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Moonlight and Love Songs are Never Out of Date—Hearts Full of Passion!

December 28, 2019 4:27 am

The rich man has his BMW i8 motor car, his country and his town estate. He smokes a $1 million Gurkha Cigar, infused with the delectable Remy Martin Black Pearl Louis XIII. And jeers at Fate. Yet through my lamp burns low and dim, though I must slave for livelihood—think you that I would change with him? You bet I would. As things are now, education is so cluttered and tangled up with a thousand senseless notions and stupidities, that the task of reformation is almost a superhuman one. It is entirely a task of taking away and reducing—not one of adding to, or expanding. It is the task of the sculptor, who cuts the superfluous marble off, rather than that of the wax-workman who lays on the stuff thicker and thicker. Beneficial school change is built on common dreams, common concerns, common aspirations, common trust, and common sense! Those individuals and organizations that are most effective do not experience fewer problems, less stressful situations, and greater fortune—they just deal with them differently. The problem is not that there are problems. The problem is expecting otherwise and thinking that having problems is a problem. Probably the most dramatic metaphor for change as the watchword of our time is the experience of the Russian Cosmonaut Krikalev, who left Leningrad for a 313-day journey in space in 1991. Almost a year later he returned to a city no longer on the map and a country that no longer existed. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22

Great changes require administrative support and necessary resources. Without these two elements the potential will die a slow death and the old negative patterns will return. Some people grin and bear it. Others smile and change it. At times it seems to us that the help promised us has not materialized. This is our opinion. However, it may also be that our ego stands in the way too obstinately. In any case it should been made clear to us in books and conversations that the people in positions of authority are not Masters, but only fellow students. If we cannot get the required help from such a one, we must accept the fact that it simply is not meant to be. When it comes to God’s grace, it cuts both ways: It can neither be earned by our merit nor forfeited by our demerit. If one sometimes feels one deserves an answer to prayer or a particular blessing from God because of one’s hard work or sacrifice, one is living by works, not by grace. However, it is just as true that if one sometimes despair of experiencing God’s blessing because of our demerits—the oughts one should have done but did not, or the do nots one should not have done but did—one is also casting aside the grace of God. Often time, we seldom think of merit on our part, but we are frequently painfully aware of our demerits. Therefore, we must, as much as possible, keep in mind that our demerits do not compel God to with draw His grace from us, but rather, God treats us without regard to deserts whatsoever. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22

I would much rather stake my hope of God’s blessing on His infinite goodness than believed that I am cursed or focus on my good works. John Newton, the debauched and dissolute slave trader, after his conversation wrote the wonderful old hymn “Amazing Grace.” He never tired of contemplating with awed amazement the wonder of a grace that would reach even to him. However, the person who grew up in a Godly Christian family, who trusted Christ at an early age, and who never indulged in any so-called “gross” sins should be just as amazed at the grace of God as was John Newton. Here is a spiritual principle regarding the grace of God: To the extent you are clinging to any vestiges of self-righteousness are putting any confidence in your own spiritual attainments, to that degree you are not living by the grace of God in your life. This principle applies both in salvation and in living the Christian life. Grace and good works (that is, works done to earn favor with God) are mutually exclusive, which means being related such that each excludes or precludes the other. Essentially these principles are incompatible. We cannot stand, as it were, with one foot on grace and the other on our own works of merit. From hence, let fierce contending nation know what dire effects from civil discord flow. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22

Go to the people. Learn from them. Love them. Start with what they know. Build on what they have. And the best leaders, when their task is accomplished, and their work is done, the people will remark: we have done through God’s grace. However, if you are trusting to any degree in your own mortality or religious attainments, or if you believe God will somehow recognize any of your good works as merit toward your own salvation, you need to seriously consider if you are truly Christian. I realize I risk offending some with that statement, but we must be absolutely clear about the truth of the gospel of salvation. The most shining deeds and valuable qualities that can be found among humans, though highly useful and truly excellent, when set in their proper places, and referred to suitable ends, are, as to the grand article of justification treated as nonentities. For divine grace disdains to be assisted in the performance imperfect performances of humans. Attempts to complete what grace begins, betray our pride and often the Lord; but cannot promote our spiritual interest. Let the reader, therefore, carefully remember, that grace is either absolutely free, or it is not at all: and, that one who professes to look for salvation by grace, either believes in one’s heart to be saved entirely by it, or one acts inconsistently in affairs of the greatest importance. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22

Those who are truly saved are those who have come to Jesus with the attitude expressed in the words of an old hymn, “Nothing in my hand I bring, simply to thy cross I cling.” Let us reflect for a moment on the classic definitions of activity and passivity we find in Aristotle, Spinoza, Goethe, Marx, and many other thinkers of the New World over the last two thousand years. Activity is understood as something that brings the powers inherent in people to expression, that helps give birth, that brings to life both our physical and emotional, both our intellectual and artistic capacities. Perhaps some of you will not quite understand what I mean when I speak of powers inherent in people, for we are accustomed to thinking of power and energy as residing in machines, not in people. And whatever powers human beings do possess are channeled primarily into inventing and operating machines. As we marvel more and more over the power of machines, we understand less and less of the wonderful powers of human beings. We no longer quite believe those lines from Sophocles’ Antigone: “Numberless are the World’s wonders, but none more wonderful than humans.” A rocket that can fly to the Moon seems far more wonderful to us than a mere human being. And in a certain sense we feel that in our modern inventions we have created things more marvelous than God did when he created humans. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22

We have to reorient our thinking if we mean to focus our attention on human consciousness and on the development of the vast potential human beings have. We possess not only the ability to speak and to think but also the capacity for ever deeper insight, for ever greater maturity, a capacity for love and for artistic expression. All those things are potentially present in us, waiting to be developed. Activity, being active in the way that authors I have named understand it, means that: the bringing out, the manifesting of those powers that human beings have but that usually remain hidden or suppressed. If you take as your point of departure the human being as human being and one’s relationship to the World as a human one, then you can give only love in return for love, trust in return for trust, and so forth. If you want to influence other people, then you have to be a person who genuinely stimulates and challenges others. Each of your relationship with people—and with nature—has to be a specific expression of your own true, individual life appropriate to the object of your intentions. If you love without awakening love in return, that is, if your love as love does not produce a loving response, if the expression of your being as a loving person does not make you loved, then your love is powerless and brings unhappiness. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22

Love is clearly a kind of activity. It rarely occurs to modern beings that they can create anything through love. One’s usual an almost exclusive concern is to be loved, not to emanate love oneself, not to awaken love in others through one’s love for them and so to create something new, something that had not existed in the World before. That is why one think that being loved is purely a matter of chance or something you can make happen is purely a matter of chance or something you can make happen by buying all sorts of things that will supposedly make you lovable, everything from the right shirt to an elegant suit will do for you I really cannot say. However, I do have to acknowledge as an unfortunate fact that many beings are loved for their sporty BMW motor cars. And here we have to add, of course, that many beings are fonder of their cares than they are of their wives. At any rate, both partners to such an arrangement often seem quite content, but after a while they will become bored with each other and possibly even hate each other, because they have both been deceived or will at least feel deceived. They thought they were both loved, but in reality all they have done is pretend at love. They have not practiced active love. Similarly, when we say, in the classic sense of the word, that someone is passive, we do not mean that one sits still, reflects, meditates, or looks at the natural World; we mean instead that one is driven by forces one does not control, that one cannot act but can only reacting. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22

Human beings are a reactive being. Present one with a stimulus, and he or she will promptly react to it. Behaviorism assumes that all human behavior is essentially governed by the principle of rewards and punishments. Reward and punishment are the two great stimuli, and a human being will presumably react to them they way another other living creature does. One will learn to do things for which one is rewarded and not to do the ones for which there is a threat of punishment. One does not necessarily have to be punished; the threat of punishment alone usually suffices. Every now and then, of course, a few people do indeed have to be punished so that the threat of punishment does not become an empty threat. Now let us look at what it means to be “driven.” Take an inebriated person, for example. One may well be “active.” One yells and waves one’s arms around. Or think of someone in that psychotic state that we describe as “manic.” Such a person is hyperactive, one thinks one can help the whole World; one talks a blue streak, sends telegrams, gets things moving. One appears to be prodigiously active. However, we know that in the first case the motor behind the activity is alcohol; in the manic patient, it is some electrochemical malfunction in the brain. The external manifestations in both cases, though, appear to be those of extreme activity. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22

“Activity” that is either a mere reaction to a stimulus or a “driveness” or compulsion manifested as passion is, in reality, passivity, no matter how great a stir it may make. Our words “passion” and “passive” derive from passio and passivus respectively, both of which stem in turn from the Latin verb meaning “to suffer.” So if we say of someone that one is a very passionate person, we are paying one a rather dubious compliment. Jealousy is a passion that eagerly pursues what brings about suffering. That is true not only of jealousy but of any passion that takes on a compulsive character: ambition, green, the lust for power, gluttony. All addictions are passions that create suffering. They are forms of passivity. “Passion” has taken on a wider range of meaning in our modern usage and so has lost the clarity it once had. I will not go into the reasons for that. Now if you take a close look at the activity of people who merely react or who act compulsively, people who are therefore passive in the classical sense, you will notice that their reactions never take a new direction. Their reactions are always the same. The same stimulus will always produce the same reaction. You can predict with certainty what will happen each time. Everything can be calculated. There is no individuality in evidence here; no powers of thought come into play; everything seems to be programmed: the same stimulus, the same effect. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22

Since behaviorism sees the human being primarily as a mechanism, it makes similar assumptions about one: A certain stimulus will evoke a certain response. The study and exploration of that phenomenon and the formulation of prescriptions based on it is what the behaviorist call science. Perhaps it is a science, but it is not a human one, for a living human being never reacts twice in precisely the same way. At each moment one is a different person, one is at least never exactly the same. Heraclites expressed the same idea when he said, “It is impossible to wade into the same river twice.” The reason is, of course, that the river is constantly flowing. I would say that behavioral psychology may be a science, but it is not a science of humans. It is rather a science of alienated beings conducted with alienated methods by alienated researchers. It may be capable of illuminating certain aspects of human nature, but it does not touch on what is vital, on what is specifically human about human beings. It is clear that scientific findings can be communicated only to those who have agreed to the same ground rules of investigation. The Australian bushman will be quite unimpressed with the findings of science regarding bacterial infection. He knows that illness truly is caused by evil spirits. It is only when he too agrees to scientific method as good means of preventing self-deception, that he will be likely to accept its findings. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22

However, even among those who have adopted the ground rules of science, tentative belief in the findings of a scientific research can only occur where there is a subjective readiness to believe. One could find many examples. Most psychologist are quite ready to believe evidence showing that the lecture system produces significant increments of learning, and quite unready to believe that the turn of an unseen card may be called through an ability labelled extrasensory perception. Yet the scientific evidence for the latter is considerably more impeccable than for the former. Likewise when the so-called “Iowa studies” first came out, indicating that intelligence might be considerably altered by environmental conditions, there was great disbelief among psychologists, and many attacks on the imperfect scientific methods used. The scientific evidence for this finding is not much better today than it was when the Iowa studies first appeared, but the subjective readiness of psychologists to believe such a finding has altered greatly. A historian of science has noted that empiricists, had they existed at the time, would have been the first to disbelieve the findings of Nicolaus Copernicus, who formulated a model of the Universe that placed the Sun rather than Earth at the center of the Universe. Nonetheless, Aristarchus of Samos also formulated the same model about 1800 years prior. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22

It appears then that whether I believe the scientific findings of others, or those from my own studies, depends in part on my readiness to put a tentative belief in such findings. One example from my own experience may suffice. In 1941 a research study done under my supervision showed that the future adjustment of delinquent adolescents was best predicted by a measure of their realistic self-understanding and self-acceptance. The instrument was a crude one, but it was a better predictor than measures of family environment, hereditary capacities, social milieu, and the like. At that time I was simply not ready to believe such a finding, because my own belief, like that of most psychologists, was that such factors as the emotional climate in the family and the influence of the peer group were the only real determinates of the future delinquency and non-delinquency. Only gradually, as my experience with psychotherapy continued and deepened, was it possible for me to give my tentative belief to the findings of this study and of a later one (1944) which confirmed it. One reason we are not particularly aware of this subjective fact is that in the physical sciences particularly, we have gradually adopted a very large area of experience in which we are ready to believe any finding which can be shown to rest upon the rules of the scientific game, properly played. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22

Anybody can win, unless there happens to be a second entry. Draw your salary before you spend it. Because the soul encompasses and organizes the whole person, it is frequently taken to be the person. We naturally treat persons as souls. However, of course, the soul is not the person. It is, rather the deepest part of the self in terms of overall operations; and like body, it has the capacity to operate (and does, largely, operate) without conscious supervision. The soul is somewhat like a computer that quietly runs a business or manufacturing operation and only comes to our attention when it malfunctions or requires some adaption to new tasks. It can be significantly reprogrammed, and this too is a major part of what goes into the spiritual formation (re-formation) of the person. The figures of the soul are given off in the beams of Heaven, and the Earth receives them. There is an appetite that binds the whole and its parts, the motion of congruity or situation of the parts in respect of the whole, evident in so many particulars. This entails a consenting or proportion. There is the appetite in which the inferior kind moves toward its superior kind. Like agrees with like in small moments, as is seen when the magnet receives tiny iron particles; but iron in larger quantities will go to the Earth, the kind superior to the magnet. There is an appetite in every being to propagate the more general form of oneself, for instance, to multiply one’s species. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22

Because the soul is so inclusive and fundamental and to some degree independent of conscious direction, biblical and poetic language often addresses it in the third person. The psalmist asked, “Why are you in despair, O my Soul? And why have you become disturbed within me? Hope in God, for I shall again praise Him for the help of His presence,” reports Psalm 42.5. The “rich fool” of Luke 12 said, “I will say to my soul, ‘Soul, you have many goods laid up for many years to come; take your ease, eat, drink and be merry,’” reports verse 19. In his poem “The Chambered Nautilus,” Oliver Wendell Holmes intoned, “Build thee more stately mansion, oh my soul, as the swift season roll.” However, for all of the soul’s vastness and independence, the tiny executive center of the person—that is, the spirit or will—can redirect and re-form the soul, with God’s cooperation. It mainly does this by redirecting the body in spiritual disciplines and toward various other types of experiences under God. In the language of the prophets, it is the Lord Who shakes the mountains and melts the rocks. This is a language that modern being cannot understand. And so God, Who is not bound to any special language, not even to that of the prophets, spoke to the beings of today through the mouths of our greatest scientists, and this is what He said: You yourselves can bring about the end upon yourselves. I give the power to shake the foundations of your Earth into your hands. You can use this power for creation or destruction. How will you use it? #RandolphHarris 14 of 22

This is what God said to humankind through the work of the scientists and through their discover of the key to the foundations of life. However, through them He did even more. God forced His Word upon them, as He had forced it upon the prophets, in spite of their attempt ever to resist it. For no prophet likes to say what one has to say. And no scientist who participated in the great and terrible discovery liked to say what he or she had to say. However, one could not but speak; one had to raise one’s voice, like the prophets, to tell this generation what the prophet told their generations: that the Earth and humans, trees and animals, are threatened by a catastrophe which they can scarcely escape. A tremendous anxiety expresses itself through the words of these beings. Not only do they feel the shaking of the foundation, but also that they themselves are largely responsible for it. They tell us that they despise what they have done, because they know that we are left with only a slight chance of escape. Wavering between little hope and much despair, they urge us to use this chance. This is the way in which God had spoken to our generation about the shaking of the foundations. We have forgotten about such shaking. And it was science, more than anything else, which had made us forget it. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22

