hold her back? Is she a better woman because she is married to me? Is she a better friend? A better mother? Men, our call is clear: sanctifying love. A passage emphasizing the complete and absolute forgiveness of our sins is Isaiah 43.25, “I, even I, am he who blots out your transgressions, for my own sake, and remembers your sins no more.” Here God uses two expressions: He blots out our transgressions—that is, He removes them from the record—and He remembers them no more. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

ImageA friend of mine, because of a teenage “prank,” had a felony conviction in Canada. Later, he received a Queen’s pardon. Now, if his past is ever investigated for criminal activity, the response given is, “We have no record of this person.” His record has not just been marked “pardoned,” it has been completely removed from the file and destroyed. It has been blotted out, never to be seen again. This is what God does with our sins. When you trust in Jesus Christ as you Savior, God removes your record from the file. He does not keep it there or daily add the long list of sins you continue to commit even as a Christian. God not only blots our sins from His record, He also remembers them no more. This expression means God no longer holds them against us. The blotting out of our transgressions is a legal act. It is an official pardon from the Supreme Governor. The remembering them no more is a relational act. It is the giving up by an injured party of all sense of being offended or injured. It is a promise never to bring up, either to Himself or to you, your sins. There is a difference between not remembering and forgetting. Forgetting is passive and is something that we human beings, not being omniscient, so. “Not remembering” is active; it is a promise whereby one person (in this case, God) determines not to remember the sins of another against him. To “not remember” is simply a graphic way of saying, “I will not bring up these matters to you or others in the future.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

ImageConsider a rebellious, recalcitrant student in a classroom. His acts of defiance toward the teacher may have both legal and relational consequences. Legally, he may be expelled from school. Relationally, the teacher may feel a deep sense of hostility toward the student. Even if the student is allowed to return to school (the equivalent of a pardon), the teacher may continue to hold hostility toward the student, “remembering” his rebellion and defiance. In order to gain a good standing in the classroom, the rebellious student needs to be both pardoned by the school authorities and forgiven by the teacher. On needs to have the teacher give up al sense of being offended and agree “not to remember”—for instance, not to bring up—his poor behavior. (Obviously, for this to happen, the student’s attitude and future conduct must change. However, still, the teacher must decide to not remember the past.) This, then, is similar to what God does when He blots out our transgressions and remembers our sins no more. As the Supreme Governor and Judge, God pardons us. As the offended party, God forgives us and He promises never to bring up our sins again. Through His death, Jesus not only secured our pardon with God, He also reconciled us to God. However, Paul said, “All this from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ,” reports 2 Corinthians 5.18. God, acting in grace through the giving of His Son to die for us, was the initiator of reconciliation. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

ImageIf you have trusted in Jesus Christ alone for your salvation, you are both justified (a legal act) and reconciled (a relational act). You are no longer condemned by God. As Paul said, “Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus,” Romans 8.1. In addition, you are no longer estranged from God. God is no longer against you; God is now for you. Again as Paul said, “If God is for us, who can be against us?” (8.31). Both of these wonderful changes occurred because of God’s grace and despite our sin and guilt: “[For] where sin increased, grace increased all the more” (5.20). Those who hate you do not win unless you hate them—and then you destroy yourself. Most people ask for happiness on condition. Happiness can be felt only if you do not set conditions. Come live with me, and be my love, and we will some new pleasure prove of golden sands and crystal brooks with silken lines, and silver hooks. “And there shall be a new Heaven and a new Earth; and they shall be like unto the old save the old have passed away, and all things have become new,” reports Ether 13.9. Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, Who didst descend from Heaven to Earth, out of the bosom of the Father, and didst sustain five wounds upon the wood of the Cross, and shed thy precious Blood for the remission of our sins. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

ImageWe humbly beseech Thee, God, that at the day of judgment we may be set at Thy right hand and be thought worthy to hear those sweetest words, “Come, ye blessed, into the kingdom of My Father:” Who with the same Father, who will save all beings. O Father, Thou hast made man from the glory of thyself, and when not an instrument of that glory, he is a thing of nought; no sin is greater than the sin of unbelief, for if union with Christ is the greatest good, unbelief is the greatest sin, as being cross to thy command; I see that whatever my sin is, yet no sin is like disunion from Christ by unbelief. Lord, keep me from committing the greatest sin in departing from him, for I can never in this life perfectly obey and cleave to Christ. When thou takest away my outward blessings, it is for sin, innot acknowledging that all that I have is of thee, in not serving thee through what I have, in making myself secure and hardened. Lawful blessings are the secret idols, and do mist hurt; the greatest injury is in the having, the greatest good in the taking away. In love divest me of blessings that I may glorify thee the more; remove the fuel of my sin, and may I prize the gain of a little holiness as overbalancing all my losses. The more I love thee with a truly gracious love the more I desire to love thee, and the more miserable I am at my want of love; the more I hunger and thirst after thee, the more I faint and fail in finding thee, the more my heart is broken for sin, the more I pray it may be far more broken. My great evil is that I do not remember the sins of my youth, nay, the sins of one day I forget the next. Keep me from all things that turn to unbelief or lack of felt union with Christ. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

ImageBy the shedding of the Blood of Christ our Lord, peace has been established in Heaven and Earth.  O truly precious is the Covenant of peace, which was made by the offering of that holy Blood! Not with gold, nor silver, nor gems, nor pearls, but with the Blood that gushed from the side of the Saviour. That Blood-shedding gladdened Heaven, purified Earth, and terrified hell. Today, O good Jesus, for us Thou didst not hide Thy Face from shame and spitting. Today, Jesus our Redeemer, for us Thou wast mocked, buffeted by unbelievers, and crowned with thorns. Today, O good Shepherd, Thou didst lay down Thy life on the Cross for the sheep, and wast crucified with robbers, and hadst Thy sacred hands nailed through. Today Thou was laid in the guarded sepulcher, and the Saints burst open their tombs. Today, O good Jesus, put an end to our sins, that no the day of Thy Resurrection we may joyfully receive Thy holy Body, and be refreshed with Thy sacred Blood. O Christ, the Only-begotten Son of the Unbegotten Father, Who for us wast this say slain, the Innocent for the ungodly; remember the price of Thy Blood, and bout out the sins of Thy people; and as Thou wast pleased to endure for us reproaches, spitting, bonds, blows, the scourge, the cross. The nails, the bitter cup, death, the spear, and lastly burial, vouchsafe to us wretched ones for whom Thou didst suffer this, the infinite blessedness of Heavenly kingdom; that we who bow down in reverence for Thy Passion, may be raised up to things Heavenly in the joys of Thy Resurrection. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Life is the Rose’s Hope While Yet Unblown the Reader of an Ever-Changing Tale!

ImageYou are rich beyond your wildest dreams! Treasures it, measure it, in units of love. We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it. Learning to lead is, on one level, learning to manage change. A leader imposes (in the most beneficial sense of the word) one’s philosophy on the organization, creating or re-creating its culture. The organization then acts on that philosophy, carries out the mission, and the culture takes on a life of its own, becomes more cause than effect. However, unless the leader continues to evolve, to adapt and adjust to external changes, the organization will sooner or later fall. You will never stub your toe standing still. The faster you go, the more chance there is of stubbing your toe, but the more chance you have of getting somewhere. Think of accelerated change as an object hurtling toward you at tremendous speed. If you first spot it a mile away, its speed and the distance between you and it blur its nature; all you can see is an indistinct shape. As the object continues rushing toward you, you begin to discern a rough oblong shape, but you cannot determine much else about it. Is it a threatening enemy missile or a friendly vehicle you might ride toward the future? Quickly, it bears down on you. As you peer at it closely, you suddenly see handles on its side. An opportunity, not a danger! If you have focused well enough and soon enough, you can seize it, letting it whisky you forward well ahead of those who failed to focus on it in time. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21

ImageMany people do not understand the concept of faith because they are still learning to believe. However, electricity had the possibility of being discovered in 400 A.D., but was not discovered until 1752. So that gives you an idea of how powerful can become as you develop it. Perhaps we will eventually have the power to manifest our blessings by believing they are possible. New ideas do not detach themselves gradually from the traditional concepts of energy by deeper reflection on them, but belongs to those intuitively apprehended ideas which, arising in other realms of a spiritual nature, as it were take possession of the mind and compel it to reshape the traditional conceptions in their own likeness. The question now arises: Whence this new idea that thrusts itself upon consciousness with such elemental force? And whence did it derive the power that could so seize upon consciousness that it completely eclipsed the multitudinous impressions of a first voyage to the tropics? These questions are not so easy to answer. However, if we apply our theory here, the explanation can only be this: the idea of energy and its conservation must be a primordial image that was dormant in the collective unconscious. Such a conclusion naturally obliges us to prove that a primordial image of this kind really did exist in the mental history of humankind and was operative through the ages. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21

ImageAs a matter of fact, this proof can be produced without much difficulty: the most primitive religions in the most widely separated parts of the Earth are founded upon this image. These are the so-called dynamistic religions whose sole and determining thought is that there exists a universal magical power about which everything revolves. Many people misunderstand this idea of animism. In reality primitives do not mean, by their power-concept, souls or spirits at all, but something which the American investigator Lovejoy has appropriately termed “primitive energetics.” This concept is equivalent to the idea of soul, spirit, God, health, bodily strength, fertility, magic, influence, power, prestige, medicine, as well as certain states of feeling which are characterized by the release of affects. Among certain Polynesians mulungu—this same primitive power-concept—means spirit, soul, daemonism, magic, prestige; and when anything astonishing happens, the people cry out “Mulugu!” This power-concept is also the earliest form of a concept of God among primitives, and is an image which has undergone countless variations in the course of history. In the Old Testament the magic power glows in the burning bush and in the countenance of Moses; in the Gospels it descends with the Holy Ghost in the form of fiery tongues from Heaven. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21

