Home » structure (Page 43)
Category Archives: structure
My Heart is a Lonely Hunter that Hunts on a Lonely Hill!
The workers have nothing to lose but their chairs. They have a World to gain. Worrying is like a rocking chair—it gives you something to do, but it gets you nowhere. “Take therefore no thought for the morrow for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself,” reports St. Matthew 6.34. There are many insights laid out by Paul which asks of the Christian that they be watchful. He strong being is strong only if one watches one’s strength, aware of the fact that there is weakness in one’s strength. There is a non-Christian in every Christian. There is a weak being in every strong one. There is cowardice in every courage, and unbelief in every faith, and hostility in every love. Watchfulness means that the Christian never can rest on one’s being a Christian, that one who is strong can never rely on one’s strength. One can be strong by subjecting oneself to a strong discipline. By suppressing much in oneself one may become powerful in relation to others. It is often this type that is called a strong personality. And, certainly, strength without the ability to direct oneself is no strength. However, those who have this ability and are admired as strong personalities should be watchful: they should watch whether their strength has weakness at its basis, whether it excludes elements of life that constitute the richness and the glory of life. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
If they do not watch their hidden weakness, it may flow forth as hatred for those who affirm the abundance of life. This abundance they cannot endure, because it reveals the weakness on which their strength is built. In order to reassure themselves, they force upon others the same restrictions they have imposed on their life. Their domineering strength creates weakness in others. There is a profound ambiguity about the strong Christian personality: Christianity could not live, society could not go on, without them. However, many other Christians, many persons, who perhaps could have become strong themselves, are destroyed or reduced to mental weakness and often illness by them. They are the bearers of Christianity and society; but their victims among Christians and non-Christians, beginning with their children, their wives or their husbands, are numerous. Be watchful when you are considered, or consider yourself, strong. Be watchful, and do not demand of those around you to be what you are, and what they are not. You will destroy them by your strength. Those who are considered strong usually have a strong conviction. They seem to do what Paul asks them to—namely, to “stand in the faith.” Everybody needs place to stand upon. Without a foundation no strength is possible. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
In the physical Universe it is a place on the well-grounded Earth, as the Greeks said; no experience seems more disturbing, even for the strongest mins, than the shaking of the ground in an Earthquake. In the social Universe it is the home—the home town country on which we stand; and from earliest times those who lost their homeland were considered weakest and most unprotected. What about the spiritual Universe? Language is the place we stand on in the spiritual Universe. For out of the word by which we grasp our World and our own being all other spiritual creations grow: knowledge and the arts, social traditions and philosophical beliefs. The word gives beings the strength to build a World above the given World. It makes one the ruler of nature, as in the paradise story: one becomes the ruler over other living beings by giving them names. One who is strong in the spiritual Universe is strong in the power of the word. A profound insight into human strength and human weakness is expressed in the story of the tower of Babel. Humankind was strong as long as it was united in one language. Its strength impelled it to enter the Heavenly sphere. However, when God wanted to destroy human’s self-elevation and reveal one’s weakness, one confused the one language so that people no longer understood each other. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
We are in a similar situation today. Our period is weak, because we can no longer speak to each other. Each one has one’s own language, and the word has lost its power. It has become shallow and confused. We have experienced Earthquake and exile in the spiritual World. Paul asks the Corinthians to stand on something that is deeper than the physical and social and spiritual Universe, something that cannot be shaken, because all levels of the Universe rest upon it, their divine Ground. To stand on this Ground is, in Paul’s words, to stand in the faith. One, of course, thinks of the faith in the form in which one has brought it to the Corinthians. However, in this faith, faith itself is present—namely, the standing on the ultimate Ground below any shaking and changing ground. Breaking the way to this Ground is the meaning of the appearance of the Christ. “Stand firm in your faith” means—do not give up that faith that alone can make your ultimately strong, because it gives you the ultimate Ground on which to stand. Standing firm in one’s faith does not mean adhering to a set of beliefs; it does not require us to suppress doubts about Christian or other doctrines, but points to something which is possessed beyond doubt in the depth in which human’s being and all being is rooted. To be aware of this Ground, to live in it and out of it is ultimate strength. “Be strong” and “stand in the faith” are one and the same command. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
However, remembering now the word “be,” some may reply—“Then the demand to be strong is not for us, because we do not stand in any faith. Doubt or unbelief is our destiny, not faith. We know you are right, there is no strength where there is no faith. However, we have neither. And if there is some strength in us, it is the strength of honesty, the unwillingness to submit to a faith that is not ours, either for conventional reasons, or because of our longing for strength, or because of being taken in by our contemporary emotion-arousing evangelists. Our strength is to resist and to reject strength that is born of dishonesty. Some of the best minds of our time would speak thus. To them I answer—Your honesty proves your faith and therefore your honesty is your strength! You may not believe in anything that can be stated in doctrines or symbols. However, you stand on the ultimate Ground, you stand firm in your faith as long as you sand in honesty and take your doubt and your unbelief seriously without restriction. Become aware of the faith that you have, and you will find words for it, perhaps even Christian words. However, with or without words, be strong; for you are strong. Strength, according to Paul’s words, includes courage. For human strength is built on human anxiety. Insecurity takes many forms. One of the most dangerous is the experience of being split within ourselves. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
One who is united with oneself is invincibly strong. However, who is? We are all dominated by forces that conquer parts of our being and split our personality. We have not merely lost the power of the word; we also have lost the strength that is given with a united, centered personality. We are disrupted by compulsions, known formerly as demonic powers. And who can command a split personality—“Be strong!” To which side of the personality can such a command be addressed? Yet, there is the possibility of something else. Healing power, coming ultimately from the Ground on which we stand in the faith, can enter the personality and unite it in an act of courage. It is the courage that takes upon itself the anxiety of our disruptions. This courage is the innermost center of faith. It dares to affirm our being, while simultaneously rejecting it. Out of this courage the greatest strength emerges. It is the strength that overcomes the powers splitting World and soul. Be courageous! Say Yes to yourselves in spite of the anxiety of the No. So Paul finishes his description of the strong personality: a courageous, watchful hero, firm in faith, worthy of great praise. However, that is just what Paul has in mind is based on something beyond courage and faith and watchfulness. It is not the strength of a hero. It is the strength of one who surrenders the praise one could receive as a hero to the humility of love. They may be friendly and be willing to help. This they demand of themselves. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
However, everything they demand of themselves they also demand of others. They use the word “be” without hesitation. They become tyrants through personal strength. Without love one who is strong becomes a law for the weak. And the law makes those who are weak even weaker. It drives them into despair, or rebellion, or indifference. Strength without love destroys, first others, then itself. For love is not something that may or may not be added to strength in its fullest sense; it is an element of strength. One cannot be strong without love. For love is not an irrelevant emotion; it is the blood of life, the power of reunion of the separated. Strength without love leads to separation, to judgment, to control of the weak. Love reunites what is separated; it accepts what is judged; it participates in what is weak, as God participates in our weakness and gives us strength by His participation. “When he had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in Heaven about the space of half an hour,” reports Revelations of St. John. If you are a thoughtful and observant person you will probably recognize in this description the usual course of human affairs—thank God for any exceptions there may be! And if you find yourself substantially exempted from this picture, you can say thankfully, “There, but for the grace of God, go I. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
Paul, at least, was not hopeful that things would get better as human history moved along. He was not a believer in “progress” as it has been humanly understood. In what seems to have been his last letter, perhaps the very last thing he wrote, he warned Timothy that “in the last days difficult times will come. For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, revilers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, unloving, irreconcilable, malicious gossips, without self-control, brutal, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God; holding to a form of Godliness, although they have denied its power,” reports 2 Timothy 3.1-5. One could be forgiven for thinking that this certainly looks like “now.” Who does not recognize in these words the prevailing tone and texture of contemporary life? Who does not know that such behaviour, if not approved outright, is excused or even justified by clever psychological, legal, and moral maneuvers, often reciting elevated “principles.” In fact this has been the end stage f every successful human society that has arisen on Earth. Invariably, such a society begins to believe it is responsible for its success and prosperity and begins to worship itself and rebel against the understandings and practices that allowed it, under God, to be successful in the first place. “Jeshurun grew fat and kicked,” the prophetic analysis states Deuteronomy 32.15. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
The human decline into what was expressed in the words of Paul to Timothy is inevitable. However, underneath it all is the radical evil of the human heart—a heart that would make me God in place of God. The prophetic clarity still stands for all to read and test. Our human “righteousness” is like “filthy rags” reports Isaiah 64.6. And over against this we hear intoned: “I, the LORD, search the heart, I test the mind, even to given to each being according to one’s ways, according to the results of one’s deeds,” reports Jeremiah 17.10. Some fathers exasperate their children by being overly strict and controlling. They need to remember that rearing children is like holding a wet bar of soap—too firm a grasp and it shoots from your hand, too loose a grip and it slides away. A gentle but firm hold keeps you in control. We cannot begin to estimate the ravages of overstrictness on the evangelical Christian community over the years. I have had occasions in my ministry to bury people who lived virtually all of their seventy years in reaction to the harsh legalism of their upbringing—lost bars no one could manage to pick up. Others were not so tragic. They came to renounce legalism Biblically and theologically, but still wrestled with it emotionally for the rest of their lives. Why are some fathers overly strict? Many because they are trying to protect their children from an increasingly Philistine culture—and smothering rules seem the best way to accomplish that. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
Others are simply controlling personalities who use rules, money, friendship, or clout to rule their children’s lives. The Bible, read through their controlling grid, becomes a license to own and dominate. Still others wrongly understand their faith in terms of Law rather than grace. Some men are overly strict because they are concerned about what others will think. “If my child goes to this place or wears this clothing, or is heard listening to that music, what will they think?” Not a few preacher’s kids have been catapulted into rebellion because their fathers squeezed their lives to fit their parishioners’ expectations. What a massive sin against one’s children! Rather, we ought to begin our fatherhood by holding the tiny helpless bar snugly, but as it grows, gradually and wisely loosen our grip. As conscientious fathers we have to say “no” to many things. Thus we should try to say “yes” to as much as possible, and save our no’s for the really important situations. We must be Biblical in regard to our no’s—and as our children grow, be prepared to discuss the rules Biblically and principally. We must learn to trust God with our children, realizing they must learn to make decision for themselves. Fathers, do not exasperate your children by being overly strict. Learn to hold their lives with God’s pressure and to mold it with His love. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
Seeking the Master: Great possibilities attach themselves to the first interview between the student earnestly seeking direction, needing guidance, or requesting counsel, and the illuminate who has established communion with God. These possibilities do not depend upon the length of time it takes nor upon what is said during the actual conversation itself. They depend upon the attitude which a student silently brings with one and upon the power which the illuminate silently expresses. In other words, they depend upon invisible and telepathic factors. Only when one is finally ready for a master will one find a true one. However, to be ready the aspirant must bring his character to its highest possibility. When that is done then even at the first meeting the power of attraction will speak silently yet eloquently. Both will know, before that first meeting ends, that the other is the right one; there will be no doubts, no hesitations; they can exist only when judgement is wrong. One will know an affinity of soul that can and has previously been experienced with no one else. Affinity has its own clear language. It will put both people at perfect ease. When a sensitive heart, a receptive mind, and a strong yearning for spiritual perfection meet a being who embodies such perfection to a large degree, there is or should be some recognition, some brief purification, some intellectual clarification, some emotional exaltation, amounting in all to a miniature mystical experience. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
When the predestined disciple meets the master for the first time, one may feel either that one has known the individual before or else that one has known one always. Sometimes we have the feeling on meeting a stranger for the first time, one may feel either that one has known one before or else that one has known one always. Sometimes we have the feeling on meeting a stranger for the first time, that we have known one long and known one well. The feeling on first meeting the destined master is much the same but greatly expanded and deeply intensified. The feeling which is aroused on this contact—whether affinity or antipathy—must be one’s first guide to the choice of a master. One may feel the force of a real attraction when first meeting one’s master, in most cases, but it is just possible one may not. The human in whose presence your character rises to its best and your faith to its highest, is the being who can help you spiritually. Without this inward affinity it is of not much use to attach yourself to a guide, however reputed one may be. “And now, my brethren, how is it possible that ye can lay hold upon every good thing? And now I come to that faith, of which I said I would speak; and I will tell you the way whereby ye may lay hold on every good thing. For behold, God knowing all things, being from everlasting to everlasting, behold, he sent Angels to minister unto the children of humans, to make manifest concerning the coming of Christ; and in Christ there should come every good thing,” reports Moroni 7.20-22. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
Grant, we beseech Thee, Almighty God, that the splendour of Thy brightness may shine upon us, and the light of Thy Light confirm with the illumination of the Holy Spirit the hearts of those who have been born again through Thy grace: for the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord. Grant, we beseech Thee, Almighty God, that we who celebrate the solemnity of the gift of the Holy Ghost, may be kindled with Heavenly desires, and thirst for the fountain of life; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Everlasting Creator-Father, I have destroyed myself, my nature is defiled, the powers of my soul are degraded; I am vile, miserable, strengthless, but my hope is in thee. If ever I am saved it will be by goodness undeserved and astonishing not by mercy alone but by abundant mercy, not by grace but by exceeding riches of grace; and such thou hast revealed, promised, exemplified in thoughts of peace, not of evil. Thou hast devised means to rescue me from sin’s perdition, to restore me to happiness, honour, safety. I bless thee for the everlasting covenant, for the appointment of a mediator. I rejoice that he failed not, nor was discouraged, but accomplished the work thou gavest him to do; and said on the cross, “It is finished.” I exult in the thought that thy justice is satisfied, thy trust established, thy la magnified, and a foundation is laid for my hope. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
I look to a present and personal interest in Christ and say, surely he has borne my griefs, carried my sorrows, won my peace, healed my soul. Justified by his blood I am saved by his life, glorying in his cross I bow to his scepter, having his Spirit I possess his mind. Lord, grant that my religion may not be occasional and partial, but Universal, influential, effective, and may I always continue in thy words as well as thy works, so that I may reach my end in peace. Almighty and everlasting God, Who in the fulness of this day’s mystery hast completed the secret work of the Paschal solemnity; grant, we beseech Thee, that we who have been made Thine adopted sons may obtain that peace which our Lord Jesus Christ left unto us when He came to Thee; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. We beseech Thee, O Lord, let the Holy Spirit prepare our minds by Divine mysteries, forasmuch as He Himself is the remission of all sins; through Jesus Christ our Lord. We beseech Thee, O Lord, let the power of the Holy Spirit be present with us, that it may both mercifully cleanse our hearts, and protect us from all adversities; through our Lord Jesus Christ. O God, Who by the mystery of this day’s festival dost sanctify Thy Universal Church in every race and nation, shed abroad throughout the whole World the gift of the Holy Spirit; that the work wrought by Divine goodness at the first preaching of the Gospel may now also be extended among believing hearts; through Jesus Christ our Lord. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
With these sobering vistas of the human heart and soul before us, we need now to rethink for our time what it means to be lost. For a ruined soul is a lost sou. What is a lost soul? Just someone God is mad at? When is a person lost? And is anyone lost today? Considerable confusion on this topic has resulted from trying to think of being lost in terms of its outcome. Theologically, that outcome is Hell—a most uncomfortable notion. Certainly, if you are lost in any sense there is a little likelihood of your arriving where you want to be. However, the condition of lostness is not the same as the outcome to which it leads. We are not lost because we are going to wind up in the wrong place. We are going to wind up in the wrong place because we are lost. TO be lost means to be out of place, to be omitted. “Gehenna,” the term often used in the New Testament for the place of the lost, may usefully be thought of as the cosmic dumb for the irretrievably useless. Think of what it would mean to find you have become irretrievably useless. Something that is lost is something that is not where it is supposed to be, and therefore it is not integrated into the life of the one to whom it belongs and to who it is lost. Think of what it means when the keys to your house or are lost. They are useless to you, no matter how much you need them and desire to have them and no matter what fine keys they may be. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
And when we are lost to God, we are not where we are supposed to be in his World and hence are not caught up into his life. We are not “partakers of the divine nature,” have not “escaped the corruption that is in the World” through lust reports 2 Peter 1.4. We are our own god, and our god does not amount to much. When we are lost to God, we are also lost to ourselves: we do not know where we are or how to get where we want to go. We may know we are lost or we may not. Many a driver is lost long before one knows one his—though rarely before one’s wife knows it. Many are lost before God but do not know it. They sincerely believe that they know where they are, where they are going, and how to get there; but in fact they do not, and they often find out too late. Disorientation to moral, personal, and divine reality, as well as to the physical, sometimes leads us across lines that cannot be recrossed. This is part of the tragic meaning of human time and action. Almighty and everlasting God, Who in the fulness of this day’s mystery hast completed the secret work of the Paschal solemnity; grant, we beseech Thee, that we who have been made Thine adopted sons may obtain that peace which our Lord Jesus Christ left unto us when He came to Thee; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. We beseech Thee, O Lord, let the Holy Spirit prepare our minds by Divine mysteries, forasmuch as He Himself is the remission of all sins; through Jesus Christ our Lord. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Cresleigh Homes
Tropical decor? 🌴 Yes please! 😍 Your Brighton Station Residence 4 master suite has plenty of space to create the perfect coastal vibes.
See more and explore interactive floor plans on our website. Link: https://cresleigh.com/brighton-station/residence-4/
#CresleighRanch
#CresleighHomes
Watch and Pray that Ye Enter Not into Temptation: that Spirit Indeed is Willing, but the Flesh is Weak!