It was not science as knowledge, but rather science for the purpose of hidden idolatry, for the purpose of persuading us to believe in our Earth as the place for the establishment of the Kingdom of God, to believe in ourselves as those through whom this was to be achieved. There were prophets of this idolatry—false prophets, as they were called by Jeremiah—who cried: “Progress, infinite progress! Peace, universal peace! Happiness, happiness for everyone!” And now what has happened? That same science, in the saving power of which these false prophets believed, has utterly destroyed that idolatry. The greatest triumph of science was the power it gave to humans to annihilate themselves and their World. And those who brought about this triumph are speaking today, like the true prophets of the past—which is to say, not of progress, but of a return to the chaos of the beginning; not of peace, but of disruption; and not of happiness, but of doom. In this way science is atoning for the idolatrous abuse to which it has lent itself for centuries. Science, which has closed our eyes and thrown us into an abyss of ignorance about the few things that really matter, has revealed itself, had opened our eyes, and has pointed, at least, to one fundamental truth—that “the mountains shall depart and the hills shall be removed,” that “Earth shall fall down to rise no more,” because its foundations shall be destroyed. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22

However, still we hear voices—and since the first shock, they have been increasing—which try to comfort us, saying: Perhaps humans will use the power to shake the foundations for creative purposes, for progress, for peace and happiness. The future is possessed in human’s hands, in our hands. If we should decide for constructiveness instead of destruction, why should we not be able to continue the creation? Why should we not become like God, at least in this respect? Job had to become silent when the Lord spoke to him our of the whirlwind, saying, “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the Earth? Declare if thou hast understanding!” However, out false voices continue: “Perhaps we can answer where Job could not. Have not our scientific discoveries revealed the mysteries of the ways in which the Earth was founded? Are we not, in thought and knowledge, able to be present at this event? Why should we be afraid of the shaking of the foundations?” However, humans are not God; and whenever one has claimed to be like God, one has been rebuked and brought to self-destruction and despair. When one has rested complacently on one’s cultural creativity, or on one’s technical progress, on one’s political institutions or on one’s religious systems, one has been thrown into disintegration and chaos; all the foundations of one’s personal, natural and cultural life have been shaken. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22

As long as there has been human history, this is what has happened; in our period it has happened on a larger scale than ever before. Human’s claim to be like God has been rejected once more; not one foundation of the life of our civilization has remained unshaken. The existence of God and other like truths about God, which can be known by natural reason, are not articles of faith, but are preambles to the articles; for faith presupposes natural knowledge, even as grace presupposes nature, and perfection supposes something that can be perfected. Nevertheless, there is nothing to prevent a being, who cannot grasp proof, accepting, as a matter of faith, something which in itself is capable of being scientifically known and demonstrated. When the existence of a cause is demonstrated from an effect, this effect takes the place of the definition of the cause in proof of the cause’s existence. This is especially the case in regard to God, because, in order to prove the existence of anything, it is necessary to accept as a middle term the meaning of the word, and not its essence, for the question of its essence follows on the question of its existence. Now the names given to God are derived from His Effects; consequently, in demonstrating the existence of God from His effects, we may take for the middle term the meaning of the word “God.” #RandolphHarris 18 of 22

From effects not proportionate to the cause no perfect knowledge of that cause can be obtained. Yet from every effect the existence of the cause can be clearly demonstrated, and so we can demonstrate the existence of God from His effect; through from them we cannot perfectly know God as He is in His Essence. Before Thine eyes, O Lord, I stand guilty by the witness of my own conscience. I hardly dare to ask what I do not deserve to obtain. For Thou, Lord, knowest our doings. We blush to confess what we fear not to commit. Unto Thee, after falling into sin, I return from my wanderings; before Thee I lie sorely wounded; worthless as I am, my only relief is in Thee, O good Physician! Everywhere Thou findest us; therefore unto Thee we flee, because from Thee we cannot escape. Let Thy forgiveness comfort those whom their guilt terrifies. We plead guilty before Thee, O Lord; spare us, because Thou art kind. We know that unless Thou pardon, Thou mayest justly punish us. However, with Thee is great mercy, and overflowing readiness to forgive. Let Thy loving-kindness, from which we hope everything, not impute to us that wherein we have offended, but look upon that which we ask. O God, Who desirest not the death, but the repentance of sinners, reject not from Thy tender love my wretched self, a frail sinner; nor look to my sins and crimes, and my unclean and base thoughts, whereby I am woefully disunited from Thy will; but look Thou to thine own mercy. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22

We may meet a self-actualized person daily over several weeks and yet know nothing of one’s mind, have no insight into one’s true character. This is because you do not have the high-grade quality of perceptiveness needed to sense the individual. There is no level of contact, no real communication between you and the individual. Not every illuminated being has one’s status admitted and one’s knowledge recorded. Some have not been found out by the World until years after they have been dead. If the being has found one’s divine soul and it has fund one, one is thereby set free of the rules, restrictions, and disciplines which ascetically fence the life of a being who has not. Nothing can burn away the divine presence in one’s heart. “And no I, Moroni, have written the words which were commanded me, according to my memory; and I have told you the things which I have sealed up; therefore touch them not in order that ye may translate; for that thing is forbidden you, expect by and by it shall be wisdom in God. And behold, ye may be privileged that ye may show the plates unto those who shall assist to bring forth this work; and unto three shall they be shown by the power of God; wherefore they shall know of surety that these things are true,” reports Ether 5.1-3. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22

The second day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. I pray Heaven to be bestow the best of blessings on this House and all that shall hereafter inhabit it. My none but honest and wise beings every rule under this roof. O Lord, I hand on thee; I see, believe, live, when thy will, not mine, is done; I can plead nothing in myself in regard of any worthiness and grace, in regard of thy providence and promises, but only thy good pleasures. If thy mercy make me poor and vile, blessed be thou! Prayers arising from my needs are preparations for future mercies; help me to honour thee by believing before I feel, for great is the sin if I make feeling a cause of faith. Show me what sins hide three from me, and eclipse thy love; help me to humble myself for past evils, to be resolved to walk with more care, for if I do not walk holily before thee, how can I be assured of my salvation? It is the meek and the humble who are shown thy covenant, know thy will, are pardoned and healed, who by faith depend and rest upon grace, who are sanctified and quickened, who evidence they love. Help me to pray in faith and so find thy will, by leaning hard on thy rich free mercy, by believing thou wilt give what thou hast promised. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22

Strengthen me to pray with the conviction that whatever I receive is thy gift, so that I may pray until my prayer be granted; teach me to believe that all degrees of mercy arise from several degrees of prayer, that when faith is begun it is imperfect and must grow, as shaped ground opens wider and wider until rain comes. So shall I wait thy will, pray for it to be done, and by grace become fully obedient. Almighty and everlasting God, by Whom that begins to be which was not, and that which lay hid is made visible, cleanse away the folly of our heart, and purify us from our secret vices; that we may be able to serve Thee, O Lord, with a pure mind; though Jesus Christ our Lord. Beware that you do not lose the substance by grasping at the shadow. And thou wilt give thyself relief, if thou doest every act of thy life as if it were the last. Time is like a river made up of the events which happen, and it current is strong; no sooner does anything appear than it is swept away, and another comes in its place, and will be swept away too. Nothing happens to any person that one is not formed by nature to bear. Remember that to change your mind and follow one who sets you right is to be none the less free than you were before. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22

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

December 23, 2019 5:14 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

December 18, 2019 2:11 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Feed Upon Apples Red and Strawberries, and Choose Each Pleasure that My Fancy Sees!

December 17, 2019 2:35 am

Stop and consider life is but a day; a fragile dew-drop on its perilous way from a tree’s summit. When they especially do not deserve it is when people need love the most. In field of medicine, we know that certain recognized sicknesses are the result of a physician’s (witting or unwitting) invitation to consider oneself weak or sick. Such conditions are designated iatrogenetic diseases. If we speak of iatrogenic illness, is it not just as meaningful to speak of iatrogenic wellness? Or “mother-o-genic” wellness; or “psychologist-o-genic” wellness? Could we classify some physicians as wellness-inviters, i.e., healers, and others as sickness, who have a knack for persuading others that they are weak, helpless, and sick? There are some people in society who have a proven flair for transmitting powerful invitations to others to regard life as pointless and hopeless and to regard themselves as weak and worthless. There may be many in society who are gifted at getting people to “give up,” to yield, to give in. Mental hospital personnel invite or shape patients so that they will conform to current conceptions of how a mad person should appear. And a visit to any mental hospital will prompt this question: “What kind of behavior and attitude are invited by the hospital buildings themselves? By the social organization that prevails there?” #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

Much of the traditional psychiatric symptomatology can be explained as the outcome of invalidating and disconfirming behavior from relatives and professional people toward anyone who experiences difficulty in living. In fact, it is warranted to wonder whether hospital personnel can take healthy behavior when it appears in the ones called “patients,” or do they rather get terrified by it when it appears and persuade the patient (invite one) to stop this nonsensical autonomy and self-expression and step into line. Do hospital personnel invite “crazy” behavior, and punish healthy behavior? In Kesey’s novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, patients who became bumptious were sedated or electroshocked into their appropriate social roles. If that did not work, they were lobotomized. I do not think the story told in that novel is far from truth. At least in then existing mental hospitals. A person’s attitude to reality is something extraordinarily persistent, but the more persistent one’s mental habitus (the norms, values, attitudes, and behaviours of a particular social group/class) is, the less permanent will be one’s effective achievement of adaptation. This is the necessary consequence of the continual changes in the environment and the new adaptations demanded by them. Thus it may easily happen that an attitude can no longer satisfy the demands of adaptation because changes have occurred in the environmental conditions which require a different attitude. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

An example of an attitude that can no longer satisfy the demands of adaption, when changes have occurred in the environment is that require a different attitude has occurred is like when a feeling-attitude seeks to fulfill the demands of reality by means of empathy, but easily encounters a situation that can only be solved by thinking. Then one is at an impasse. In this case the feeling-attitude breaks down the progression and the progression of the psyche (human soul, mind, or spirit) also ceases. The vital feeling that was present before disappears, and in its place the psychic value of certain conscious contents increases in an unpleasant way; subjective contents and reactions press to the fore and the situation becomes full of affect and ripe for explosions. Thee symptoms indicate a damming up the psyche, and the stoppage is always marked by the breaking up of the pairs of opposites. During the progression of the psyche the pairs of opposites are united in the co-ordinated flow of psychic processes. Their working together makes possible the balanced regularity of these processes, which without the inner polarity would become one-sided and unreasonable. We are therefore justified in regarding all extravagant and exaggerated behavior as a loss of balance, because the co-ordinating effect of the opposite impulse is obviously lacking. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

Hence, it is essential for progression, which is the successful achievement of adaptation, that impulse and counter-impulse, positive and negative, should reach a state of regular interaction and mutual influence. This balancing and combining of pairs of opposites can be seen, for instance, in the process of reflection that precedes a difficult decision. However, in the stoppage of psyche that occurs when progression has become impossible, positive and negative can no longer unite in coordinated action, because both have attained an equal value which keeps the scales balanced. The longer the stoppage lasts, the more the value which keeps the scales balanced. The longer the stoppage lasts, the more the valued of the opposed positions increases; they become enriched with more and more associations and attach to themselves an ever-widening range of psychic material. The tension leads to conflict, the conflict leads to attempts at mutual repression, and if one of the opposing forces is successfully repressed a dissociation ensures, a splitting of the personality, or disunion with oneself. The stage is then set for neurosis. The acts that follow from such a condition are unco-ordinated, sometimes pathological, having the appearance of symptomatic actions. Although in part normal, they are based partly on the repressed opposite which, instead of working as an equilibrating force, has an obstructive effect, thus hindering the possibility of further progress. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

The struggle between the opposites would persist in this fruitless way if the process of regression, the backward movement of the psyche, did not set in with the outbreak of the conflict. Through their collision the opposites are gradually deprived of value and depotentiated. This loss of value steadily increases and is the only thing perceived by consciousness. It is synonymous with regression, for in proportion to the decrease in value of the conscious opposites there is an increase in the value of all those psychic processes which are not concerned with outward adaptation and therefore are seldom or never employed consciously. These psychic factors are for the most part unconscious. As the value of the subliminal elements and of the unconscious increases, it is to be expected that they will gain influence over the conscious mind. On account of the inhibiting influence which the conscious exercises over the unconscious, the unconscious values assert themselves at first only indirectly. The inhibition to which they are subjected is a result of the exclusive directedness of conscious contents. (This inhibition is called the “censor.”) The indirect manifestation of the unconscious takes the form of disturbances of conscious behaviour. In the association experiment they appear as complex-indicators, in daily life as the “symptomatic actions,” and in neurotic conditions they appear as symptoms. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

Since regression raises the value of contents that were previously excluded from the conscious process of adaption, and hence are either totally unconscious or only dimly conscious, the psychic elements now being forced over the threshold are momentarily useless from the standpoint of adaptation, and for this reason are invariably kept at a distance by the directed psychic function. They are altogether incompatible contents and tendencies, partly immoral, partly unaesthetic, partly again of an irrational, imaginary nature. The obviously inferior character of these contents as regards adaptation has given rise to that depreciatory view of the psychic background which is habitual in psychoanalytic writings. What the regression brings to the surface certainly seems at first sight to be slime from the depths; but if one does not stop short at a superficial evaluation and refrains from passing judgment on the basis of a preconceived strict and rigid doctrine, it will be found that this “slime” contains not merely incompatible and rejected remnants of everyday life, or inconvenient and objectionable terrestrial tendencies, but also germs of a new life and vital possibilities for the future. This is one of the great merits of psychoanalysis, that it is not afraid to dredge up the incompatible elements, which would be a thoroughly useless and indeed reprehensible undertaking were it not for the possibilities of new life that are possessed in the repressed contents. That this is and must be so is not only proved by a wealth of practical experiences but can also be deduced from the following considerations. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

The process of adaptation requires a directed conscious function characterized by inner consistency and logical coherence. Because it is directed, everything unsuitable must be excluded in order to maintain the integrity of direction. The unsuitable elements are subjected to inhibition and thereby escape attention. Now experience shows that there is only one consciously directed function of adaptation. If, for example, I have a thinking orientation I cannot at the same time orient myself by feeling, because thinking and feeling are two quite different functions. In fact, if I am to satisfy the logical laws of thinking, so that the thought-process will not be disturbed by feeling, I must carefully exclude feeling. In this case I withdraw as much of the psyche as possible from the feeling process, with the result that this function becomes relatively unconscious. Experience shows, again, that the orientation is largely habitual; accordingly the other unsuitable functions, so far as they are incompatible with the prevailing attitude, are relatively unconscious, and hence unused, untrained, and undifferentiated. Moreover, on the principle of coexistence they necessarily become associated with other contents of the unconscious, the inferior and incompatible quality of which I have already pointed out. Consequently, when these functions are activated by regression and so reach consciousness, they appear in a somewhat incompatible form, disguised and covered up with the slime of the deep. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

If we remember that the stoppage of the psyche was due to failure of the conscious attitude, we can now understand what valuable seeds are possessed in the unconscious contents activated by regression. They contain the elements of that other function which was excluded by the conscious attitude and which would be capable of effectively complementing or even of replacing the inadequate conscious attitude. If thinking fails as the adapted function, because it is dealing with a situation to which one can adapt only by feeling, then the unconscious material activated by repression will contain the missing feeling function, although still in embryonic form, archaic and undeveloped. Similarly, in the opposite type, regression would activate a thinking function that would effectively compensate the inadequate feeling. By activating an unconscious factor, regression confronts consciousness with the problem of the psyche as opposed to the problem of outward adaptation. It is natural that the conscious mind should fight against accepting the regressive contents, yet it is finally compelled by the impossibility of further progress to submit to the regressive values. In other words, regression leads to the necessity of adapting to the inner World of the psyche. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

Just as adaptation to the environment may fail because of the one-sidedness of the adapted function, so adaption to the inner World may fail because of the one-sidedness of the function in question. For instance, if the stoppage of the psyche was due to the failure of the thinking attitude to cope with the demands of outward adaptation, and if the unconscious feeling function is activated by regression, there is only a feeling attitude towards the inner World. This may be sufficient at first, but in the long run it will cease to be adequate, and the thinking function will have to be enlisted too, just as the reverse was necessary when dealing with the outer World. Thus a complete orientation towards the inner World becomes necessary until such time as inner adaptation is attained. One the adaptation is achieved, progression can begin again. The principle of progression and regression is portrayed in the myth of the whale-dragon worked out by Forbenius. The hero is the symbolic exponent of the movement of the psyche. Entry into the dragon is the regressive direction, and the journey to the East (the “night sea journey”) with its attendant events symbolizes the effort to adapt to the conditions of the psychic inner World. The complete swallowing up and disappearance of the hero in the belly of the dragon represents the complete withdrawal of interest from the outer Word. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