ImageIn Heraclitus magic power appears as World energy, as “ever-living fire”; among the Persians it is the fiery glow of “Haoma,” divine grace; among the Stoics it is the original heart, the power of fate. Again, in medieval legend it appears as the aura or halo, and it flares up like a flame from the roof of the hut in which the saint lies in ecstasy. In their visions the saints behold the Sun of this power, the plentitude of its light. According to the old view, the soul itself is this power; in the idea of the soul’s immortality the there is implicit its conversation, and in the Buddhist and primitive notion of metempsychosis—transmigration of souls—is implicit its unlited changeability together with its constant preservation. So this idea has been stamped on the human brain for aeons. That is why it lies ready to hand in the unconscious of every being. Only, certain conditions are needed to cause it to appear. These conditions were evidently fulfilled in the case of Benjamin Franklin. The greatest and best thoughts of beings shape themselves upon these primordial images as upon a blueprint. I have often been asked where the archetypes or primordial images comes from. It seems to me that their origin can only be explained by assuming them to be deposits of the constantly repeated experiences of humanity. One of the commonest and at the same time most impressive experiences is the apparent movement of the Sun every day. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21

ImageWe certainly cannot discover anything of the kind in the unconscious, so far as the known physical process is concerned. What we do find, on the other hand, is the myth of the Sun-hero in all its countless modifications. It is this myth, and not the physical process, that forms the Sun archetype. The same can be said of the phases of the Moon. He archetype is a kind of readiness to produce over and over again the same or similar mythical ideas. Hence it seems as though what is impressed upon the unconscious were exclusively the subjective fantasy-idea aroused by the physical process. Therefore we may take it that archetypes are recurrent impressions made by subjective reactions. Naturally this assumption pushes the problem only further back without solving it. There is nothing to prevent us from assuming that certain archetypes exist even in animals, that they are grounded in the peculiarities of the living organism itself and are therefore direct expressions of life whose nature cannot be further explained. Not only are the archetypes, apparently, impressions of ever-repeated typical experiences, but, at the same time, they behave empirically like agents that tend towards the repetition of these same experiences. For when an archetype appears in a dream, in a fantasy, or in life, it always brings with it a certain influence or power by virtue of which it either exercises a numinous or fascinating effect, or impels to action. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21

ImageWhatever America hopes to bring to pass in this World must first come to pass in the heart of America. Deep learning brings about personality change. In psychotherapy, the concept of a “cure” is entirely inappropriate, since in most of these disorders we are dealing with learned behavior, not with a disease. During and after therapy the client increases in attitudes of self-acceptance, and this is correlated with an increase in acceptance of others. We did not ask unanswerable questions as to what instruments would measure success or cure. We asked specific questions related to each hypothesis. What instrument can be used to measure the individual’s concept of self? What instrument will give a satisfactory measure of maturity of behavior? How can we measure the degree of an individual’s acceptance of others? While question such as these are difficult, operational answers are discoverable. Thus our decision in regard to criteria gave us much help in solving the whole problem of instrumentation of the research. Profound research indicates that changes occur in the perceived self of the client during and after therapy; there are constructive changes in the client’s personality characteristics and personality characteristics of the well-functioning person; there is change in the direction defined as personal integrations and adjustment; there are also changes in the maturity of the client’s behavior as observed by friends. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21

ImageNo one learns to make right decision without being free to make wrong one. In each instance, the change we have observed in someone during and after therapy is significantly greater than that found in people who try to deal with their problems without seeking help. Findings indicate some people are misguided and become somewhat confused and ambiguous when they do not have the proper guidance. For instance, a boy found out he was adopted, ditched his father before entering the ballpark to see a baseball game, sold his ticket and went to meet with some man at the park at night. The boy thought was his biological father because in an email he had claimed to be. In the process, unbeknownst to him, he was about to be kidnapped, when the FBI intercepted and rescued the minor. The boy had no idea he was being preyed on. Prior to the incident, the teacher did notice a change in his personality, and held him after class prior to the incident, but the boy would not confess that anything was wrong. He had also been hanging out with unsavory youth and trying to impress them. Had the boy been in therapy, he would have been able to express his concerns and received proper guidance. Luckily the boy was returned home safely and the bad man was caught in the process, but he could have lost his life and a lot of taxpayer money was used to find him. The bright side, however, is the man will not be able to prey on other young kids. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21

ImageWe must learn to explore all the options and possibilities that confront us in a complex and rapidly changing World. We must learn to listen. Sometimes change means doing things different. In regard to client-sponsored psychotherapy, at least, there is now objective evidence of beneficial changes in personality and behavior in directions which are usually regarded as constructive and these changes are attributed to the therapy. It is the adoption of multiple specific research criteria and the use of a rigorously controlled research design which makes it possible to make such a statement. If you are like I am, your heart may be saddened by what we have discussed. As disciples of Jesus Christ, we must ask how we can become the kind of people who bring honor to Christ, to help turn the culture toward Him, and to be lights in the midst of darkness for our families, friends, churches, and communities. There is no simple answer to this question, but one thing is crystal clear. We must rededicate ourselves to being deeply spiritual people who it can truly be said that “Christ is formed in you.” And, given the times in which we live, we must obey Jesus’ admonition to be as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves. Surrounded by a fragmented culture, how do we become deeply spiritual people who are wise and savvy, yet innocent and pure? How do we raise children, develop good marriages, serve as role models at work, and make an attractive impact on our communities? #RandolphHarris 8 of 21

ImageMore than ever before, we need what the Old Testament calls wisdom. The spiritually mature person is a wise person. And a wise person has the savvy and skill necessary to lead an exemplary life and to address the issues of the say in a responsible, attractive way that brings honor to God. Wisdom is the fruit of a life of study and a developed mind. Wisdom is the application of knowledge gained from studying both God’s written Word and His revealed truth in creation. If we are going to be wise, spiritual people prepared to meet the crises of our age, we must be a studying, learning community that values the life of the mind. Clearly, to become spiritually formed in Christ, a person of wisdom, requires that we follow Christ’s teaching in this critical area—and it was Christ who taught us to love the Lord our God with all our minds. The information of most relevance in the study of stigma has certain properties. It is information about an individual. It is about one more or less abiding characteristics, as opposed to the moods, feelings, or intents that one might have at a particular moment. The information, as well as the sign through which it is conveyed, is reflexive and embodied; that is, it is conveyed by the very person it is about, and conveyed though bodily expression. Information possessing all of these properties I here call “social.” Some signs that convey social information may be frequently and steadily available, and routinely sought and received; these signs may be called “symbols.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 21

ImageThe social information conveyed by any particular symbol may merely confirm what other signs tell us about the individual, filling out our image of one in a redundant and unproblematic way. Some lapel buttons attesting to social club membership, are examples, as are male wedding rings, or the color of the sole of some women’s high heel shoes, in some contexts. However, the social information conveyed by a symbol can establish a special claim to prestige, honor, or desirable class position—a claim that might not otherwise be presented or, if otherwise presented, then not automatically granted. Such a sign is popularly called a “status symbol” might be more accurate, the former term being more suitably employed when a well-organized social position of some kind is the referent. Prestige symbols can be contrasted to stigma symbols, namely, signs which are especially effective in drawing attention to a debasing identity discrepancy, breaking up what would otherwise be a coherent overall picture, with a consequent reduction in our valuation of the individual. The shaved head of female collaborators in World War II is an example, as is an habitual solecism through which someone affecting middle class manner and dress repeatedly employs a word incorrectly or repeatedly mispronounces it. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21

ImageIn addition to prestige symbols and stigma symbols, one further possibility is to be found, namely, a sign that tends—in fact or hope—to break up an otherwise coherent picture but in this cause in a beneficial direction desired by the actor, not so much establishing a new claim as throwing severe doubt on the validity of the virtual one. I shall refer here to disidentifiers. On example is the “good English” of an educated inner-city adult visiting the South; another is the bandana or loud boisterous conversations conducted outside the homes affected by some urban lower-class people. A study of illiterates provides another illustration: Therefore, when goal orientation is pronounced or imperative and there exists a high probability that definition as illiterate is a bar to the achievement of the goal, the illiterate is likely to “pass” as literate. The popularity in the group studied of windowpane lenses with heavy horn frames (“bop glasses”) may be viewed as an attempt to emulate the stereotype of the businessman-teacher-young intellectual and especially the high state jazz musician. A New York specialist in the arts of vagrancy provides still another illustration: After seven-thirty in the evening, in order to read a book in Grand Central or Penn Station, a person either has to wear horn-rimmed glasses or look exceptionally prosperous. Anyone else is apt to come under surveillance. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21

ImageOn the other hand, newspaper readers never seem to attract attention and even the seediest vagrant can sit in Grand Central all night without being bothered if he or she continues to read a paper. Note that in this discussion of prestige symbols, stigma symbols, and disidentifiers, sighs have been considered which routinely convey social information. These symbols must be distinguished from fugitive signs that have not been institutionalized as information carriers. When such signs make claims to prestige, one can all them points; when they discredit tacit claims, one can call them slips. Some signs carrying social information, being present, first of all, for other reasons, have only an overlay of informational function. There are stigma symbols that provide examples: the wrist markings which disclose that an individual has attempted suicide pock marks of drug addicts; the handcuffed wrists of convicts in transit; or black eyes when worn in public by people, as writer on women of the evening suggests: “Outside [the prison were she now is] I had been in the soup with it. Well, you know how it is: the law sees a chick with a shiner, figures she is up to something. Bull figures maybe in the life. Next thing trails her around. Then maybe bang! Busted.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 21

ImageOther signs are designed by a person solely for the purpose of conveying social information, as in the case of insignia of military rank. It should be added that the significance of the underlay of a sign can become reduced over time, becoming, at the extreme, merely vestigial, even while the informational function of the activity remains constant or increases in importance. Further, a sign that appears to be present for non-informational reasons may sometimes be manufactured with malice aforethought solely because of its informing function, as when dueling scares were carefully planned and inflicted. Signs conveying social information vary according to whether or not they are congenital, and, if not, whether, once employed, they become a permanent part of the person. (Skin color is congenital; a brand mark or maiming is permanent but not congenital; a person’s head-shave is neither congenital nor permanent.) More important, impermanent signs solely employed to convey social information may or may not be employed to convey social information may or may not be employed against the will of the informant; when they are, they tend to be stigma symbols. Later it will be necessary to consider stigma symbols that are voluntarily employed. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21