Plots, true are false are necessary things, to raise up commonwealths, and ruin kings. One’s power of keeping one’s knowledge a secret from those who are unready for or uninterested in it is perfect. Nothing in one’s words or manner may lead them to think that the self-actualized knows immensely more than one tells them. One knows how to protect one’s status well. In the presence of sceptics and scoffers, or the unevolved and unready, neither one’s outward manner nor one’s uttered talk will give any hint of it. With all one’s reclusive habits, the self-actualized is compassionate in temperament, benevolent in personality. Even when one avoids people, one does not hate them. They feel tense, uneasy, and unsure in the presence of a superior class of beings. This one knows by experience and this is one reason why one keeps apart and alone; yet paradoxically it is also why one is kinder to them than a situation calls for, why one then behaves as if one were an equal and not on a different level. In one sense, the self-actualized consciousness is insulated by its own superior quality from that of others, but in another sense it fleetingly registers or lengthily holds their states through one’s compassion, sympathy, or understanding. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
The self-actualized has no intention of meddling in other people’s personal lives, no conceit that one’s duty is to change them, no willingness to take on responsibility for them. One commits them to God and commends them to it. However this it done, if intuitively or rationally one is led to suggest a purpose or remind them of a truth or point to a beneficial course or utter a warning, one will bey the leading—but always in response to their approach. If fate will let the self-actualized being, one is happier to move through this World incognito, than celebrated. Most people are always more impressed by outward show than by inner worth. However, when the show is philanthropic service and benevolent activity dramatically performed, they are even more impressed. The recognition and appreciation are immediate. The being whose inner stillness admit spiritual forces into one’s surroundings remains unnoticed. Nor is the people’s judgment always true; the most may err as grossly as the few. Beware the fury of a patient person. Experience is something you do not get until just after you need it. I maintain that there is a desperate social need for the creative behavior of creative individuals. It is this which justifies the setting forth of a tentative theory of creativity—the nature of the creative act, the conditions under which it occurs, and the manner in which it may constructively be fostered. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
Such a theory of creativity may serve as a stimulus and guide to research studies in this field of therapy. Many of the serious criticisms of our culture and its trend may best be formulated in terms of a dearth of creativity. Let us state some of these briefly: In education we tend to turn out conformists, stereotypes, individuals whose educations is “completed,” rather than freely creative and original thinkers. In our leisure time activities, passive entertainment and regimented group action are overwhelmingly predominant while creative activities are much less in evidence. In the sciences, there is an ample supply of technicians, but the number who can creatively formulate fruitful hypotheses and theories is small indeed. In industry, creation is reserved for the few—the manager, the designer, the head of the research department—while for the many life is devoid of original or creative endeavor. In individual and family life the same picture holds true. In the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the books we read, and the idea we hold, there is a strong tendency toward conformity, toward stereotypy. To be original, or different, is felt to be “dangerous.” Why be concerned over this? If, as a people, we enjoy conformity rather than creativity, shall we not be permitted this choice? In my estimation such a choice would be entirely reasonable were it not for one great shadow which hangs over all of us. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
In a time when knowledge, constructive and destructive, is advancing by the most incredible leaps and bounds into a fantastic atomic age, genuinely creative adaptation seems to represent the only possibility that beings can keep abreast of the kaleidoscopic change in the World. With scientific discovery and invention proceeding, we are told, at the rate of geometric progression, a generally passive and culture-bound people cannot cope with the multiplying issues and problems. Unless individuals, groups, and nations can imagine, construct, and creatively revise new ways of relating to these complex changes, the lights will go out. Unless beings can make new and original adaptations to one’s environments as rapidly as one’s science can change the environment, our culture will perish. Not only individual maladjustment and group tensions, but international annihilation will be the price we pay for a lack of creativity. Consequently it would seem to me that investigations of the process of creativity, the conditions under which this process occurs, and the ways in which it may be facilitated, are of the utmost importance. It is in the hope of suggestion a conceptual structure under which such investigations might go forward will help facilitate necessary changes. “Be watchful, stand firm in your faith, be courageous, be strong. Let all that you do be done in love,” reports 1 Corinthians 16.13-14. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
Out of this well-known passage, I chose two word on which I want you to center your attention in this hour—be strong! They are surrounded in our text by other qualities that makes strength possible—watchfulness, faith, courage, love. All together, they describe the strong Christian personality. How can we attain strength? This is a question asked in all ages of a being’s life and in all periods of human history. It is a question asked with passion and despair in our time, and most impatiently by those who are no longer children and not yet adults. In our texts Paul uses the word “be” several times: “be strong,” he says to the Corinthians. We easily slip over it. However, it should arrest our attention as fully as, and perhaps even more than, the main words of our text. Fore the word “be” contains in its two letters the whole riddle of the relation of beings to God. Paul does not ask of the Christians in Corinth something that is strange to them. He asks them to be what they are, Christian personalities. All the imperatives he uses are descriptions of something that is, before they are demands for what ought to be. Be what you are—that is the only thing one can ask of any being. One cannot ask of a being to be something it was not before. It is as if life in all its forms desires to be asked, to receive demands. However, no life can receive demands for something which it is not. It wants to be asked to become what it is and nothing else. This seems surprising, but a little thought shows us that it is true. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
We know that one cannot ask fruits from thorns, or grain from weeds, or water from a dry fountain, or love from a cold heart, or courage from a cowardly mind, or strength from a weak life. If we ask such things from beings who do not have them, we are foolish; and either they will laugh at us or condemn us as unjust and hostile towards them. We can ask of anything or anyone only to bring forth what one has, to become what one is. Out of what is given to us, we can act. Receiving precedes acting. “Be strong,” says Paul. He says it to those who have received strength as he himself received strength when the power of a new reality grasped him. Now some of us will ask—“what about us who feel that we have not received, and that we do not have faith and courage and strength and love? We are wanting in all these, so the commanding ‘be’ of Paul is not said to us. Or if it is said to us we remain unconcerned or become hostile towards one who says it. We are not strong, so nobody should ask us to be strong! We are weak. Shall we remain weak? Shall we fall into resignation, and become cynical about your demands? They may be for others. They are not for us.” I hear many people, more than we imagine, saying this. I hear whole classes of young people speaking thus. I hear many individuals in older generation repeating these words. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
And I do not find any consolation in the Bible There is the parable of the different soils on which the seed of the divine message falls and of which only one brings fruit. There is the word of the many who are called and few who are elected. There is the terrifying, realistic statement of Jesus that those whom much is given will receive more, and that from those who little is given, even this will be taken away. There is the contrast between those who are born of light and have become its children and those who are born out of darkness and have become its children. There is the parable of the man as clay which cannot revolt against God the potter, no matter what the potter does to the clay. We would like to revolt, when we hear this. However, if we look around us into the lives of beings we are forced to say—“So it is, the Bible is right!” We would like to say in a god democratic phrasing—“Everyone has a God-given chance to reach fulfillment, but not everybody uses it. Some do, some do not. Both have their ultimate destiny in their own hands.” We would like that to be so. However, we cannot escape the truth that it is not so. The changes are not even. There is only a limited number of human beings to whom we can say—“Be strong,” because they are strong already. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
And the only honest thing I could say to the others, to whom many of us belong, is—“Accept that you are weak. Do not pretend that you are strong. And perhaps if you dare to be what you are, your weakness will become your strength. Accept that you are weak”—that is what we should say to those who are weak. “Accept that you are a coward”—that is what we should say to those who are cowardly. “Accept that you are wavering in the faith—that is what we should say to those who are not firm in it. And to those who do not love, we should say—“Accept that you are not able to love.” This sounds strange! However, everyone who knows the human soul, and knows one’s own soul above all, will understand what is meant. One will understand that the first step in becoming strong is to acknowledge and accept one’s weakness. One who does so will cease to deceive oneself by saying to oneself—“I have at least something of what the apostle demands. One can demand it from me, for somehow I have it.” There are people who could rightly speak so to themselves. Yet there are others for whom such a judgment would be a self-deception. To them we must say—“Accept that you are weak; be honest towards yourselves.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
Let me say to those who are responsible for others, as parents, teachers, ministers, counselors, friends: do not say the demanding “be” to anybody without fear and hesitation. If you use it, you approach the mystery of the divine election and you may destroy a life by demanding something of a person that one is not! There are various ways of defining creativity. In order to make more clear the meaning of what is to follow, let me present the elements which, for me, are part of the creative process, and then attempt a definition. In the first place, for me as a scientist, there must be something observable, some product of creation. Though my fantasies may be extremely novel, they cannot usefully be defined as creative unless they eventuate in some observable product—unless they are symbolized in words, or written in a poem, or translated into a work of art, or fashioned into an invention. These products must be novel constructions. This novelty grows out of the unique qualities of the individual in one’s interaction with the materials of experience. Creativity always has the stamp of the individual upon its product, but the product is not the individual, nor one’s materials, but partakes of the relationship between the two. Creativity is not, in my judgment, restricted to some particular content. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
I am assuming that there is no fundamental difference in the creative process as it is evidenced in painting a picture, composing a symphony, devising new instruments of killing, developing a scientific theory, discovering new procedures in human relationships, or creating new formings of one’s own personality at in psychotherapy. (Indeed it is my experience in this last field, rather than in one of the arts, which has given me special interest in creativity and its facilitation. Intimate knowledge of the way in which the individual remolds oneself in the therapeutic relationship, with originality and effective skill, gives one confidence in the creative potential of all individuals.) My definition, then, of the creative process is that it is the emergence in action of a novel relational product, growing out of the uniqueness of the individual on the one hand, and the materials, events, people, or circumstances of one’s life on the other. Let me append some negative footnotes to this definition. It makes no distinction between “good” and “bad” creativity. One being may be discovering a way of relieving pain, while another is devising a new and more subtle form of torture for political prisoners. Both these actions seem to me creative, even though their social value is very different. Though I shall comment on these social valuations later, I have avoided putting them in my definition because they are so fluctuating. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
Galileo and Copernicus made creative discoveries which in their own day were evaluated as blasphemous and wicked, and in our day as basic and constructive. We do no want to cloud our definition with terms which rest in subjectivity. Another way of looking at this same issue is to note that to be regarded historically as representing creativity, the product must be acceptable to some group at some point of time. This fact is not helpful to our definition, however, both because of the fluctuating valuations already mentioned, and also because many creative products have undoubtedly never been socially noticed, but have disappeared without ever having been evaluated. So this concept of group acceptance is also omitted from our definition. In addition, it should be pointed out that our definition makes no distinction regarding the degree of creativity, since this too is a value judgment extremely variable in nature. The action of the child inventing a new game with one’s playmates; Einstein formulating a theory of relativity; the housewife devising a new sauce for the meat; a young author writing one’s first novel; all of these are, in terms of our definition, creative, and there is no attempt to set them in some order of more or less creative. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
The motivation for creativity—the mainspring of creativity appears to be the same tendency which we discover so deeply as the curative force in psychotherapy –human’s tendency to actualize oneself, to become one’s potentialities. By this I mean the directional trend which is evident in all organic and human life—the urge to expand, extend, develop, mature—the tendency to express and activate all the capacities of the organism, or the self. This tendency may become deeply buried under layer after layer of encrusted psychological defenses; it may be hidden behind elaborate facades which deny its existence; it is my belief however, based on my experience, that it exists in every individual, and waits only the proper conditions to be released and expressed. It is this tendency which is the primary motivation for creativity as the organism forms new relationships to the environment in its endeavour most fully to be itself. Let us now attempt to deal directly with this puzzling issue of the social value of a creative act. Presumably few of us are interested in facilitating creativity which is socially destructive. We do not wish, knowingly, to lend our efforts to developing individuals whose creative genius works itself out in new and better ways of robbing, exploiting, torturing, killing, other individuals. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
Nor do we wish to lend our efforts to developing individuals whose forms of political organization or art forms which lead humanity into paths of physical or psychological self-destruction. Yet how is it possible to make the necessary discriminations such that we may encourage a constructive creativity and not a destructive? The distinction cannot be made by examining the product. The very essence of the creative is its novelty, and hence we have no standard by which to judge it. Indeed history points up the fact that the more original the product, and the more far-reaching its implications, the more likely it is to be judged by contemporaries as evil. The genuinely significant creation, whether an idea, or a work of art, or a scientific discovery, is more likely to be seen at first as erroneous, bad, or foolish. Later it may be seen as obvious, something self-evident to all. Only still later does it receive its final evaluation as a creative contribution. It seems clear that no contemporary mortal can satisfactorily evaluate a creative product at the time that it is formed, and this statement is increasingly true the greater the novelty of the creation. Nor is it of any help to examine the purposes of the individual participating in the creative process. “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are the Caesar’s; and into God the things that are God’s,” reports St. Matthew 22.21. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
Many, perhaps most, of the creations and discoveries which have proved to have great social value, have been motivated by purposes having more to do with personal interest than with social value, while on the other had history records a somewhat sorry outcome for many of those creations (various Utopias, Prohibitions, and so forth) which has as their avowed purpose the achievement of the social good. No, we must face the fact that the individual creates primarily because it is satisfying to one, because this behavior is felt to be self-actualizing, and we get nowhere by trying to differentiate “good” and “bad” purposes in the creative process. Must we then give over any attempt to discriminate between creativity which is potentially constructive, and that which is potentially destructive? I do not believe this pessimistic conclusion is justified. It is here that recent clinical findings from the field of psychotherapy give us hope. It has been found that when the individual is “open” to all of one’s experience (a phrase which will be defined more fully), then one’s behavior will be creative, and one’s creativity may be trusted to be essentially constructive. The differentiation may be put very briefly as follows. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
To the extent that the individual is denying to awareness (or repressing, if you prefer the term) large areas of one’s experience, then one’s creative formings may be pathological, or socially evil, or both. To the degree that the individual is open to all aspects of one’s experience, and has available to one’s awareness all the varied sensings and perceivings which are going on within one’s organism, then the novel products of one’s interaction with one’s environment will tend to be constructive both for oneself and others. To illustrate, an individual with paranoid tendencies may creatively develop a most novel theory of the relationship between oneself and one’s environment, seeing evidence for one’s theory in all sorts of minute clues. One’s theory has little social value, perhaps because there is an enormous range of experience which this individual cannot permit in one’s awareness. Sokrates, on developed novel ideas which have proven to be socially constructive. Very possibly this was because he was notably nondefensive and open to one’s experience. The reasoning behind this will perhaps become more clear in the remaining sections of this paper. Primarily however it is based upon the discovery in psychotherapy, that as the individual becomes more open to, more aware of, all aspects of one’s experience, one is increasingly likely to act in a manner we would term socialized. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
If one can be aware of one’s hostile impulses, but also of one’s desire for friendship and acceptance; aware of the expectations of one’s culture, but equally aware of one’s own purposes; aware of one’s selfish desires, but also aware of one’s tender and sensitive concern for another; then one behaves in a fashion which is harmonious, integrated, constructive. The more one is open to one’s experience, the more one’s behavior makes it evident that the nature of the human species tends in the direction of constructively social living. The eros quality of love is in a polar way related to what could be called the philia quality of love. While eros represents the transpersonal pole, philia represents the personal pole. Neither of them is possible without the other. There is eros quality in philia. And there is philia quality in eros. They are in a polar way interdependent. This implies that without the radical separation of the self-centered self neither the creative nor the religious eros is possible. Beings without a personal centre are without eros, although they are not without epithymia. One cannot relate oneself as an “I” to a “thou” cannot relate oneself to the true and the good and to the ground being in which they are rooted. One who cannot love the friend cannot love the artistic expression of ultimate reality. Stages of the aesthetical and the ethical and the religious are not stages but qualities which appear in structural interdependence. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Conversely, philia is dependent on eros. Concepts like participation and communion point to the eros quality in every philia relation. It is the desire to unite with a power of being which is both most separated and mist understandable and which radiates possibilities and realities of good and the true in the manifestation of its incomparable individuality. However, eros and philia are not only united in the individual relation. They are also united in the communion of social groups. In families, and national groups, the desire for participation is directed towards the power of being which is embodied in the group, even if special relations of the philia type are lacking. The very fact that such groups consist of individual with whom an I-thou relation is potentially given, distinguishes the eros within a group from the eros which is effective, for instance, in artistic creations. Love as a philia presupposes some amount of familiarity with the object of love. For this reason Aristotle asserted that philia is possible only between equals. This is true if “equal” is defined in a sufficiently large way and not in terms of an esoteric group. “For behold, the Spirit of Christ is given to every being, that one may know good from evil; wherefore, I show unto you the way to judge; for every thing which inviteth to do good, and to persuade to believe in Christ, is sent forth by the power and gift of Christ; wherefore ye may know with a perfect knowledge of it is of God,” reports Moroni 7.16. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
Be present, O Lord, to our supplications; that as we trust that the Saviour of humankind is seated with Thee in Thy Majesty, so we may feel that, according to His promise, He abideth with us unto the end of the World; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Almighty and everlasting God vouchsafe unto us, by the gift of this day’s festival, that the aims of Thy children may thither be directed, where our substance, in Thine Only-begotten Son, is with Thee; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Thou blessed spirit, author of all grace and comfort, come, work repentance in my soul; represent sin to me in its odious colours that I may hate it; melt my heart by the majesty and mercy of God; show me my ruined self and the help there is in Him; teach me to behold my Creator, His ability to save, His arms outstretched, His heart big for me. May I confide in His power and love, commit my soul to Him without reserve, bear His image, observe His laws, pursue His service, and be through time and eternity a monument to the efficacy of His grace, a trophy of His victory. Make me willing to be saved in His way, perceiving nothing in myself, but all in Jesus: Help me not only to receive Him but to walk in Him, depend upon Him, commune with Him, be conformed to Him, follow Him, imperfect, but still pressing forward, not complaining of labour, but valuing rest, not murmuring under trials, but thankful for my state. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
Give me that faith which is the means of salvation, and the principle and medium of all Godliness; may I be saved by grace through faith, live by faith, feel the joy of faith, do the work of faith. Perceiving nothing in myself, my I find in Christ wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, redemption. Hear us, O merciful God, and grant our minds to be lifted up, whither our Redeemer hath ascended; that at the second coming of the Mediator we may receive from Thy manifested bounty what we now venture to hope for as promised gift; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Grant, we beseech Thee, Almighty God, that the faithful members of Thy Son may tither follow, whither our Head and Chief has gone before, Who with Thee, we shall be blessed with eternal life and everlasting grace. O God, Who, to show forth the wonders of Thy Majesty, didst after Thy Resurrection from the dead ascend this day into Heaven, in the presence of Thine Apostles, grant us the assistance of Thy loving kindness; that according to Thy promise Thou mayest ever dwell with us on Earth, and we with Thee in Heaven; where with the Father, we shall live in his mansions and have an abundance of blessings. “Though I speak with the tongues of humans and of Angles, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal,” Reports 1 Corinthians 13.1. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
Cresleigh Homes
Plumas Ranch is your next home! 🏡 Pricing is now available for the Riverside and Meadows communities. Check out more info at the link in bio! 👉 https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-meadows-at-plumas-ranch/
I Used to think Love was Something I Could Take or Leave Alone but Now I Could Not do without My Supply!
Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you should begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense. Though no one can go back and make a brand new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand new end. We should be lenient in our judgment, because often the mistakes of others would have been ours had we had the opportunity to make them. What is food to one being is bitter poison to others. Every negative development in a person is to be understood as the result of damaging influences in early childhood. This has led sometimes to irrational self-accusation on the part of parents who feel guilty for every undesirable or pathological trait that appears in a child after birth, and to a tendency of people in analysis to put the blame for all their trouble on their parents, and to avoid confronting themselves with the problem of their own responsibility. Good intentions mean noting if they cover up the unconscious intentions; “honest” dishonesty demonstrates that it is not enough to have “meant” well consciously. Forces operate in beings of which one is not aware and rationalization protects one from awareness; unconscious forces are integrated in a system to which we call character. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Character syndromes are rooted and nourished in the particular forms of relatedness of the individual to the outside World and oneself; furthermore, inasmuch as the social group shares a common character structure (“social character”) the socioeconomic conditions shared by all members of a group mold the social character. That is where the saying, “birds of a feather flock together” comes from. Love, tenderness, sadism, masochism, ambition, curiosity, anxiety, rivalry—these and many other drives are no longer each attributed to a special instinct, but to the influence of the environment (essentially the significant persons in early childhood) via the psyche. The description given thus far suggest that character determines, the character trait, whether loving or destroying, drives a person to behave in a certain way, and the person is acting according to one’s character feels satisfied. Indeed, the character traits tells us how a person would like to behave. However, we must add an important qualification: if one could. The conflict between what we would like to do and the demands of self-interest remains crucial. We cannot always behave as we are driven to by our passions, because we have to modify our behavior to some extent in order to remain alive. The average person tries to find a compromise between what one’s character would make one want to do and what one must do in order not to suffer more or less harmful consequences. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
The degree to which a person follows the dictates of self-preservation (ego interest) varies, of course. At one extreme the weight of the ego interest is zero; this holds true for the martyr and a certain type person who targets and terminates prominent people. At the other extreme is the opportunist for who self-interest includes everything that could make one more successful, popular, or comfortable. Between these two extremes all people can be arranged, characterized by a specific blend of self-interest and character-rooted passions. How much a person represses one’s passionate desires depends not only on factors within oneself but on the situations; if the situation changes, repressed desires become conscious and are acted out. This holds true, for instance, for the person with a sadistic-masochistic character. Everybody knows the type of person who is submissive to one’s boss and sadistically domineering to one’s wife and children. Another case in point is the change that occurs in character when the total social situation changes. The sadistic character who may have posed as a meek or even friendly individual may become a fiend in a terroristic society in which sadism is valued rather than deplored. Another may suppress sadistic behavior in all visible actions, while showing it in a subtle expression of the face or in seemingly harmless and marginal remarks. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
Repression of character traits also occurs with regard to the most noble impulses. In spite of the fact that the teachings of Jesus are still part of our moral ideology, a being acting in accordance with them is generally considered a fool or a neurotic; hence many people still rationalize their generous impulses as being motivated by self-interests. These considerations show that the motivating power of character traits is influenced by self-interest in varying degrees. They imply that character constitutes the main motivation of human behavior, but restricted and modified by the demands of self-interest under varying conditions. Here is possessed the fundamental difference between behaviorism and psychoanalytic characterology. Conditioning works through its appeal to self-interest, such as the desire for food, security, praise, avoidance of pain. In animals, self-interest proves to be so strong that by repeated and optimally spaced reinforcements that interest for self-preservation proves to be stronger than other instincts like pleasures of the flesh or aggression. Humans of course also behave in accordance with one’s self-interest; but not always, and not necessarily so. One often acts according to one’s passions, one’s meanest and one’s noblest, and is often willing—and able—to risk one’s self-interest, one’s fortune, one’s freedom, and one’s life in the pursuit of love, truth, and integrity—or for hate, greed, sadism, and destructiveness. In this very difference is possessed the reason conditioning cannot be a sufficient explanation for human behavior. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
The discovery of unconscious processes and of the dynamic concept of character were radical because they went to the roots of human behavior; they were disquieting because nobody can hide any longer behind one’s good intentions; they were dangerous, because if everybody were to know what one could know about oneself and others, society would be shaken to its very foundations. Psychoanalysts is essentially a theory of unconscious strivings, of resistance, of falsification of reality according to one’s subjective needs and expectations (transference), of character, and of conflicts between passionate strivings embodied in character traits and the demands for self-preservation. Thus far, feelings of inferiority have nothing to do with any factual inferiority, but have been discussed only as the effects of a tendency to recoil from competition. Do they then have nothing to do with existing shortcomings, with a realization of actual flaws? They are in fact the result of both actual and imagined inadequacies: feelings of inferiority are a combination of anxiety-motivated belittling tendencies and a realization of existing defects. As I have emphasized several times, we cannot ultimately fool ourselves, though we may be successful in shutting certain impulses out of awareness. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
And therefore a neurotic person of the character we have been discussing will know, deep down, that one has anti-social tendencies which one must conceal, that one is far from genuine in one’s attitudes, that one’s pretenses are quite different from the undercurrents below the surface. One’s registering of all these discrepancies is an important cause for one’s feelings of inferiority, even though one never recognizes clearly the source of the discrepancies because they arise from repressed drives. Not recognizing their source, one gives to oneself reasons for feeling inferior which are rarely the real reasons, but only a renationalization. There is another reason why one feels that one’s inferiority feelings are the direct expression of an existing deficiency. On the basis of one’s ambition one has built up fantastic notions of one’s own value and importance. One cannot help measuring one’s realistic accomplishments against one’s notions of being a genius or a perfect human being, and in this comparison one’s real acts or one’s real possibilities appear inferior. The total result of all these recoiling tendencies is that the neurotic incurs real failures, or at most does not get on as well as one should, considering one’s opportunities and one’s gifts. Others who started with one get ahead of one, have better careers, greater success. This lagging behind does not concern only external success. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
The older one becomes the more one feels the discrepancy between one’s potentialities and one’s achievements. One feels keenly that one’s gifts, whatever they may be, are going to waste, that one is blocked in the development of one’s personality, that one does not mature as time goes on. The problem of persons around the age of forty is that they become blocked in their development. However, one has not recognized the conditions leading up to such a situation, and therefore has not found any satisfactory solution. And one reacts to the realization of this discrepancy with a vague discontent, a discontent which is not masochistic but real and proportionate. A discrepancy between potentialities and achievement may be due, as I have already pointed out, to external circumstances. However, the discrepancy which develops in a neurotic person, and which is a never-failing character of neuroses, is due to one’s internal conflicts. One’s actual failures and the consequent increasing discrepancy between potentialities and achievements inevitably give even greater force to one’s existing inferiority feelings. Thus one not only believes oneself to be, but actually is inferior to what one might be. The impact of this development is all the greater since it puts the inferiority feelings on a realistic basis. Meanwhile the other discrepancy which I have mentioned—that between high-flown ambitions and the comparatively poor reality—becomes so unbearable that it demands a remedy. As such a remedy fantasy offer itself. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
More and more the neurotic substitutes grandiose ideas for attainable goals. The value they have for one is obvious: they cover up one’s unendurable feelings of nothingness; they allow one to feel important without entering into any competition and thus without incurring the risk of failure or success; they allow one to build up a fiction of grandeur far beyond attainable goal. It is this blind-alley value of grandiose fantasies that makes them dangerous, because the blind alley has a definite advantage for the neurotic when compared with the straightforward road. These neurotic ideas of grandeur should be distinguished from those of the normal person and those of the psychotic. Even the normal person will at times think oneself wonderful, attribute undue importance to what one is doing, or indulge in fantasies of what one might do. However, these fantasies and ideas remain decorative arabesques and one does not take them too seriously. They psychotic person with ideas of grandeur is at the other end of the line. One is convinced that one is a genius, the Emperor of Japan, Napoleon, Christ, and will reject all evidence of reality which tends to disprove one’s conviction; one will be wholly unable to comprehend any reminder that one is actually a less affluent doorman, or patient in an asylum or the object of disrespect and ridicule. If one become aware of the discrepancy at all one will decide in favor of one’s grandiose ideas, and will believe that the others do not know any better, or that they are deliberately treating one with disrespect in order to hurt one. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
However, if therapy enables the individual to reorient one’s pattern of life and to reduce the tension and anxiety one feels regarding one’s personal problems, then the reactions of one’s automatic nervous system in, for example, a situation of stress, should also be altered. Essentially, if a change in life pattern and in internal tension occurred in therapy, this should show up in organismic changes in autonomic functioning, an area over which the individual has no conscious control. Individual who have experienced therapy develop a higher frustration threshold during their series of therapeutic contacts, and are able to recover their homeostatic balance more rapidly following frustration. After therapy, the individual is able to meet, with more tolerance and less disturbance, situations of emotional stress and frustration or stress was never considered in therapy; the more effective meeting of frustration is not a surface phenomenon but is evident in autonomic reactions which the individual cannot consciously control and of which one is completely unaware. Thus, it is predicted that if therapy enabled the individual to better handle stress at the psychological level, then this should be evident also in one’s autonomic functioning. Therefore, do not major in the minors. Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes. Remember to breathe not weak, snatched gasps, but deep riveting drafts. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
Another point in which the impossibility of the theory of addition of love and justice becomes visible is the relation of love and justice to the concrete situation. Justice is expressed in principles and laws none of which can ever reach the uniqueness of the concrete situation. Every decision which is based on the abstract formulation of justice alone is essentially and inescapably unjust. Justice can be reached only if both the demand of the universal law and the demand of the particular situation are accepted and made effective for the concrete situation. However, it is love which created participation in the concrete situation. It would be completely wrong to say that love must be added to justice if the uniqueness of the situation is to be reached. For this would mean that justice as such is impossible. Actually the situation shows that justice is just because of the love which is implicit in it. However, this can e understood fully only in the context of an ontological analysis of the root meanings of both love and justice. The weight of the problems and the dangerous character of the confusions is equally obvious when we finally confront power and justice. It is in this realm of problems that the relation of law and order to justice and of all of them to power is discussed and more often confused than illuminated. The first questions is: Who gives the law in which justice is supposed to be expressed? #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
To give a law is the basic manifestation of power. However, if a group which has power gives laws, how are they related to justice? Are they not simply the expression of the will to power of this group? The Marxist theory of the State asserts that the laws of the State are tools which give social control to a ruling group. The origin of its power may be military invasion or it may be socioeconomic stratification. In both cases justice is possible only if the State has withered away and has been replaced by an administration without political power. The justice of the ruling class is injustice and, if defended, ideology. The laws it gives preserve a social order, and as long as there is no alternative social order, the laws of the ruling classes are better than chaos. The more cynical representatives of this theory interpret justice exclusively as a function of power and in no way as its judge. They accept the Marxist analysis without the Marxist expectation, and reduce justice completely to a function of power. In reaction against this removal of justice as an ultimate principle a theory has been developed which tries to separate justice from power and completely and to establish it as a self-contained system of valid judgements. Justice is an absolute, without any relation to structures of power. The absolute law, derived from the principles of the natural or rational law, does not express wat is, but it demands what should be. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
Irrespective of power it commands and expects obedience because of its intrinsic validity. It does not express but it judges power. The contrast of these two theories about the relation of power to justice reveals the difficulty of the problem and the necessity of an ontological research into the rot meanings of power and justice. As announced before, I have led you into a jungle of problems and confusions, and, at every point, I have indicated the way out; namely, the ontological analysis of love, power, and justice. When the God we love chose to reveal Himself, He did so in creation itself and in more specific, special ways—most importantly, in the Scriptures and Jesus Christ. When we affirm that the Bible is a revelation from God, we do not simply assert that God as a person is known in and through it. We also mean that God has revealed understandable, objectively true propositions. The Lord’s Word is not only practically useful, it is also theoretically true (John 17.17). God has revealed truth to us and not just Himself. This truth is addressed to our minds and requires an intellectual grasp to understand and then apply. Because of the Bible’s nature, serious study is needed to grasp what it says. Of course, the Scripture contains easily grasped portions that are fairly straightforward. However, some of it is very difficult, intellectually speaking. In fact, Peter one said that some of Paul’s writings were intellectually challenging, hard to understand, and easily distorted (that is, uneducated in Christian theology) and unstable people (2 Peter 3.16). #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
The more a person develops the mind and the understanding of hermeneutics (the science of interpreting the Scriptures), the more one will be able to understand the meaning and significance of the Scriptures. Unfortunately, many today apparently think that hard intellectual work is not needed to understand God’s propositional revelation to us. Instead, they believe that the Holy spirit will simply make know the meaning of a text if it is implored to do so. Tragically, this represents a misunderstanding of the Spirit’s role in understanding the Scriptures. In my view, the Spirit does not help the believer understand the meaning of Scripture. Rather, He speaks to the believer’s soul, convicting, comforting, opening up applications of His truths through His promptings. On the evening Christ gave Himself up for us, John 17 tells us, He prayed in succession for Himself, for His twelve disciples, and for all of us who would later believe. When He finished praying for His future bride, He went to the cross. Then came Hos death, His resurrection, His ascension, and His enthronement at the right hand of the Father, where He constantly makes intercession for us. Thus we understand that giving ourselves for our brides involves prayerful intercession. Men, do you pray for your wives with something more than, “Bless good Meghan in all she does”? If not, you are sinning against her and against God. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Most Christian men who claim to love their wives never offer more than a perfunctory nod to their wives’ needs before God. Men, you ought to have a list of her needs, spoken and unspoken, which you passionately hold up to God out of love for her. Praying is the material work of a Christian husband! The most basic command is, “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave up himself for her.” Men, we are divinely called to die for our brides, to take on her sufferings as our own, and to make intercession for her. You are supposed to be her ride or die man. When it is said that the readiness of the seeker determines the appearance of the master, this applies to the first fundamental initiation of one’s spiritual life. It does not mean that a master will come into one’s own town and seek one out, but that one will come into one’s life. And this may be brought about in various ways—as by the seeker oneself being led, either by Worldly circumstances or by one’s own seeking, out of one’s own town to the town or country where the master is living. The location of one’s spiritual guide will in part be the accident of one’s own geographical situation, for one will obviously be limited in one’s selection to possibilities and reputations in one’s own country or nation or race. The sheer physical and financial difficulties of traveling throughout the World—not to mention the obstacles of personal circumstance, family obligations, and ignorance of where to search and whom to approach in foreign lands, combine to set this limitation upon one’s inquiry and hence upon one’s opportunity. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
It is foolish to seek holiness geographically or holy beings in particular places. I have found that one being may live in a Himalayan abode and be a scoundrel and another being may live in a Bowery slum and be a saint. Wherever the live, people always carry their own thoughts and their own selves with them. The Soul, which is the object of our quest, is within us. The Master, who is to guide us upon our quest, will appear whenever we are ready for one and wherever we happen to live—or else we will be led to one. There are beings in the New World and the Old World, not less wise and noble than each other. If we have not met them, “the fault, Dear Brutus is…in ourselves,” primarily in our unworthiness, and secondarily in our incapacity to recognize what is beneath the surface. All speculation upon the motives and the methods of the illuminate will avail little. The light by which one works is denied to ordinary beings. We should not try to bind one down to qualities which fit only those who grope in the dark or move in twilight. We should trust where we cannot see and wait patiently for the day of revilement, when we will find all made clear and all riddle solved to our satisfaction. It is an old truism in the Old World that it takes an adept to understand an adept, but the New World will have to learn this truth by bitter experiences with pseudo-adepts. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
There are many signs of one’s spiritual status in the dignity and composure of one’s bearing, the deliberateness and truthfulness of one’s speech, and the impressiveness of one’s tension-free face. Helter Skelter is a phrase taken from a song performed by a well-known rock music group. Charles Manson used it to characterize that state of confusion in which he kept his followers, and himself as well. In the state of helter-skelter nothing makes sense, and everything makes as much sense as anything else. Manson was able to use this ideology to brainwash his followers and make them believe they were not responsible for their actions and they were not doing anything wrong when the ended the life of an individual. He taught them they if harm came to a person by means of his follower’s hands, then it was meant to be, it was in divine order and they did no really harm the individual and the individual was still alive on a different plane of existence. Aldous Huxley, in one of his retrospective writings, commented on how, among the associates of his youth, the endless talk of meaninglessness—the meaninglessness of life and therefore of everything in it—was merely an excuse to permit them to do whatever they wanted. Their life was organized (or, more properly, disorganized) around their feelings and wayward thoughts, with their will in two. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
However, resolute action for the good requires that things make sense. You would not want someone caught up in helter-skelter to work on your lawn mower, do your gastrointestinal examination, nor work on your computer. Life makes sense only if you understand its basic components and how they interrelate to form the whole. Evil, on the other hand, thrives on confusion. God is not the author of confusion (1 Corinthians 14.33). Frankly, our visible Christian World is not too far from helter-skelter with reference to its understanding of the makeup of the person and therefore of the spiritual life and spiritual formation. We need to access the fullness of biblical teachings on these matters. We suffer far too much from the influence of a surrounding culture that thrives on confusions. (And therefore its denial that human beings have a nature.) This may seem like a harsh thing to say about our “Christian World,” and I am sorry to day it; but the issues here are too important to mince words. Accordingly, much of what we do in Christian circles with very good intentions—hoping, we say, to see steady, significant growth in Christlikeness—simply makes no sense and lead nowhere so far as substantive spiritual formation is concerned. What a brutal thing to say! However, we need to recognize this, or show why it is not the case. I hope we have taken significant first steps toward a clarity that can serve as a foundation for the effectual practice of Christian spiritual formation. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
You live longer once you realize that any time spent being unhappy is wasted. “As far as the East is from the West, so far has he removed our transgression from us,” reports Psalm 103.12. How far is the East from the West? If you start due north at any point on Earth, you would eventually cross over the North Pole and start going south, but that is not true when you go East or West. If you start West and continue in that direction you will always be going West. North and South meet at the North Pole, but East and West never meet. In a sense, they are an infinite distance apart. So when God says He removes our transgressions from us as far as the East is from the West, He is saying they have been removed an infinite distance from us. However, how can we get a handle on this rather abstract truth in such a way that it becomes meaningful in our lives? When God uses this metaphorical expression describing the extent of His forgiveness of our sin, He is saying His forgiveness is total, complete, and unconditional. God is saying He is not keeping score with regard to our sins. “He does not treat us as our sins deserve or repay us according to our iniquities,” reports Psalm 103.10. Yes, God actually says that! I know it seems too good to be true. I confess I almost hesitate to write those words because they are so foreign to our innate concepts of reward and punishment. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
However, those gracious words are right in the Bible, and they are God’s words. How can God possibly do this? How can He so completely disregard our transgressions as to say He removes them an infinite distance from us? The answer is by His grace through Jesus Christ. God laid our sins on Christ and He bore the penalty we should have borne. Because of Christ’s death in our place, God’s justice is now completely satisfied. God can now, without violating His justice or His moral law, forgive us freely, completely and absolutely. He can now extend His grace to us; He can show favor to those who, in themselves, deserve only wrath. O Loving Wisdom of the living God, O living everlasting Word and everlasting Power of God the eternal Father—for everlasting is Thy birth, Who art the everlasting Son of God the everlasting Father, and art God; without Whom is nothing, by Whom are all things; in Whom consisteth whatever is; Who art God above us, and Man for our sakes; for Thou hast willed for us to be what we are: grant us what Thou hast promised; give to us, although unworthy, what Thou hast offered to all alike; that is, that Thy Passion may be our deliverance, and Thy Death our life, and Thy cross our redemption, and Thy Wound our healing; that being crucified with Thee, we may by Thy gift be lifted up on high to Thy Father, with Whom in bliss Thou livest and reignest. “And it is by faith that my fathers have obtained the promise that these things should come unto their brethren through the Gentiles; therefore the Lord hath commanded me, yea, even Jesus Christ,” reports Ether 12.22. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
O Source of All Good, what shall I render to three for the gift of gifts, then own dear Son, begotten, not created, my redeemer, proxy, surety, substitute, his self-emptying incomprehensible, his infinity of love beyond the heart’s grasp. Herein is wonder of wonders: he came below to rise me above, was born like me that I might become like him. Herein is love; when I cannot rise to him he draws near on wings of grace, to raise me to himself. Herein is power; when Deity and humanity were infinitely apart he untied them in indissoluble unity, the uncreated and the created. Herein is wisdom; when I was undone, with no will to return to him, and no intellect to devise recovery, he came, God-incarnate, to save me to the uttermost as man to die my death, to shed satisfying blood on my behalf, to work out a perfect righteousness for me. O God, take me in spirit to the watchful shepherds, and enlarge my mind; let me hear good tidings of great joy, and hearing, believe, rejoice, praise, adore, my conscience bathed in an ocean of repose, my eyes uplifted to reconcile Father; place me with ox, mule, camel, goat, to look with them upon my redeemer’s face, and in him account myself delivered from sin; let me with Simeon clasp the new-born child to my heart, embrace him with undying faith, exulting that he is mine and I am his. In him thou hast given me so much that Heaven can give no more. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
CRESLEIGH MEADOWS AT PLUMAS RANCH
Plumas Lake, CA | from the mid $300’s
NOW AVAILABLE!