The overcoming of the monster from within is the achievement of adaptation to the conditions of the inner World, and the emergence (“slipping out”) of the hero from the monster’s belly with the help of a bird, which happens at the moment of Sunrise, symbolizes he recommencement of progression. It is characteristic that the monster begins the night sea journey to the East, for instances, towards Sunrise, while the hero is engulfed in its belly. This seems to me to indicate that regression is not necessarily a retrograde step in the sense of a backwards development or degeneration, but rather represents a necessary phase of development. The individual is, however, not consciously aware that one is developing; one feels oneself to be in a compulsive situation that resembles an early infantile state or even an embryonic condition within the womb. It is only if one remains stuck in this condition that we can speak of involution or degeneration. The Spiritual Formation Lines presents discipleship to Jesus Christ as the greatest opportunity individual human beings have in life and the only hope to corporate humankind has of solving its insurmountable problems. It affirms the unity of the present-day Christian with those who walked beside Jesus during His incarnation. To be His disciple then was t be with Him, to learn to be like Him. It was to be Christ’s student or apprentice in kingdom living. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

Christ’s disciples heard what He said and observed what He did, and then, under His direction, they simply began to say and to the same things. They did so imperfectly but progressively. As He taught: “Everyone who is full trained will be like his or her teacher,” reports Luke 6.40. Today it is the same, except now it is the resurrected Lord who walks throughout the World. He invites us to place our confidence in Him. Those who rely on Christ believe that He knows how to live and will pour our His life into us as we “take His yoke and learn from Him, for He is gentle and humble in heart,” reports Matthew 11.29. To take His yoke means joining Him in His work, making our work His work. To trust Christ is to understand that total immersion in what He is doing with our life is the best thing that can happen to us. The grace of God is one of the most important subjects in all of Scripture. At the same time it is probably one of the least understood. All Christians believe in grace. Many of us frequently quote Paul’s well-known words in Ephesians 2.8-9: ‘For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast. And John Newton’s beloved hymn “Amazing Grace” is said to be the all-time favorite hymn in the United States of America. Why then do I say the grace of God is one of the least understood subjects in the Bible? #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

When we think of grace, we almost always think of being saved by grace. That is why Ephesians 2.8-9 is so familiar to us. Even Christian literature available on the subject of grace seems to deal almost exclusively with salvation. However, the Bible teaches we are not only saved by grace, but we also live by grace every day of our lives. It is this important aspect of grace that seems to be so little understood or practiced by Christians. Most of us tend to base our personal relationship with God on our performance instead of on His grace. If we have performed well—whatever “well” is in our opinion—then we expect God to bless us. If we have not done so well, our expectations are reduced accordingly. In this sense, we live by works rather than grace. We are saved by grace, but we are living by the sweat of our own performance. Moreover, we are always challenging ourselves and one another to try harder. We seem to believe success in the Christian life (however we define success) is basically up to us: our commitment, or discipline, our zeal, with some help from God along the way. We give lip service to the attitude of the apostle Paul, “But by the grace of God I am what I am” (1 Corinthians 15.10), but our unspoken motto is, “God helps those who help themselves.” The realization that my daily relationship with God is based on the infinite merit of Christ instead of on my own performance is a very freeing and joyous experience. However, it is not mean to be a one-tome experience; the truth needs to be reaffirmed daily. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

Now, in order to see what this means and why it is so, we must be clear about what the “heart” or “spirit: is within the human system and how it can effectively govern our lives for good. The human heart, will, or spirit is the executive center of a human life. The heart is where decisions and choices are made for the whole person. That is its function. This does not mean that the whole person actually does only what the heart directs, any more than a whole organization actually does precisely what the chief executive officers (CEO) directs. That would be ideal, perhaps (and again, perhaps not); but as any CEO or person in a management position—or even the head of a family—knows, the system rarely goes as it is directed, and never perfectly so. Many factors are always at work in the decisions and actions that actually occur. The individual, like the group, is often divided into incoherent fragments. “Like a city that is broken into and without walls is the human who has no control over one’s spirit,” reports Proverbs 25.28. Still, the ideal is there because of the necessities imposed by real life—a house divided cannot stand, and so on—and only to the degree that we come close to that ideal are our lives well directed or even coherent. In a World deeply infected with evil and stuff that just happens, the usual case is that the individual does not consistently do what his or her own heart says is good and right, and all too often it is the same with groups of all kinds. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

And how rare to find a group that consistently functions well for the good it envisions. In fact, the group usually exhibits the divided hearts and lives of its members even more strikingly than does the individual alone. That is because of its larger scope and greater complexity. When successful, spiritual formation (or, really, reformation) unites the divided heart and life of the individual. That person can then bring remarkable harmony into the groups where he or she participates. Be one a dictator holding the fortunes of a nation in the hollow of one’s hand, or a despised outcast, degraded, destitute, and sin-steeped, none is too high to find a place in the illuminate’s orbit of contact, just as none is too low. For the first time virtue of self-knowledge is the inner understanding of others, the intellectual sympathy with them. Through this sympathy one is able to place oneself at the point of view of each being with whom one has to deal, or of each school of thought which one has to lead to one beyond its own. If it can be said that one has any negative attitude at all, it may be noted that one has a strong disinclination to talk about the Quest to those who are uninterested in it, or antagonistic to it. Enlightened individuals hold their convictions calmly where others preach them violently. One is indifferent to laudatory articles about oneself in the public prints as to condemnatory gossip in the private circles. One can understand why they hold these views even though one does not share them. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

The current of peace an enlightened individual carries along is part of the gift of grace from God, so one does not have to struggle for it. O God, Who hast made the most glorious Name of our Lord Jesus Christ, Thine Only-begotten Son, to be exceeding sweet and supremely lovable to Thy faithful servants, and tremendous and terrible to malignant spirits; mercifully grant that all who devoutly venerate this Name of Jesus on Earth, may in this life receive the sweetness of holy comfort, and in the life to come attain the joy of exulting gladness and never-ending jubilation; through the same name Jesus Christ our Lord may we feel better than we are, wiser than we are. Please kindle this spark that allows us to be wholly possessed by the love of God and give us the guidance for which we have long been waiting. The words of God are like a lighthouse to those seekers who are still grouping in the dark, and even to those who have found the light. O God, Whose Only-begotten Son hath appeared in substance of our flesh; grant, we beseech Thee, that through Him Whom we have acknowledged as outwardly like unto us, we may attain an inward renewal; through Jesus Christ our Lord. “O Lord, thou hast given us a commandment that we must call upon thee, that from thee we may receive according to our desires,” reports Ether 3.2. Therefore, no insult will I give one’s spirit, by telling what one’s sees from the native merit. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15

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Mills 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 Mission, Mid-Century Modern, California Modern, and Contemporary Farmhouse. These homes are symbols of the creative freedom and optimism that is prevalent in the Age of Information. The homes are constructed by artisans who take great pride in showcasing their craftsmanship. Furthermore, the designs for these homes are inspired by the classical architectural elements and forms that have withstood the test of time. Various details, such the windows, porches, and rooflines, provide traditional forms that are easily understood and emotionally comforting. The homes in Mills Station utilize the same traditional values and provide a sense of continuity by linking the present to the past. The Farmhouse and other plans, for example, are designed to recapture the harmony of style and timeless design of the bygone Victorian era.

Along with this nostalgic charm, Cresleigh homes created houses that are retreats from today’s fast paced soictey, with spacious living areas, multi-purpose media centers, and elegant master suites. The design knowledge Cresleigh has accumulated from open-concept space planning, along with the realization that people also desire private, personal areas, has resulted in a blend o unobstructed views, along with versatile alcoves and cozy nooks for privacy. 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. As you browse through Cresleigh’s website, we hope you agree that these designs offer a lasting tribute to the design and integrity of the Victorian Era and reflect all the modern comforts. Perhaps one of them will not only recall for you the comfort and serenity that you desire, but also fulfills all the requirements you may have for your ideal home. https://cresleigh.com/mills-station/residence-2/

Here is also a link for a virtual walk through of Mills Station Cresleigh Ranch Resident 2 with Mrs. Abbie Johnson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Rpm_C0hXkY&feature=youtu.be

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

December 5, 2019 3:07 am

A 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

And 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

Members 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

Healthy 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

Experience 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

For 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

Often 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

Therefore, 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

Defensiveness 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

Good 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

Less 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

The 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

Let 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

By 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

Indeed, 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

In 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

The 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

We 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

Contrary 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

O 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 20

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Unwise People Do Not Understand How that Which Differs With itself is in Agreement: Harmony Consists of Opposing Tensions!

November 6, 2019 2:09 am

I did not know that I could live with such a decision, and I was certain that they could not mentally or spiritually survive such a denial. Yet I felt compelled to ponder. And ponder I did. Why does one become an alcoholic? Since no final answer to this question is available, since the subject is complex and the size of this paper limited, a relatively brief and rigid phrased description will follow. In accord with the two essentials for the development of the condition, it will be divided into two parts: one, the habitual use of alcohol; two, certain personality types or structures. There is not much evidence of a physiological or constitutional basis for alcoholism. Neither of these alone can bring on alcoholism. There are many individuals with personalities similar to those found in alcoholics who never become alcoholics, who may never touch alcohol; there are tends of millions of individuals who use alcohol who never become alcoholics. The combination of the two factors is essential for the appearance of alcoholism. Alcohol is a depressant, the direct opposite of a stimulant. Taken in sufficient quantities it produces sleep. Its depressant action is gradual, however; and as it depresses certain control functions of the brain it allows behavior and attitudes which are usually repressed. (It is this less controlled behavior which makes people believe that it is a stimulant.) #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

Alcohol, even in small quantities, lowers sensitivity, relieves tension, allows the forgetting of difficult and unpleasant conceptions and memories. It reduces accuracy of judgment and discrimination, especially about the self. With alcohol, then, one can temporarily escape worries and anxieties, temporarily ease tensions, feel as if one were happy, clever, witty, graceful or, at least, less unhappy, less inept, less awkward. And one can gain this temporary feeling without utilizing the effort and ability which real achievement of such feeling would demand. Of the personality types significant for alcoholism only two will be mentioned. It should be recognized that there are psychotics and feebleminded persons who are also alcoholics, that there are persons, apparently quite normal, who under extraordinary stress may become compulsive drinkers. The great bulk of the alcoholics, however, fit into the two classes to be described, the primary and the secondary compulsive drinker types. The primary type may be likened to that category of persons labeled neurotic. This over-used and little understood word in the present instance at least serves to point out that primary compulsive drinkers were definitely maladjusted before they began drinking. Here, for example, is the individual whose personality was warped, whose emotional development was unhealthy from infancy or childhood on. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

The maladjustment might be seen as an inability to compete with equals or superiors without feeling extreme anxiety or apprehension of undefined, future pain. Or it might be seen as an unusual fear of contact with those of the opposite gender, or as a general conception of the self as unworthy, inefficient, and socially awkward. These states of mind are fairly common though irregular occurrences among adolescents, but as continued attitudes in a young or middle-aged adult they are out of keeping with the demands of our society. In the early twenties and certainly by the age of thirty there is great pressure on adults to be socially and economically competitive and appropriately self-assertive, to be married, and to have attained a relatively mature independence of self-control. As individuals of poor or no adjustment along these lines grow older, the pressures upon them grow stronger and the maladjustment becomes increasingly harder to bear. No statement is presented to explain why or how these individuals comes to be “neurotics.” It is a matter of common observation that there are many such persons. If such persons are, like most Americans, introduced to the custom of drinking, and if anxieties about drinking are not too great and no other way out of their dilemma is found, then they are likely candidates to start out on the road to alcoholism. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

Alcohol allows them to compete without anxiety, to mingle without or with less fear in mixed company, perhaps even to initiate courtship behavior, to forget their own interpretation of their personal inadequacies; it allows them relief from whatever their problem may be. Small wonder that they come to lean upon this crutch with increasing dependency. This development illustrates the conception that for the type of person described alcohol is an adjustment. However, the alcohol wears off while the neurotic characteristics remain as before. Furthermore, the memory of having acted aggressively or assertively, of having shown interest in the opposite gender because of alcohol creates new anxieties; the knowledge of having been “out-of-control” also adds guilt and remorse. However, in the long run the rewards of drinking for the incipient alcoholic are greater than these feelings. Later on, one may use alcohol to get rid of the post-alcoholic guilt and anxiety. Thus, a vicious circle comes into operation. The vicious circle is stimulated further by the inevitable extension and intensification of old problems and the rise of news one due to increasing periods of inebriety. Family and friends, employers and neighbors, customers and strangers, all will punish the person who often gets drunk. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

With the increase in problems the relieving, soothing, encouraging effects of alcohol become all the more desirable. So, although alcohol is an adjustment, it is a short-run, temporary adjustment and leads to further maladjustment. Before one’s drinking starts the secondary compulsive type appears on the surface as a fairly well-adjusted person. He or she has utilized social customs, attitudes, and organizations with considerable ability. Certainly the label “neurotic” would never have been applied. Some of this type may be more extroverted than those around them, tending to be the leader in the group, the excessive practical joker, the most aggressive salesman. The implication from this is sense of personal adequacy, of being a significant member of their group. Whatever the case, it is noticeable that they can differ markedly from the earlier mentioned “neurotic” type, that they have utilized customs, associations and attitudes which were socially acceptable; this plays an important role in the discussion of therapy. The prospective secondary type of compulsive drinker, when introduced to the drinking customs, appears to take it with great satisfaction. One already belongs to a group which usually drinks a good deal or one shortly joins such a group and become a regular drinker, later perhaps a heavy drinker, but one is not yet an alcoholic; one is in control of the drinking, not the drinking in control of one. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

Many people can be so characterized, and they need not become alcoholics. For the individual in whom we are interested, however, a process sets in which has been called the pampering effect of alcohol. Alcohol lowers sensitivity, discrimination, control and efficiency. Unless counteracting forces arise, it allows the drinker to respond to stimuli less adequately and to follow personal inclinations in the face of contrary social demands with less notice and less care. As a result the fairly constant heavy drinker may become a more careless worker, a more thoughtless father and husband, or mother and wife, a more demanding friend, a more aggressive neighbor. Nor is this the only effect. On the negative side one may be seen as failing to exercise one’s social abilities and one’s intellectual techniques. Without practice the personality assets become dulled and more difficult to use. This process may take place by almost imperceptible steps. The result of this process is inevitable—occupational, familial, financial, and neighborly problems are going to arise. Unfortunately, the individual has learned a simple response to avoid such problems—drinking. Again, a vicious circle can be seen. A second result of this process, a result which may confuse the therapist, is that the personality of the drinker seems to change. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

The personality change is not hard to explain. The individual finds oneself losing the affection and regard of one’s spouse, one’s boss, one’s friends; whereupon one loses affection and regard for them. One finds that one is less popular in one’s club, among fellow workers, or in community groups; whereupon one gives up these organizations. One can hardly help but realize that one’s work is not as good as it was; whereupon one talks it up, idealizes what one is going to do, what one has done; while realistic accomplishment continues downhill. One becomes increasingly isolated and consequently self-centered. As one loses friends and interests, one become cynical, self-conscious and suspicious of others. One rationalizes one’s situation, and as one’s rationalizations are not subject to the discipline of realistic give-and-take, one becomes overly idealistic or overly optimistic or pessimistic. Gradually one takes on more and more of the characteristics of the primary type. When one has achieved the full status of an alcoholic one may seem not a whit different from the primary type. From the point of view of rehabilitation, however, he or she is a decidedly different person; the changes of recover are far better than for those of the primary types. These descriptions of the two largest categories of compulsive drinkers, categories based on the developmental nature of the disease, are not a full answer to the question “Why does one become an alcoholic?” #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