ImageIt is possible for signs which mean one thing to one group to mean something else to another group, the same category being designated but differently characterized. For example, the shoulder patches that prison officials require escape-prone prisoners to wear can come to mean one thing to guards, in general negative, while being a mark of pride for the wearer relative to one’s fellow prisoners. The uniform of an officer may be a matter of pride to some, to be worn on every possible occasion; for other officers, weekends may represent a time when they can exercise their choice and wear mufti, passing as civilians. Similarly, while the obligation to wear the school cap in town may be seen as a privilege by some boys, as will the obligation to wear a uniform on leave by other ranks, still there will be wearers who feel that the social information conveyed thereby is a means of ensuring control and discipline over them when they are off duty and off the premises. So, too, during the eighteen hundreds in California, the absence of a pigtail (queue) on a Chinese man signified for Occidentals a degree of acculturation, but to fellow-Chinese a question would be raised as to respectability—specifically, whether or not the individual has served a term in prison where cutting off of the queue was obligatory; loss of queue was for a time, then, very strongly resisted. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21

ImageSigns carry social information vary of course as to reliability. Distended capillaries on the cheek and nose, sometimes called “venous stigmata” with more aptness than meant, can be and are taken as indicating alcoholic excess. However, teetotalers can exhibit the same symbol for other physiological reasons, thereby giving rise to suspicions about themselves which are not justified, but with which they must deal nonetheless. A final point about social information must be raised; it has to do with the informing character of the “with” relationship in our society.  To be “with” someone is to arrive at a social occasion in one’s company, walk with one down a street, be a member of one’s party in a restaurant, and so forth. The issue is that in certain circumstances the social identity of those an individual is with can be used as a source of information concerning one’s own social identity, the assumption being that one is what the others are. Being with some people alone, like with Paris Hilton, is a prestige symbol. In the extreme, perhaps, is the situation in criminal circles: a person wanted for arrest can legally contaminate anyone he or she is seen with, subjecting them to arrest on suspicion. (A person for whom there is a warrant is therefore said “to have smallpox” and his or her criminal disease is said to be “catching.”) In any case, an analysis of how people manage the information they convey about themselves will have to consider how they deal with the contingencies of being seen “with” particular others. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21

ImageBy the late nineteenth century, etiquette books no longer had to give advice to people about suppressing bodily functions and being proper. In the early nineteenth century, diners still had to be reminded not to blow their noses on the tablecloth, not to spit food back into the serving dishes, not to pick their teeth with their knives, and not to urinate in front of ladies. As time passed, people learned enough to control themselves in public. The self-contained, modern, discreet person was invented in the late nineteenth century as a reaction to the loss of control inherent in modern, anonymous city life. The noteworthy element is not how quaint the Victorians were or how different, but how much more like us they are than any other people before them. To really appreciate the revolution in eating in the late nineteenth century, it would help to see a Victorian dining room with its pantry fully stocked and its food on the table. The nineteenth century saw the introduction and spread of brand-named foods, prepackaging, logos, and graphic labels. Before the Victorian era, food was either raised or grown at home or bought in bulk. The local general store or grocer had large sacks of sugar, beans, and flours; barrels of molasses and pickles; as well as spices such as pepper, cloves, and allspice. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21

ImageThe grocer measured and weighed his waves into the customer’s containers and kept a tab, billing his or her accounts once a month. Milk, eggs, and fowl were purchased from a country farmer who brought them to market or, more likely, from a city dairyman who kept cows and chickens in town. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the quality of foods often got a lot worse. Railroads and urbanization supported the growth of the food business. Flour was milled closer to the source or closer to inexpensive transportation rather than closer to the consumer. It was commonly extended by unscrupulous companies with a measure of chalk dust or plaster. Tea was often stretched with iron filings, a profitable ingredient for a product sold by weight. Milk was often skimmed of valuable cream and sold as whole. Even when it was not, city cows often lived in multistory brick barns, were fed on rotten silage, and infected with tuberculosis. These consumptive Camilles of the cow Worldly hardly gave thick, white milk that Americans were used to. New York City’s milk was most often described as watery and bluish. By the late nineteenth century, there were strong reactions to the declining quality of food. You can change anything you want, but you cannot change everything you want. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21

ImageDuring the 1870s, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg was hired to manage the Western Health Reform Institute which he renamed the Battle Creek Sanitarium. He believed in crispy foods to clean the teeth, uncooked fruit as God made it, and bran to encourage evacuation. “Bran does not irritate, it titillates,” reports Dr. Kellogg. His first commercial product was called Granola, but there was another product already on the market called Granula so he changed the name to Granose and sold 100,000 pounds in the first year. One of his patients was Charles Post. After nine months Post still has his ulcers, but he had learned the joy of food marketing. In 1895 in invented Postum, a coffee substitute, and, soon thereafter, a dry cereal called Elijah’s Manna. As grocers objected to the blasphemy, he renamed it Grape Nuts. Soon after he followed with Post-Toasties. Dr. Kellogg prescribed a diet high in grains and low in the ubiquitous salt pork on which most Americans subsisted. He was so successful that he packaged his corn flakes and advertised them heavily, urging brand-name loyalty as an assurance of purity. Post marketed his Grape Nuts and Post-Toasties in the same way—with a distinctive logo, testimonials from doctors and patients, and factory packaging. The National Biscuit Company put up billboards across America assuring consumers that “You Need a Biscuit” (Uneeda Biscuit) was packaged in a moisture-proof wrapping to ensure a pure, untainted, crisp product. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21

ImageAt the same time, the Reverend Sylvester Graham was an evangelist for whole-wheat flour and developed a sweetened whole-wheat cracker (the Graham cracker) that was supposed to keep the consumer not only healthy, but also moral. Graham was both a Presbyterian minister and an agent of the Pennsylvania Temperance Society and marketed his new cracker to boarding schools as a suppressant of masturbation in boys. This was certainly creative advertising that even a modern advertising executive would admire. The greatest contributor among these health-food pioneers Gail Borden. City people were being poisoned by tainted milk every day. Borden discovered that by evaporating much of the water from milk and canning the result, the milk did not have to be refrigerated. The cows could live a healthy country life while the consumers could stay far away in the city, hence Borden’s famous slogan for Carnation milk: “from contented cows.” The condition upon which God hath given liberty to humans is eternal vigilance. God made the country, and people made the town. Be always sure you are right—then go ahead. Absence of occupation is not rest, a mind quite vacant is a mind distressed. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21

ImageAlmighty and everlasting God, Who restores us by the blessed Passion of Thy Christ, preserve in us the works of Thy mercy; that by the celebration of this Mystery our lives may be continually devout; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. We beseech Thee, O Lord, purify Thy family, and cleanse it from all contagion of wickedness; that the vessels which have been redeemed by their Lord’s Passion may never again be stained by the unclean spirit, but may be possessed by everlasting salvation; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Remember Thy compassions, O Lord, and sanctify with eternal protection Thy servants, for whom Christ Thy Son by His Blood appointed unto us the Paschal mystery; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. O God, Who by the Passion of Thy Christ our Lord hast dissolved that hereditary death of the ancient sin, to which the whole race of Adam’s posterity had succeeded; grant that havng been made conformable unto Him, as we by necessity of nature have borne the image of the Earthly, so by the sanctification of grace we may bear the image of the Heavenly, even of Christ our Lord; Who with Thee we shall prosper and overcome all oppression. “And it came to pass that Orihah did walk humbly before the Lord, and did remember how great things the Lord had done for his father, and also taught his people how great things the Lord had done for their fathers,” reports Ether 6.30. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21

ImageLord of all being, there is one thing that deserves my greatest care, that calls forth my ardent desires, that is, that I may answer the great end for which I am made—to glorify thee who hast given me being, and to do all the good I can for my fellow beings; verily, life is not worth having if it be not improved for this noble purpose. Yet, Lord, how little is this the thought of humankind! Most beings seem to live for themselves, without much or any regard for thy glory, or for the good of others; they earnestly desire and eagerly pursue the riches, honours, pleasures of this life, as if they suppose that wealth, greatness, merriment, could make their immortal souls happy; but, alas, what false delusive dreams are these! And how miserable ere long will those be that sleep in them, for all our happiness consists in loving thee, and being holy as thou art holy. O may I never fall into the tempers and vanities, the sensuality and folly of the present World! It is a place of inexpressible sorrow, a vast empty nothingness; time is  a moment, a vapour, and all its enjoyments are empty bubbles, fleeting blasts of wind, from which nothing satisfactory can be derived; give me grace always to keep in covenant with thee, and to reject as delusions a great name here or hereafter, together with all sinful pleasures or profits. Help me to know continually that there can be no true happiness, no fulfilling of thy purpose for me, apart from a life lived in and for the Son of thy Love. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21Image

BRIGHTON STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH

Rancho Cordova, CA |

Now Selling!

ImageNOW 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. Residence three is nearly 2,800 square feet, and comes in three different exterior architectural styles. One of my favorite is this Mid-Century Modern house by Cresleigh Homes reminds me of a Frank Lloyd Wright house. It is crisp and commanding, yet looks welcoming, like it is made for down-home hospitality. The star attractions is of course the balcony and angular roofline. Inside, though, the design is truly a hard worker with plenty of room to maneuver: the kitchen is anchored by the large great room, and expansive dining room, and there is a huge first floor master suite. Additionally on the first floor is a powder room and a decent sized foyer, and a mud room just off of the three car garage.

ImageThere is also a master bedroom on the second floor, a laundry room, two seondary bedroom, and the third bedroom opens up to the balcony. Do not miss the other extras throughout this 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. You will find yourself in love with one of Cresleigh’s amazing designs. https://cresleigh.com/brighton-station/

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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!

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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

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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

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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

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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
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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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CRESLEIGH MEADOWS AT PLUMAS RANCH

Plumas Lake, CA | from the mid $300’s

Coming Soon!

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

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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/

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It is a Lifting-Up into One’s Mind When You Have Reached the Very Edge of Your Own Mind!