Cresleigh Meadows is NOW AVAILABLE!! Found just north of Feather River Boulevard, Cresleigh Meadows is home of the largest neighborhood in Plumas Ranch as well as the popular Bear River Park. Good interiors have a soul. With four floor plans available, ranging from approximately 2,000 – 3,500 square feet offering, three to five bedrooms, we are certain you will find the home that fits your needs and lifestyle.
Popular design elements include open floor plans, large kitchen islands, and flex spaces are staples in Cresleigh homes. Multi-generational living options also available in select homes. These homes are a crisp American take–spirited, clean, bright, optimistic and never age and are always beautiful. They are a daydream come true. https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-meadows-at-plumas-ranch/
But I Never Forget Dear Your Sweet Memory—If You Really Love Me be Honest with Me!
Leadership is a potent combination of strategy and character. However, if you must be without one, be without the strategy. Patience is a virtue that carries a lot of wait. Therefore, be bold in what you stand for and careful in what you fall for. The need for superiority in the case of he detached person has certain superiority in the case of the detached person has certain specific features. Abhorring competitive struggle, one does not want to excel realistically through consistent effort. One feels rather that the treasures withing one should be recognized without any effort on one’s part; one hidden greatness should be felt without one’s having to make a move. In one’s dreams, for instance, one may picture stores of treasure hidden away in some remote village which connoisseurs come from far to see. Like all notions of superiority this contains an element of reality. The hidden treasure symbolizes one’s intellectual and emotional life which one guards within the magic circle. Another way one’s sense of superiority express itself is in one’s feeling of one’s own uniqueness. This is a direct outgrowth of one’s wanting to feel separate and distinct from others. One may liken oneself to a tree standing alone on a hilltop, while the trees in the forest below are stunted by those about them. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
Where the compliant type looks at one’s fellow humans with the silent question, “Will he or she like me?”—and the aggressive type wants to know, “How strong an adversary is he or she?” or “Can one be useful to me?”—the detached person’s first concern is, “Will he or she interfere with me?” Will one want to influence me or will one leave me alone?” The scene in which Peer Gynt meets the buttonmolder is a perfect symbolic representation of the terror the detached person feels at being thrown with others. One’s own room in hell would be all right, but to be tossed into a melting pot, to be molded or adapted to others, is a horrifying thought. One feels oneself akin to a rare Persian rug, unique in its pattern and combination of colors, forever unalterable. One takes extraordinary pride in having kept free of the leveling influences of environment and is determined to keep on doing so. In cherishing one’s unchangeableness one raises the rigidity inherent in all neuroses to the dignity of a sacred principle. Willing and even eager to elaborate one’s own pattern, to give it greater purity and lucidity, one insists that nothing extrinsic be injected. In all its simplicity and inadequacy the Peer Gynt maxim stands: “To thyself be enough.” The emotional life of the detached person does not follow as strict a patter as that of the other types detached. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
Individual variations are greater in one’s case, chiefly because in contradistinction to the other two, whose predominant trends are directed toward beneficial goals—affection, intimacy, love in the one; survival, domination, success in the other—one’s goals are negative: one wants not to be involved, not to need anybody, not to allow others to intrude on or influence one. Hence the emotional picture would be dependent on the particular desires that have developed or been allowed to stay alive within this negative framework, and only a limited number of tendencies intrinsic to detachment as such can be formulated. There is a general tendency to suppress all feeling, even to deny its existence. I should like to quote here a passage from an unpublished novel of the poet Anna Maria Armi, because it succinctly expresses not only this tendency but also other typical attitudes of the detached person. The main character, reminiscing about one’s adolescence, says: “I could visualize a strong physical tie (as I had with my father) and a strong spiritual tie (as I had with my heroes), but I could not see where or how feeling came into it; feelings simply did not exist—people lied about that as about so many other things. B. was horrified. ‘But how do you explain sacrifice?’ she said. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
“For a moment I was astounded by the truth in her remark; then I decided that sacrifice was just another of lies, and when it was not a lie it was either a physical or spiritual act. I dreamed at that time of living alone, of never marrying, of becoming strong and peaceful without talking too much, without asking for help. I wanted to work on myself, to be freer and freer, to give up dreams in order to see and live clearly. I thought morals had no meaning; being good or bad made no difference as long as you were absolutely true. The great sin was to look for sympathy or to expect help. Souls seemed to me temples that had to be guarded, and inside them there were always strange ceremonies going on, known only to their priests, their custodians.” The rejection of feeling pertains primarily to feelings toward other people and applies to both love and hate. It is a logical consequence of the need to keep at an emotional distance from others, in that strong love or hate, consciously experienced, would bring one either close to others or into conflict with them. The term, distance machinery, is appropriate here. It does not necessarily follow that feeling will be suppressed in areas outside human relationships and become active in the realm of books, animals, nature, art, food, and so on. However, there is considerable danger in this. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
For a person capable of deep and passionate emotion it may be impossible to suppress only one sector of one’s feelings—and that the most crucial—without going the whole length of suppressing feeling altogether. This is speculative reasoning, but certainly the following is true. Artists of the detached type, who have demonstrated in their creative periods that they can not only feel deeply but also give expression to it, have often gone through periods, usually in adolescence, of either complete emotional numbness or of vigorous denial of all feeling—as in the passage quoted. The creative periods seem to occur when, following some disastrous attempts at close relationships, they have either deliberately or spontaneously adapted their lives to detachment—that is, when they have consciously or unconsciously determined to keep at a distance from others, or have become resigned to a kind of isolated living. The fact that now, at a safe distance from others, they can release and express a host of feelings not directly connected with human relationships permits the interpretation that early denial of all feelings was necessary to the achievement of their detachment. Another reason why the suppression of feeling may go beyond the sphere of human relationships has already been suggested in our discussion of self-sufficiency. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
Any desire, interest, or enjoyment that might make the detached person dependent upon others is viewed as treachery from within and may be checked on that account. It is as if every situation had to be carefully tested from the standpoint of a possible loss of freedom before feeling could be allowed full play. Any threat of dependence will cause one to withdraw emotionally. However, when one finds a situation quite safe in this regard one can enjoy it to the full. Profound emotional experience is possible under these conditions. The lurking fear of either becoming too attached to a pleasure or of its infringing upon one’s freedom indirectly will sometimes make one verge on the ascetic. However, it is an asceticism of its own kind—not oriented toward self-denial or self-torture. We might rather call it a self-discipline which—accepting the premises—is not lacking in wisdom. It is of great important to physic balance that there be areas accessible to spontaneous emotional experience. Creative abilities, for instance, may be a kind of salvation. If their expression has been inhibited, and if then through analysis or some other experience it is liberated, the beneficent effect upon the detached person can be so great as to make it look like a miraculous cure. Caution is in order in evaluating such cures. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
In the first place it would be a mistake to make any generalization about their occurrence: what may mean salvation foe a detached person will not necessarily have any such meaning for others. And even for one it is not strictly a “cure” in the sense of a radical change in neurotic fundamentals. It merely allows one a more satisfactory and less disturbed way of living. The more the emotions are checked, the more likely it is that emphasis will be placed upon intelligence. The expectation then will be that everything can be solved by sheer power of reasoning, as if mere knowledge of one’s own problems would be sufficient to cure them. Or as if reasoning alone could cure all the troubles of the World! Acceptant of the person by loving individuals as a unique being rather than as an object, the more the individual will come to perceive oneself as a person of value rather than a material object to be used. The reputation of a thousand years may be determined by the conduct of one hour. In greater matters people show themselves as they wish to be seen; in small matters, as they are. Nearly all people can stand adversity, but if you want to test a person’s character, give one power. The foundations of character are built not by lecture, but by bricks of good example, laid day by day. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
In reviewing one’s own moral career, the stigmatized individual may single out and retrospectively elaborate experiences which serve for one to account for one’s coming to the beliefs and practices that one now has regarding one’s own kind and normals. A life event can thus have a double bearing on moral career, first as immediate objective grounds for an actual turning point, and later (and easier to demonstrate) as a means of accounting for a position currently taken. One experience often selected for this latter purpose is that through which the newly stigmatized individual learns that full-fledged members of the group are quite like ordinary human beings. A physically disabled man provides a statement: “If I had to choose one group of experiences that finally convinced me of the importance of this problem [of self-image] and that I had to fight my own battles of identification, it would be the incidents that made me realize with my heart that people who have physical limitations can be identified with characteristics other than their physical disability. I managed to see that people who have a physical disability could be comely, charming, well-built, masculine, neatly dressed, beautiful, ugly, lovely, stupid, brilliant—just like all other people, and I discovered that I was able to hate or love someone with a physical limitation in spite of one’s disability. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
It may be added that in looking back to the occasion of discovering that persons with one’s stigma are human beings like everyone else, the individual may bring to bear a later occasion when one’s pre-stigma friends imputed un-humanness to those one had by then learned to see as full-fledged persons like oneself. Thus, in reviewing one’s experience as a circus worker, a young girl sees first that she had learned her fellow-workers are not freaks, and send that her pre-circus friends fear for her having to travel in a bus along with other members of the troupe. Another turning point—retrospectively if not originally—is the isolating, incapacitating experience, often a period of hospitalization, which comes later to be seen as the time when the individual was able to think through one’s problem, learn about oneself, sort out one’s situation, and arrive at a new understanding of what is important and work seeking in life. It should be added that not only are personal experiences retrospectively identified as turning points, but experiences once removed may be employed in this way. It should be added that not only are personal experiences retrospectively identified as turning points, but experiences once removed may be employed in this way. Good character is more to be praised than outstanding talent. Most talents are, to some extent, a gift. Good character, by contrast, is not given to us. We have to build it piece by piece—by thought, choice, courage, and determination. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
There is nothing ambiguous about “abundance” and “superfluity,” even though there is little difference in their root meanings. “Abundance” comes to us from the Latin word una (wave), which English still retains in its basic meaning in words like “undulate” and “undulant.” Abundance, too, means an “overflowing,” yet it has acquired an altogether beneficial meaning in our language. An abundant land provides us with more than just the basic necessities. It is a land of plenty what the Old Testament describes as “a land flowing with milk and honey.” Or suppose you have been to a party where there was no scarcity of refreshments. You might say, “The wine flowed in abundance,” and you would mean something beneficial by that. There was no shortage of good things, no rationing, no need to worry about overdoing today and going without tomorrow. However, if we want to suggest the negative aspects of an “overflowing,” the word that some to mind is “superfluous.” That word, like “affluent,” goes back to the Latin verb fluere, and a superfluity is therefore a “super-flowing.” Here, however, the overflow is seen in a strictly negative light. It is pointless, wasteful. If you say to someone, “Your presence here is superfluous,” you are really saying, “Why do you not go away?” You are not saying, “How nice that you are here,” which is what you do mean, more of less, if you speak of wine being present in abundance. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
So whenever we speak of affluence, we have to ask ourselves whether we mean a beneficial, enlivening abundance or a negative, deadening superfluity. Turning now to “ennui,” we find that its basic meaning is stronger than our current definition of boredom or a feeling of dissatisfaction and weariness. Ennui and the English word “annoy” both derive from the Latin inodiare, “to make loathsome or hateful.” We might ask ourselves now, taking our clues from these words we have just examined, whether superfluity does not lead to boredom, disgust, and hatred. If so, then we should ask ourselves some hard questions about our affluent society. By “we” I mean modern industrial society as it has developed in the United States of America, Canada, and Western Europe. Do we live in affluence? Who in our society lives in affluence, and what kind of affluence is it, an affluence of abundance or an affluence of superfluity? To put the question more simply yet: Is it good affluence or bad affluence? Does affluence necessarily produce ennui? And what would a good, abundant, ebullient kind of affluence look like, and affluence that does not produce ennui? There are two possibilities, two approaches to the psychological study of the human psyche. At the moment academic psychology studies human beings primarily from the standpoint of behaviorism. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
Behaviorism is limited exclusively to what can be directly seen and observed, to what is visible and what can therefore be measured and weighed, for whatever cannot be directly seen and observed cannot be measures or weighted either, at least not with sufficient precision. Depth psychology, the psychoanalytical method, proceeds differently. It has different goals. It does not limit its study of human actions and behavior solely to what can be seen. It inquires instead into the nature of behavior, into the motives underlying behavior. You can describe, for instance, a person’s smile. That is an action that can be photographed, that can be described in terms of the musculature of the face, and so on. However, you know very well, that there are differences among the smile of a salesgirl in a shop, the smile of someone who is antagonistic toward you but wants to hide one’s antagonism, and the smile of a friend who is happy to see you. You are able to distinguish among hundreds of kinds of smiles that take rise from different psychic states. They are all smiles, but the things they express can be Worlds apart. No machine can measure or even perceive those differences. Only a human being who is not a machine—you, for example—can do that. You observe not only with your mind but also, if I may be allowed such an old-fashioned expression, with your heart. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Your whole being comprehends what transpires before it. You can sense what kind of smile you are seeing. And if you cannot sense things like that, then you will be in for a lot of disappointments in your life. Or take a very different kind of behavior: the way someone eats. All right, so someone eats. However, how does one eat? One person wolfs one’s food down. Another person’s manner at table reveals that one is pedantic and attaches great importance to doing things in an orderly fashion and cleaning up one’s plate. Still another eats without haste, without greediness. One enjoys one’s food. One simply eats and takes pleasure in eating. Or take still another example. Someone bellows and turns red in the face. You conclude one is angry. Surely one is angry. However, then you take a little closer look at one and ask yourself what it is the person is feeling (perhaps you know one fairly well), and suddenly you realize that he or she is afraid. One is frightened, and one’s rage is simply a reaction to one’s own fear. And then you may look even deeper still and realize that this is a human being who feels thoroughly helpless and powerless, someone who is afraid of everything, of life itself. So you have made three observations: that one is angry, that one is afraid, and that one feels a profound sense of helplessness. All three observations are correct. However, they relate to different levels of one’s psychic structure. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
The observation that takes on one’s sense of powerlessness is the one that registers most profoundly what is going on inside one. The observation that takes in nothing but rage is the most superficial. In other words, if you react by flying into a rage as well and see nothing but an angry person in the other individual, then you have failed to see one at all. However, if you can look being the façade of the angry person and see the frightened one, the one who feels helpless, then you will approach one differently, and it may happen that one’s anger will subside because one no longer feels threatened. From a psychoanalytical point of view, what interests us is not human behavior viewed from the outside but rather what motivates a person has, what one’s intentions are, whether one is conscious of them or not. We are interested in the quality of one’s behavior. The analyst listens with a third ear. Or, one reads between the lines. One sees not only what is offered one directly but perceives something more in what is offered and observable. One sees into the heart of the personality whose every action is merely an expression, a manifestation, yet one that is always colored by the entire personality. Every last bit of behavior is a gesture originating in one specific human individual and in no other, and that is why there are no two human actions that are identical, any more than there are two identical human beings. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
They may resemble each other; they may be related; but they are never the same. There are no two people who raise a hand in exactly the same way, who walk the same way, who tilt their heads in the same way. That is why you can sometimes recognize a person by one’s gait even though you have not seen one’s face. A gait can be as characteristic for a person as one’s face, sometimes even more so, for it is more difficult to alter a gait than the expression of the face. We can lie with our faces. That is a capability we have that animals do not. It is more difficult to lie with one’s body, though that too can be learned. It is not that some of us become sinful because of an unfortunate childhood environment, while others are blessed with a highly moral upbringing. Rather we are all born sinners with a corrupt nature, a natural inclination to go out own way. As David wrote, “Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me,” reports Psalm 51.5. Here is an amazing statement from David that he was sinful while still in his mother’s womb, even during the period of pregnancy when as yet he had performed no actions, either good or bad. Because of Adam’s rebellion, we are all born with a sinful perverse nature, an inclination to go our own way. Whether it is the way of the decent individual or the way of the obvious transgressor, it makes no difference. We were all born in a state of rebellion against God. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
The Bible says we have all sinned, and almost everyone would agree with the statement. Descriptive synonyms for sin—rebellion, despising, defying—and God takes a far more serious view of sin than the being on the street or even most Christians. Sin, in the final analysis, is rebellion against the sovereign Creator, Ruler, and Judge of the Universe. It resists the rightful prerogative of a sovereign Ruler to command obedience from His subjects. It says to an absolutely holy and righteous God that His moral laws, which are a reflection of His own nature, are not worthy of our wholehearted obedience. Sin is not only a series of actions, it is also an attitude that ignores the law of God. However, it is even more than a rebellious attitude. Sin is a state of heart, a condition of our inmost being. It is a state of corruption, of vileness, yes, even of filthiness in God’s sight. This view of sin as corrupt, vileness, and filth is symbolically when Joshua the high priest—the person holding the highest religious office in Israel is shown dressed in filthy clothes, a pictorial representation of both his sins and the sins of the people he represented as high priest. The filthiness of his garments depicts not the guilt of his sin but its pollution. Like Joshua, all of us are, in a spiritual sense, dressed in filthy clothes. We are not justly guilty before God; we are also corrupted in our natures, polluted and vile before Him. We need forgiveness and cleansing. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
For this reason the Bible never speaks of God’s grace as simply making up our deficiencies—as if salvation consists in so much good works (even a variable amount) plus so much of God’s grace. Rather the Bible speaks of “a God who justifies the wicked,” who is found by those who do not seek Him, who reveals Himself to those who do not ask for Him, reports Romans 4.5, 10.20. However, the seeker should resolve to appeal directly by constant aspiration and prayer to one’s own higher self, in the knowledge that it alone can help one if one is to work without a teacher. On the other hand, if one’s soul has decreed that one is to have a guide, God will bring before one the mental image or intuitive thought of the Master. If this happens, one will not need to seek out the Master’s physical person; the inner picture brings results. Cicero wrote nearly two thousand years ago that the ideally perfect person is nowhere to be found at all. Who, except wishful thinkers and pious sentimentalists, can gainsay him? Those who seek absolute perfection, whether in someone else or for themselves, seek what is unattainable in this World. It is not possible to find human perfection. Travel, contact, and experience with them reveal that not one is always infallible, not one failed to commit errors of judgment. We do not just need God’s grace to make up for our deficiencies; we need His grace to provide a remedy for our guilt, a cleansing for out pollution. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
We need God’s grace to provide a satisfaction of His justice, to cancel a debt we cannot pay. It may seem that I am belaboring the point of our guilt and vileness before God. However, we can never rightly understand God’s grace until we understand our plight as those who need His grace. The first and possibly most fundamental characteristic of divine grace is that it presupposes sin and guilt. Grace has meaning only when beings are seen as fallen, unworthy of salvation, and liable to eternal wrath. Grace does not contemplate sinners merely as undeserving but as ill-deserving. It is not simply that we do not deserve hell. The discipline of the mind is, of course, the greatest of challenges. And Scripture regularly presents its discipline as a discipline of the eyes. Humans, if you are a television-watching, fake news consuming couch bacon cheese burger with medium fries and a diet coke and a slice of cherry pie, it is impossible for you to maintain a pure mind. In one week you will watch more murders, adulteries, and perversions than our grandfathers read about in their entire lives. Things are getting so bad that people are even acting out scripts in their daily lives because they have become slaves to sin and inequity. “Can a human scoop fire into one’s lap without one’s clothes being burned?” reports Proverbs 6.27. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
This also means treating all women with dignity—looking at them respectfully. If their dress or demeanor is distracting, look them in the eyes, and nowhere else, and get away as quickly as you can! The mind also encompasses the tongue. “For out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks,” reports Matthew 12.34. “But among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immortality, or any kind of impurity, or of greed, because these are improper for God’s holy people. Nor should there be obscenity, foolish talk, or coarse joking, which are out of place, but rather thanksgiving,” reports Ephesians 5.3. There must be no sexual humor, urbane vulgarities, and coarseness, as so many Christians are so prone to do to prove they are not “slow” or “out of it.” The human self requires rootedness in others. This is primarily an ontological matter—a matter of being what we are. It is not just a moral matter, a matter of what ought to be. And the moral aspect of it grows out of the ontological. The most fundamental “other” for the human is, of course, God himself. God is the ultimate social fact for the human being. That is why people in general think more often about God than about any other thing, even pleasures of the flesh and death. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