The answers we discussed may help, however, toward a better understanding of the sorts of processes, conditions and factors involved in the development of the alcoholic condition. The human character is a structure built up to avoid perception of the terror, perdition and annihilation that dwell next door to every being. The task of psychology is to discover the strategies that a person uses to avoid anxiety. What style does one use to function automatically and uncritically in the World, and how does this style cripple one’s true growth and freedom of action and choice? Basically, how is a person being enslaved by one’s characterological lie about oneself? Most people live in a half-obscurity about their own perceptions of reality. Understating the compulsive character, means recognizing the rigidity of the person who has had to build extra-thick defenses against anxiety, a heavy character armor. A partisan of the most orthodoxy knows it all, one bows before the holy, truth is for one an ensemble of ceremonies, one talks about presenting oneself before the throne of God, of how many times one must bow, one knows everything the same way as does the pupil who is able to demonstrate a mathematical proposition with the letters ABC, but not when they are changed to DEF. One is therefore in dread whenever one bears something not arranged in the same order. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

In society today there is a shut-upness which we refer to as repression; it is the closed personality, the one who had fenced oneself around in childhood, not tested one’s own powers in action, not been free to discover oneself and one’s World in a relaxed way. If the child is not burdened by too much parental blocking of one’s action, too much infection with the parents’ anxieties, one can develop one’s own defenses in a less monopolizing way, can remain somewhat fluid and open in character. One is prepared to test reality in terms of one’s own action and experimentation and less on the basis of delegated authority and prejudgment or preperception. It is of infinite importance that a child be brought up with a conception of the lofty shut-upness [reserve], and be saved from the mistake kind. In an external respect it is easy to perceive when the moment has arrived that one ought to let the child walk alone; the art is to be constantly present and yet not be present, to let the child be allowed to develop itself, while nevertheless one has constantly a survey clearly before one. The art is to leave the child to itself in the very highest measure and on the greatest possible scale, and to express this apparent abandonment in such a way that, unobserved, one at the same time knows everything. And the father who educates or does everything for the child entrusts to one, but had not prevented one from becoming shut-up, has incurred a great accountability. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

The parent should let the child do one’s own exploration of the World and develop one’s own sure experimental powers. One knows that the child has to be protected against dangers and that watchfulness by the parent is of vital importance, but one does not want the parent to obtrude one’s own anxieties into the picture, to cut off the child’s action before it is absolutely necessary. Today we know that such an upbringing alone gives the child a self-confidence in the face of experience that one would not have if one were overly blocked: it gives one an inner sustainment. And it is precisely this inner sustainment that allows the child to develop a lofty shut-upness, or reverse: that is, an ego-controlled and self-confident appraisal of the World by a personality that can open up more easily to experience. Mistaken shut-upness, on the other hand, is the result of too much blockage, too much anxiety, too much effort to face up to experience by an organism that has been overburdened and weakened in its own controls: it means, therefore, more automatic repression by an essentially closed personality. The good is the opening toward new possibility and choice, the ability to face into anxiety; the closed is the evil, that which turns one away from newness and broader perceptions and experiences; the closed shut out revelation, obtrudes a veil between the person and one’s own situation in the World. Ideally these should be transparent, but for the closed person they are opaque. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

This shut-upness is precisely a lite of character. It eo ipso signifies a lie, or if you prefer, untruth. However, untruth is precisely unfreedom; the elasticity of freedom is consumed in the service of close reserve. Close reserve was the effect of the negating retrenchment of the ego in the individuality. And this is a perfectly contemporary psychoanalytic description of the costs of repression on the total personality, which could lead to things like alcoholism because the person becomes fragmented within oneself by the repression. Meanwhile, the real reality dwells under the surface, close at hand, ready to break through the repression, but the repression seemingly leaves the personality intact, seemingly functioning as a whole, in continuity—and that is how continuity is broken, how the personality is really at the mercy of the discontinuity expressed by the repression. The lie of character is built up because the individual needs to adjust to the World, to the parents, and to one’s own existential dilemmas. It is built up before the child has a chance to learn about oneself in an open or free way, and thus character defenses are automatic and unconscious. The problem is that the child becomes dependent on them and comes to be encased in one’s own character armor, unable to see freely beyond one’s own prison or into oneself, into the defenses on is using, the things that are determining one’s unfreedom. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

The best thing that the child can hope is that one’s shut-upness will not be of the mistake or massive kind, in which one’s character is too fearful of the World to be able to open itself to the possibilities of experience. However, that depends largely on the parents who have incurred a great accountability, and so they are obliged to shut themselves off from possibility. Styles of denying possibility and lies of character are the same thing. It leads to what we call inauthentic beings, beings who avoid developing their own uniqueness; they follow out the styles of automatic and uncritical living in which they were conditioned as children. They are inauthentic in that they do not belong to themselves, are not their own person, do not act from their own center, do not see reality on its terms; they are the one-dimensional being totally immersed in the fictional games being played in their society, unable to transcend their social conditioning: the corporation men and women in the West, the bureaucrats in the East, the tribal beings locked up in tradition—beings everywhere who do not understand what it means to think for themselves, and who, if one did, would shrink back at the idea of such audacity and exposures. The immediate man or woman, one’s self or one oneself is something included along with the other in the compass of the temporal and the Worldly. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

Thus, because these beings derive their identity from the collective, the self coheres immediately with the other, wishing, desiring, enjoy, and so forth, but passively; one manages to imitate other men or women, noting how they manage to live, and so one too lives after a sort. In Christendom one too is Christian, goes to church every Sunday, hears and understands the parson, yea, they understand one another; one dies; the parson introduces one into eternity for the price of $10—but a self one was not, and a self one did not become. For the immediate being does not recognize one’s self, one recognizes oneself only by one’s dress, one recognizes that one has a self only by externals. This is the automatic cultural human—human as confided by culture, a slave to it, who imagines that one has an identity if one pays one’s insurance premium, that one has control of one’s life if one guns one’s sports car or works one’s electric toothbrush. Today the inauthentic or immediate beings are familiar types, after decades of Marxist and existentialist analysis of being’s slavery to one’s social system. However, at some time, it must have been a shock to be a modern European city-dweller and be considered a Philistine at the same time. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

Philistinism is triviality, beings lulled by the daily routines of one’s society, content with the satisfactions that it offers one: in today’s World the car, the shopping center, the two-week Summer vacation. Beings are protected by the secure and limited alternatives one’s society offers one, and if one does not look up from one’s path one can live out one’s life with a certain dull security. Devoid of imagination, as the Philistine always is, one lives in a certain trivial province of experience as to how things go, what is possible, what usually occurs….Philistinism tranquilizes itself in the trivial. Why do beings accept to live a trivial life? Because the danger of a full horizon of experience, of course. This is the deeper motivation of philistinism, that it celebrates the triumph over possibility, over freedom. Philistinism knows its real enemy: freedom is dangerous. If you follow it to willingly in threatens to pull you into the air; if you give it up to wholly, you become a prisoner of necessity. The safest thing is to tow the mark of what is socially possible. For philistinism thinks it is in control of possibility, it thinks that when it has decoyed this prodigious elasticity into the field of probability or into the madhouse it holds it a prisoner; it carries possibility around like a prisoner in the change of the probable, shows it off. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

Consciousness itself is born out of the awareness of these limits. Human consciousness is the distinguishing feature of our existence; without limitations we would never have developed it. Consciousness is the awareness that emerges out of the dialectical tensions between possibilities and limitations. Infants begin to be aware of limits when they experience the balls as different from themselves; mother is a limiting factor for them in that she does not feed them every time they cry for food. Though a multitude of such limiting experiences they learn to develop the capacity to differentiate themselves from others and from objects and to delay gratification. If there had been no limits, there would be no consciousness. Our discussion so far may seem, at first glance, to be discouraging, but not when we probe more deeply. It is not by accident that the Hebrew myth that marks the beginning of human consciousness, Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, is portrayed in the context of rebellion. Consciousness is born in the struggle against a limit, called there a prohibition. Going beyond the limit set by Yahweh is then punished by the acquiring of others limits which operate inwardly in the human being—anxiety, the feeling of alienation and guilt. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

However, valuable qualities also come out of this experience of rebellion—the sense of personal responsibility and ultimately the possibility, born out of loneliness, of human love. Confronting limits for the human personality actually turns out to be expansive. Limiting and expanding thus go further. Civilization arose out of out physical limitations, or what some called inferiority. Tooth for tooth and claw for claw, men and women were inferior to the wild animals. In the struggle against these limitations for their survival, human beings evolved their intelligence. Conflict is both king of all and father of all. Conflict presupposes limits, and the struggle with limits is actually the source of creative productions. The limits are as necessary as those provided by the banks of the river, without which the water would be dispersed on the Earth and there would be no river—that is, the river is constituted by the tension between the flowing water and the banks. Art in the same way requires limits as a necessary factor in its birth. Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem. Again listen, unwise people do not understand how that which differs with itself is in agreement: harmony consists of opposing tension, like that of the bow and the lyre. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

In a discussion of how he composed his music, Duke Ellington explained that since his trumpet play could reach certain notes beautifully but not other notes, and the same with his trombonist, he had to write his music within those limits. “It’s good to have limits,” he remarked. True, in our age there is occurring a new valuation of spontaneity and a strong reaction against rigidity. This goes along with a rediscovery of the values of the childlike capacity to play. In modern art, as we all know, there has evolved a new interest in children’s painting as well as in peasant and primitive art, and these kinds of spontaneity often are used as models for adult art work. This is especially true in psychotherapy. The great majority of patients experience themselves as stifled and inhibited by the excessive and rigid limits insisted on by their parents. One of their reasons for coming for therapy in the first place is this conviction that all of this needs to be thrown overboard. Even if it is simplistic, this urge toward spontaneity obviously should be valued by the therapist. If they are to become integrated in any effective sense, people must recover the lost aspects of their personalities, lost under a pile of inhibitions. However, we must not forget that these stages in therapy, like children’s art, are interim stages. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

Children’s art is characterized by an unfinished quality. Despite the apparent similarity with nonobjective art, it still lacks the tension necessary for authentic mature art. It is a promise but not yet an achievement. Sooner or later the growing person’s art must relate itself to the dialectic tension that comes out confronting limits and is present in all forms of mature art. Michelangelo’s writhing slaves; van Gogh’s fiercely twisting cypress trees; Cezanne’s lovely yellow-green landscapes of southern France, reminding us of the freshness of eternal spring—these works have that spontaneity, but they also have the mature quality that comes from the absorption of tension. This makes them much more than interesting; it makes them great. The controlled and transcended tension present in the work of art is the result of the artists’ successful struggle with and against the limits. Remember, what is within you is everywhere. What is not, is nowhere. To start our quest for truth, we must start in the land where we are living, where destiny has put us. Look deeper into your own heart, for that is where what you really seek is. Enlightenment involves liberation from one’s ego, its captivity and deceitfulness. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

It is not emotional exuberance which produces a high spiritual result, but the depth and concentration with which truth is seen. The vibrations it emits will now clear you of external influences of false Gods and help you to center within your divine self. Prepare for your journey into eternal light and abundance and its integration with your soul. Know that the comfort you will find is that which you have the strength to create and perceive. Find strength to create and perceive comfort and joy within you soul as you connected with our Heavenly Father. “We would subject ourselves to the yoke of bondage if it were requisite with the justice of God, or if he should command us so to do. However, behold God doth not command us that we shall subject ourselves to our enemies, but that we should put our trust in him, and he will deliver us. Therefore, let us resist evil, and whatsoever evil we cannot resist with our words, yea, such as rebellions and dissension, let us resist them with our swords, that we may retain our freedom, that we may retain our freedom, that we may rejoice in the great privilege of our church, and in the cause of our Redeemer and our God,” reports Alma 61.12-14. Many an old fable is a perfect allegory of this quest. The temptations and perils, the toils and adventures of its hero are faithful references to what the aspirant has always encountered in the past and will encounter in our own day. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

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The Challenges You Face in Your Own Life Experience Will be Trying, to Say the Least, for it Has a Glory and Naught Else Can Share it!

October 24, 2019 12:51 am

I have guest here! Where exactly did you come from? It is once in a blue Moon a boat ties up at my dock. However, you are most welcome. We are very private here, you understand, I cannot invite you to stay. But these are all golden dreams. On, tell me, who was it first announced, who was it first proclaimed, that beings only do nasty things because one does not know one’s own interests; and that if one were enlightened, if one’s eyes were opened to one’s real normal interests, beings would at once cease to do nasty things, would at once become good and noble because, being enlightened and understanding one’s real advantage, one would see one’s own advantage in the good and nothing else, and we all know that not one being can, consciously, act against one’s own interests, consequently, so to say, through necessity, one would begin doing good? Oh, the babe! Oh, the pure, innocent child! Why, in the first place, when in all these thousands of years has there been a time when beings have acted only from their own interest? What is to be done with the millions of facts that bear witness that beings, consciously, that is, fully understanding their real interest, have left them in the background and have rushed headlong on another path, to meet peril and danger, compelled to this course by nobody and by nothing, but, as it were, simply disliking the beaten track, and have obstinately, willfully, struck out another difficult, absurd way, seeking it almost in the darkness. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

So, I suppose, this obstinacy and perversity were pleasanter to them than any advantage…Advantage! What is advantage? And will you take it upon yourself to define with perfect accuracy in what the advantage of beings consists? And what, if it so happens that a being’s advantage, sometimes, not only may, but even must, consist in one’s desiring in certain cases what is harmful to oneself and not advantageous. And if so, there can be such a case, the whole principle falls into dust. What do you think—are there such cases? You laugh; laugh away gentlemen, but only answer me: have being’s advantages been reckoned up with perfect certainty? Are there not some which not only have been included but cannot possibly be included under any classification? You see, you gentlemen and ladies have, to the best of my knowledge, taken your whole register of human advantages from the averages of statistical figures and political-economical formulas. Your advantages are prosperity, wealth, freedom, peace—and so on, and so on. So that the being who should, for instance, go openly and knowingly in opposition to all that list would, to your thinking, and indeed mine too, of course, be an obscurantist or an absolute mad person: would not one be? However, you know, this is what is surprising: when they reckon up human advantages, why does it so happen that all these statisticians, sages, and lovers of humanity invariably leave out one? #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

They do not even take it into their reckoning in the form in which it should be taken and the whole reckoning depends upon that. It would be no great matter, they would simply have to take it, this advantage, and add it to the list. However, the trouble is, that this strange advantage does not fall under any classification and is not in place in any list. I have a friend for instance…Ech! Gentlemen and ladies, but of course he is your friend, too; and indeed there is no one, no one, to whom he is not a friend! When he prepares for any undertaking this gentleman immediately explains to you, elegantly and clearly, exactly how he must act in accordance with the laws of reason and truth. What is more, he will talk to you with excitement and passion of the true normal interest of humans; with irony he will upbraid the short-sighted fools who do not understand their own interests, nor the true significance of virtue; and, within a quarter of an hour, without any sudden outside provocation, but simply through something inside one which is stronger than all one’s interests, one will go off on quite a different track—that is, act in direct opposition to what one just been saying about oneself, in opposition to the laws of reason, in opposition to one’s own advantage—in fact, in opposition to everything…I warn you that my friend is a compound personality, and therefore it is difficult to blame him as an individual. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

The fact is, gentlemen and ladies, it seems there must really exist something that is dearer to almost every being than one’s greatest advantages, or (not to be illogical) there is a most advantageous advantage (the very one omitted of which we spoke just now) which is more important and more advantageous than all other advantages, for the sake of which a being if necessary is ready to act in opposition to all laws; that is, in opposition to reason, honour, peace, prosperity—in fact, in opposition to all those excellent and useful things if only one can attain that fundamental, most advantageous advantage which is dearer to him than all. “Yes, but it is advantage all the same” you will retort. However, excuse me, I will make the point clear, and it is not a case of playing upon words. What matters is, that this advantage is remarkable from the very fact that it breaks down all our classifications, and continually shatters every system constructed by lovers of humankind for the benefit of humankind. In fact, it upsets everything. However, before I mention this advantage to you, I want to compromise myself personally, and therefore I boldly declare that all these fine systems—all these theories for explaining to humankind their real normal interests, in order that inevitably striving to pursue these interests they may at once become good and noble—are, in my opinion, so far, mere logical exercises! Yes, logical exercises. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