ImageIt is not the human thoughts which the teacher sends out, so much as the spiritual power within the disciple which is aroused by those thoughts, that matters. Our ideals are important to us as is the love of books and the love of knowledge and the love of truth and free information and letting people discover things for themselves. We can say in a preliminary manner, that spiritual formation for the Christian basically refers to the Spirit-driven process of forming the inner World of the human self in such a way that it becomes like the inner being of Christ himself.  In the degree to which spiritual formation in Christ is successful, the outer life of the individual becomes a natural expression or outflow of the character and teachings of Jesus. Christian spiritual formation is focuses entirely on Jesus. Its goal is an obedience or conformity to Christ that arises out of an inner transformation accomplished through purposive interaction with the grace of God in Christ. Obedience is an essential outcome of Christian spiritual formation. When humans forget it, they are reminded of their divine linkage by prophets, teachers, and enlightened individuals. One of the advantages of having a personal teacher is that, to some extent, you can watch his or her mind work. The master can see the disciple’s character and motives, hidden complexes and unrevealed weaknesses better than one can oneself. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14

ImageTeachers affect eternity; they can never tell where their influence stops. So long as one’s experience and results have not established sufficient confidence in one’s intuitive guidance and sufficient trust in one’s philosophic knowledge, one needs to continue travelling with a teacher. What the earnest mind is struggling to formulate to itself vaguely and uncertainly and unclearly, the teacher states decisively, assuredly, and definitely. That Christ be formed within you is the eternal watchword of Christian spiritual formation. This ideal is fortified by the deep moral and spiritual insight and in part of the process of proving that the spirit gives life. There are various wrong behaviors: acting out of anger, looking to lust, heartless divorce, verbal manipulation, returning evil for evil, and so forth. However, as abundant experience teaches, to strive merely to act in conformity with his expressions of what living in the kingdom of God from the heart is like is to attempt the impossible. And it will also lead to doing things that are obviously wrong and even ridiculous—such as self-castration as presumed act of devotion to Christ, which unfortunately has repeatedly occurred in Christian history. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14

ImageThe outward interpretation of spiritual formation, emphasizing specific acts as it does, will merely increase the righteousness of beings. However, we must go beyond it to achieve genuine transformation of who we are through Christ, so we can live richly in his kingdom. If we were studying the process of growth in plants, we would assume certain constant conditions of temperature, moisture and Sunlight, in forming our conceptualization of the process. Likewise in conceptualizing the process of personality change in psychotherapy, there are elements which will denote or characterize the change itself. When beings in the past have asked themselves the purpose o life, some have answered, in the words of the catechism, that the chief end of beings is to glorify God. Others have thought of life’s purpose as being the preparation of oneself for immortality. Some has settled on a much more Earthy goal—to enjoy and release and satisfy every sensual desire. Still many—and this applies to much of humanity—regard the purpose of life as being to achieve—to gain material possessions, status, knowledge and power. Some have made it their goal to give themselves completely and devotedly to a cause outside of themselves such as Christianity, or capitalism. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14

ImageAdolph Hitler has seen his goal as that of becoming the leader of a master race which would exercise power over all. In sharp contact, many in the East have striven to eliminate personal desires, to exercise the utmost of control over themselves. I mention these widely ranging choices to indicate some of the very different aims beings have lived for, to suggest that there are indeed many goals possible. Nonetheless, our first value dimension involves a preference for a responsible, moral, self-restrained participation in life, appreciating and conserving what beings have attained. The second-place stress upon delight in vigorous action for overcoming of obstacles. In involves a confident initiation of change, either in resolving personal and social problems, or in overcoming obstacles in the natural World. The third dimension stresses the value of a self-sufficient inner life with a rich and heightened self-awareness. Control over persons and things is rejected in favor of a deep and sympathetic insight into self and others. The fourth underlying dimension values a receptivity to persons and to nature. Inspiration is seen as coming from a source outside the self, and the person lives and develops in devoted responsiveness to this source. The fifth and final dimension stresses sensuous enjoyment, self-enjoyment. The simple pleasures of life, an abandonment to the moment, a relaxed openness to life, are values. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14

ImageThis is a significant study, one of the first to measure objectively the answers given in different cultures to the question, what is the purpose of my life? It has added to our knowledge of the answers given. It has also helped to define some of the basic dimension in terms of which the choice is made. When we look at these dimensions, it is as if persons in various cultures have in common five major tones in the musical scales on which they compose different melodies. It is clear that the very expression of the fear is part of what we are becoming. Instead of simply being a façade, as if it were one is coming closer to being oneself, namely a frightened person hiding behind a façade because one regards oneself as too awful to be seen. However, the main overall effect of higher education upon student values is to bring about general acceptance of a body of standards and attitudes characteristic of collegebred men and women in the World community. The impact of the college experience is to socialize the individual, to refine, polish, or shape up one’s values so that one can fit comfortably into the rank of global college alumni. Nonetheless, I find that many individuals have formed themselves by trying to please others, but again, when they are free, they move away from being this person. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14

ImageOne professional man, looking back at some of the process he has been through, writes, toward the end of therapy: “I finally felt that I simply had to begin doing what I wanted to do, not what I thought I should do, and regardless of what other people feel I should do. This is a complete reversal of my whole life. I have always felt I had to do things because they were expected of me, or more important, to make people like me. The hell with it! I think from now on I am going to just be me—rich or poor, good or bad, rational or irrational, logical or illogical, famous or infamous. So thanks for your part in helping me to rediscover Shakespeare’s—‘To thine own self be true.’” People seem to move toward more openly being a process, a fluidity, a changing. They are not disturbed to find that they are not the same day to day, that they do not always hold the same feelings toward s given experience or person, that they are not always consistent. They are in flux, and seem more content to continue in this flowing current. The striving for conclusions and ends states seems to diminish. An existing individual is constantly in process of becoming, and translates all one’s thinking into terms of process. It is with one as it is with a writer and one’s style; for one only has a style who never has anything finished, but moves waters of the language every time one begins, so that the most common expression comes into being for one with the freshness of a new birth. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14

ImageI find that people move toward being a process of potentialities, being born, rather than being or becoming some fixed goal. It also involves being a complexity of process. I find that this desires to be all of oneself in each moment—all the richness and complexity, with noting hidden from oneself, and nothing feared in oneself—this is a common desire in those who have seemed to show much movement in therapy. To be that self which one truly is involves still other components. One which ha perhaps been implied already is that the individual moves toward living in an open, friendly, close relationship to one’s own experience. This does not occur easily. Often as a person sense some new facet of oneself, one initially rejects it. Only as one experiences such a hitherto denied aspect of oneself in acceptant climate can one tentatively accept it as a part of oneself. Many cannot tolerate the experience of one’s childish feelings, but gradually as one comes to accept and embrace them as a part of oneself, to live close to them and in them when they occur. One type of wise person is one whose wiseness comes from working in an establishment which caters either to the wants of those with a particular stigma or to actions that society takes in regard to these persons. For example, nurse and physical therapist can be wise; they can come to know more about a given type of prosthetic equipment than the patient who must learn to use it so as to minimize one’s mobility impairment. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14

ImageOther types of wise persons are the individuals who are related through the social structure to a stigmatized individual—a relationship that leads the wider society to treat both individuals in some respects as one. Thus the loyal spouse of the mental patient, the daughter of a wealthy CEO, the parent of a physically disabled child, the friend of someone visually impaired, the family of the hangman, are all obliged to share some of the discredit of the stigmatized person to whom they are related. One response to this fate is to embrace it, and to live within the World of one’s stigmatized connection. It should be added that persons who acquire a degree of stigma in this way can themselves have connections who acquire a degree of stigma in this infirmary twice-removed. The problems faced by stigmatized persons spread out in waves, but of diminishing intensity. For instance, there was a 12-year-old girl who was left out of all social activities because her father was a successful CEO. She tired to be nice and friendly to everyone but it was no use. The girls at school told her that their mother’s did not want them to associate with her because it will be bad for their reputations. Her father had some bad publicity in the papers and even through he is running a successful business people are envious of him. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14

ImageThe girl wanted to know if there was anything someone could do because she was very lonesome; it was no fun being alone all the time. Her mother tried to take her places, but the girl wanted to be with people her own age. In general, the tendency for a stigma to spread from the stigmatized individual to one’s close connections provides a reason why such relations tend either to be avoided or to be terminated, where existing. Persons with a courtesy stigma provide a model of “normalization,” showing how far normal could go in treating the stigmatized person as if one did not have a stigma. (Normalization is to be distinguished from “normification,” namely, the effort on the part of a stigmatized individual to present oneself as an ordinary person, although not necessarily making a secret of one’s failing.) Further, a cult of the stigmatized can occur, the stigmaphobic response of the normal being countered by the stigmatized response to the wide. The person with a courtesy stigma can in fact make both the stigmatized and the normal uncomfortable: by always being ready to carry a burden that is not really theirs, they can confront everyone else with too much morality; by treating the stigma as a neutral matter to be looked at in a direct, off-hand way, they open themselves and the stigmatized to misunderstanding by normal who may read offensiveness into this behavior. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14

ImageThe relation between the stigmatized and one’s stand-in can be an uneasy one. The person with a failing may feel that reversion to type may occur at any moment, and at a time when defenses are down and dependency is up. One person showed a tendency to move away, hesitantly and fearfully, from a self that he is not. In other words even though there may be no recognition of what one might be moving toward, he is moving away from something. And of course, in doing so one is beginning to define, however negatively, what he is. At first this may be expressed simply as a fear of exposing what he is. Thus one eighteen-year-old boy says, in an early interview: “I know I am not so hot, and I am afraid they will find it out. That is why I do these things…They are going to find out some day that I am not so hot. I am just trying to put that day off as long as possible. If you know me as I know myself—I am not going to tell you the person I really think I am. There is only one place I will not cooperate and that is it. It would not help your opinion of me to know what I think of myself.” A phrase or two, coming from an inspired being, may set a subconscious process working in the mind of another and lead oneself in the end to acquire a new truth. Those who come forward as gurus driven by the ego, the ambitions, and ulterior motives are not gurus at all. They are trespassers on a fine vocation. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14

ImageWe must remember that those who work to earn a livelihood and come home tired have not the time or strength to think for themselves. For them the ready-made support of established religion is indeed helpful, while the guidance of sincere, competent, and available teachers is even more sought. Modern cynics and skeptics see no harm in paying those to whom we entrust the minds of their children a smaller wage than is paid to those to whom they entrust the care of their plumbing. Teachers are the important link to the future and the World of knowledge and self-esteem for children. We need to strengthen the chain that brings us together in a worthwhile and noble cause—teaching! Let us continue to strengthen the chain that brings us together. We are a team but we are only as strong as our weakest link. To follow one’s path, rejecting the idea of seeking the expert help, tested knowledge, and accumulated experience of a Master is to follow a haphazard course of trial and error. The determination to maintain such independence and to make one’s own way by one’s own effort is not of much use. One will be far better off working under guidance than without it. If one as an aspirant has been led safely upwards past the delusory sidetrack and bypaths which detain so many other seekers, one is most fortunate. Only in this way can one’s consciousness arrive at what really constitutes the Highest Truth. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14