However, because all are to be rooted in God—and really are, whether they want it or not—our ties to one another cannot be isolated from our shared relationship to God, nor our relationship to him from our ties to one another. Our relations to others cannot be right unless we see those others in their relation to God. Though others God comes to us and we only really find others when we see them in God. When scripture speaks of God’s arm, the literal sense is not that God has such a member, but only what is signified by this member, namely operative power. Hence, it is plain that nothing false can ever underlie the literal sense of Holy Writ. Appetite is the power of receiving and giving. The appetite that is in all things to receive and to give part of God’s plan. Things receive what is attractive and reject what is repugnant, and the preference of the receiver determines the action of the giver. Giving and receiving, furthermore, are motions the one motion affecting preservation and the other multiplication. Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom. O God, beneath Whose eyes every heart trembles, and all consciences are afraid; be merciful to the groanings of all, and heal the wounds of all; that as not one of us is free from fault, so not one may be shut out from pardon; through Jesus Christ our Lord. “He hath filled me with his love, even unto the consuming of my flesh. He hath confounded mine enemies, unto the causing of them to quake before me,” reports 2 Nephi 4.21-22. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Almighty and merciful God, Who willest not the souls of sinners to perish, but their faults; restrain the anger which we deserve, and pour our upon us the clemency which we entreat, that through Thy mercy we may pass from mourning into joy; through Jesus Christ our Lord. O fountain of all good, destroy in me every lofty thought, break pride to pieces and scatter it to the winds, annihilate each clinging shred of self-righteousness, implant in me true lowliness of spirit, abase me to self-loathing and self-abhorrence, open in me a fount of penitential tears, break me, then bind me up; thus will my heart be a prepared dwelling for my God; then can the Father take up his abode in me, then can the blessed Jesus come with healing in his touch, then can the Holy Spirit descend in sanctifying grace; O Holy Trinity, three Persons and one God, inhabit me, a temple consecrated to thy glory. When thou art present, evil cannot abide; in thy fellowship is fullness of joy, beneath thy smile is peace of conscience, by thy side no fears disturb, no apprehensions banish rest of mind, with thee my heart shall bloom with fragrance; make me meet, through repentance, for thine indwelling. Nothing is too great for thee to do, nothing is too good for thee to give. Infinite is thy might, boundless thy love, limitless thy grace, glorious thy saving name. Let Angels sing for sinners repenting, prodigals restored backsliders reclaimed, Satan’s captives released, blind eyes opened, broken hearts bound up, the despondent cheered, the self-righteous stripped, the formalist driven from a refuge of lies, the ignorant enlightened, and saints built up in their holy faith. I ask great things of a great God. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
BRIGHTON STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH
Rancho Cordova, CA |
Now Selling!
NOW SELLING! Brighton Station at Cresleigh Ranch is Rancho Cordova’s newest home community! This charming neighborhood offers an array of home types with eye catching architecture styles such as Mid-Century Modern, California Modern, Prairie, and Contemporary Farmhouse. Details make this modern sized Cresleigh home stand out at a glance. It is reminiscent of the Italianate style of architecture that was distinct in the 19th-century phase in the history of architecture. The captivating well-designed floor plans make it even more attractive. Notice how guests as well as family are accommodated: bathroom on first floor; gathering room, fireplace and attached formal dining room. Included is an enchanting master suite with grand bath. There are also other bedrooms, bathrooms, and a two car garage.
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 (Home Owner’s Association) fees, two community parks and the benefits of being a part of the highly-rated Elk Grove Unified School District. https://cresleigh.com/brighton-station/
Come to Me and You Will Find Rest in Your Souls–I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End!
We often worry about what we will be tomorrow, but do not take into account that we are somebody today. Life should be a place of learning suffused with excitement, engagement, passion, challenge, creativity, and joy. When we are in the minority, that is when the test of courage comes; when we are in the majority is when the test of acceptance comes. It is our destiny and the destiny of everything in the World that we must come to an end. Very end that we experience in nature and humankind speaks to us with a loud voice: you also will come to an end! It may reveal itself in the farewell to a place where we have lived for a long time, the separation from the fellowship of intimate associates, the death of someone near to us. Or it may become apparent to us in the failure of a work that gave meaning to us, the end of a whole period of life, the approach of old age, or even in the melancholy side of nature visible in autumn. All this tells us: you will also come to an end. Whenever we are shaken by this voice reminding us of our end, we ask anxiously—what does it mean that we have a beginning and an end, that we come from the darkness of the not yet, and rush ahead towards the darkness of the no more? When Augustine asked this question, he began his attempt to answer it with a prayer. And it is right to do so, because praying means elevating oneself to the eternal. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
In fact, there is no other way of judging time than to see it in the light of the eternal. In order to judge something, one must be partly within it, partly out of it. If we were totally within time, we would not be able to elevate ourselves in prayer, meditation and thought, to the eternal. We would be children of time like all other creatures and could not ask the question of the meaning of time. However, as human beings we are aware of the eternal to which we belong and from which we are estranged by the bondage of time. We speak of time in three ways or modes—the past, present, and future. Every child is aware of them, but no wise being has ever penetrated their mystery. We become aware of them when we hear a voice telling us: you also will come to an end. It is the future that awakens us to the mystery of time. Time runs from the beginning to the end, but our awareness of times goes in the opposite direction. It starts with the anxious anticipation of the end. In the light of the future we see the past and present. So let us first consider our going into the future and towards the end that is the last point that we can anticipate in out future. The image of the future produces contrasting feelings in beings. The expectation of the future gives one a feeling of joy. We may even learn to recapture the will to laugh and the art of laughing at will. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
It is a great thing to have a future in which one can actualize one’s possibilities, in which one can experience the abundance of life, in which one can create something new—be it new work, a new way of life, or the regeneration of one’s own being. Courageously one goes ahead towards the new, especially in the earlier part of one’s own life. However, this feeling struggles with other ones: the anxiety about what is hidden in the future, the ambiguity of everything it will bring us, the shortness of its duration that decreases with every year of our life and becomes shorter the nearer we come to the unavoidable end. And finally the end itself, with its impenetrable darkness and the threat that one’s whole existence in time will be judged as a failure. Therefore, it may be a good idea to think before one speaks, and read before one thinks. This may give one something to think about that we did not make up ourselves—a wise move at any age, but most especially at seventeen, when one is at the greatest danger of coming to annoying conclusions. We want to be in the pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in the pursuit of us. The goal is to fully realize the wealth of sympathy, kindness, and generosity hidden in our souls. The effort of every true education should be to unlock that treasure. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
How do beings, how do you, react to this image of the future with its hope and threat and inescapable end? Probably most of us react by looking at the immediate future, anticipating it, working for it, hoping for it, being anxious about it, while cutting off from our awareness the future which is farther away, and above all, by cutting off from our consciousness the end, the last moment of our future. Perhaps we could not live without doing so most of our time. However, perhaps we will not be able to die if we always do so. And if one is not able to die, is one really about to live? How do we react if we become aware of the inescapable end contained in our future? Are we able to bear it, to take its anxiety into a courage that faces ultimate darkness? Or are we thrown into utter hopelessness? Do we hope against hope, or do we repress our awareness of the end because we cannot stand it? Repressing the consciousness of our end expresses itself in several ways. Many try to do so by putting the expectation of a long life between now and the end. For them it is decisive that the end be delayed. Even old people who are near the end do this, for they cannot endure the fact that the end will not be delayed much longer. Many people realize this deception and hope for a continuation of this life after death. They expect an endless future in which they may achieve or possess what has been denied them in this life. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
This attitude that we will achieve our hearts desires in the after life is a prevalent attitude about the future, and also a very simple one. It denies that there is an end. It refuses to accept that we are creatures, that we come from the eternal ground of time and return to the eternal ground of time and have received a limited span of time as our time. It replaces eternity by endless future. However, endless future is without a final aim; it repeats itself and could well be described as an image of hell. This is not the Christian way of dealing with the end. The Christian message says the eternal stands above past and future. “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.” The Christian message acknowledges that time runs towards an end, and that we move towards the end of that time which is our time. Many people—but not the Bible—speak loosely of the “hereafter” or the “life after death.” Even in our liturgies eternity is translated by “World without end.” However, the World, by its very nature, is that which comes to an end. If we want to speak in truth without foolish, wishful thinking, we should speak about the eternal that is neither timelessness nor endless time. The mystery of the future is answered in the eternal of which we may speak in images taken from time. However, if we forget that the images are images, we fall into absurdities and self-deceptions. There is no time after time, but there is eternity above time. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
Time is like a jigsaw puzzle. Each edge piece of a puzzle interlocks with two others to form the puzzle’s framework and give structure and support to the puzzle as a whole. Each piece has a unique design and cut that ensures just the right place to fit within the puzzle. Each morning, people from the edge pieces that interlock to create a safe environment and give support to one another and the whole. Each morning, they provide just the right place for every individual to fit safely and securely. The community members are strength and stability, and like the edge pieces, they do not stand alone in this responsibility. There are always others to support and assist, ensuring that every person has a place. The spirits temper the movements of bodily parts. Some infectious diseases are chiefly in the spirits, and not so much in the humours. We have complex and contradictory feelings toward the freedom and independence and self-determination of the individuals and countries: we desire these and are proud of the past support we have given to such tendencies, and yet we are often frightened by what they may mean. We tend to value and respect the dignity and worth of each individual, yet when we are frightened, we move away from this direction. Suppose we presented ourselves in some such fashion, openly and transparently, in our foreign relations. We would be attempting to be the nation which we truly are, in all our complexity and even contradictoriness. What would be the result? #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
If we, as a country, were more open and transparent in our foreign relations, it seems the results would be similar to the experiences of a client when one is more truly that which he or she is. Let us look at some of the probable outcomes. We would be much more comfortable, because we would have nothing to hide. We could focus on the problem at hand, rather than spending our energies to prove that we are moral or consistent. We could use all of our creative imagination in solving the problem, rather than in defending ourselves. We could openly advance both our selfish interests, and our sympathetic concern for others, and let these conflicting desires find the balance which is acceptable to us as a people. We could freely change and grow in our leadership position, because we would not be bound by rigid concepts of what we have been, must, ought to be. We would find that we were much less feared, because others would be less inclined to suspect what lies behind the façade. We would, by our own openness, tend to bring forth openness and realism on the part of others. We would tend to work out the solutions of World problems on the basis of the real issues involved, rather than in terms of the facades being worn by the negotiating parties. In short what I am suggesting by this fantasied example is that nations and organizations might discover, as have individuals, that it is a richly rewarding experience to be what one deeply is. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
I am suggesting that this view contains the seeds of a philosophical approach to all of life, that it is more than a trend observed in the experience of clients. Feeling rules are what guide emotion work by establishing the sense of entitlement or obligation that governs emotional exchanges. This emotion system works privately, often free of observation. It is a vital aspect of deep private bonds and also affords a way of talking about them. It is a way of describing how—as parents and children, wives and husbands, friends and lovers—we intervene in feelings in order to shape them. What are feeling rules? How do we know they exist? How do they bear on deep acting? We may address these questions by focusing on the pinch between “what I do feel” and “what I should feel,” for at this spot we get our best view of emotional convention. Now, when we take a closer look at the whole person, we find that there are six basic aspects in our lives as individual human beings—six things inseparable from every human life. These together and in interplay make up human nature. Thought (images, concepts, judgments, inferences), feeling (sensation, emotion), choice (will, decision, character), body (action, interaction with the physical World), social context (personal and structural relations to others), and soul (the factor that integrates all of the above to form one life. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
Simply put, every human being thinks (has a thought life), feels, chooses, interacts with one’s body and its social context, and (more of less) integrates all of the foregoing as parts of one life. These are the essential factors in a human being, and nothing essential to human life falls outside of them. The ideal of the spiritual life in the Christian understanding is one where all of the essential parts of the human self are effectively organized around Go, as they are restored and sustained by him. Spiritual formation in Christ is the process leading to that ideal end, and its result is love of God with all of the hearts, soul, mind, and strength, and of the neighbor as oneself. The human self is then fully integrated under God. The salvation or deliverance of the believer in Christ is essentially holistic or whole-life. David the psalmist, speaking of his own experience but prophetically expressing the understanding of Jesus the Messiah, said, “I bless the LORD who gives me counsel; in the night also my heart instructs me. I keep the LORD always before me; because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved. Therefore my heart is glad, and my soul rejoices; my body also rests secure,” reports Psalm 16.7-9. Note how many aspects of the self are explicitly involved in this passage: the mind, the will, the feeling, the soul, and the body. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
A major part of understanding spiritual formation in the Christian traditions is to follow closely the way the biblical writings repeatedly and emphatically focus on the various essential dimensions of the human being and their role in life as a whole. We will draw from spiritual understanding the incentive to keep on with our quest and the courage to set higher goals. To learn from God in this total-life immersion is ow we seek first His kingdom and His righteousness. The outcome is that we increasingly are able to do all things, speaking or acting, as I Christ were doing them. As apprentices of Christ we are not learning how to do some special religious activity, but how to live every moment of our live from the reality of God’s kingdom. I am learning how to live my actual life as Jesus would if He were me. No matter what my profession is, I am in full-time Christian service no less than someone who earns his or her living in a specifically religious role. Jesus stands beside me and teaches me in all I do to live in God’s World. He shows me how, in every circumstance, to reside in His word and thus be a genuine apprentice of His—His disciple indeed. This enables me to find the reality of God’s World everywhere I may be, and thereby to escape from enslavement to sin and evil. We become able to do what we know to be good and right, even when it is humanly impossible. Our lives and words become constant testimony of the reality of God. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
When, for example, an architect facing a difficult architectural job, one must know how to integrate it into the kingdom of God as much as someone attempting to win another to Christ or preparing a lesson for a congregation. Until we are clear on this, we will have missed Jesus’ connection between life and God and will automatically exclude most of our everyday lives from the domain of faith and discipleship. Jesus lived most of His life on Earth as a blue-collar worker, someone we might describe today as an independent contractor. In His vocation He practiced everything He later taught about in life in the kingdom. It is important to move away from derogatory language against others, calling them twits, jerks, or idiots, and increasingly mesh with the respect and endearment for persons that naturally flows from God’s way. This in turn transforms all of my dealings with others into tenderness and makes the usual coldness and brutality of human relations, which lays a natural foundation for unspeakable actions, simply unthinkable. Our mind and heart will keep coming back to God’s grace. The grace of God is so inexhaustible and at times overwhelming. “Grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be glory both now and forever more! Amen,” reports 2 Peter 3.18. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
Growing in the grace of God allows one to become acquainted with elements of our experience which have in the past been denied to awareness as too threatening, too damaging to the structure of the self. One finds one’s experiencing these feelings fully, completely, in the relationship, so that for the moment one is one’s fear, or one’s anger, or one’s tenderness, or one’s strength. And as one lives these widely varied feelings, in all their degrees of intensity, one discovers that one has experienced oneself, that one is all these feelings. One finds that one’s behavior changing in constructive fashion in accordance with one’s newly experienced self. One approaches the realization that one no longer needs to fear what experience may hold, but can welcome it freely as a part of one’s changing and developing self. However, it seems to me that the good life is not any fixed state. It is not, in my estimation, a state of virtue, or contentment, or nirvana, or happiness. It is not a condition in which the individual is adjusted, or fulfilled, or actualized. It is not a state of drive-reduction, or tension-reduction, or homeostasis. I believe that all of these terms have been used in ways which imply that if one or several of these states is achieved, then the goal of life have been achieved. Certainly, for many people happiness, or adjustment, are seen as states of being which are synonymous with the good life. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
Social scientists have frequently spoken of the reduction of tension, or the achievement of homeostasis or equilibrium as if these states constituted the goal of the process of living. So it is with a certain amount of surprise and concern that I realize that my experience supports none of these definitions. If I focus on the experience of those individuals who seem to have evidenced the greatest degree of movement during the spiritual and therapeutic relationship, and who, in the years following this relationship, appear to have made and to be making real progress toward the good life, then it seems to me that they are not adequately described at all by any of these terms which refer to fixed states of being. I believe they would consider themselves insulted if they were described as adjusted, and they would regard it as false if they were described as happy or contented or even actualized. As I have known them I would regard it as most inaccurate to say that all their dive tensions have been reduced, or that they are in a state of homeostasis. So I am forced to ask myself whether there is any way in which I can generalize about their situation, any definition which I can give of the good life which would seem to fit the facts as I have observed them. I find this not at all easy, and what follows is stated very tentatively. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction, not a destination. The direction which constitutes the good life is that which is selected by the total organism, when there is psychological freedom to move in any direction. This organismically selected direction seems to have certain discernible general qualities which appear to be the same in a wide variety of unique individuals. The good life, from the point of view of my experience, is the process of movement in a direction which the human organism selects when it is inwardly free to move in any direction, and the general qualities of this selected direction appear to have a certain universality. Many people, however, seem to be morally bankrupt—completely devoid of any decent moral qualities. And it is just about the worst thing you can say about a person. A lot of people are also spiritually bankrupt. Spiritual bankruptcy is a most absolute state. It means we have nothing to give to God. Salvation is a gift from God; it is entirely by grace through faith—not by works. People living the good life are righteous and the process seems to involve an increasing openness to the experience. It is the polar opposite of defensiveness. Defensiveness is an organism’s response to experiences which are perceived or anticipated as threatening, as incongruent with the individual’s existing picture of oneself, or of oneself in relationship to the World. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
These threatening experiences are temporarily rendered harmless by being distorted in awareness, or being denied to awareness. I quite literally cannot see, with accuracy, those experiences, feelings, reactions in myself which are significantly at variance with the picture of myself which I already possess. A large part of the process of therapy is the continuing discovery by the client that one is experiencing feelings and attitudes which heretofore one has not been able to be aware of, which one has not been able to own as being a part of oneself. If a person could be fully open to one’s experience, however, every stimulus—whether originating within the organism or in the environment—would be freely relayed through the nervous system without being distorted by any defensive mechanism. There would be no need of the mechanism of subception whereby the organism is forewarned of any experience threatening to the self. On the contrary, whether the stimulus was the impact of a configuration of form, color, or sound in the environment on the sensory nerves, or a memory trace from the past, or visceral sensation of fear or pleasure or disgust, the person would be living it, would have it completely available to awareness. Thus, one aspect of this process which I am naming the good life appears to be a movement away from the pole of defensiveness toward the pole of openness to experience. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
The individual living the good life is becoming more able to listen to oneself, to experience what is going on within oneself. One is more open to one’s feelings of fear and discouragement and pain. One is also more open to one’s feelings of courage, and tenderness, and awe. One is free to live one’s feelings subjectively, as they exist in one, and also free to be aware of these feelings. One is more able fully to live the experiences of one’s organism rather than shutting them off. Almighty and everlasting God, Who hast made known the Incarnation of Thy Word by the testimony of a glorious star, which when the wise men be held, they adored Thy Majesty with gifts; grant that the star of Thy righteousness may always appear in our hearts, and our treasure consist in giving thanks to Thee; through Jesus Christ our Lord. O God, the Enlightener of all nations, grant Thy people to enjoy perpetual peace; and pour into our hearts that radiant light which Thou didst shed into the minds of the wise men; thought Jesus Christ Our Lord. “Behold, O Lord, thou hast smitten us because of our iniquity, and hast driven us forth, and for these many years we have been in the wilderness; nevertheless, thou hast been merciful unto us. O Lord, look upon me in pity, and turn away thine anger from this thy people, and suffer not that they shall go forth across this raging deep in darkness; but behold these things which I have molten out of rock,” reports Ether 3.3. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
CRESLEIGH MEADOWS AT PLUMAS RANCH
Plumas Lake, CA | from the mid $300’s
Coming Soon!