Why, to maintain this theory of the regeneration of humankind by means of the pursuit of one’s own advantage is to my mind almost the same thing as…as to affirm, for instance, following Buckle, that through civilization humankind becomes softer, and consequently less bloodthirsty, and less fitted for warfare. Logically it does not seem to follow from one’s arguments. However, beings have such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that one is ready to distort the truth intentionally, one is ready to deny the evidence of one’s senses only to justify one’s logic. I take this example because it is the most glaring instance of it. Only look about you: blood is being spilt in streams, and in the merriest ways, as though it were champagne. Take the whole of the nineteenth century in which Buckle lived. Take Napoleon—the Great and also the present one. Take North America—the eternal union. Take the farce of Schleswig-Holstein…And what is it that civilization softens in us? The only gain of civilization for humankind is the greater capacity for variety of sensations—and absolutely noting more. And through the development of this many-sidedness beings may come to finding enjoyment in bloodshed. In fact, this has already happened to them. Have you noticed that it is the most civilized gentlemen who have been the subtlest slaughterers, to whom the Attilas and Stenka Razins could not hold a candle, and if they are not so conspicuous as the Attilas and Stenka Razins it is simply because they are so often met with, are so ordinary and have become so familiar to us. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

In any case civilization has made humankind if not more bloodthirsty, at least more vilely, more loathsomely blood-thirsty. In old days one saw justice in bloodshed and with one’s conscience at peace exterminated those one thought proper. Now we do think bloodshed abominable and yet we engage in this abomination, and with more energy than ever. Which is worse? Decide that for yourselves. They say that Cleopatra (excuse an instance from Roman history) was fond of sticking gold pins into her slave-girls breasts and derived gratification from their screams and writhings. You will say that that was in the comparatively barbarous times; that these barbarous times too, because also, comparatively speaking, pins are stuck in even now; that though beings have now learned to see more clearly than in barbarous ages, one is still far from having learnt to act as reason and science would dictate. However, yet you are fully convinced that one will be sure to learn when one gets rid of certain old bad habits, and when common sense and science have completely re-educated human nature and turned it in a normal direction. You are confident that then beings will cease from intentional error and will, so to say, be compelled not to want to set one’s will against one’s normal interests. That is not all; then, you say, science itself will teach beings (through to my mind it is a superfluous luxury) that one never has really had any caprice or will of one’s own, and that one is something of nature of a piano-key or the stop of an organ, an that there are, besides, things called the laws of nature; so that everything one doe is not done by one’s willing it, but is done of itself, by the laws of nature. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

Consequently we have only to discover these laws of nature, and beings will no longer have to answer for their actions and life will become exceedingly easy for one. All human actions will then, of course, be tabulated according to these laws, mathematically, like tables of logarithms up to 108,000, and entered in an index; or, better still, there would be published certain edifying works of the nature of encyclopedic lexicons, in which everything will be so clearly calculated and explained that there will be no more incidents or adventures in the World. Then—this is all what you say—new economic relations will be established, all ready-made and worked out with mathematical exactitude, so that every possible question will vanish in the twinkling of an eye, simply because every possible answer to it will be provided. Then the “Palace of Crystal” will be built. Then…In fact, those will be halcyon days. Of course there is no guaranteeing (this is my comment) that it will not be, for instance, frightfully dull then (for what will one have to do when everything will be calculated and tabulated?), but on the other hand everything will be extraordinarily rational. Of course boredom may lead you to anything. It is boredom sets one sticking golden pins into people, but all that would not matter. What is bad (this is my comment again) is that I dare say people will be thankful for the gold pins then. Beings are stupid, but one is so ungrateful that you could not find another like one in all creation. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

I, for instance, if all of a sudden, apropos of nothing, in the midst of general prosperity a gentleman with an ignoble, or rather with a reactionary and ironical, countenance were to arise and putting his arms akimbo, say to us all: “I say, gentlemen, had not we better kick over the whole show and scatter rationalism to the winds, simply to sent these logarithms to the devil and to enable us to live once more at our own sweet foolish will!”, I would not be in the least surprised. That again would not matter; but what is annoying is that one would be sure to find followers—such is the nature of beings. And all that for the most foolish reason, which, one would think, was hardly worth mentioning: that is, that beings everywhere and at all times, whoever one may be, has preferred to act as one chose and not in the least as one’s reason and advantage dictated. And one may choose what is contrary to one’s own interests, and sometimes one absolutely ought (that is my idea). One’s own free unfettered choice, one’s own caprice—however wild it may be, one’s own fancy worked up at times to frenzy—is that very “most advantageous advantage” which we have overlooked, which comes under no classification and against which all systems and theories are continually being shattered to atoms. And how do these wiseacres know that beings want a normal, a virtuous choice? What has made them conceive that beings must want a rationally advantageous choice? #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

What beings want is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead. And choice, of course, the devil only knows what choice. For some time now I have been talking to people who have served as subjects (Ss) in psychologists’ experiments. They have told me of their experience, and it has troubled me. I want to share my concern with my colleagues. The letter that follows is my effort to consolidate the attitudes and feelings of the people to whom I talked. Dear E (Experimenter): My name is S. You do not know me. I have another name my friends call me by, but I drop it, and become S number 27 as soon as I take part in your research. I serve in your surveys and experiments. I answer your questions, fill out questionnaires, let you wire me up to various machines that record my physiological reactions. I pull levers, flip switches, track moving targets, trace mazes, learn nonsense syllables, tell you what I see in inkblots—do the whole barrage of things you ask me to do. I have started to wonder why I do these things for you. What is in it for me? Sometimes you pay me to serve. More often I have to serve, because I am a student in a beginning psychology course, and I am told that I will not receive a grade unless I take part in at least two studies; and if I take part in more, I will get extra points on the final exam. I am part of the Department’s “subject-pool.” When I have asked you what I will get out of your studies, you tell me that, “It is for Science.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

When you are running someone particular study, you often lie to me about your purpose. You mislead me. It is getting so I find it difficult to trust you. I am beginning to see you as a trickster, a manipulator. I do not like it. In fact, I lie to you a lot of the time, even on anonymous questionnaires. When I do not lie, I will sometimes just answer at random, anything to get through with the hour, and back to my own affairs. Then, too, I can often figure out just what it is you are trying to do, what you would like me to day or do; at those times, I decide to go along with your wishes if I like you, or foul you up if I do not. You do not actually say what your hopes or hypotheses are; but the very setup in your laboratory, the alternatives you give me, the instruction you offer, all work together to pressure me to day or do something in particular. It is as if you are whispering in my ear, “When the light comes on, pull the left switch,” and then you forget to deny that you have whispered. However, I get the message. And I pull the right or the left one, depending on how I feel toward you. You know, even when you are not in the room—wen you are just the printed instructions on the questionnaire or the voice on the tape recorder that tells me what I am supposed to do—I wonder about you. I wonder who you are, what you are really up to. I wonder what you are going to do with the “behavior” I give you. Who are you going to show my answers to? Who is going to see the marks I leave on your response-recorders? #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

Do you have any interest at all in what I think, feel, and imagine as I make the marks you are so eager to study and analyze? Certainly, you never ask me what I mean by them. If you asked, I would be glad to tell you. As a matter of fact, I do tell my roommate or my girl friend what I thought your experiment was about and what I meant when I did what I did. If my roommate could trust you, he could probably give you a better idea of what your data (my answers and responses) mean than the idea you presently have. God knows how much good psychology has gone down the drain, when my roommate and I discuss your experiment and my part in it, at the beer-joint. As a matter of fact, I am getting pretty tried of being S. It is too much like being a punched IBM card in the University registrar’s office. I feel myself being pressured, bulldozed, tricked, manipulated every where I turn. Advertisements in magazines and commercials on TV, political speeches, salesmen, and con men of all kinds put pressure on me to get me to buy, say, or do things that I suspect are not for my good at all. Just for their good, the good of their pocketbooks. Do you sell your “expert knowledge” about me to these people? Is this why you keep reviewing my case every month for four years and then sending the packets all over the Untied States of America? Is this why you are asking third parties to fill out forms my condition that my health information privacy rights, and then what I tell you is leaked all over the World? If that is true, then you are really not in good faith with me. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

You have told me that when I show myself to you and let you study me, that in the long run it will be for my good. I am not convinced. You really seem to be studying me in order to learn how to influence my attitudes and my actions without realizing it. I resent this more than you realize. It is not fair for you to get me to show how I can be influenced and then for you to pass this information along to people who pay your salary or pay your bribes, or give you money to equip your laboratory, and then not acknowledge there is a data breach of my information, which you are responsible and can be held civically and legally responsible for. I do not like that you put my life in danger. I do not like that you are a threat to my health and safety. I feel used, like a science experiment, and I do not like it. However, I protect myself by not showing you my whole self or by lying. Did you ever stop to think that your articles, and the textbooks you write, the theories you spin—all based on your data (my disclosures to you)—may actually be a tissue of lies and half-truths (my lies and half-truths) or a joke I have played on you because I do not like you or trust you? That should give you cause for some concern. Now look, Mr. E, I am not “paranoid,” as you might say. Nor an I stupid. And I do believe some good can come out of my serving in your research. Even some good for me. I am not entirely selfish, and I would be glad to offer myself up for study, to help others. However, somethings have to change first. Will you listen to me? Here is what I would like from your researchers: #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

I would like you to help me gain a better understanding of what has made me the way I am today. I would like to know this because I want to be more free than I feel. I would like to discover more of my own potentialities. I would like to be more whole, more courageous, more enlightened. I would like to be able to experience more, learn better, remember better, and express myself more fully. I would like to learn how to recognize and overcome the pressures of other people’s influences, of my background, that interfere with my going in the paths I choose. Now, if you would promise to help me in these ways, I would gladly come into your lab and virtually strip my body and soul naked. I would be there meaning to show you everything I could that was relevant to your particular interest of the moment. And I can assure you, that is different from what I have been showing you thus far, which is as little as I can. In fact, I cross my fingers when I am in your lab, and say to myself, “What I have just said or done here is not me.” Would not you like to change? Can you handle my truth, the full truth? Do you even really know what you are investigating? If you will trust me, I will trust you, if you are trustworthy. I would like you to take the time and trouble to get acquainted with me as a person, before we go through your experimental procedures. And I would like to get to know you and what you are up to, to see if I would like to expose myself to you. Can you imagine your body being violated by strangers you never met without your consent? #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

Sometime, you remind me of physicians. They look at me as the unimportant envelope that conceals the information they are really interested in. You have looked at me as the unimportant package that contains “responses,” and this is all I am for you. Let me tell you that when I feel this, I get back at you. I give your responses, all right; but you will never know what I meant by them. You know, I can speak, not just with words, but with my action. And when you have thought I was rending to a “stimulus” in your lab, my response was really directed at you; and what I meant by it was, “Take this, you unpleasant so-and-so.” Does that surprise you? It should not. Another ting. Those tests of yours that have built-in gimmicks to see if I am being consistent, or deliberately lying, or just answering at random—they do not feel me. Actually, if you would get on level with me, they would not be necessary. There are enough con men and women in the World, without your joining their number. I would hope that psychologist would be more trustworthy than politicians or salesmen. I will make a bargain with you. You show me that you are doing your research for me—to help me become freer, more self-understanding, better able to control myself—and I will make myself available to you in any way you ask. And I will not play jokes and tricks on you. I do not want to be controlled, not by your or anyone else. And I do not want to control other people. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

I do not want you to help other people to understand how I am or can be “controlled,” so that they can then control me. Show me that you are for me, and I will show myself to you. You work for me, Mr. E, and I will truly work for you. Between us, we may produce a psychology that is more authentic and more liberating. Some lead an austere life and emaciate themselves; some give clear instructions to their disciples; some rule kingdoms quite justly and rightly; some openly hold disputations with other schools of thought; some write down their teachings and experiences; others simulate ignorance; a few do even responsible actions; but all these are famous as wise beings in the World. Some of the enlightened ones sit as recluses in prayer, others travel and preach, still others create centers where they teach, a fourth class heal the sick, and a fifth write. Each does what one’s tendency or mission dictates. The sage may sit under a village tree, head an ashram, or live as a sequestered hermit. One may also live in a luxurious palace, head a business organization, or farm land. These things are not the point, which is one’s consciousness of divine presence. The World, its pleasures and treasures, does not deceive one: one sees through its values even if one is active in the midst of it. These powers will seep into the physical plane by drawing upon the power of the ley lines as well as the power hidden within nature. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

Turning the cord inside our represents backward knowledge and the passage of the consciousness from the limited confines of the body into the other Worlds unseen by the masses. This is to gain the power to move though Worlds to create change within this realm of illusory limits, to make things easy. To help fuel and facilitate the process of soul introspection and open up psychic vision while also providing a more internal endurance needed to face this World. Understand that you are in control. Negative energy that attacks you in this realm are gnats to be swatted, despite how others may be tormented by them. They are reflections of their fear, not yours and you do not have to have anything to do with such folly. The infernal forces will gain momentum in the direction of becoming your allies in creation. Oppressive circumstance that may be experienced here becomes tension to be harnessed and mastered for your own liberation. It becomes a tool within your toolbox of becoming. Like all of these realms it is your will and personal power which can liberate you. Ground this power by investing time in the corporeal plane toward consciously applying effort toward ascent and personal evolution. Look for obstacles to overcome for the sake of overcoming them alone. Do hard thing. Become superior. Work harder, exercise harder, pray longer. Run until you sweat and keep running. Push yourself to the Heavenly extremes until it hurts. Then keep moving through the torment to further connect to the powers of Heaven so you can access them. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

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If they Come in the Form of to-die-for Clay Dinnerware, I Guess Monday Blues are Okay!