ImageAs the strata of the Earth preserves in succession the living creatures of past epochs, so the shelves of libraries preserve in succession the errors of the past and their expectations, which like the former were very lively and made a great commotion in their own age but now stand petrified and stiff in place where only the literary paleontologist regards them. One is wise who knows the sources of knowledge—where it is written and where it is to be found. The library is not only there as a socially owned and governed institution, a true people’s information service; it is staffed by men and women who maintain high respect for intellectual values. Because they are also the traditional keepers of the books, the libraries have a healthy sense of the hierarchical relationship between data and ideas, facts and knowledge. Teaching is necessary. How can those who do not know the true cause of their afflictions know the way out of them? Someone must warn them, someone must awaken them. In a completely rational society, the best of us would aspire to be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for something less, because passing civilization along from one generation to the next ought to be the highest honor and the highest responsibility anyone could have. The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14

ImageA being who approached God with deep longing for Him, and earnest prayer, will find god if one has no guru. However, a teacher is necessary because very few people have his deep yearning and therefore the guru is necessary for them.  When the going gets tough, the teacher inspires and encourages seekers of God not to give up, but to stick to the Quest, regardless of the many long years it takes. It is always pleasant to learn that a seeker has found a good teacher. It may be puzzling then to hear that the teacher can no longer continue with one’s pupil. However, in such a case, the individual should not be unnecessarily distressed, because one can most certainly continue to make progress on the Quest irrespective of whether or not one has an outward teacher. All one needs to do is to pray humbly to God, whose love and forgiveness will accompany one always where a human teacher cannot. The instruments of Christian spiritual formation therefore involve much more than human effort and actions under our control. Well-informed human effort certainly is indispensable, for spiritual formation is no passive process. However, Christlikeness of the inner being is not a human attainment. It is, finally, a gift of grace. Though we must act, the resources for spiritual formation extend far beyond the human. They come from the interactive presence of the Holy Spirit in the lives of those who place their confidence in Christ. They also come from the spiritual treasures—people, events, traditions, teachings—stored in the body of Christ’s people on Earth, past and present. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14

ImageTherefore we must understand that spiritual formation is not only formation of the spirit or inner being of the individual, though that is both the process and the outcome. It is also formation by the Spirit of god and by the spiritual riches of Christ’s continuing incarnation in his people—including, most prominently, the treasures of his written and spoken word and the amazing personalities of those in whom one has most fully lived. Grant unto us, we pray Thee, O Lord our God, that we who rejoice to keep the feast of the Nativity of Jesus Christ our Lord, may by walking worthily of Him attain to fellowship with Him, through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Grant, O Lord, we beseech Thee, to Thy people an inviolable firmness of faith; that as they confess Thine Only-begotten Son, the everlasting partaker of Thy glory, to have been born in our very flesh, of the Virgin Mother, they may be delivered from present adversities, and admitted into joys that shall abide; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Grant, O Lord, we beseech Thee, O Lord our God, that Thy Church may alike apprehend both parts of the one Mastery, and adore One Christ, very God and very Man, neither divided from our nature nor separate from Thine essence; though the same Jesus Christ our Lord. “And it came to pass that Alma ate bread and was filed; and he blessed Amulek and his house, and he gave thanks unto God,” reports Alma 8.22. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14Image

Cresleigh Homes

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Take a look at #BrightonStation Residence 2 with Abbie Johnson! This charming home has 3 to 4 bedrooms and lots of customization options so you can turn this residence into a home that truly reflects you. 🧡

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Visit our website to check out the interactive floor plan and explore more options. Link in bio! https://cresleigh.com/brighton-station/

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The Soul Gives People Contact with the Great Minds of the Past, a Contact that is at the Heart of All Learning!

ImageTo furnish the means of acquiring knowledge is the greatest benefit that can be conferred upon humankind. It prolongs life itself and enlarges the sphere of existence. God is fun, educational, and the biggest brain on the face of the Earth. And as children of God, it is our daily mood that creates the weather. We possess a tremendous power to make our loves miserable or joyous. We can be tools of torture or instruments of inspiration. It should be our goal to inspire dreams, shape lives, and give hope for the future. Although everyone can learn to success, it may not be on the same day and in the same way. Therefore, make it a point to understand those not very good at explaining and enlighten those not very good at comprehending. No calling in society is more demanding than teaching; no calling in our society is more selfless than teaching; and no calling is more central to the vitality of a democracy than teaching. The library, much like the soul, give people and faculties a contact with the great minds of the past, a contact that is at the heart of all learning. There are great results to be had from associating with resources and others who are more spiritually advanced than we are. These sources allow us to excel, strengthen ourselves in the resolve to pursue the quest, and they also fan the spark of longing for the Divine. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

ImageThe company of enlightened beings tends to arouse those who dwell in darkness to seek light, as it tends to hasten the development of those who are already engaged in this search. It is when one reaches the end of a particular phase and has first to find, then to begin a new one that help from the outside is useful. When one reaches a difficult place on the Quest, the same is true. This help may be found in a book, a lecture, and educator, a chance meeting, or in some other way. The help of a master shows itself principally, and is chiefly important in, the course taken by the mind during prayer. One of the chief benefits of meeting with an illumined book or an inspired being, is that such an encounter opens up the possibility of moving more swiftly from a lower to a higher standpoint. It opens up truths which would ordinarily be too far ahead to be noticed, thus acting like a spiritual telescope. It also brings us face to face with our own errors in thought and conduct. Such a movement might otherwise take several years or sometimes a whole lifetime. However, it remains only a possibility. It is for us to recognize the true character of the opportunity and for us to grasp and take the fullest advantage of it. It may be that one keeps the spiritual quest in the background of one’s mind only. If so one needs a quickening impulse. One imparts the necessary impetus which helps the student towards the realization of his finest aspirations. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

ImageWhoever seeks to raise one’s own consciousness of God, will get most help from seeking out an individual who has already accomplished the task. In the presence of someone whose own consciousness is of God’s Grace, one will receive the inward inspiration which can energize and lead one’s personal effort in the same direction. The entrance of a book of truth, or of a being bearing truth, into the aspirant’s life will, at certain periods when one is ready and prepared for further development, be like turning on the light in a room to shut out the darkness. The earnest seeker will get more from a single meeting with a truly inspired being than from attendance at a hundred sessions in an organized spiritual school and a center of worship. For the first will awaken one’s intuition whereas the second will only give the illusion of doing so. However, such is the widespread ignorance and inexperience of these things, as well as the suggestive power of pomp and prestige, that the organized institution will always attract fifty followers where the lone illuminate will attract five. A human channel is needed for the superhuman inspiration, grace, teaching, or revelation because the recipient minds are not sufficiently sensitive, pure, or prepared to receive it directly for themselves. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

ImageIf we understand sacrifice in both its dimensions—as guilt and as the unblocking of power—we can see how logically an unmysteriously warfare had to increase in viciousness: beings staged whatever size death potlach they were technically capable of, from Genghis Khan to Auschwitz. The general opinion is that at the most primitive level of religious organization—that of shamanism—sacrifice of war captives was a rarity; captives could be taken in small number for a variety of reasons, but usually simple sadistic ones like gloating over torture or personal ones like avenging the loss of members of one’s own family. And this is in accord with what we see in simpler societies expiation for guilt was easier to achieve and required no massive expenditure of life. However, as societies increased in scale and complexity, incorporating high gods, a priesthood, and a king, the motive for sacrifice became frankly one of pleasing the gods and building power, and then mountains of war captives began to be sacrificed. When much booty and many slaves were brought back from riding expeditions, it may have seemed that the purpose was secular and economic, but it was basically religious: it was a matter of affirming one’s power over life and death; and the lure of economic gain was always outweighed by the magical power of war, no matter how this was disguised. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

Image The kings of Dahomey undertook their war expeditions to bring back slaves to sell to Europeans. They held an annual custom at which hundreds of prisoners’ heads were lopped off and placed in heaps—a celebration of victory which the king offered to the people. To the amazement of the European slave traders, the king would not sell these victims even when there was a dearth of slaves for sale; in spite of his avarice the sacrificial slaughter had to take place. The reason, of course, was that the ceremony was much more important than mere possession: power is the ability to dispense life and death for the whole tribe and in relation to all of nature. Allied to this dynamic is another one which we have trouble understanding today: the one who makes the sacrifice dispenses not only power but fate; if you kill your enemy, your life is affirmed because it proves that the gods favor you. The whole philosophy is summed up in the lines from a typical western movie, when the Indians come upon a cavalry officer and the leader says, “Let us see if his gods protect him—shoot!” The point we moderns miss is that this is not said out of cocky pride or cynicism, as if the Indian knew in advance that the enemy would fall: ancient beings really wanted to see. War was a test of the will of the gods, to see if they favored you; it forced a revelation of destiny and so it was a holy cause and a sacred duty, a kind of divination. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

ImageWhatever the outcome was, it was a decision of holy validity—the highest kind of judgment humans can get—and it was in one’s hands to be able to force it: all one had to do was to stage a way. It was thus natural for the divine kings, who had total power over their people, to want to test their own fate before the highest court. It is as though they said to the gods, “Now show me if I am really as special as I believe; prove to me that I am your favored son.” With the massive slave armies spread across the plain, the flotilla of ships chocking the shore, the arms glistening in the Sun, and the din rising to the Heavens, the divine king must have felt that a sacrifice hunt of such magnitude could not fail, that one could almost defiantly force the favor of the gods in view of the blood that would flow for them. This was the gift complex of the primitive potlatch magnified to its highest intensity: the dialogue with the gods was there, and the sacrificial gift was prominent; the accent was on massive visible power; the ambition was to mount the biggest production possible. And so it made no difference how many were killed, or from what side they came. War was a sacred duty and a holy cause, but it was the king’s cause: its primary meaning was to prove one’s power to survive. And so the more dead, the better. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

ImageFortunate and favored, the survivor stands in the midst of the fallen. For him there is one tremendous fact; while countless others have died, many of them one’s comrades, one is still alive. The dead lie helpless; one stands upright amongst them, and it is as though the battle had been fought in order for one to survive it. It is a feeling of being chosen amongst the many who manifestly shared the same fate. The being who achieves this often is a hero. One is stronger. There is more life in one. One is the favored of the Gods. Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result. As Hitler concluded—after miraculously surviving the bomb blast that was mean to take his life but instead took several others, “Providence has kept me alive to complete my great work.” It seems that the larger and more frequent the heaps of dead which attest to one’s special favor, the more one needs this confirmation. It becomes a kind of addiction to proving an ever-growing sense of invulnerability, to tasting the continually repeated pleasure of survival. If the king is victorious, then all the dead on the battlefield belong to him because they prove one’s specialness. No wonder the divine kings repeatedly staged their compulsive campaigns and inscribed the mountainous toll of their butchery for all time. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