Cresleigh homes gives emphasis to detail and authenticity in their designs, remaining true to a style architecturally, while updating floor plans to create a modern, comfortable home. This combination of classic architectural style and easy livability add up to solid, long-lasting value. Today, there is a return to traditionalism and pure styles. People want the look and feel of an older home with the amenities and comforts of modern floor planning. Elaborate master bedroom suites, cozy country kitchens, libraries, media centers, and great rooms are all part of what makes a plan livable.
Cresleigh Meadows is coming soon! Found just north of Feather River Boulevard, Cresleigh Meadows is home of the largest neighborhood in Plumas Ranch as well as the popular Bear River Park. With four floor plans available, ranging from approximately 2,000 – 3,500 square feet offering, three to five bedrooms, we are certain you will find the home that fits your needs and lifestyle. Popular design elements include open floor plans, large kitchen islands, and flex spaces are staples in Cresleigh homes. Multi-generational living options also available in select homes. https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-meadows-at-plumas-ranch/

#CresleighHomes
The Line Between Knowing and Loving is Impossible to Draw–Feelings are More Important than Anything Under the Sun!
“It is easy for us to make beings like you. We do it all the time. There is nothing to it. We can easily replace you. Understand, all the mental and physical equipment we have given you is for a purpose.” At this point, I knew my first real fear. I was afraid they were going to do away with Derek then and there. I could not bear it. The pain in me was so all-consuming that it took all the strength I possessed to stand by and say nothing. However, I did not feel that there was anything that I could do to prevent whatever the Parents would now do to Derek. What deep-seated fears and needs underly Derek’s delusional system? We were long in finding out, for Derek’s preventions effectively concealed the secret of his autistic behavior. In the meantime we dealt with his peripheral problems one by one. During his first year with us Derek’s most trying problem was toilet behavior. This surprised us, for Derek’s personality was not “anal” in the Freudian sense; his original personality damage had antedated the period of his toilet-training. Rigid and early toilet-training, however, had certainly contributed to his anxieties. It was our effort to help Derek with this problem that led to his first recognition of us as human beings. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Going to the toilet, like everything else in Derek’s life, was surrounded y elaborate preventions. We had to accompany him; he had to take off all his clothes; he could only squat, not sit on the toilet seat; he had to touch the wall with one hand, in which he also clutched frantically the vacuum tubes that powered his elimination. He was terrified lest his whole body would be sucked down. To counteract this fear we gave him a metal wastebasket in lieu of the toilet. Eventually, when eliminating into the wastebasket, he no longer needed to take off all his clothes, nor to hold on to the wall. He still needed the tubes and motor which, he believed moved his bowels for him. However, here again the all-important machinery was itself a source of new terrors. In Derek’s World the gadgets had to move their bowels, too. He was terribly concerned that they should, but since they were so much more powerful than men, he was also terrified that if his tubes moved their bowels, their feces would fill all of space and leave him no room to live. He was thus always caught in some fearful contradiction. Our readiness to accept his toilet habits, which obviously entailed some hardship for his counselors, gave Derek the confidence to express his obsession in drawings. Drawing these fantasies was a first step toward letting us in, however distantly, to what concerned him most deeply. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
Drawing was the first step in a year-long process of externalizing Derek’s anal preoccupations. As a result he began seeing feces everywhere; the whole World became to hm a mire of excrement. At the same time he began to eliminate freely wherever he happened to be. However, with this release from his infantile imprisonment in compulsive rules, the toilet and the whole process of elimination became less dangerous. Thus far it had been beyond Derek’s comprehension that anybody could possibly move his bowels without mechanical assistance. Now Derek took a further step forward; defecation became the first physiological process he could perform without the help of vacuum tubes. It must not be thought that he was proud of this ability. Taking pride in an achievement presupposes that one accomplishes it of one’s own free will. He still did not feel himself an autonomous person who could do things on his own. To Derek defecation still seemed enslaved to some incomprehensible but utterly binding cosmic law, perhaps the law his parents had imposed on him when he was being toilet trained. It was not simply that his parents had subjected him to rigid, early training. Many children are so trained. However, in most cases the parents have a deep emotional investment in the child’s performance. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
As a result of this deep emotional investment, the child’s response in turn makes training an occasion for interaction between them and for the building of genuine relationships. Derek’s parents had no emotional investment in him. His obedience gave them no satisfaction and won him no affection or approval. As a toilet-trained child he saved his mother labor, just as household machines saved her labor. As a machine he was not loved for his performance, nor could he love himself. So it has been with all other aspects of Derek’s existence with his parents. Their reactions to his eating or noneating, sleeping or wakening, urinating or defecating, being dressed or undressed, washed or bathed did not flow from any unitary interest in him, deeply embedded in their personalities. By treating him mechanically his parents made him a machine. The various functions of life—even the parts of his body—bore no integrating relationship to one another or to any sense of self that was acknowledged and confirmed by others. Though he had acquired mastery over some functions, such as toilet-training and speech, he had acquired them separately and kept then isolated from each other. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
Toilet-training had thus not gained Derek a pleasant feeling of body mastery; speech had not led to communication of thought or feeling. On the contrary, each achievement only steered him away from -self-mastery and integration. Toilet-training had enslaved him. Speech left him talking in neologisms that obstructed his and our ability to relate to each other. In Derek’s development the normal process of growth had been made to run backward. Whatever he had learned put him not at the end of his infantile development toward integration but, on the contrary, farther behind than he was a its beginning. Had we understood this sooner, his first years with us would have been less baffling. In order to explore more fully the relations among the several parts of social front, it will be convenient to consider here a significant characteristic of the information conveyed by front, namely, its abstractness and generality. However specialized and unique a routine is, its social front, with certain exceptions will tend to claim fact that can be equally claimed and asserted of other, somewhat different routines. It is unlikely that Derek’s calamity could befall a child in any time and culture but our own. He suffered no physical deprivation; he starved for human contact. Just to be taken care of is not enough. At the extreme where utter scarcity reigns, the forming of relationships is certainly hampered. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
However, in our society of mechanized plenty often makes for equal difficulties in a child’s learning to relate. Where parents can provide simple creature-comforts for their children only at the cost of significant effort, it is likely that they will feel pleasure, that gives children a sense of personal worth and sets the process of relating in motion. However, if comfort is so readily available that the parents feel no particular pleasure in winning it for their children, then the children cannot develop the feeling of being worthwhile around the satisfaction of their basic needs. Of course parents and children can and do develop relationships around other situations. However, matters are then no longer so simple and direct. If he is to feel loved and worthy of respect and consideration, the child must be on the receiving end of care and concern given with pleasures and without the exaction of return. This feeling gives him the ability to trust; he can entrust his well-being to persons to whom he is so important. Out of such trust the child learns to form close and stable relationships. For Derek relations with his parents were empty of pleasures in comfort-giving as in all other situations. His was an extreme instance of a plight that sends many schizophrenic children to our clinics and hospitals. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
Many months passed before he could relate to us; his despair that anybody could like him made contact impossible. When Derek could finally trust us enough to let himself become more infantile, he began to play at being a papoose. There was a corresponding change in his fantasies. He drew endless pictures of himself as an electrical papoose. Totally enclosed, suspended in empty space, he is run by unknown, unseen powers through wireless electricity. As we eventually came to understand, the heart of Derek’s delusional system was the artificial, mechanical womb he had created and into which he had locked himself. In his papoose fantasies lay the wish to be entirely reborn in a womb. His new experience in the school suggested that life, after all, might be worth living. Now he was searching for a way to be reborn in a better way. Since machines were better than men, what was more natural than trying to rebirth through them? This was the deeper meaning of his electrical papoose. As Derek made progress, his pictures of himself became more dominant in his drawings. Though still machine operated, he has grown in self-importance. Now he has acquired hands that do something, and he has had the courage to make a picture of the machine that runs him. Later still the papoose became a person, rather than a robot encased in glass. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Eventually Derek began to create an imaginary family at the school: the “Carr” family. Why the Carr family? In the car he was enclosed as he had been in his papoose, but at least the car was not stationary; it could move. More important, in a car one was not only driven but also could drive. The Carr family was Derek’s way of exploring the possibility of leaving the school, of living with a good family in a safe, protecting car. Derek at last broke through his prison. In this brief account it has not been possible to trace the painfully slow process of his first true relations with other human beings. Suffice it to say that he ceased to be a mechanical boy and became a human child. This newborn child was, however, nearly 12 years old. To recover the lost time is a tremendous task. That work has occupied Derek and us ever since. Sometimes he sets to it with a will; at other times the difficulty of real life makes him regret that he ever came out of his shell. However, he has never wanted to return to his mechanical life. One last detail and this fragment of Derek’s story has been told. When Derek was 12, he made a float for our Veteran’s Day parade. It carried the slogan: “Feeling are more important that anything under the Sun.” Feelings, Derek had learned, are what make for humanity; their absence, for a mechanical existence. With this knowledge Derek entered the human condition. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
Instead of having to maintain a different pattern of expectation and responsive treatment for each slightly different performer and performance one can place the situation in a broad category around which it is easy for one to mobilize one’s past experience and stereotypical thinking. Observers then need only be familiar with a small and hence manageable vocabulary of fronts, and know how to respond to them in order to orient themselves in a wide variety of situations. There are grounds for believing that the tendency for a large number of different acts to be presented from behind a small number of fronts is a natural development in social organization. In the descriptive kinship system which gives each persona a unique place, it may work for very small communities, but, as the number of persons becomes large, clan segmentation becomes necessary as a means of providing a less complicated system of identifications and treatments. As a compromise, the full range of diversity is cut at a few crucial points, and all those within a given bracket are allowed or obliged to maintain the same social front in certain situations. In addition to the fact that different routines may employ the same front, it is to be noted that a given social front tends to become institutionalized in terms of the abstract stereotyped expectations to which it gives rise, and tends to take on meaning and stability apart from the specific tasks which happen at the time to be performed in its name. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
The front becomes a collective representation and a fact in its own right. When an actor takes on an established social role, usually one finds that a particular front has already been established for it. Whether one’s acquisitions of the role was primarily motivated by a desire to perform the given takes or by a desire to maintain the corresponding front, the factor will find that one must do both. Further, if the individual takes on a task that is not only new to one but also unestablished in the society, of if one attempts to change the light in which one’s task is viewed, one is likely to find that there are already several well-established fronts among which one must choose. Thus, when a task is given a new front we seldom find that the front it is given is itself new. Since fronts tend to be selected, not created, we may expect trouble to arise when those who perform a given task are forced to select a suitable from for themselves from among several quite dissimilar ones. Thus, in military organizations, task are always developing which (it is felt) require too much authority and skill to be carried out behind the front maintained by one grade of personnel and too little authority and skill to be carried out behind the front maintained by the next grade in the hierarchy. Since there are relatively large jumps between grades, the task will come to carry too much rank or to carry too little. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
When Reese remarked to me that a man in her home town would not have committed suicide if one person had known him, what was she saying? I believe she was saying that this man had no person to whom he could open himself up, no one who was interested enough in him to listen, to pay attention to him. Se was saying that he lacked someone who had compassion for him, a compassion which would be the basis of his self-esteem. If he had had such a person, he would have counted himself too valuable to wipe out. She was also saying, although she did not know it, that the line between knowing and loving is impossible to draw. One merges into the other. If I know someone well I will tend to have compassion for one; and as I have compassion for one I will try to know one well. This is why it is next to impossible, when somebody you dislike is talking to listen to one, take in what you hear, and let it form itself into a comprehensible structure in your mind. If not our ears, the tendency is to close off our minds; to block out the person we do not like. The development of power is a prerequisite for compassion just as it is for communication. At the beginning of psychotherapy persons are normally so bereft of power in interpersonal relationships that they have very little compassion to give. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
Compassion requires that one have some security, some position of power from which one can give concern to another. Lack of self-esteem and self-affirmation makes it very difficult to have anything left over for others; an individual must have something with which to prime the pump before one can give to others. I cannot agree with some of my colleagues who hold that there are two kinds of people: those who operate by love, and those who operate by power. I believe this is a dichotomy which leaves the way open for the illusion of the past, namely that one can have powerless love and another (generally a person one does not like) loveless power. Do not protest, let love alone rule! Can you prove it true? However resolve: every morning I shall concern myself anew about the boundary between the love-deeds-Yes and the power-deed-No and pressing forward honor reality. If we are to honor reality, we must be aware that power and love can have a dialectical relationship, each feeding and nourishing the other. We must turn our attention to the interplay between love and power, and the fact that powers needs love if it is not to slide into manipulation. Power without charity ends up in cruelty. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
The destructive kind of power generally comes from persons who have suffered radical deprivation, like when Duke Harry, despairing over the lack of effect his protest had in Washington, fantasied firing all the people in the supermarket. The constructive forms of power, such as nutrient power and integrative power, come only when there has already been built up within the individual some self-esteem and self-affirmation. Having established the relationship between power and love, let me now state that there is an experience in which love does transcend power. This is shown in Goethe’s drama in which Faust has made his compact with Mephistopheles to gain infinite knowledge and infinite sensual experience. Mephistopheles can give him only power, and that he does. Faust has loved Margarete and Helen of Tory and thinks he will leave them easily and casually behind. However, when Faust experiences the moment when his soul should logically be surrendered to the devil, he is saved by Margarete’s love for him. The mothers re-enter the drama, carrying with them the ties that every being has with nature and humankind. This allegory of love conquering power reveals an archetype of human experience that speaks to us all in diverse ways: I do not know what would remain to us were love not transfigured power and power not staying love. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
We are the creatures whose love is continually straying into power, and whose power is occasionally transfigured by love. We all participate in some way or other in the power structure of our society. Compassion is the name of that form of love which is based on our knowing and our understanding each other. Compassion is the awareness that we are all in the same yacht and that we all shall either skin of swim together. Compassion arises from the recognition of community. It realizes that all being, men and women, are bothers and sisters, even though a disciplining of our own instincts is necessary for us even to being to carry out that belief in our actions. Compassion is the tie felt for another not because one fulfills one’s potentialities (as if anyone ever did!). Compassion is felt for another as much because one does not fulfill one’s potentialities—in other words, one is human, like you or me, forever engaged in the struggle between fulfillment and nonfulfillment. We then surrender the demand that we be divine in order to join humankind in its suffering and its destiny. We are all lonely….We have learnt to pity one another for being alone. And we have learnt that nothing remains to be discovered except compassion. Compassion is the acceptance of the conviction that nothing human is foreign to me. I can then understand that if my enemy is killed, humanity is reduced that much. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
Even if the sum total of cruelty has not greatly diminished in the last twenty-one centuries—children still suffer for the things which they have not the slightest responsibility—we shall not require a token of success. It is in the confronting of this dilemma—fighting cruelty without regard for tangible success—that beings discover what one is in the dept of one’s personality. An interesting illustration of the dilemma of selecting an appropriate front from several not quite fitting ones may be found today in American medical organization with respect to the task of administering anesthesia. In some hospitals anesthesia is still administered by nurses being the front that nurses are allowed to have in hospitals regardless of the task they perform—a front involving ceremonial subordination to doctors and a relatively low rate of pay. In order to establish anesthesiology as a specialty for graduate medical doctors, interested practitioners have had to advocate strongly the idea that administering anesthesia is a sufficiently complex and vital task to justify giving to those who perform it the ceremonial and financial reward given to doctors. The difference between the front maintained by a nurse and the front maintained by a doctor is great; many things that are acceptable for nurses are infra dignitatem for doctors. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Some medical people have felt that a nurse under-ranked for the task of administering anesthesia and that doctors over-ranked; were there an established status midway between nurse and doctor, an easier solution to the problem could perhaps be found. Similarly, had the Canadian Army had a rank halfway between lieutenant and captain, two and a half pips instead of two or three, then Dental Corps captains, any of them of underrepresented ethnic origin, could have been given a rank that would perhaps have been more suitable in the eyes of the Army than the captaincies they were actually given. I do not mean here to stress the point of view of a formal organization or a society; the individual, as someone who possesses a limited range of sign-equipment, must also make unhappy choices. Thus, in the crofting community studied by the writer, hosts often marked the visit of a friend by offering one a shot of hard liquor, a glass of wine, some home-made brew, or a cup of tea. The higher the rank or temporary ceremonial status of the visitor, the more likely one was to receive an offering near the liquor end of the continuum. Now one problem associated with this range of sign-equipment was that some crofters could not afford to keep a bottle of hard liquor, so that wine tended to be the most indulgent gesture they could employ. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
However, perhaps a more common difficulty was the fact that certain visitors, given their permanent and temporary status at the time, outranked one potable and under-ranked the next one in line. There was often a danger that the visitor would feel just a little affronted or, on the other hand, that the host’s costly and limited sign-equipment would be misused. In our middle classes a similar situation arises when a hostess has to decide whether or not to use the good silver, or which would be the more appropriate to wear, her best afternoon dress or her plainest evening gown. Compassion gives us a basis for arriving at the humanistic position which will include both power and love. Compassion occupies a position opposite to violence; as violence projects hostile images on the opponent, compassion accepts such daimonic impulses in one’s self. It gives us the basis for judging someone without condemning one. Although loving one’s enemies requires grace, compassion for one’s enemies is a human possibility. I have suggested that social front can be divined into traditional parts, such as settings, appearances, and manner, and that (since different routines may be presented from behind the same front) we may not find a perfect fit between the specific character of a performance and the general socialized guise in which it appears to us. #RandolphHarris #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