October 23, 2019 1:40 am

Can you not smell that coffee perking on the stove? You sit right down. You are not driving off without some grits and biscuits and scrambled eggs. I got bacon and ham on the stove. The alienating conditions we have described in the past pervade modern society and touch vast numbers of men and women—factory workers, white-collar workers, organization men, voters, audiences, the seniors, and various ethnic grounds and cultures. Although alienated, their responses—except in times of severe crisis—and subdued; theirs are the lives of quiet desperation. However, we are now going to investigate people who do not sit and take it: they rebel, retreat, or deviate in some significant way from ordinary behavior. In grouping together artistic rebels, juvenile delinquents, addicts, sexual deviants, psychotics and suicides, we most certainly do not mean to suggest that they are similar in nature or that there is any simple explanation for them. Nor is this intended to be a catalogue of “maladjustment” or “social disorganization.” Rather, it is a sampling of a number of major types of alienated behavior, each one of which deserves and often receives whole volumes of treatment. These people are alike only in that they feel cut off or have cut themselves off from the main stream of community life. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

By using reason alone beings can progress to higher forms. This underground being scorns reason (or science), planning and progress; he or she derides or would destroy their works to preserve his or her freedom—even a freedom underground. Juvenile delinquency in America is not merely a reflection of personality difficulties, slums and broken homes, but is directly related to the structure of our society and its prevailing values. Thus while delinquency is not exclusively working-class in origin, it may be interpreted in large part as the frustrated and violent responses of those at the bottom to middle-class values which school and other institutions seek to impose but which—given the obstacles to social advancement—they are unable to achieve. Isolated from the community, working-class boys can achieve status or recognition chiefly in their gangs, which offer a solution. It is in the nature of that solution to reject the middle-class values which society tries to impose and to sanction that rejection. The same value system, impinging upon children differently equipped to meet it, is instrumental in generating both delinquency and respectability. That delinquency may have sinister political and racial overtones. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

If delinquents are clearly rebellious, no simple statement can be made about addicts, the next group described or discussed here. Some may be rebellious and others escapist or retreatist; but all are victims of a chemical compulsion whereby alcohol or drug becomes the master. Neuroses unquestionably lie at the root of addictions, but alone cannot explain why people drown in drink or drugs. Evidence shows that physiological factors and nutritional elements are also involved. Nevertheless, addictions have serious psychological and social consequences; the addict’s behavior is generally unacceptable; society is hostile; and the victim responds with feelings of guilt and remorse, and further undesirable behavior. The heavy drinker often becomes isolated from family and community as a result of his condition. It is a measure of the intricacy of the problem that while psychotherapy alone has been notoriously unsuccessful in curing alcoholics, combined with diet and drugs it has often proved helpful. Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.), a quasi-religious movement, has scored notable successes in restoring alcoholics to community life. While alcoholism is serious enough; drug addiction is perhaps more terrible still—especially in the United States, where the non-medical use of narcotics is a criminal offense and the public is violent in disapprobation. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

Furthermore, while alcoholic may find solidarity in a movement such as A.A., narcotics addicts huddle together for mutual protection while under the influence. Theirs is truly a league of the damned. William Burroughs, himself a former addict, tells us, “Nothing ever happens in the junk World.” Nothingness, however, is precisely what many addicts and alcoholics seek, as Elmer Bendiner shows in his description of the “Bowery men.” Here in this brotherhood of the beaten and defeated, men find a perfect hiding place from the World, find what so many citizens of the modern World seek and never find—an escape from tensions. In this respect, at least, as Bendiner observes, they have something in common with the organization of man. However, while he fails to achieve tranquility, they succeed. Bowery men are deviants in that they reject the drive for status. However, what of those who deviate in that most sensitive area of human experience, pleasures of the flesh? Are they also alienated—either by choice or because of society’s hostility? Donald Cory, an acknowledged homosexual, offers an interesting description of homosexuals as a minority group. Like other minorities seeking a place in the community which has been denied them, they wage a grim struggle against society’s rejection. And as in the case of other minorities, part of their fate is to “internalize” the contempt of the majority. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

Another kind of outcast is represented by the anonymous and gifted English lady of the evening who wrote “Streetwalker.” For her there is no in-group to offer defense against a hostile World. Instead of fighting back, she welcomes her rootlessness. Her choice is homelessness: “The slight security I would be able to enjoy, by allowing myself to pretend that my personality was contained in something more than the shell of my body, would make the nights—which hold no safety of my body, would make the nights—which hold no safety and in which I must be constantly alert, constantly rootless—even more desolate.” Streetwalker has chosen alienation as a way of life (until at last she decides to make a fresh start). However, others, more properly described as psychotic, have no opportunity to make a choice. For them the ties have snapped. They most certainly snapped for “Joey” as described in Bruno Betelheim’s remarkable case study of a schizophrenic child who “converted himself into a ‘machine’ because he did not dare be human.” One must not read too much into Joey’s mechanical fantasy World; after all, most of us are not schizophrenic. However, our society produced him, and his delusion is only an extreme form of escape. Still, Denmark, which has the most comprehensive system of social security still has one of the highest suicide rates in the World. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

Often times, suicide is linked to early upbringing, in which the Danish child’s dependence on one’s mother is encouraged, aggression is strictly checked, and the arousal of guilt feelings is used as a disciplinary technique. As a result, aggressive feelings are turned inward. This alone does not explain suicide. Among the other factors involved is a fairly common belief in the idea of reunion after death with a lost loved one. Competitiveness, often associated with suicide elsewhere, has little bearing on Danish suicide. Danish and American character traits are quite different. Differences in personality traits may explain why we are half as likely to kill ourselves as the Danes. May it also explain why we are ten times more likely to kill each other? I do not believe that any conflict between desires and fears could ever account for the extent to which a neurotic is divided within oneself and for an outcome so detrimental that it can actually ruin a person’s life. A psychic situation implies that a neurotic retains the capacity to strive for something wholeheartedly, that one merely is frustrated in these strivings by the blocking actions of fears. The source of the conflict revolves around the neurotic’s loss of capacity to wish for anything wholeheartedly because one’s very wishes are divided, that is, go in opposite directions. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

The fundamental conflict is more disruptive. The basic neurotic conflict does not necessarily have to arise in the first place and is possible of resolution if it does arise—provided the sufferer is willing to undergo the considerable effort and hardship involved. This difference is not a matter of optimism or pessimism but inevitably results from the difference in our premises. There is a conflict between constructive and destructive forces in human beings. However, these opposites can sometimes be complementary—the goal is to accept both and thereby approximate the ideal of wholeness. The neurotic is a person who has been stranded in a one-sided development. In the law of complements, the opposite tendency contains complementary elements neither of which can be dispensed with in an integrated personality. However, these are already outgrowths of neurotic conflicts and are so tenaciously adhered to because they represent attempts at solution. If, for instance, we regard a tendency toward being introspective, withdrawn, more concerned with one’s own feelings, thoughts, or imagination that with other persons’ as an authentic inclination—that is, constitutionally established and reinforced by experience. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

The effective therapeutic procedure would be to show the person one’s hidden “extravert” tendencies, to point out the dangers of one-sidedness in either direction, and encourage one to accept and live out both tendencies. If, however, we look upon introversion (or, as I prefer to call it, neurotic detachment) as a means of evading conflicts that arise in close contact with others, the task is not to encourage more extraversion but to analyze the underlying conflicts. The goal of wholeheartedness can be approximated only after these have been resolved. The basic conflict of the neurotic in the fundamentally contradictory attitude one has acquired toward other persons. Let me call attention to the dramatization of such a contradiction in the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. We see him on the one hand delicate, sensitive, sympathetic, helpful, and on the other brutal, callous, and egotistical. I do not, of course, mean to imply that neurotic division always adheres to the precise line of this story, but merely to point to a vivid expression of basic incompatibility of attitudes in relation to others. To approach the problem genetically we must go back to what I have called basic anxiety, meaning by this feeling a child has of being isolated and helpless in a potentially hostile World. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

A wide range of adverse factors in the environment can produce this insecurity in a child: direct or indirect domination, indifference, erratic behavior, lack of respect for the child’s individual needs, lack of real guidance, disparaging attitudes, too much admiration or the absence of I, lack of reliable warmth, having to take dies in parental disagreements, too much or too little responsibility, overprotection, isolation from other children, injustice, discrimination, unkept promises, hostile atmosphere, and so one. The only factor to which I should like to draw special attention in this context is the child’s sense of lurking hypocrisy in the environment: his or her feeling that the parents’ love, their Christian charity, honesty, generosity, and so on may be only pretense. Part of what the child feels on this score is really hypocrisy; but some of it may be just one’s action to all the contradictions one senses in the parents’ behavior. Usually, however, there is a combination of cramping factors. They may be out in the open or quite hidden, so that in analysis one can only gradually recognize these influences on the child’s development. Harassed by these disturbing conditions, the child gropes for ways to keep going, ways to cope with this menacing World. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

Despite one’s own weakness and fears one unconsciously shapes one’s tactics to meet the particular forces operating in one’s environment. In doing so, one develops not only ad hoc strategies but lasting character trends which become part of one’s personality. I call these neurotic trends. When new forms of governing the city-states, new laws, and new interpretations of gods are emerging, all give new psychological power. In such a period of change and growth, emergence is often experienced by the individual as emergency with all its attendant stress. It is no accident that shrines and popular stars become important in chaotic times, as for some they serve as a god of proportion and balance the citizens seek assurance and it gives meaning and purpose behind the seeming chaos. We appreciate more of the rich meaning and light that culture brings into our lives. It is a light of mind, light of reason, light of insight. When we are at peace and feel uplifted and safe, our conscious intentions and our deeper intentionality will be already committed to the event about to take place. For the ones who participates in harmony, it carries its own healing power. Thinking and self-creating are inseparable. When become aware of all the fantasies in which we see ourselves in the future, pilot ourselves this way or that, and this becomes obvious. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

How a person lives his or her life attests to the awareness in the experience of the race that the individual does have some responsibility for how he or she lives. Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. The capacity to create ourselves, based upon this freedom, is inseparable from consciousness or self-awareness. Clearly self-creating is actualized by our hopes, our ideals, our images, and all sorts of imagined constructs that we may hold from time to time in the forefront of our attention. These “models” function consciously as well as unconsciously; they are shown in fantasy as well as in overt behavior. “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain; for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain,” reports Exodus 20.7. If the second commandment tries to protect it as the other commandments try to protect life, honor, property there must be something extraordinary about the name. Of course, God need not protect Himself, but He does protect His name, and so seriously that He adds to this single commandment a special threat. This is done because, within the name, that which bear the name is present. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

In ancient times, one believed that one held in one’s power the being whose hidden name one knew. One believed that the savior-god conquered the demons by discovering the mystery of the power embodied in their names, just as we today try to find out the hidden names of the powers that disrupt our unconscious depths and drive us to mental disturbances. If we gain insight into their hidden striving, we break their power. Beings have always tried to use the divine name in the same way, not in order to break its power, but to harness its power for their own uses. Calling on the name of God in prayer, for instance, can mean attempting to make God a tool for our purposes. A name is never an empty sound; it is a bearer of power; it gives Spiritual Presence to the unseen. This is the reason the divine name can be taken in vain, and why one may destroy oneself by taking it in vain. For the invocation of the holy does not leave us unaffected. If it does not heal us, it may disintegrate us. This is the seriousness of the use of the divine name. This is the danger of religion, and even of anti-religion. For in both the name of God is used as well as misused. Let us now consider the danger of the use of the word God, when it is both denied and affirmed, and of the sublime embarrassment that we feel when we say “God.” We may distinguish three forms of such embarrassment: the embarrassment of tact, the embarrassment of doubt, and the embarrassment of awe. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

Some people do not find a higher truth: they reaffirm the ancient and eternal truth. It could not be that is it were subject to change. However, each reaffirms it in one’s own way, according to one’s own perceptions and as one’s environment requires. This accounts for part of the differences in its presentation, where it has been really attained. The other part is accounted for by there being varying degrees of attainment. It is a mistake to believe that mystical adepts all possess the same supernormal powers. On the contrary, they manifest such powers or powers as are in consonance with their previous line of development and aspiration. One who has come along an intellectual line of development, for instance, would most naturally manifest exceptional intellectual powers. The situation has been well put by Saint Paul in the First Epistle to the Corinthians: “Now there are diversities of graces, but the same Spirit. And there are diversities of ministries but the same Lord. And there are diversities of working but the same God who worketh all in all.” When the Overself activates the newly made adept’s psyche, the effect shows itself in some part or faculty; in another adept it produces a different effect. Thus the source is always the same but the manifestation is different. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

The undiscerning often believe that because some great saints have been fools in Worldly affairs, a stain who is always clever cannot be great. Yet, the spiritual aspirations which diminish a being’s desire for Worldly activities do not therefore diminish one’s competence for them. One who is born a fool usually remains so; one who is born clever usually stays so; and both cases are unaffected by the attachment of the heart to God. We must not think that every mystic who has been blessed with the light of the Overself stands on the same spiritual peak of vision and consciousness, of being and knowledge. Some are still only on the way to the summit of this peak. There are definite differences between them. If they all share alike the consciousness of a higher Self, they do not share it in the same way or to the same degree. The saints and mystics serve a high purpose in remining humanity of that diviner life which must one day flower in human evolution, but they do not serve as perfect exemplars of its final growth. The sages alone can do that. Healing powers are like intellectual power, one may be a realized person and yet not possess much intellect. Similarly, one may not possess healing power. Realization does not endow one with encyclopedic knowledge with all the talents. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

We must make a difference between the Messenger, who is sent to communicate a teaching through writing or speech, and the Master, who comes to embody the teaching and who alone possesses the power to bless others with one’s Grace. This difference is not so clearly understood among some beings, a lack which leads to confused ideas and unjustified customs. Having reached this stage one is free to continue one’s personal life as before, to accept the load of new responsibilities one one’s shoulders, or to retire wholly from the World. To work for humanity in public is one thing, to work for it in secrecy is another, while to enjoy the freedom and privacy of complete retirement is a third and very different thing. Naturally and inevitably any public appearance will soon turn one into a lightning rod, attracting the aspirations and yearnings of many spiritual seekers. As your mundane consciousness begins to merely attempt to grasp what God has to say, your own consciousness begins to expand. The result of this is a much improved intellectual capacity in this corporeal plane. Evocation of God is a means to exercise the mind. I have come to understand that communing with God increases the rate at which neurons fire off in the physical brain. If you are living righteously, God will sway others toward your will. He can get into the minds of others and help them benefit you. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

If one has really found one’s inner freedom, one must necessarily be free to stay in the World and do the World’s work. One does not have to retire into isolation, although one is free to do that. However, whatever one decides to do, one will henceforth be an impersonal channel for higher forces, which one will obey, and whose directions one will follow, whether one remains in the World or not. As God speaks to you in these inverted words of power the sounds begin to transform you on a very subtle level transmuting your communication into something more powerful. The intent of your words will be made very clear and concise. After time working with and communicating with God, it will seem as if you can command reality. Conveying power through words is only the surface of God’s power. Conflict may seem to simply dissipate from within your reality as all things become an opportunity for ascent through His guidance. It is not the conflict being removed, but the altering of your perception of it. On this physical plane your physical life will begin to reflect this growth and change as you become more spiritually refined with lightning speed. Once summoned, God acts as a familiar spirit helping to guide your thoughts, words, and deeds in this plane to gain strength and power within your soul. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

It is necessary to give certain terms often but wrongly used interchangeably, and hence confusedly, a sharper definition. The Saint has successfully carried out ascetic disciplines and purificatory regimes for devotional purpose. The Prophet has listened for God’s voice, heard and communicated God’s message of prediction, warning, or counsel. The Mystic has intimately experienced God’s presence while inwardly rapt in contemplation or has seen a vision of God’s cosmogony while concentrated in prayer. The Sage has attained the same results as al these three, has added a knowledge of infinite and eternal reality thereto, and has brought the whole into balanced union. The Philosopher is a sage who has also engaged in the spiritual education of others. There is a third type of illumined being, besides the Teacher and the Saint. One is the Messenger. One renders service not by dealing with persons and their problems but by stating truths and principles in general. Your whole perception of the experience will morph, and you will begin to cut through opposition as a hot knife through butter. Your momentum toward becoming will gain an almost severe momentum. Through evocation of God, one can gain the wisdom of experience that a being who has lived a thousand years would accumulate. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

The masses are controlled by anger. One should learn how to use and control it without allowing it to be a mere reactive response to external forces. Anger implies a lack of power. God will increase your psychic empathy so that adept can become aware of when they may use their tools to better expression their motives. God, we thank you for your presence within this World of creation. We have offered you our lives, in hopes of salvation, and as a gateway to your manifestation within this realm before us! You are the Lord of creation, whom has brought forth the mountains to the plains! You have brought forth the beasts to the field and the creatures to the night! God, with your infernal blessing I ask that you would bring forth the baneful powers of the Heavenly Angels to fil us with their essence, as a gateway to empower them to act within this World according to your will and purpose. We know that much work must be performed so that we may be found worthy of this blessing. This work will be unique to the individual and we must take care to stay centered in self through these assignments. Please allow of to assimilate your power. Cast off the limits of garb of flesh into the refining Sun to be clothed with the powers of divine light eternal. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

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Is Life Only a Stream of Random Events Following One Another Haphazardly? Or is there an Order, a Meaning, a Purpose Behind it All?