ImageWe now understand that their pride was holy; they had offered the gods an immense sacrifice and a direct challenge, and the gods had confirmed that their destiny was indeed divinely favored, since the victories went to them. In recent times President Trump threw out the same challenge to God from the White House—to show His favor by giving victory and blessing the economy. It is very clear to us that pride is the driving power motive behind most people. And how could it be otherwise? Humans are a terrestrial organism who must naturally aggress on their World in order to incorporate the energy-power they need from it. On the most elemental level this power resides in food, which is why primitives have always acknowledged food power as the basic one in the sacrificial meal. From the beginning, humans, as meat-eating hunter, incorporated the power of animals. However, humans were particularly weak beings, and so they had to develop a special sensitivity to sources of power, and a wide latitude of sources of power for one’s own incorporation. This is one way to understand the greater aggressiveness of humans compared to animals: humans were the only beings we know of that are conscious of death and decay, and so they engaged in a heightened search for powers of self-perpetuation. Any study of the early evolution of warfare and the natural viciousness of it has to take this into account. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

ImageVery early in human evolution humans aggressed in order to incorporate two kinds of power, physical and symbolic. This meant that trophy taking in itself was a principal motive for war raiding; the trophy was a personal power acquisition. Beings took parts of the animals they killed in the hunt as a testimonial to their bravery and skill—buffalo horns, grizzly bear claws, jaguar teeth. In war they took back proof that they had killed an enemy, in the form of one’s scalp or even one’s whole head or whole-body skin. These could be worn as badges of bravery which gave prestige and social honor and inspired fear and respect. But more than that, the piece of the terrible and brave animal and the scalp of the feared enemy often contained power in themselves: they were magical amulets, powerful medicine, which contained the spiritual powers of the object they belonged to. And so trophies were a major source of protective power: they shielded one from harm, and one could also use them to conjure up evil spirits and exorcise them. In addition to this trophy was the visible proof of survivorship in the contest and thus a demonstration of the favor of the gods. What greater badge of distinction than that? No wonder trophy hunting was a driving obsession among primitives: it gave to humans what they needed most—extra power over life and death. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

ImageWe see this most directly, of course, in the actual incorporation of parts of the enemy; in cannibalism after victory the symbolic animal makes closure on both ends of this problematic dualism—one gets physical and spiritual energy. An Associated Press dispatch from the Cambodian Front Lines quotes a Sargent Danh Hun on what he did to his North Vietnamese foes: “I try to cut them open while they are still dying or soon after they are dead. That way the livers give me the strength of my enemy…[One day] when they attacked we got about 80 of them and everyone ate liver.” Spirits are things by themselves. No abstract entity is entailed here, but a natural body, and natural bodies are no less differing one from the other than the dense or tangible parts which embrace them. Sometimes spirits are taken for vacuum, but they are really the most active bodies. Sometimes they are taken for garded as virtues and qualities of tangible parts, but they are actually things by themselves. Sometimes they have been called souls of plant and living creatures, but they are not such. Spirits are minute parts and a special study of their effects and manifestations are needed in order that we may learn about their motions. The spirit of humans (being of an equal and uniform substance) pre-supposes and feigns in nature a greater equality and uniformity than really is. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

ImageIf the church has shown more understanding of this part of the message, the regrettable split between religion and medicine might never have happened. In both, the power of saving is at work. If we look at the miracles of medical and mental healing today, we must say that there is a wall between eternal and perishable life is pierced at one point; that liberation from the evil one has happened in one dimension of our life; that a physician or mental helper becomes a savior for someone. One functions, as every savior does, as an instrument of the healing power given to nature as well as to beings by the divine presence in time and space. However, there are also limits to this kind of healing and liberating. The people healed by Jesus became sick again and died. Those who were liberated from demonic compulsion might, as Jesus himself warned, relapse into more serious states of mental disease. It was a break-through of eternal life in one moment of time, as all our medical healing is. Also, there is a second limit to the healing body and mind: The attitude of one who is to be healed may prevent healing. Without the desire for delivery from the evil one there is no liberation; without longing for the healing power, no healing! The wall which separates us from eternal life is broken through only when we desire it, and even then only when we trust in the bearers of healing power. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

ImageTrust in saviors does not mean what is called today faith-healing, which is at best psychic sanctification of oneself or someone else. However, it means openness to liberation from evil, whenever we encounter the possibility of such liberation. This openness is not always present. We may prefer infirmary to health, enslavement to liberty. There are many reasons for the desire not to be healed, not to be liberated. One who is weak can exercise a power over one’s environment, over one’s family and friends, which can destroy trust and love but which gives satisfaction to one who exercises this power through weakness. Many amongst us should ask ourselves whether it is not this that we unconsciously do toward husband or wife; toward children or parents; toward friends or groups. There are others who do not want liberation because it forces them to encounter reality as it is and to take upon themselves human’s heaviest burden: that of making responsible decisions. This is especially true of those who are in bondage to mental disturbances. Certainly they suffer, as do those with bodily infirmary, but the compensation of gaining power or escaping responsibility appears more important to them than the suffering. They cut themselves off from the saving power in reality. For them, this saving power would first of all mean opening themselves up to the desire for salvation of body or mind. However, even Jesus could not do it with many—perhaps most—of His listeners. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

ImageOne could perhaps say that the first work of every healer and liberator is to break through the love of infirmary and enslavement in those who Jesus wants to save. One alone can afford to be as boundlessly patient as Nature is. One alone can rightly be lavish with time. The one on the spiritual path lead beings into a life that is noble, beautiful, and intelligent, and to save them from their sins of self-exhaustion through febrile and foolish conflicts. The enlightened individual has lifted one’s thinking above the level of both free will and fate, matters which concern the ego. One lives in the Witness Self. The practical result is that one does not feel the caress of pleasure or the sting of pain so keenly as others. One exemplifies the truth of Nature’s dictate, “To one who asks nothing everything is given.” Whatever greatness the World looks up to one for possessing, vanishes utterly from one’s mind in the presence of this infinite greatness. God periodically moves upon one’s people and in their surrounding culture to achieve Hos everlasting purpose for that tiny stretch of cosmic time we call “human history.” This usually happens in ways that no one but God could have planned or foreseen and in ways that are possessed far beyond our control or comprehension. We discover, usually after the fact, that a pervasive and powerful shift has occurred. It may happen to the individual, to the group, or to an entire culture. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

ImageOld ways of doing things cease to be effective, though they may have been very powerful in the past. There arises a very real danger that we will set ourselves in opposition to what God truly is doing now and aims to do in the future. Often we miss the opportunity to act with God in the now. We fail to find, quickly enough new wineskins for the new wine. Such a new move of God was what happened in the emergence of the Hebrew people from Egypt when the time was right and again in their entry into and emergence from Babylonian exile. Again, we see it in the emergence of a Christian people within Jewish culture, and then the emergence of a nonethnic body of Christ from the Jewish church. Since then, the pervasive and powerful movement of God has happened again and again during the sojourn of Christ in his people on the Earth: the overwhelming of classical paganism, the emergence of the monastic form of Christian devotion, the Cistercian, Franciscan, and Devotio Moderna transformations within monasticism, the Protestant Reformation, Pietism, Wesleyan and American revivalism, and many other such movements of less historical effect, such as the twentieth-century charismatic countercultural upsurges (“Jesus People,” and so on). The rise and out workings of such movements are clearly the result of God’s hand in our midst. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

ImageAnd God is still moving. The quest for spiritual formation (really, as indicated, spiritual transformation) is in fact an age-old and Worldwide one. It is rooted in the deep personal and even biological need for goodness that haunts humanity. It has taken many forms and has now resurfaced at the beginning of the twenty-first century to meet our present situation. This is, I am sure, part of an incoming tide of God’s life that would lift our lives today for our voyage into eternity. Our hearts cry out, “Lord, I want to be a Christian in my heart.” So this quest, currently so deeply felt, is at once new and very old, both very promising and full of danger, illuminative of our lacks and failures and bursting with grace, an expression of the eternal quest of Go for humans and of human’s ineradicable need for God. This contemporary quest for spiritual formation is essential to the life of God in his people as they presently move toward the fulfillment of his purposes for today and beyond. Viewed sociologically and historically, as well as spiritually, the new impulse is an aspect of the dissolution of Protestant denominationalism as we have known it and of the emergence of a new—but also an old—identity for Christians: crossing all denominational lines and national and natural boundaries. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

Image It is not generally recognized that the question, “Am I a Christian?” can no longer be answered in any significant manner by citing denominational, ethnic, or national names or symbols. There are now 33,800 different Christian denominations on Earth. Clearly, an adequate answer must go deeper than our religious associations. It must refer to what we are in our heart—before God, in the depths of our being, always the focal point of Christian spiritual formation. Such an answer has always been required “before God.” Who can deny it? However, that has not always been recognized and given adequate emphasis among us—especially not in the recent past—although we are increasingly doing so today. This change is an extremely good thing and a highly promising departure from the recent past of Christians Worldwide. “Behold, my heart cries: Wo unto this people. Come out in judgement, O God, and hide their sins, and wickedness, and abominations from before thy face!” reports Moroni 9.15. 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 fear when He cometh as our Judge. Our Lord’s realization of the truth does not weigh down on him. He finds it natural and does not feel it to be exceptional, although do others. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16Image

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The People are Reasonable or Even Humble and Pure and Express Coherence—It is a Miraculous Exception!