These two facts, taken together, lead one to appreciate that items in the social front of a particular routine are not only found in the social fronts of a whole range of routines, but also that the whole range of routines in which one items of sign equipment is found will differ from the range of routines in which another item in the same social front will be found. Thus, a lawyer may talk to a client in a social setting that one employs only for this purpose (or for a study), but the suitable clothes one wears on such occasions one will also employ, with equal suitability, at dinner with colleagues and at the theater with is wife. Similarly, the prints that hang on one’s wall and the carpet or hardwood on the floor may be found in domestic social establishments. Of course, in highly ceremonial occasions, settings, manner, and appearance may all be unique and specific, used only for performances of a single type of routine, but such exclusive use of sign equipment is the exception rather than the rule. Will our compassion be ignited by the wars in African and the Middle East? Many of us have no way out of despair at being unable to stop these cruel holocausts, noting effective to do, struggle as we might with the viable alternatives. Almost universally these wars are hated, and is they could, most people would like to forget. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Regardless of all our protests and prayers, it goes on and on, with the steady attrition of our sense of honesty, credulity, and even language. However, even as we continue all efforts to end the wars as soon as is humanly possible, it may be that the Middle East and Africa will be, in the long run, of service—if one may speak that way without blasphemy—to America. With all the evil the wars in Africa and the Middle East, daimonically indeed, represent an occasion in which American could achieve an insight into life that will be essential to its future. This could come about by our gaining a tragic sense, an awareness of our own complicity in evil, our own participation in automatized, dehumanized destructiveness. “All the violence you see amongst the mammals, all of it stems from the drive to live, to survive, and to have offspring to survive and to obtain all the food and drink necessary to survive and procreate. This is the basis of all life on Earth. And self-aware human mammals—intelligent mammals—are the most savage and cruel and vicious of all beings on the planet, or any planet in the ‘Realm of Worlds.’ They are always too deeply enmeshed in pain or pleasure, loneliness or suffocating sense of paralysis, a need for love, or a raging jealousy resulting from love, or a desire for vengeance due to personal defeat or injury. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
“And when they [humans] are physically wounded or experience disease, their suffering is unendurable for them. They are driven by it to terrible extremes. Peace, harmony, joy elude these creatures. (Pages 248-249 of Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis by Anne Rice.) The guilt we feel is surely a normal guilt and may be the beginning of America’s transformation from an adolescent posturing to the maturity of a responsible nation. So far we have kept our innocence, despite all lessons to the contrary. Let us hope that these sad events will constitute a farewell to war. Do not let the repetitiveness of pain and suffering make you callous to the endless torment. “There is hope. You have seen the human mammals of the planet weeping and sobbing and praying. They have hope, hope that the Maker (God) hears them and that when they die their spirits go up and away from Earth.” (Pages 254 of Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis by Anne Rice.) If the so-called powerful and practical persons and the self-confessed materialistic ones only knew how much nearer to realities the sage is than the they, how much more “practical” one is, they would be very much surprised. “Thus we nay see that the Lord is merciful unto al who will, in he sincerity of their hears, call upon his holy name. Yea, thus we see that the gate of Heaven is open unto all, even to those who will believe on the name of Jesus Christ, who is the Son of God,” reports Helaman 3.27-28. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
ROCKLIN TRAILS
FINAL HOME REMAINS | Rocklin, CA | Mid $400,000’s
ONE HOME REMAINING!
When we set out to design our new Rocklin Trails community, we didn’t start out by thinking about walls and windows and square footage. We began by thinking about long walks and family dinners and the rush to get your morning started. In short, we started thinking about life and how best to fit that life within the new homes that we build.
Rocklin Trails will inspire you to reinvent the way you think about outdoor living. Here, you’ll find a lifestyle inspired by walkability. Our paseo-fronting homes create beautiful green-space entries and an open environment, all without compromising privacy. Adjacent to the community, Rocklin Trails homeowners have access to a peaceful and natural creek-side walking trail and in just a short stroll, you’ll find the answers to many of your shopping, recreation and entertainment needs.
Within each of the eighty new homes in Rocklin, California, you will find thoughtful design to suit the needs of any generation and any lifestyle with energy efficiency and construction longevity at its core.
We invite you to imagine a new way to live – here at Rocklin Trails.
https://cresleigh.com/new-homes-in-rocklin-california-rocklin-trails/
Of Luxuries Bright, Milky Soft and Rosy– Shall Not the Judge of All the Earth do Right?
I want you to go to New York. New York is the capitol of the World. And I want you to go to school there. You are to have other companions now, good, decent security guards who will keep you safe. I want you to have the finest education. Remember, whatever you have suffered, no matter how bad it has been, you can use that, use that to be a stronger person. Once people believed that the World was flat; however, science has proved that the World is round. Now in spite of that, one still believes that life is flat and goes from birth to death. However, life is probably round and much superior in extension and capacity to the hemisphere known to us at present. Future generations will probably enlighten us on this so interesting subject; and then science itself might arrive—willy0nilly at conclusions relation to the other half of existence. We respect the voyager, the explorer, the climber, the cosmonaut. It makes far more sense to me as a valid project—indeed, as a desperately and urgently required project for our time—to explore the inner space and time of consciousness. In over 100 cases where we studied the actual circumstances around the social event when one person comes to be regarded as schizophrenic, it seems to us that without exception the experience and behavior that get labeled schizophrenic is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Schizophrenia can be a potential breakthrough as well as breakdown. Some schizophrenics are exceptionally bright and sensitive. They cannot dismiss the lies and distortions that beset them (indeed, all of us). They are extremely vulnerable, therefore, and experience full range of degradations. At the same time, they cannot tolerate these degradations. They do not know how to handle or rechannel them. So they build massive defenses against them, withdrawing, dissociating, or exploding. Yet, these excesses are also potentialities. They can, if properly integrated, signify the awakenings of freer minds. They can point beyond stifling patterns and pave the way to more creative, flexible lifestyles. Roman clap-trap? To the contrary. Consider such luminaries as Blake, Van Gogh, and Nietzsche. Consider numerous studies of the creative process. I believe that the key to significant life change is to be found in recovering one’s centering of life in one’s subjective vision. Genuine insight is to my mind is inner-sight, subjective vision. So-called insight that is chiefly derived from the therapist’s perceptions and interpretations is not inward-seeing; it is objective information about the person the patient has been, but is not evocative of one’s present being. I have always wanted to be one of the right people, always since my earliest recollections. My mother was a great admirer of cultured people. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
Very early I somehow got the idea that cultured people had a different skin texture than most people—maybe it was because another favorite word of hers described cultured people as finer. Being right is so important and so easily lost. Obviously, being right means pleasing the teachers. Clearly, being right means being like Dad, who is loving and dependable. And so the explorations go. In some ways, I get confirmation of being right—recognitions, offices, approval. However, always the secret self must be hidden, that I know it right. It is shameful because it is emotional and unpractical, because it really wants to play many times when I force it to work, because it likes to daydream instead of being realistic. To selves: gradually one becomes more public, the other more hidden. We discover with how crippled and stifled a life can be when it is half-lived, half-listened to, and half-searched. Attending to the process of becoming aware, of inner searching, is another healing process. It is the capacity to reinterpret what cannot be denied. It might also be simply called the capacity for creative change. Such capacity means turning one’s dual nature into rewarding personal and professional activity, including enjoying one’s family, teaching and practicing psychotherapy. For clients and many of us, creative change also means a wealth of personal and career transformations with fresh ways to reunite and reframe our lives. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
Something more has emerged from the explorations of my awareness…Something has been created. New meanings, new perceptions, new relationships, new possibilities now exit where they were not to be found before. In short, my inner vision is a creative process that does more than observe what is already at hand; it brings into being fresh possibilities. This is the astonishing and creative possibility latent in our being. Life that is searched and found choice, that chose and found change, that changed and found power. Again and again, I find that those to whom I speak or write take other—and to me, lesser—point as more fresh or meaningful. And yet, it is this very knowing as distinct from knowing about, which must be taken seriously; it is the World which so often calls out to be bridged. It is our lost sense, the inner awareness that has the potential to let each of us live in wholeness and with true realization of his or her unique nature. [And] it is our avenue toward the most profound meaning of life and the Universe. It is a plausible assumption that the working-class boy whose status is low in middle-class terms cares about that status, that this status confronts him with a genuine problem of adjustment. To this problem of adjustment there are a variety of conceivable responses, of which participation in the creation and the maintenance of the delinquent subculture is one. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
What does the delinquent response have to offer? Let us be clear, first, about what this response is. The hallmark of the delinquent subculture is the explicit and wholesale repudiation of middle-class standards and the adoption of their very antithesis. The corner-boy culture is not specifically delinquent. Where it leads to behavior which may be defined as delinquent, for instance, truancy, it does so not because nonconformity to middle-class norms defines conformity to corner-boy norms, but because conformity to middle-class norms interferes with conformity to corner-boy norms. The corner-boy plays truant because he does not like school, because he wishes to escape from a dull and unrewarding and perhaps humiliating situation. However, truancy is not defined as intrinsically valuable and status-giving. The member of the delinquent subculture plays truant because good middle-class (and working-class) children do not play truant. Corner-boy resistance to being herded and marshaled by middle-class figures is not the same as the delinquent’s floating and jeering of those middle-class figure and active ridicule of those who submit. The corner boy’s ethic of reciprocity, his quasi-communal attitude toward the property of in-group members, is shared by the delinquent. However, this ethic of reciprocity does not sanction the delinquent and malicious violation of the property rights of persons outside the in-group. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
We have observed that the differences between the corner-boy and the college-boy or middle-class culture are profound but that in many ways they are profound differences in emphasis. We have remarked that the corner-boy culture does not so much repudiate the value of many middle-class achievements as it emphasizes certain other values which make such achievement improbable. In short, the corner-boy culture temporizes with middle-class morality; the full-fledged delinquent subculture does not. It is precisely here, we suggest, in the refusal to temporize, that the appeal of the delinquent subculture is possessed. Let us recall that it is characteristically American, not specifically working-class or middle-class, to measure oneself against the widest possible status Universe, to seek status against all comers, to be as good as or better than anybody—anybody, that is, within one’s own age and gender category. As long as the working-class corner-boy clings to a version, however attenuated and adulterated, of the middle-class culture, he must recognize his inferiority to working-class and middle-class college-boy. The delinquent subculture, on the other hand, permits no ambiguity of the status of the delinquent relative to that of anybody else. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
In terms of the norms of the delinquent subculture, defined by this negative polarity to the respectable status system, the delinquent’s very nonconformity to middle-class standards sets one above most exemplary college boy. Another important function of the delinquent subculture is the legitimation of aggression. We surmise that a certain amount of hostility is generated among working-class children against middle-class persons, with their airs of superiority, disdain or condescension and against middle-class norms, which are, in a sense, the cause of their status-frustration. TO infer inclinations to aggression from the existence of frustration is hazardous; we know that aggression is not an inevitable and not the only consequence of frustration. Nevertheless, despite our imperfect knowledge of these things, we would be blind if we failed to recognize that bitterness, hostility and jealousy and all sorts of retributive fantasies are among the most common and typically human responses to public humiliation. However, for the child who temporizes with middle-class morality, overt aggression and even the conscious recognition of one’s own hostile impulses are inhibited, for one acknowledges the legitimacy of the rules in terms of which one is stigmatized. For the child who breaks clean with the middle-class mortality, on the other hand, there are no moral inhibitions on the free expression of aggression against the sources of frustration. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Moreover, the connection we suggest between status-frustration and the aggressiveness of the delinquent subculture seems to us more plausible than many frustration-aggression hypotheses because it involves no assumptions about obscure and dubious displacement of aggression against substitute targets. The targets in this case is the manifest cause of the status problem. It seems to us that the mechanism of reaction-formation should also play a part here. Its hallmark is an exaggerated, disproportionate, abnormal intensity of response, inappropriate to the stimulus which seems to elicit it. The unintelligibility of the response, the overreaction, becomes intelligible when we see that it has the function of reassuring the actor against an inner threat to one’s defenses as well as the function of meeting an external situation on its own terms. Thus we have the mother who compulsively shows inordinate affection upon a child to reassure herself against her latent hostility and we have the male adolescent whose awkward and immoderate masculinity reflects a basic insecurity about one’s own gender-role. In like manner, we would expect the delinquent boy who, after all, has been socialized in a society dominated by a middle-class mortality and who can never quite escape the blandishments of middle-class society, to seek to maintain one’s safeguards against seduction. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
Reaction-formation, in his case, should take the form of irrational, malicious, unaccountable hostility to the enemy within the gates as well as without: the norms of the respectable middle-class society. Any genuine symbol, with its accompanying ceremonial rite, becomes the mirror the reflects insight, new possibilities, new wisdom, and other psychological and spiritual phenomena that we do not dare experience on our own. We cannot for two reasons. The first is our own anxiety: the new insights often—and, we could even say, typically—would frighten us too much were we to take fully and lonely responsibility for them. In the age of ferment such insights may come frequently, and they require more psychological and spiritual responsibility than most individuals are prepared to bear. In dreams people can let themselves do things that would normally be too outrageous to think or say in ordinary speech. The second reason is we escape hubris. The value of the dreams, like these divinations, is not that they give a specific answer, but that they open up new areas of psychic reality, shake us out of our customary ruts, and throw light on a new segment of our lives. The philosopher came to the conclusion that it meant one is wisest because one had admitted one’s own ignorance. Ecstasy is a time honored method of transcending our ordinary consciousness and a way of helping us arrive at insights we could not attain otherwise. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
An element of ecstasy, however slight, is part and parcel of every genuine symbol and myth; for if we genuinely participate in the symbol or myth, we are for that moment taken out of and beyond ourselves. The humanity of the rebel is possessed in the fact that civilization rises from one’s deeds. The function of the rebel is to shake the fixated mores and the rigid order of civilization; and this shaking, though painful, is necessary if the society is to be saved from boredom and apathy. Obviously I do not refer to everyone who calls oneself a rebel, but only to the authentic rebel. Civilization gets its first flower from the rebel. Civilization begins with a rebellion. Prometheus, one of the Titans, steals fire from the gods on Mount Olympus and brings it as a gift to beings, marking the birth of human culture. For this rebellion Zeus sentences him to be chained to Mount Caucasus where vultures consume his lover during the day and at night it grows back only to be again eaten away the next day. This is a tale of the agony of the creative individual, whose nightly rest only resuscitates him so that he can endure his agonies the next day. However, note also that Prometheus is released from his sufferings only when an immortal renounces his immortality in Prometheus’ favor. This Chiron does. What a vivid affirmation of human life, one of the essential characteristics of which is that each one of us will some day die! #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
It is saying: “I willingly give up immortality to affirm humanity; I am willing to die in order to affirm human civilization.” It is death which humanizes us. And the fact that we die is intimately bound up with our rebellion and our creating civilization. This is a truth which can be known in its full force only by the rebel. A similar rebellion and a similar acceptance of mortality are central in another account of the beginning of civilization, that of the story of Adam and Eve. The essence of their deed is rebellion—with prompting from that daimonic element in nature, the snake. The remarkable parallel in the stories of Prometheus and Adam is that the gods are pictured as the enemies of humans; they seek to keep humans perpetually subordinated. Yahweh is worried least Adam and Eve, having eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, will also eat of the tree of eternal life. Again, the fact of being’s mortality is brought in as a necessary prerequisite for creativity and civilization. True, we yearn for immortality, we struggle to form symbols of it, and we smart under the necessity of dying. Do not go gentle into that good night, rage, rage against the dying of the light. However, if we did not know that we will die we would create no more than did the gods, lolling away their endless days on Mount Olympus, a boring succession of tomorrow and tomorrow relieved only by occasional pleasures of the flesh affairs with mortals. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
Consciousness itself, which includes anxiety, guilt, and a sense of responsibility, is born when Adam and Eve are ejected from Eden. And all this happens in an act of rebellion. This is not foreign to psychology: there is no meaningful “yes” unless the individual could also have said “no.” Consciousness requires the exercise of the individual’s counterwill; it is called forth, inspired, and developed by the conflicts that occur in every individual’s life which force one to wonder and to call on power one did not know one possessed. Consider also he tale of Orestes. This is a representation of beings assuming responsibility for one’s own life, likewise a prerequisite of civilization. It is similar to the story of Prometheus and that f Adam and Eve in the sense that it depicts the taking of a giant step forward in the humanization of beings; and the fact that Orestes identifies with his father should not be allowed to obscure the fact that the myth emphasizes even more profoundly that an individual’s existence must start with a rebellion against his mother, to whom he is tied at birth by the umbilical cord. After Orestes’ assassinates his mother, and his cutting himself loose from Mycenae, he endures persecution by the Erinyes, who drive him to virtual insanity. Likewise many persons in psychotherapy struggle, on the brink of psychosis, toward autonomy. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