October 22, 2019 12:43 am

You do not know the meaning of philosophical insight, or spiritual engagement, or true growth. People struggle to instill in their children some private sense of honor or dignity which will help the child survive. This means, of course, that they must struggle, stolidly, incessantly, to keep this sense alive in themselves, in spite of the insults, the indifferences, and the cruelty they are certain to encounter in their working day. They patiently browbeat the landlord into fixing the heat, the plaster, the plumbing; this demands prodigious patients; nor is patience usually enough. In trying to make their hovels habitable, they are perpetually throwing good money after bad. Such frustration, so long endured, is driving many strong, admirable men and woman whose only crimes is their culture or lack of affluence to the very gate of paranoia. One remembers them from another time—playing handball in the playground, going to church, wondering if they were going to be promoted at school. One remembers their wedding day. And one sees where the girl is now—vainly looking for salvation from some other embittered, trussed, and struggling boy—and sees the all-but-abandoned children in the streets. A ghetto can be improved in one way only: out of existence. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

Ignoring the less fortunate or making fun of them is no one to justify one’s own crimes. This perpetual justification empties the heart of all human feeling. The emptier our hearts become, the greater will be our crimes. The country will not change until it re-examines itself and discovers what it really means by freedom. In the meantime, generations keep being born, bitterness is increased by incompetence, pride, and folly, and the World shrinks around us. It is a terrible, an inexorable, law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one’s own: in the face of one’s victim, one sees oneself. Walk through the streets of America and see what we, this nation, have becomes. You can see that the whole force of social sanction would fall behind the king to protect one’s definitions of social custom and his ritual prerogatives; otherwise the tribe would lose well-being and life. We might say that the safeguarding of custom imposes tyranny because of the need for the king or queen’s power. The more successful a king or queen, the more prerogatives one could enjoy: one was judged by results. If the harvest (or economy) were good the people were prepared to put up with a moderate amount of tyranny. Protection of custom and criminal jurisdiction go together so naturally, then, that we should not wonder that ritual centralization also came to mean control of the power to punish. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

Another large step in the evolution of inequality seems to me to be summed up here. To us a police force is part of life, as inevitable, it seems, as death and taxes; we rely on the police to punish those who hurt us. However, it has not always been so. In simple egalitarian societies there is no police force, no way to settle a wrong except to do so yourself, family against family. However, if there is no police force to enforce the law, there is also none to coerce you for any reason. You have to stay alert, but you are also freer. A police force is usually drawn up temporarily for special occasions and then disbanded. However, the result, alas, is not as innocent as it must have seemed to people living during these transitions. What they were doing was bartering away social equality and a measure of personal independence for prosperity and order. There was now noting to stop the state from taking more and more functions and prerogatives into itself, from developing a class of special begins at the center and inferior ones around it, or from beginning to give these special beings a larger share of the good things of the Earth. What we see is that private interests became more and more separated from public interests—until today we hardly know what is public interest. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

Students who look for the point at which economic activity and social morality begin to pull apart usually focus on the potlatch: it was evidently around the process of redistribution that gift giving gradually changed into grabbing and keeping. As the power figures got more and more ascendancy vis-à-vis the group, y could take a fixed portion of the surplus with the involvement of the people. And this is what we are seeing in California, a state that boasts about have a $21 billion budget surplus, but also has the highest taxes, an affordable housing crisis, and a huge homeless population. The classic potlatch was a redistribution ceremonial pure and simple. The object was to humiliate rivals, to stand out as tall as possible as a big person, a hero. At the same time, the grander was the expiation before the community and the gods to whom the goods were offered. Both the individual urge to maximum self-feeling and the community well-being were served. The chiefs became the principal takers and destroyers of goods. In this was a feudal structure could naturally develop. Another suggestive way of looking at this development is to see it as a shift of the balance of power, away from a dependence on the invisible World of the gods to a flaunting of the visible World of things. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

Again, it is only natural that once the god became visible in the person of the king or queen, one’s powers became those of this World—visible, temporal powers in the place of invisible, eternal ones. One would come to measure one’s power by the piles of things one actually possessed, by the glory of one’s person, and not, as before, by the efficiency of the ritual technics for the renewal of nature. Keep in mind that it is entirely for the seeker to set one’s own rate of progress. Even the being who is interested only in theoretical discussion thereby, and to that extent, promotes one’s own good. If through inclination or circumstances one prefers to let one’s aspirations remain only at the level of reading and discussion, that at lest is better than being entirely uninterested in them. It will be for one to decide whether to endeavour to obtain the fullest realization of one’s aspirations in practical life. There is room for both classes on this Quest. One should not be discouraged because others have gone ahead on the path more quickly than one, any more than one should be gratified because some have gone ahead more slowly than one, for the fact is that the goal one seeks is already within one’s grasp. One is the Overself that one seeks to unite with, and the time it seems to take to realize this is itself an illusion of the mind. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

Let one, therefore, go forward at one’s own rate and within the limits of one’s own strength, leaving the result in the hands of God. If one imposes on themselves an impossible ideal, an unattainable standard, they must expect the sense of frustration that will overtake them later. It is better an aspirant should know one’s limitations now than that, filing to do so, one should know tragic disappointments and unutterable despair later. It is better in such a case that one should realize that one is engaged on a long search whose end one cannot reach in this incarnation. How can the naïve inexperienced beginner fail to commit errors and neglect precautions; how can one not be deceived by one’s own imaginations or puzzled by the contradictions and paradoxes which best this path? The newly awakened aspirant should search for clues without losing one’s balance or overreaching new enthusiasm. Of what use is it to reproach oneself again and again for being what one is? How could one have been otherwise, given one’s heredity, environment and history? If I complain I have no will of my own, that people are influencing me in subtle and mysterious ways, you will accuse me of being paranoid and direct me to a psychotherapist. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

If I put on a white laboratory coat, and assert that you have no will f your own, that your action and experience can be manipulated, predicted, and controlled, then I am recognized as a scientific psychologist, and honored. This is most peculiar. A revolution is going on in psychology. A different image of humans is being tried as a guide to research, theory, and application. Over years, theorists have conceptualized humans as machines; as an organism comparable to rates, pigeons, and monkeys; as a communication system; as an hydraulic system; as a servo-mechanism; as a computer—in short, one has been viewed by psychologist as an analogue of everything but what one is: a person. Humans are, indeed, like all those things; but first of all they are a free, intentional subject. The consumers of psychological writing tended to take our models too seriously and actually started to treat people as if they were the modes that theorists used only as tentative guides to inquiry. However, no, psychologist are using their experience of themselves as persons as a guide to exploring and understanding the experience of others. This is not the death of “objective,” scientific psychology. Rather, it may prove to be the birth of a scientifically informed psychology of human persons—a humanistic psychology. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

Humanistic psychology is a goal, not a doctrine. It owns its renaissance to the growing conviction that current and past approaches to the study of humans have reached their limits in elucidating human’s behavior and their “essence.” It is a growing corpus of knowledge relating to the questions, “What is a human being, and what might humans become?” Thus, humanistic psychology can be regarded in analogy with industrial psychology or the psychology of mental health or of advertising. These specialties are systems of knowledge bearing on particular families of questions: for instance, what variables affect morale, or the output of the workers, or the maintenance of wellness, or the purchasing behavior of potential customers. Humanistic psychology asks, “What are the possibilities of humans? And from among these possibilities, what is optimum human, and what conditions most probably account for one’s attainment and maintenance of these optima? If psychologist aim to predict and control human behavior and experience, as in their textbooks they claim, they are assigning humans to the same ontological status as weather, stars, minerals, or lower forms of animal life. We do not question anyone’s right to seek understanding in order to better control one’s physical environment and adapt it to one’s purposes. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

We properly challenge any human’s right to control the behavior and experience of one’s fellows. To the extent that psychologist illumine human existence to bring it under the deliberate control of someone other than the person one’s self, to that extent they are helping to undermine some person’s freedom in order to enlarge the freedom of someone else. If psychologist reveal knowledge of “determiners” of human conduct to people other than the ones from who they obtained this understanding, and if they conceal this knowledge from its source, the volunteer subjects (who have offered themselves up to the scientist’s “Look”), they put the recipients of the knowledge in a privileged position. They grant them an opportunity to manipulate beings without their knowledge or consent. Thus, advertisers, business people, military leaders, politicians, the new media al seek to learn more about the determiners of human conduct, in order to gain power and advantage. If they can sway human behavior by manipulating the conditions which mediate it, they can get large numbers of people to forfeit their own interests and serve the interests of the manipulator. Only if the ones being manipulated are kept mystified as to what is going on, and if their experience of their own freedom is blunted, such secret manipulation of the masses or of an individual by some other person is possible. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

Psychologist face a choice. We may elect to continue to treat our people as objects of a study for the benefit of some elite; or we may choose to learn about determiners of the human conditions in order to discover ways to overcome or subvert them, so as to enlarge the person—that is, everyone’s—freedom. If we opt for the latter, our path is clear. Our ways of conducting psychological research will have to be altered. Our definition of the purpose of psychology will have to change. And our ways of reporting our findings, as well as the audiences to whom the reports are directed, will have to change. We shall have to state openly whether we are psychologists-for-institutions or psychologists-for-person. The trouble with scientific psychologists is that many have, in a sense, been “bought” by the court, the media, and businesses to represent their agenda. We have in our hands the incredible power to discover conditions for behavior or for ways of being in the World. We have catalogued of the factors which have a determining effect on human behavior and on our condition. We know that, in every experiment that we analyze, there is always an error term, “residual variance”; and we seek to exhaust this residual variance to the best of our ability. We get better at it as we learn how to identify and measure more and more relevant variables. The trouble is, as I see it, that if we exhaust all the variance, the subjects of our study will be not a being, a human person, but rather a robot. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

Scientific psychology has actually sought means of artificially reducing variance—humanness—among beings, so that they will be more manipulable. Our commendable efforts (from technical viewpoint) in the fields of human engineering, teaching methods, motivation research (in advertising), and salesmanship have permitted practitioners in those realms to develop stereotyped methods that work at controlling outcomes—outcomes that are good for business or political, but necessarily good for the victim. We have taught people how to shape humans into a way of being that makes them useful. We have forgotten that an image of humans as useful grows out of a more fundamental image of humans as the being who can assume many modes of being, when it is of importance to one to do so. I think that a scientific psychologist committed to the aims of humanistic psychology would utilize one’s talents for a different purpose. For example, if individuality and full flowering growth as a person were values, one would seek means of maximizing or increasing the odds for maximization of these ways of being. An example of the biased use of scientific know-how is brainwashing. The brainwasher, through scientific means, seeks to insure that the prisoner will behave and believe as one’s captors wish. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

The same psychologist who invented the means of brainwashing know how to prevent it from happening. The latter class of knowledge is more in keeping with the aims of humanistic psychology and should be more avidly sought and then applied in more realms than presently is the case, if the humanistic psychology is to be furthered. Learning about human nature is to create change in our lives. Since the beginnings of recorded history, we have been enslaved over gold and other resources. Psychology is supposed to defile the intentions of this desire to enslave. We must learn to gain the power to move through Worlds to create change within this realm of illusory limits. To make things simple and easy. The mental stress of this plane of existence can cause madness as one observes the chaos within the collective consciousness and the effects that it has upon the collective corporeal life experience. This realm can be an accumulation of negative and useless mental garbage which is an abomination to the potential of human mental faculties and the inherent potential of the mind. How odd it seems that psychology has learned more about humans at their worst than at their best. How sad it seems that psychology has employed its powers of truth-finding to serve ignoble masters. I would like to propose that we do not wait until the scarcity of “full-functioning beings” becomes a national emergency. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

Rather, I would propose that we psychologist reconcile our aims and commitment to truth and our adherence to the canons of scientific inquiry with our human concerns that beings be free, that they grow. I propose that we commence an all-out program of investigation on many fronts to seek answers to the questions humanistic psychology is posing. For example, we need psychologist with the most informed imaginations and talent for ingenious experimentation to wrestle with such questions as, “What are the outer limits of human potential for transcending biological pressures, social pressures, and the impact on a person of one’s past conditioning?”; “What developmental and interpersonal and situational conditions conduce to courage, creativity, transcendent behavior, love, laughter, commitment to truth, beauty, justice, and virtue?” These questions themselves, and even my proposal that we address them, once struck me as less than manly, as tender-hearted and sentimental. I would never have dared pose them to mist of my mentors during my undergraduate and graduate-student says. We are supposed to be tough and disciplined, which meant that we were only to study questions about some very limited class of behavior, not questions about the larger human concerns. “Leave those to the philosophers, minister, and politicians,” we are told. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

Questions about the image of humans smacked too much of philosophy and were not our proper concern. Actually, our teacher intended only that we learn the tools of our trade, not that we stifle our humanistic concerns; but they produced that outcome anyway. I am making a plea for the powers of rigorous inquiry to be devoted to questions, answers to which will inform a growing, more viable image of beings as human being with potentiality, not solely biological or socially determined being. Through being exposed to the mental chaos over time, one will begin to adjust to the torment of one’s experiences through personal evolution. One will develop severe empathy and will begin to perceive all of the mental weakness of those around them and all the emotional turmoil that comes alone with it. This will enable one to perceive it within one’s self in order to begin ridding oneself of it. If one can remain centered in self, one can transmute this weakness into power. It is at this point that one can utilize strength of mind and will to begin to harness and control this infernal landscape and all infernal powers which dwell within it by becoming one with it. This is the only way to be liberated from it. To ground this power within one should apply methods of personal mental control. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

When researchers are transparently pledged to further the freedom and self-actualizing of their subjects, rather than be unwitting servants of the leaders of institutions, then they will deserve to be and to be seen as recipients of the secrets of human being and possibility. I can envision a time when psychologist will be the guardians of the most intimate secrets of human possibilities and experience and possessors of knowledge as to how beings can create one’s destiny because beings have showed one; and I hope that if we “sell” these secrete to advertisers, business people, politicians, mass educators, and the military, we shall not do so until after we have informed our subjects, after we have tried to “turn them on,” to enlarge their awareness of being misled and manipulate. I hope, in short, that we turn out to be servants and guardians of individual freedom, growth, and fulfillment, and not spies for the institutions that pay our salaries and research costs in order to get a privileged peep at human grist. Indeed, we may have to function for a time as counterspies, or double spies—giving reports about our subjects to our colleagues and to institutions, and giving reports back to our subjects as to the ways in which institutions seek to control and predict their behavior for their (the institutions’) ends. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

You will begin to notice how the power of speech is indeed abused and taken for granted. You will start to perceive the vibrations of words mold the very reality which surrounds others. Our words have power and are an expression of true will and divine potential. However, words today are wasted and the power of them is therefore minimized. This minimizes our collective power as a race. Newspapers are written at a sixth grade level so that the subtle nuances and intricacies of communication cannot be learned. Slang and useless words with no meaning are prevalent. This negative energy is accumulated and manifestation of the energy of those unless words happens very fast. One must strive to become peaceful and expand beyond the voice of chaos through silence. You will adjust to the burden. At this point you can generate internal power through silence and attempt to speak order into this World and compel the infernal power which dwell here. With practice, one will become successful. As a result, your words within the physical plane will gain much more power. To ground this power, listen your conscience as it guides you in methods of harnessing the vibrations of the words of others to fuel your own power of creation. Work toward respecting the power of speech. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

Respect speech as your power and speak with purpose. Invest your energy with word instead of spending it on find solace in silence. Much energy is wasted every day by the masses by investing energy into things that do not serve them. Adults spend hours a day playing video games and watching television. We get into useless power struggles for the sake of meaningless dominative purpose with powerless people. Do not become programmed to harm others, nor lie, cheat and steal through consumerism, jealousy and imposed attachments to things. That is the way to the realm of torment and slavery which seeps into the physical plane drip by drip by drip grounding us as a whole to a lower consciousness, which results in the stifling of our evolution and ascent and limits our awareness. “And they did humble themselves even in the depths of humility; and they did cry mightily to God; yea, even all the day long did they cry unto their God that he would deliver them out of their affliction,” reports Mosiah 21.13. The originality and individuality which are proofs of the prophet’s creativity will define themselves by one’s differences from other seers, even though some have drawn from one and the same MIND. These differences are inevitable and must appear. No two humans are completely alike. And having a beautiful home makes life much more enjoyable, it also helps children perform better at school and makes adults perform better at work. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17

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Stop and Consider Life is but a Day—A Lovely Tale of Human Life We Will Read!