EC7Xvi2UUAA2J54A well-chosen soul has innumerable dishes, all of admirable flavour. Readiness is achieved in different ways, depending upon what there is to be learned. It takes faith in your abilities, and in your future even when you do not believe. Life requires a person to have an essence of humanity to create the spark that glows warmly inside of them. The influence you have on others will be etched in their souls forever. Readiness may require painful and protracted effort—thinking, reading, watching, writing, talking, and doing. Other times it may be attained effortlessly, almost inadvertently.  Either way, timing is critical. Knowing how to learn or how to teach is essentially knowing when to press and when to wait. Styles of learning and teaching are characterized by their mix of pressure and patience. If we did not have souls, many people thirsty for knowledge would dehydrate. Wise people have always known that when the unconscious speaks, to pay attention. The breakdowns or check-outs that we have referred to are final outcomes of not listening. The symptoms and suffering are but the voice of the real self, the voice of human being protesting in a voice so loud it can no longer be neglected. Before the breakdown, the voice murmured softly from time to time; but its murmurings were in a code, a forgotten language that could not be understood. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

ImageAnd so the person persisted in the ways of behaving, the ways of construing oneself and other people, that had become increasingly good neither for one’s growth nor for one’s well-being. The healthier personality listens to one’s boredom, one’s anxiety, one’s dreams and fantasies and gropes for change in ways of meeting the World that will permit great realization of potential self. For stigmatized people, typically when one member of the category happens to come into contact with another, both may be disposed to modify their treatment of each other by virtue of believing that they each belong to the same group. Further, in being a member of the category, an individual may have an increased probability of coming into contact with any other member, and even forming a relationship with the individual as a result. A category, then, can function to dispose its members to group-formation and relationships, but its total membership does not thereby constitute a group. Whether or not those with a particular stigma provide the recruitment base for a community that is ecologically consolidated in some way, they are likely to support agents and agencies who respect them. (Interestingly, we have no word to designate accurately the constituents, following, fans, subjects, or supporters of such representatives.) #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

ImageMembers may, for example, have an office or lobby to push their case with the Press or Government, differing here in terms of whether they can have a being of their own kind, a “native” who really knows, as do those with a hearing impairment, visual impairment, those addicted to a substance, someone of a particular culture or ethnic background, or someone who is not as affluent as other, as do those seeking a second chance. (Action groups which serve the same category of stigmatized person may sometimes be in slight opposition to each other, and this opposition will often reflect a difference between management by natives and management by the dominate group.) Another of their usual tasks is to appear as speakers before various audiences of mass appeal and of the stigmatized; they present the case for the stigmatized and, when they themselves are natives of the group, provide a living model of fully-normal achievement, being heroes of adjustment who are subject to public awards for proving that an individual of this kind can be a good person. Indeed, the healthier personality transcends the contradiction between the conscious and unconscious, between being fully focused and grandly unfocused—one can oscillate between the extremes and push them further than the less healthy individual. When one focuses, one is fully focused and when one lets go, one really lets go. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

ImageHealthy personality is manifested by a mode of being that we can call authenticity, or more simply, honest. Less healthy personalities, people who function less than fully, who suffer recurrent breakdowns or chronic impasses, may usually be found to be liars. They say things they do not mean. Their disclosures have been chosen more for cosmetic value than truth. The consequence of a lifetime of lying about oneself to others, of saying and doing things for their sound and appearance, is that ultimately the person loses contact with one’s real self. Because of its destructive character competitiveness in neurotic persons gives rise to a huge amount of anxiety, and consequently leads to a recoiling from competition. The question now is, Whence comes this anxiety? It is understandable without any difficulty that one source is a fear of retaliation for the ruthless pursuit of ambition. One who steps on all others, humiliates and crushes them as soon as they have or want to have success, must have the fear that they will want just as intensely to defeat one. However, such a retaliation fear, although it will be active in everyone who achieves success at the expense of others, is scarcely the whole reason for the neurotic’s increased anxiety and one’s consequent inhibition toward competition. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

ImageExperience shows that retaliation fear alone does not necessarily lead to inhibitions. On the contrary, it may result merely in a cold-blooded reckoning with the imaginary or real envy, rivalry or malice of others, or in an attempt to expand one’s power in order to be protected from any defeat. A certain type of successful person has only one goal, the acquisition of power and wealth. However, if the structure of such personalities is compared with that of definitely neurotic persons there is one striking difference. The ruthless success-hunter does not care for the affection of others. One neither wants nor expects anything from others, neither help nor any kind of generosity. One knows that one can reach what one wants by one’s own strength and efforts alone. One will, of course, make use of other people, but one cares for their good opinion only in so far as it is useful in attaining one’s own goal. Affection for its own sake means nothing to one. One’s desires and one’s defenses go along one straight line: power, prestige, possession. If there is nothing within one to interfere with one’s strivings, even one who is driven to this kind of behavior by internal conflicts will not develop the usual neurotic characteristics. Fear will only push one into enhanced efforts to be more successful and more invincible. The neurotic person, however, pursues two ways that are incompatible: an aggressive striving for a “no one but I” dominance; and at the same time an excessive desire to be loved by everyone. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

ImageFor the neurotic, this situation of being caught between ambition and affection is one the central conflicts in neuroses. The main reason why the neurotic becomes afraid of one’s own ambition and demands, why one does not even want to recognize them, and why one checks them or recoils from them altogether, is that one is afraid of losing affection. In other words, the reasons why the neurotic checks one’s competitiveness is not that one has particularly stringent “super-ego demands” which prevent too great an aggressiveness, but that one finds oneself caught in a dilemma between two equally imperative needs: one’s ambition and one’s need for affection. The dilemma is practically unsolvable one. One cannot step on the people and be loved by them at the same time. Yet in the neurotic the pressures is so great that one does try to solve it. In general one attempts a solution to two ways: by justifying one’s drive for dominance and the grievances resulting from its nonfulfillment; and by checking one’s ambition. The justification is important as a strategy: it is attempted to make the demands incontestable so they will not block the way toward being loved. If one disparages others in order to humiliate them or crush them in a competitive fight, one will be deeply convinced that one is being wholly objective. If one wants to exploit others one will believe and try to make them believe that one is in great need of their help. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

ImageOften those with a particular stigma sponsor a publication of some kind which gives voice to shared feelings, consolidating and stabilizing for the reader one’s sense of the realness of one’s group and attachment to it. Here the ideology of the members if formulated—their complaints, their aspirations, their politics. The names of well-known friends and enemies of the group are cited, along with information to confirm the goodness or the badness of these people. Success stories are printed, tales of heroes of assimilation who have penetrated new areas of normal acceptance. Atrocity tales are recorded, recent and historic, of extreme mistreatment by the dominate group, or those perceived as normals. Exemplary moral tales are provided in biographical and autobiographical form illustrating a desirable code of conduct for the stigmatized. The publication also serves as a forum for presenting some division of opinion as to how the situation of the stigmatized person ought best to be handled. Should the individual’s failing require special equipment, it is here advertised and reviewed. The readership of these publications provides a market for books and pamphlets which present a similar line. Those who come to serve as representatives of a stigmatized category are usually a little more vocal, a little better know, or a possibly better connected than one’s fellow-sufferers. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

ImageTherefore, one’s effort to gain attention for a movement may actually absorb one’s whole day, and one maybe become a professional at it. Once those who are actually making a difference in the community and helping others who are villainized attains a high occupational, political, or financial position—how high depending on the stigmatized group in question—a new career is likely to be thrust upon one, that of representing one’s category. One finds oneself too eminent to avoid being presented by one’s own as an instance of them. (The weakness of a stigma can thus be measured by how eminent a member of the category may be and yet manage to avoid these pressures). The authentic being manifested by healthier personalities takes the form of unself-conscious disclosure of self in words, decisions, and actions. It is a risky way of being, especially in a social setting that punishes all forms of action and disclosure that depart from some current stereotype of the ideal or acceptable being. The healthier person will doubtless experience many a bruise for being and disclosing who one is, but one prefers to accept these blows rather than lose oneself or sell oneself (one’s authentic being) for short-run acceptability. Indeed, there is much reason to suspect that authenticity before others is the same mode of being that permits a being to have access to the underground realm of experiencing, the unconscious. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

ImageDefensiveness and concealment of self before others unfortunately are the same modes of being that screen off a being’s unconscious, one’s preverbal experiencing from oneself. The currents of feeling, fantasy, memory, and wish that would get a being criticism from others also produce anxiety in oneself; so one blocks these from the view of self and others in the service of self-defense. In time, one succeeds in fooling oneself as much as other into believing one is the person one is so expertly seeming to be. In truth one is an invisible person. Whatever is authentic of one, whatever is most spontaneous and alive (one’s experience of one’s possibilities), is buried so deep not even one can cognize it. One of the reasons less healthy personalities are so self-conscious, so deliberate in their choice of word and action before others, is that they dread letting something slip out that truly expresses their being, something which will get them into trouble. They are, as it were, idolaters of the state of artificial grace known as “staying out of trouble.” In fact, they have sold their souls and possibilities for a good, but false name. All this is not to say that healthier personalities are always fully visible, fully transparent, before the gaze of self an others. Such chronic self-revelation may be itself idolatrous, and is suicidal in certain circumstances. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

ImageGood intent or sincere motive cannot by itself be enough to protect the unwise individual against one’s own gullibility, the uncritical against one’s own folly, and the uninformed against one’s own miseducation. All this is as true of the quest itself as of that part of its practice called deep prayer. Certainly we would expect a healthier personality to have enough common sense, judgment, even cunning, to preserve oneself in a hostile environment, dropping one’s guard only when one is among trusted and loving friends. And, in fact, a healthy personality will have been able to enter into and maintain relationships of trust and love with one or more people, people whom one has let know one and whom one knows and responds to. Seductive activities, phenomena, ideas, or guides may try to lure one from this straight course into time-wasting sideshows or dangerous directions. Reform, psychism, politics, perverted teachings or counterfeit ones may call but must not be heeded. One has a long way to go yet and must take care to keep on the right road. Another dimension of healthy personality concerns the realm of values itself. Healthier personalities seek and find meaningful values and challenges in life, such that there is an element of direction, of focus, to their existence. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

ImageLess healthy personalities, estranged as they are from their real selves, usually pursue only cliched goals and values current in their present social milieu. These latter goals frequently do not challenge or inspire the average person to the fullest integration and expression of one’s unique being; they do not “turn one on” or keep one going. The upshot is that one will often feel trapped or, worse, feel that one is “losing one’s mind.” The latter fear is mostly likely to occur when a person looking at the externals of one’s present situation finds that one has accomplished or has been given “everything to make a being happy”—but that one, in honesty, is miserable, bored, and does not know what to do next. One has loved ones, a family, material success, a nice house, car, and so on; but one finds one’s work increasingly boring, more like a treadmill, and one’s relationships with others empty, formal, and all too predictable; and one entertains fantasies of leaving one’s loved ones, chucking it all, and going to Las Vegas, only to repress these ideas with the anxious thought, “I must be insane to harbor such notions.” One might scurry into further “busy-work,” commence drinking to excess, create excitement by treading along primrose paths at great risk, or do others searching in the outer World for some new meanings. One looks in the wrong place, the right place being within one’s own experience. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

ImageThe healthier personality, less estranged and less afraid of one’s real self, can look within and without and create or find new sources of value, new directions of commitment, even when these elicit some criticism from others in one’s World. One is freer to invest value in more aspects of the World than one’s less healthy counterpart. The few who have a broad experience of life, whose reason is sufficiently alive to judge both fruits and roots correctly and whose intuition is sufficiently active to recognize nobility when meeting it, want the whole truth and nothing less, will find a friend (for one will not wish to be anything more) who will decline to permit others to hold a fanciful vision of an Earthly perfection which is non-existent; who will be humble, sane, and balanced above all things, and yet prove with time—if they themselves prove loyal—to be also a sure and benevolent guide in this dark forest where so many wander bewildered, deceived, or self-deceived. Excessive unreflective saint-worship raises exaggerated and false hopes. It has unreflective saint-worship raises exaggerated and even false hopes. It has historically often ended with exploitation of the worshipper. However, even where it does not, it is still incompatible with healthy self-development; an affectionate respect is wiser and safer. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

ImageLet us not ask a teacher to be a god, because thereby we are liable to deceive and endanger ourselves, but let us ask one to be competent and illumined, truthful and helpful and compassionate. Today society asks more of educators than ever before. You are required to be social workers, computer experts, juvenile officers, mediators, researchers, business partners, interdisciplinary team members, and chemical dependency counselors. You must provide for children who do not speak the native language of the country; who are gifted learners, visual learners, kinesthetic learners, voracious leaners, and reluctant learners; who are emotionally disturbed, hungry, and without a home. We ask you to teach children how to drive, get along with others, how to maintain proper social hygiene, balance a checkbook, make healthy choices, use new technologies—and yes, how to read, write, and do arithmetic. Sokrates did not have an overhead projector. He asked questions that bothered people and 3,500 years later people are still talking about him. The soul is the wardrobe of humanity; whence beings properly informed may bring something for ornament, much for curiosity, and more for use. A healthy personality lives in and with one’s body, one is an embodied self. One is able freely to move one’s body, which has a look of grace, coordination, and relaxation. One dances through life, to state this idea in its most extreme but essentially accurate form. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

ImageBy contrast, the less healthy personality is afraid to live in one’s body. One represses one’s bodily experiencing and feels one’s body alternately numb and dead or as a dangerous and stinking cesspool charged with explosive nitroglycerine. One must take care lest an urge, a feeling, an impulse, or a movement break through the tight control. For one, this would be disastrous. One of the most common evidences of disembodiment is muscular tension that reveals itself as stiffness in body posture, awkwardness in gait, the mouth a thin red line, the jaws clenched, and the face an immobile mask, frozen in false smile or anxious frown or counterfeit dignity; the voice emits sounds that are jerky, pressured, constricted. Touch such an average person on the arm or place one’s arm around his or her shoulders, and one will instantly stiffen, experience panic, jump as if stabbed, and perhaps experience a mixture of sexual arousal and guilt or anxiety. The healthier person has a more fully lived and experienced body. One’s face is mobile and expressive; one speaks in a voice that is free, but one which is fighting off an impulse to say something else at the same moment that the present speech is being emitted. It is no accident that the average people receive psychotherapeutic benefit from instruction in vocalization or freely expressive dance and from massage and other forms of direct experience with their bodies. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

ImageIndeed, the therapists of the future will without doubt be obliged to learn to live gracefully with their own bodies and learn ways of inviting their clients to get back into theirs. Not by our own exertions alone, and not by gift or grace of an external being alone, can we be brought to final realization, but by both. Those who can let themselves be uplifted by some inspired or enlightened person should understand that one is capable of lifting them to the point of touching their best self, the divinity within them. Some may even gain a glimpse of it, a memorable unforgettable experience. However, will they let it happen? We are not left to find out for ourselves that the truth is. Now and then messengers appear among us, each bearing one’s own personal communication about the existence of a higher power and the need of a higher life. We may help our souls in drawing to us the goal by surrendering to the guidance of a competent spiritual adviser or we may obstruct it by clinging to the ego’s. However, an incompetent adviser will also obstruct it, and in fact become a channel for the ego’s truth-obscuring tactics. The difficulty of the task of self-improvement is not to be underrated and it is because of this as well as for other reasons that seekers since ancient times have been advised to obtain the help of a teacher. From one they can get inspiration, guidance, and a certain telepathically transferred strengthening power which is called Grace. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

ImageIn nature the physical is a totally different type of reality from the spiritual side of the human being, which remains hidden in a way the physical World never can be. This is by now an old story, but often repressed or forgotten. Science misses the heart. Paradoxically, the spiritual side of us—though it is not perceivable by the senses and though we can never fully grasp it in any way—is never entirely out of our mind. It always stands in the margin of our consciousness, if not the center. It is really the only thing that is celebrated (or degraded) in the arts, in biography and history, and in most of our popular writings in magazines and the like. Their emphasis is continually upon what people think and feel, on what they might or should do and why, and on what kind of character they have. Human beings gossip about nothing else, and now much of what is called news is really just gossip. However, that only emphasizes how we are constantly aware of the spiritual side of life. We know immediately that it is what really matters. We pay more attention to it—in ourselves and others—than to anything else. And there is a deep, if often perverted, wisdom in this. For the spiritual simply is our life, no matter what grand theories we may hold or what we may say when trying to be intellectual, well informed, and up-to-date. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

ImageThe swelling protest from the human depths has recently been shouting at us that the physical and public side of the human Universe cannot sustain our existence. “Humans shall not live by bread alone.” We would do well to listen, no matter who is talking. Those are, of course, words from Jesus. And his way is truly the way of the heart, or spirit. If we would walk with him, we must walk with him at that interior level. There are very few who really do not understand this about him. He saves us by realistic restoration of our heart to God and then by dwelling there with his Father though the distinctively divine Spirit. The heart thus renovated and inhabited is the only real hope of humanity on Earth. The statement that “Humans shall not live by bread alone” was adapted by Jesus from the history of the Jewish experience with God. Jesus was, among other things, the most profound and powerful expression of that experience. However, it was also given new and profound meaning by one’s death and resurrection. Through them he established a radically new order of life on Earth within the kingdom of God. It was free of any specific ethnic or cultural form. All human beings can now live the life of the renovated heart by nourishing ourselves constantly on one’s persona presence—now here in our World, beyond his death and ours. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

ImageWe are much interested in the causes of bodily corruption and of prolongation of life. Perhaps decay is due chiefly to the parasitic action of the lifeless spirits and if this action could be controlled life could be extended. Living spirits, on the other hand, seem to be self-subsisting. They need a friendly body if they are to exist; yet they are essential to life itself and thus seem more to give to living processes than to take away. The living spirit seems to require three things for its subsistence. First, the spirit must have room to move according to its nature, particularly requiring space for its motion in the ventricles of the brain and the nerves perpetually. Blows to the head and some parts of the body constrict its movement and sometimes kill it. Its own motion is constantly reinforced by the pulsation of the heart and the rhythms of breathing. Second, through its own nature is flammeous, its condition must be more cold than hot, and respiration provides the proper refrigeration. Third, the body, as the home of the spirit, must be properly fed and maintain a state of good health. Feeling, or alimentation, involves the organs and parts of the body directly, and concerns the spirit, if at all, only indirectly. As for the requirement of aliment, it seems to belong more to the parts than to the living spirit. Consequently, a human may easily believe that the living spirit subsists in identity, and bot by succession or renovation. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

ImageContrary to what many say today, our deliverance (salvation) does not arise out of the murky human depths from which our natural life springs—whether that includes an oversoul or collective unconsciousness or not. However, Jesus moves into and through those very depths, whatever they contain, to bring us home to God. There, too, he is Master. The spiritual renovation and the spirituality that comes from Jesus is nothing less than an invasion of natural human reality by supernatural life from above. The vital spirit has a long, continuous period of existence, probably from the birth of the body to its death. Its vital force does not flare up and down, like a flame, being perpetually generated and extinguished, and of no sensible duration. This spirit must not be confused with the rational soul in being, which is certainly not propagated, nor subject either to repair or death. The vital spirit has a special affinity for the body; indeed, it abhors leaving the flesh, because it has no connaturals near 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. One may not be affluent outwardly but one will be rich inwardly. One may have to endure troubles but one will endure them without worry. One will show this high degree of advancement by the assured direction of one’s efforts, the unflinching strength of one’s purpose, and the effective results of one’s work. “Because of meekness and lowliness of the heart cometh the visitation of the Holy Ghost, which Comforter with hope and perfect love, which endureth,” reports Moroni 8.26. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

ImageO God, Who didst look on beings when one had fallen down into death, and resolved to redeem one by the Advent of Thine Only-begotten Son; grant, we beseech Thee, that they confess His glorious Incarnation may also be admitted to the fellowship of Him, their Redeemer; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. O Wisdom, that camest out of the mouth of the Most High, reaching from one end to another, mightily and sweetly ordering all things; come to teach us the way of understanding. O Adonai, and Leader of the house of Israel, Who didst appear to Moses in the flame of the burning bush, and gavest the  Law on Sinai; come to deliver us with an outstretched arm. O Root of Jesse, Who standest for an ensign to the people; before Whom kings shall shut their mouths, Whom nations shall entreat; come to deliver us now, tarry not. O Key of David, and Sceptre of the house of Israel, Who openest and no being shutteth, and shuttetest and no being openeth, come and bring forth the prisoner out of the prison-house, where one sitteth in darkness and the shadow of death. O Day-spring, Splendour of the eternal Light, and Sun of Righteousness; come an enlighten those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death. O King of Gentiles, Thou Whom they long for, and Corner-stone that makest both one; come and save humans, Whom Thou formedst out of the clay. O Emmanuel, our King and Law-giver, the Expected One of the Gentiles, and their Saviour; come to save us, O Lord our God! #RandolphHarris 20 of 20Image

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Mills Station at Cresleigh Ranch | Residence 3

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

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