October 17, 2019 1:29 am

Not twenty minutes has passed since you left me here in the café, since I said No to your request, that I would never write out for you the story of my mortal life. Now here I am with your notebook open, using one of the sharp pointed eternal ink pens you left me, delighted at the sensuous press of the black ink into the expensive and flawless white paper. Naturally, David, you would leave me something elegant, an inviting page. This notebook bound in dark varnished leather, is it not, tolled with a design of rich roses, thornless, yet leafy, a design that means only Design in the final analysis but bespeaks an authority. What is written beneath this heavy and handsome book cover will count, sayeth this cover. The thick pages are ruled in light blue—you are practical, so thoughtful, and you probably know I almost never put pen to paper to write anything at all. Even the sound of the pen has its allure, the sharp scratch rather like the finest quills in ancient Rome when I would put them to parchment to write my letters to my Father, when I would write in a diary my own laments…ah, that sound. The only think missing here is the smell of the ink, but we have the fine plastic pen which will not run out for volumes, making as fine and deep a black mark as I choose to make. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

I am thinking about your request in writing. You see you will get something from me. I find myself yielding to it. The questions of social isolation and loneliness in senior years will be discussed here. A distinction is made between the two: to be socially isolated is to have few contacts with family and community; to be lonely is to have an unwelcome feeling of lack or loss of companionship. The one is objective, the other subjective and, as we shall see, the two do not coincide. The poorest people, socially as well as financially, were those most isolated from family life. Social isolation needs to be measured by reference to objective criteria. The problem is rather like that of measuring poverty. “Poverty” is essentially a relative rather than an absolute term, and discovering its extent in a population is usually divided into two stages. Most people agree on the first stage, which is to place individuals on a scale according to their income; they often disagree about the second, which involved deciding how far up the scale the poverty “line” should be drawn. They task of measuring isolation can also be divided in this way by placing individuals on a scale according to their degree of isolation and by drawing a line at some point on the scale so that those below the line would, by common consent, be called “isolated.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

There were 20 people who were very isolated. Their ages ranged from 64 to 83. They comprised two married women, two widowers, eight widows, five spinsters and three bachelors. Thirteen of them lived alone; 12 had no children and half of the rest had sons only. It is worth examining their circumstances, taking first those with children. Four of the eight with surviving children had daughters. One was a widow living with her only daughter, unmarried; she had few other relatives and all lived outside London. The second was a widow who had come with her only daughter from Scotland after the war, leaving friends and relatives behind. They were together until the housing authorities of her daughter’s children lived with her but she saw the rest of the family once a week or less. The third was a very infirm widow whose only daughter was married to a naval officer, obliged to live near Portsmouth; she lived in the same house as a widowed and childes sister and saw her every day but infirmity prevented other social contacts. The fourth was a widower of 80 who said his daughter and son living in Bethnal Green visited him twice a week to see he was all right but did not spend much time with him, now his wife was dead; he had a drink with a friend twice a week but infirmity precluded other activities. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

The other four very isolated people with children had sons only. One was a married woman whose only son had moved into his wife’s home district outside London; she and her husband had only one relative in Bethanl Green, the wife’s unmarried sister, who was seen each week, and they had no friends or outside social activities, largely because the husband could not walk. Another was a widower, living with an unmarried son, who saw two married sons about once a week; he had no other surviving relatives. The two remaining people were both widows living alone. One had three sons living outside London, two of them visited her once a week; she saw a sister and two mature aunts in Bethnal Green every week but she spent much of her time on her own. The other had two illegitimate sons but no other relatives; she saw these sons occasionally. There remained the childless and the unmarried. Most were in a worse position. The 10 most isolated people of the 203 interviewed were all unmarried or childless. The circumstances of two are summarized below. Miss Paley, 67 years of age, lived in a one bedroom flat. It was a large airless room with dismal orange-brown wallpaper peeling off in huge strips. Two or three mats, ingrained with dirt, covered the floor. There was an old iron bedstead propped up in the middle by two bits of wood and on this was a heap of gray and brown blankets. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

An ancient iron mangle stood in a corner and there was a gas stove, a gas mantel for lighting, three or four wooden chairs and a table with a flat-iron propping up one of its legs. Miss. Paley wore a pair of stockings, extensively patched and tied around her knees, and a ramshackle navy-blue skirt and slip. Her skin had the whiteness of someone who rarely went out and she was very shy of her appearance, particularly the open sores on her face. She said she suffered from blood poisoning, but had not seen her doctor since the war. (This was confirmed by the doctor.) She was the only child of parents who had been street traders and who had died when she was young, in the 1880s, “I was with my aunt until I was nearly 40. She was 85 when she died. I had cousins in the street traders and who had died. I had cousins in the street but they were my aunt’s children. In the war they got scattered. They all had families to bring up and I have not met them since the war. I do not know where they are. I do my work in my own way. They would not have the patience with me.” Persistent questioning failed to reveal a singe relative with whom she has any contact. She did not g to the cinema, to a club or to church, and had no radio. She had spent Christmas on her own and had never had a holiday away from home. She sometimes made conversation with her neighbors in the street but because of her appearance did not go into their homes or hers. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

She had only one friend, a young woman who “used to live in the street where I lived,” and they visited one another about once a week. Her answer to a question about membership of a club was typical of much she said. “No, I cannot be shut in. I do not go to those clubs. They had been too much excitement for me.” At one point she said she went to bed about 8pm and got up between 10am and 11am the next day. I also found she had an hour or two in bed in the afternoons.” Mr. Fortune, 76 years of age, lived alone in a two-room council flat. There were two wooden chairs, an orange box converted into a cupboard, a gas stove, a table covered with newspaper, a battered old pram with tins and boxes inside, a pair of wooden steps and little else in the sitting-room. There was no fire, although the interview took place on a cold February morning. Mr. Fortune had been a cripple from birth and he was partly deaf. He was unmarried and his give siblings were dead. An older widowed sister-in-law lived about a mile away with an unmarried son and daughter. These three and two married nieces living in another East London borough were seen from once a month to a few times a year. Asked how often he saw his sister-in-law Mr. Fortune said, “Only when I go there. It is a hard job to walk down there in the Winter time and I have not seen her for three of four months.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

Asked about a gentleman’s club Mr. Fortune said, “No. I am simply as I am now. I should not like to join. Walking is such a painful job for me. I cannot get any amusement out of it.” He spoke to one or two of the neighbors outside his flat but he had no regular contact with any of them. He had one regular friend, living a few blocks away, who came over to see him on a Sunday about once a month, “more when there is fine weather.” He was not a churchgoer, never went to a cinema, rarely went to a pub because he could not afford a drink, had never had a holiday in his life and spent Christmas on his own. “My nephew came down for an hour. He gave me a little present, a Digital Storm Lynx Gaming PC, and the Canon EOS 6D Digital SLR Camera. No, I did not get any cards.” He received a non-contributory pension and supplementary assistance through the National Assistance Board, which recently arranged for him to have a woman home-help for two hours a week. Her regular call was the main event of the week. “I sit here messing about. Last week I was making an indoor aerial. I made those steps over there. I like listening to the wireless and making all manners of things. My time is taken up, I can tell you, with that and cooking and tidying-up.” The most striking fact about the most isolated people was that they had few surviving relatives, particularly near relatives of their own or of succeeding generations. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

This lent special significance to familiar references to fathers having weaker ties with children than mothers, to sons being drawn into their wives’ families, and to distant relatives being lost sight of after the death of “connecting” relatives. The isolated included a comparatively high number of unmarried and childless people, of those possessing sons but not daughters and of those without siblings. Rarely did they have friends, become members of clubs or otherwise participate in outside social activities in compensation. Nearly all of them where retired and most were infirm; some were why of revealing to others how ill or poverty-stricken they were or how they have “let themselves go.” They had little or no means of regular contact with the younger generation, and for one reason or another could not be brought into club activities. One of the most striking results of the whole inquiry was that those living in relative isolation from family and community did not always say they were lonely. Particular importance was attached during the interviews to “loneliness.” The question was not asked until most of an individual’s activities had been discussed and care was taken to ensure as serious and as considered a response as possible. One difficulty had to be overcome. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

A few people liked to let their children think they were lonely so the latter would visit them as much as possible. If children were present, this meant they were not inclined to give an honest answer. In an early interview one married woman, asked whether she ever got lonely, said, “Sometimes I do when they are all at work.” However, she hesitated before answering and looked at two married daughters, who were in the room. When this woman was alone, on a subsequent call, she told me she was “never lonely really, but I like my children to call.” When interviewed, a widow who was along, said she was never lonely. In fascinating contrast to this was a statement of one of her married daughters, who was interviewed independently. “She is not too badly off. The most she complains of is loneliness. She is always wanting us to go up there.” When the senior was alone, care was therefore taken to ask about loneliness so far as possible, and to check any answer which seemed doubtful. Some people living at the center of a large family complained of loneliness and some who were living in extreme isolation repeated several times with vigor that they were never lonely—such as Miss Paley and Mr. Fortune, described above. Despite there being a significant association between isolation and loneliness about a half of the isolated and rather isolated said they were not lonely; over a fifth of the first group said they were. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

Spirituality is something that can keep people from being lonely. When it liberates one from the yoke of the commandments to the freedom of the Spirit, the work of the Spiritual Presence in a being reaches its height. This is like a release from the sentence of death to a new life. A tremendous experience lies behind such words, an experience in which we all can share, but one that is rare in its full depth, and is then a revolutionary power that, through beings like Paul and Augustine and Luther, changes the Spiritual World, and, through it, the history of humankind. Can we, you and I, share in such an experience? First, have we not all felt the deadening power of the written code, written not only in the ten commandments and their many interpretations in the Bible and history, but also with the authoritative pen of parents and society into the unconscious depths of our being, recognized by our conscience judging us by what we do and, above all, by what we are? Nobody can flee from the voice of this written code, written internally as well as externally. And if we try to silence it, to close our ears against it, the Spirit itself frustrates these attempts, opening our ears to the cries of our true being of that which we are and ought to be in the sight of eternity. We cannot escape this judgment against us. The Spirit itself, using the written code, makes this impossible. For the Spirit does not give life without having led us through the experience of Hell. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

And certainly, the written code in its threatening majesty has the power to kill. It kills the joy of fulfilling our being by imposing upon us something we feel as hostile. It kills the freedom of answering creatively what we encounter in things and beings by making us look at a table of laws. It kills our ability to listen to the calling of the moment, to the voiceless voice of others, and to the here and now. It kills our courage to act through the scruples of our anxiety-driven conscience. And among those who take it most seriously, it kills faith and hope, and throws them into self-condemnation and despair. There is no way out from the written code. The Spirit itself prevents us from becoming compromisers, half fulfilling, half defying the commandments. The Spirit itself calls us back when we try to escape into indifference, or lawlessness, or (most usually) average self-righteousness. However, when the Spirit calls us back, it does so not in order to hold us within the written code, but in order to give us life. How can we describe the life that the Spirit gives us? I could use many words, well known to everybody, spoken by Paul himself, and after him by the great preachers and teachers of the church. I could say that the work of the Spirit, liberating us from the law, is freedom. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

Or I could say that its work is faith, or that its work is grace, and above all, that the Spirit creates love, the love in which all laws are confirmed and fulfilled and at the same time overcome. However, if I used such words, the shadow of the absent God would appear and make you and me aware that we cannot speak like this today. If we did, freedom would be distorted into willfulness, faith into belief in the absurd, hope into unreal expectations, and love—the word I would like most to use for the creation of the Spirit—into sentimental feeling. The Spirit must give us new words, or revitalize old words to express true life. We must wait for them; we must pray for them; we cannot force them. However, we know, in some moments of our lives, what life is. We know that it is great and holy, deep and abundant, ecstatic and sober, limited and distorted by time, fulfilled by eternity. And if the right words fail us in the absence of God, we may look without words at the image one in whom the Spirit and the Life are manifest without limits. One responds to the inner call according to one’s capacity, history, one’s circumstances and perspective. There was a British doctor, George Pickering, who wrote a book called Creative Malady, subtitled “Illness in the Lives and Minds of Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, Mary Baker Eddy, Sigmund Freud, Marcel Proust, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

In this book, the successful people we listened are covered, but the author could have added Mozart, Chopin, and Beethoven—these were all writers and musicians who had a malady, and George Pickering, the author, points out that each one suffered severe illness and met it constructively in creativity and in contribution to our culture. Pickering speaks of his own arthritic hips as “an ally,” and he “put them to bed,” he said, “when they become painful.” In bed he cannot attend committee meetings; cannot see patients or entertain visitors. He adds, “These are the ideal conditions for creative work—freedom from intrusion, freedom from the ordinary chores of life.” Now you have many questions in your mind about what I am saying, and I certainly had, and have, many questions also. Otto Rank, as a matter of fact, wrote a whole book, Art and Artist, on [these ideas]…Overcoming neurosis and creating art are identical things in Rank’s work. What I am doing tonight is challenging our whole view of health in our culture. We keep people living day after day because we think it is simply the number of days you live. We struggle to invent ways to live longer, as though infirmary were the ultimate enemies. Our health is our only priority. If we obey the dying nurse, whose constant care is not to please, but to remind of ours, and Adam’s curse and that to be restored, our we must heal and grow better. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

These are tremendously significant things—if you can take them in. When we think about Adam’s curse, this is referring to the fact that we are all the ultimate children of the myth of Adam—this is called in words that do not sound very nice anymore—this is called original sin, and the whole idea is that life is not a question of how long you live. It is not a question of how many days you can add. Many people would much prefer to go when their work is finished—to die—but what this verse is trying to say is that disease and illness mean something quite different from what most people in our Faustian civilization take then to mean. As alienating as illness is, it can also be a connecting of ourselves with new others on a new and deeper level. We see this in compassion. Creativity is one of the products of the right relationship between nature and infinity within us. We see also another gift which Fromm Reichmann certainly had, which Abe Maslow had, which Harry Stack Sullivan had—the gift of compassion, the ability to feel with other people, the ability to understand their problems—this is the other quality that makes a good psychiatrist. The experience of degeneration and of chaos is, I hope, temporary, but this can often be used as a way of reforming or reorganizing ourselves on a higher level. The Gods return in our charity. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

It is fair for each of us to ask ourselves what do we bring to the quest: what equipment, qualities, and virtues to entitle me to ask for the results I seek? When the sublime light of the Ideal shines down upon one and one has the courage to look at one’s own image by it, one will doubtless make some humiliating discoveries about oneself. One will find that one is worse than one believed and not so wise as one thought oneself to be. However, such discoveries are all to the good. For only then can one know what one is called upon to do and set to work following their pointers in self-improvement. However deep one’s commitment to the quest may be, one will have to reckon with one’s own frailties and one’s environmental pressures. The great being knows one has limitations, one knows one’s defects and faults—but one is not afraid of them. Paint me as I am, lips and all. All do not start with equal capacities for the quest. Each is qualified to go only a certain distance upon it. Those who exaggerate their capacities harm themselves by the presumption. Those who underrate them practise a false modesty. It is an error either to deceive oneself about one’s aspirations or to deter oneself unduly. Hope is good for beings: it confers endurance, spurs beneficial attitudes, and urges endeavour upon one. However, if its base is ungrounded fancy and extravagant wishes, one is hurt rather than benefited by it. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

Begin by admitting that one knows really little or nothing about your deeper mind. That is better than learned tall talk. It is much easier to set oneself a discipline than to keep it. This will engage one’s own creative faculties through application, and will further unite physical and spiritual discipline in order to create a dynamic of synergy which will assist in tearing the veil between physical and spiritual realms. Powerful changes will begin to take place within you and your life experience as you start to integrate and merge with these spiritual forces. When the inner blessings spills from the crown into outer darkness then mold and shape the energy of the spirit as a clear vision of what you want to achieve or accomplish through your process of prayer. The energy of God is then grounded by reversing negativity and moving more spiritual harmony in your being. Our faith feeds and grows in power as our consciousness expands. Every human being is an emanation of the void and unlimited possibility. As out consciousness expands, we unite and the knowledge of all and eternity becomes ours once again. We are simply taking back infernal wisdom which was ours to begin with. “Hear and know the commandments of God, and stir them up in remembrance of the oath which they have made,” reports Mosiah 6.3. However, when a being turns belief in the superior knowledge of the guide into belief in the virtual omniscience of the guide, it is dangerous. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

(The photos are from a furnished model home very similar to the house featured.)

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Randolph Harris II International Institute

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