The stages of the dramas are Orestes’s act, his guilt and atonement, his assuming responsibility for his deed, and his ultimate forgiveness in the Eumenides, the final play of Aeschylus’ trilogy, by a court composed of men, not gods. It is a portrayal of the importance of rebellion for the capacity to assume responsibility for one’s own and one’s fellow’s lives. We also note that startling regularity through history with which society martyrs the rebel in one generation and worships him in the next. Sokrates, Jesus, Prince Lestat, William Blake—the list is as endless as it is rich. It we look more closely at the first two, we shall see how the rebel typically challenges the citizenry with his visions. Jesus’ dictum was: “It was said unto you of old, but I say unto you.” Although Sokrates refused to evade the law, he challenged it: “Men of Athens, I shall obey God rather than you, and so long as I live I shall never cease from the teaching of philosophy.” Both are introductions to frank espousal of rebellious teachings; they are challenges to the structure and stability of the society. Society can tolerate only a certain amount of threat to its mores, laws, and established ways. However, if civilization has only its own mores and no input to fertilize its growth—that is, has only its established ways—it stagnates in passivity and apathy. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
The adaptation that has been worked out is to martyr the rebel during the time in which he or she lives and then, when he or she is dead and there is no chance for one to alter one’s message (it is now established), disinter one, apotheosize one, and finally worship one. If the gods are occupied with keeping beings subordinate, why do not we simply say: “Away with them!” Then we could, as rationalist through the ages have tried to do, simply accept Jesus and Sokrates and Prince Lestat as the sensitive human beings they were. However, that is to misunderstand the function of the gods. Gods are, culturally speaking, symbols of our ideal yearnings and visions. (Symbols encompasses diverse stands of reality and participates in the reality itself.) God is the symbol of the power human beings year for but do not have. We are always enlarging our insights and visions. To simply deny the god function in human life is to impoverish our lives, specifically our ideals and our visions. However, as we enlarge and purify our insights (say about justice) and our visions (say of a better World), we also enlarge our symbols of the gods. This is why one reads in the Old Testament of the curious phenomenon of Abraham arguing with God not to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, saying: “Far be that from Thee! Shall not the judge of all the Earth do right?” (Genesis 18.25). #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
Abraham takes God to task for not living up to his own principles. God in terms of his new vision of what God ought to be and stand for. This curious phenomenon—source of much gymnastics among theologians—makes no sense when we define God as the all-perfect, purely ineffable. However, it makes entire sense when we see God, as I believe the higher religions have always seen Him, as the confluence of the Ground of Being (the given aspect of life) and being’s own capacity for spiritual insight (the autonomous aspect of the individual being). The highest function of rebellion is the rebellion in the name of “God above God.” Everyone at one time or another finds oneself in a situation where one must decide whether one shall use or avoid the name of God, whether one shall talk with personal involvement about religion matters, either for or against them. Making such a decision is often difficult. We feel that we should remain silent in certain groups of people because it might be tactless to introduce the name of God, or even to talk about religion. However, our attitude is not unambiguous. We believe we are being tactful, when actually we may be cowardly. And then sometimes we accuse ourselves of cowardice, although it is really tact that prevents us from speaking out. This happen not only to those who would speak out for God, but also to those who would speak out against God. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Whether for or against Him, God’s name is on our lips and we are embarrassed because we feel that more is at stake than social tact. So we keep silent, uncertain as to whether we are right or wrong. The situation itself is uncertain. Perhaps we might isolate ourselves or seem ridiculous by even mentioning the divine name, affirming or denying it. However, there might also be another present for whom the mention of the divine name would produce a first experience of the Spiritual Presence and a decisive moment in one’s life. And again, perhaps there may be someone for whom a tactless allusion to God would evoke a definite sense of repulsion against religion. One may now think that religion as such is an abuse of the name of God. No one can look into the hearts of others, even if one converses with them intimately. We must risk now to talk courageously and now to keep silent tactfully. However, in one case should we be pushed into a direct affirmation or denial of God which lacks the tact that is born of awe. The sublime embarrassment about His real Presence in and through His name should never leave us. When they have had to teach their children the divine name, many persons have felt the pain of this embarrassment, and others have felt it perhaps when they tried to protect their children against a divine name that they considered an expression of dangerous superstition. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
It seems natural to teach child about most objects in nature and history without embarrassment, and there are parents who think it is equally natural to teach them divine things. However, I believe that many of us as parents in this situation feel a sublime embarrassment. We know as Jesus knew that children are more open to the divine Presence than adults. It may well be, however, that if we use the divine name easily, we may close this openness and leave our children insensitive to the depth and the mystery of what is present in the divine name. However, if we try to withhold it from them, whether because we affirm or because we deny it, emptiness may take hold of their hearts, and they may accuse us later of having cut them off from the most important thing in life. A Spirit inspired tact I necessary in order to find the right way between these dangers. No technical skill or psychological knowledge can replace the sublimely embarrassed mind of parents or teachers, and especially of teachers of religion. There is a form of misuse of the name of God that offends those who hear it with a sensitive ear, just because it did not worry those who misused it without sensitivity. I speak now of a public use of the name of God which has little to do with God, but much to do with human purpose—good or bad. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Those of us who are grasped by the mystery present in the name of God are often stung when this name is used in governmental and political speeches, in opening prayers for conferences and dinners, in secular and religious advertisements, and in international war propaganda. Often the frequent use of the name of God is praised, as this is an indication that we are a religious nation. Ans one boasts of this, comparing one’s nation with others. Should this be condemned? It is hard not to do so, but neither is it easy. If the divine name is used publicly with full conviction, and therefore with embarrassment and Spiritual tact, it may be used without offense, although this is hardly ever so. It is usually taken in vain when used for purposes that are not t the glory of His name. Through the process of learning to respect God and his name, one will begin to unlock the deeper mysteries of the Holy Ghost. You will gain greater knowledge in regard to your own divine power and creation itself. It will become clear that through perception we can turn power n and off and will come to understand that gaining power is not really about obtaining something we do no have. It is more about learning to perceive what already dwells within the soul. The soul with allow us to experience God and the vast power of the concept through a continual process of becoming. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Many are worshipping a false divine blueprint drawn upon the collective mind of humanity which binds individual desire to guilt and evil, syphoning the minds of people turning them into slaves, and this is destroying the ability to love self. Evil is a power which cuts down love. This separation from God is the impetus which forces humankind to give up their power of loving, faith and adoring the divine source leaving a black hole of hatred within that cases prejudice, spite, and lack of compassion for the totality. It is not empowering, but separating human beings from the inherent power. “And now behold, we desire to know the cause of this exceedingly great neglect; yea, we desire to know the cause of your thoughtless state. Can you think to sit upon your thrones in a state of thoughtless stupor, while your enemies are spreading the work of death around you? Yea, while they are murdering thousands of your people?” reports Alma 60.6-7. “And now behold, I say unto you, I fear exceedingly that the judgments of God will come upon this people, because of their exceeding slothfulness, yea, even the slothfulness of our government, and their exceedingly great neglect toward their brethren, yes, towards those who have been slain,” report Alma 60.14. The other ways were not without their usefulness and helpfulness, of course, but they lost that value the moment they were turned into substitute for the interior way, which is unique and without a second because each one of us is unique. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
Each person gets one’s own special experience of life, makes one’s own special set of contact with other persons, and meets one’s own particular destiny. In one’s reactions to and dealings with all this, one is really reacting to and dealing with oneself. One is showing quarrelsomeness, or trying to conquer it; ne is losing oneself in the day’s activity, or saving oneself from it in a half-hour retreat. One is letting negative thoughts or feelings stay in one’s heart, or trying to drive them out of it. One is practicing a larger relationship and a kindlier attitude toward those one encounters in one’s day-to-day business, or one is failing to recognize why they—and not others who are quite different—have been put into one’s path by the Infinite Intelligence (God). Our environment is really a testing-place and a disciplinary school. Speech is no longer a means to express internal power and raise one’s vibrational frequency via the vibrations of the tonal sound. It is no longer a tool to speak our reality into existence. It is through God’s angelic force that words of power are reserved for the few. Speech is not used for mere conversation even though its power really serves a much deeper and greater purpose. “When a person speaks by power of the Holy Ghost, that power carries it unto hearts,” reports 2 Nephi 33.1. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
Cresleigh Homes
California beauty as far as the eye can see. ☀️ Interested in becoming a part of a Cresleigh Homes community? Visit our website to learn more about Plumas Ranch, now selling!
https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-riverside-at-plumas-ranch/
#PlumasLake
#California
#NewHomes
There is an Invisible Mechanism within the Universe and an Intelligent Mind (God) Directing this Mechanism!
Maybe it is time I discovered what is going on here for myself. Now listen to me. I want you to go belowstairs and stay there. If someone benighted emissary of the thing should crash-land on our wintry little paradise, you will be sage from it down there. Stay there till I return. This is the same precaution being taken by others the World over. Belowground you are safe. And if this thing talks to you, this Voice, well, try to learn more about it. In the settlement houses and other adult-sponsored and managed recreational agencies similar conflicts may often be seen between the middle-class values of the adults in charge and the working-class values of the children for whose benefit the institution ostensibly exist. Such organizations smile upon neat, orderly, polite, personable, mannerly children who want to make something of themselves. The sponsor, directors and group work leaders find it a pleasure to work with such children, whose values are so like their own, and make them feel welcome and respected. They do indeed feel a special responsibility toward the boy whose family and neighborhood culture have not equipped him with those values, the rough boy, the dirty boy, the bum who just hangs around with the gang on the corner, in the pool hall or in the candy store. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
However, the responsibility they feel toward him is to encourage him to engage in more worthwhile activities, to join and to be a responsible member of some wholesome adult-supervised club or other group, to expurgate one’s language and, in general, to participate in the constructive program of the institution. Indeed, like the school, it functions to select potentially upwardly mobile working-class children and to help and encourage them in the upward climb. It is common experience of such organizations that they are very successful and do a lot of good but do not seem to get children who need them most. The reason is that here, as in the school, it is almost impossible to reward one or quite openly, punishing its absence or its opposite. The corner boy quickly senses that he is under the critical or at best condescending surveillance of people who are foreigners to his community and who appraise him in terms of values which he does no share. He is aware that he is being invidiously compared to others; he is uncomfortable; he finds it hard to accommodate himself to the rules of the organization. To win the favor of the people in charge he must change his habits, his values, his ambitions, his speech and his associates. Even were these things possible, the game might not be worth the candle. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
So, having sampled what they have to offer, he returns to the street or to his clubhouse in a cellar where facilities are meager but human relations more satisfying. Not only in terms of standards of middle-class adults but in terms of their children’s standards as well, the working-class culture is likely to be a failure. Despite the existence among middle-class children of a youth culture which may differ in significant ways from the culture of their parents, the standards these children apply are likely to relegate to an inferior status their working-class peers. Gradually the group became more critical of prospective members. A process somewhat evident from the beginning became more obvious. In general only boys who measured up to the group’s unwritten, unspoken and largely unconscious standards were ever considered. These standards, characteristics of their middle-class homes, required the suppression of the impulsive disorderly behavior and put a high value on controlled cooperative attitudes. Hence even these normally healthy and boisterous boys were capable of rejecting schoolmates they considered too wild and boisterous. Coincident with this was an emphasis on intellectual capacity and achievement. They preferred smart as contrasted with dumb prospects. The boys seemed to use their club unconsciously to express and reinforce the standards learned in their homes and the community. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
Not only teachers but schoolmates, in evaluating the character of other children, tend to give the highest ratings to the children of the higher social levels, although the correlation between social class and character reputation is far from perfect. Beneficial correlations between various indices of social class status of the home and social status in the schools as measured by pupils’ choices have been found. We have seen how social class and the behavior and personality associated with social class membership operate to determine prestige and clique and date patterns among high school boys and girls. This process operates in all classes, but it is especially noticeable in contacts with class V [lower-lower]. This class is so repugnant socially that adolescents in the higher classes avoid clique and dating ties with its members. Furthermore, working-class children are less likely to participate, and if they participate are less likely to achieve prominence, in extra-curricular activities, which are an important arena for the competition for status in the eyes of the students themselves. In the area of organized athletics the working-class boy is perhaps least unfitted for successful competition. Even here, however, he is likely to be at a disadvantage. Adherence to a training regimen and a schedule does not come to him as easily as to the middle-class boy and, unless he chooses to loosen his ties to his working-class friends, he is likely to find some conflict between the claims of the gang and those of his athletic career. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
Finally, although we must not minimize the importance of athletic achievement as a status-ladder, it is, after all, granted to relatively few, of whatever social class background, to achieve conspicuously in this area. In summary, it may confidently be said that the working-class boy, particularly if his training and values be those we have here defined as working-class, is more likely than his middle-class peers to find himself at the bottom of the status hierarchy whenever he moves in a middle-class to which he values middle-class status, either because he values the good opinion of middle-class persons or because he had to some degree internalized middle-class standards himself, he faces a problem of adjustment and is in the market for a solution. The delinquent subculture, we suggest, is a way of dealing with the problems of adjustment we have described. These problems are chiefly status problems: certain children are denied status in the respectable society because they cannot meet the criteria of respectable status system. The delinquent subculture deals with these problems by providing criteria of status which these children can meet. We remarked earlier that our ego-involvement in a given comparison with others depends upon status universe. Whom do we measure ourselves against? #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
In some other societies virtue may consist in willing acceptance of the role of peasant, low-born commoner or member of an inferior caste and in conformity to the expectations of that role. If others are richer, more nobly-born or more able than oneself, it is by he will of an inscrutable Providence and not to be imputed to one’s own moral defect. The sting of status inferiority is thereby removed or mitigated; one measures oneself only against those of like social position. We have suggested, however, that an important feature of American democracy, perhaps of Western European tradition in general, is the tendency to measure oneself against all comers. This means that, for children as for adults, one’s sense of persona worth is at stake in status comparisons with all other persons, at least of one’s own age and gender, whatever their family background or material circumstances. It means that, in the lower levels of our status hierarchies, whether adult or juvenile, there is a chronic fund of motivation, conscious or repressed, to elevate one’s status position, either by striving to climb within the established status system or by redefining the criteria of status so that one’s present attributes become status-giving assets. To manage private loves and hates is to participate in an intricate private emotional system. When elements of that system are taken into the marketplace and sold as human labor, they become stretched into standardized social forms. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
In these forms, a person’s contribution of feeling is thinner, less freighted with consequence but at the same time it is less seen as coming less from the self and being less directed to the other. For that reason it is more susceptible to estrangement. I followed emotion work into the job market via two routes. First I entered the World of the flight attendant. As a point of entry, I chose American Airlines for several reasons: it puts a higher premium on service than other airlines do; its in-flight training program is perhaps the best in the World; its service has been ranked very high; and it has some of the best uniforms for flight attendants and pilots. For all these reasons, American’s company demands are higher and its work demands are met with success. Thus American fulfills the demands they put on flight attendants. It also gives sharper point to the general case about emotion work in public life. When emotional labor is put into the public marketplace, it behaves like a commodity: the demand for it waxes and wanes depending upon the competition with the industry. I gathered information at American in various ways. First, I watched. The head of American Airlines Training and Conference Center in Fort Worth, Texas, a gentle young man called Jim Thomas, allowed me to attend classes there. I watched recruits learning passenger landing and meal service in the mock cabin. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
I got to know the trainers, who patiently explained their work to me. They were generous with their time on duty and off; one trainer invited me home to dinner, and several repeatedly invited me to lunch. Over countless other breakfasts, lunches, and dinners, and in the airport bus, I talked with students doing Initial Training and with experienced flight attendants attending the mandatory Recurrent Training sessions. I interviewed twenty American officials, from the executive vice-president, training, sales, and billing. I held a group interview with seven supervisors. I interviewed four advertising agents employed by the firm commissioned to promote American Airlines and its flight attendants, and I looked through microfilms of thirty years of American Airlines advertising. Finally, I also interviewed the two public relations officials who were in charge of handling me. It is an elite occupation, it is difficult to find one of these prestigious careers. Flight attendants do emotion work to enhance the status of the customer and entice further sales by their friendliness, there is another side of the corporate show, represented by the bill collectors who are taught to deflate the anger and frustration of customers, so they are more likely to pay their bills on time. Therefore, some emotional labor principles apply to very different jobs and very different feelings. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
A nineteenth-century child working in a challenging Lincrusta-Walton wallpaper factory and a well-paid twenty-first century American flight attendant have something in common: in order to survive in their jobs, they must mentally prepare themselves—the factory worker from his own body and physical labor, and the flight attendant from his or her own feelings and emotional labor. I am interested in telling the flight attendant’s story in order to promote a fuller appreciation of the costs of what one does. And I want to base this appreciation on a prior demonstration of what can happen to any of us when we become estranged from our feelings and the management of them. We feel. But what is a feeling? I would define feeling, like emotion, as a sense, like the sense of hearing or sight. In a general way, we experience it when bodily sensation are joined with what we see or imagine. Like the sense of hearing, emotion communicates information. Anxiety is a signal function. From feeling we discover our own viewpoint on the World. We often say that we try to feel. However, how can we do this? Feelings are not stored inside us, and they are not independent of acts of management. Both the act of getting in touch with feeling and the act of trying to feel may become part of the process that makes the thing we get in touch with, or the thing we manage, into a feeling or emotion. In managing feeling, we contribute to the creation of it. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
If this is so, what we think of as intrinsic to feeling or emotion may have always been shaped to social form and put to civic use. Consider what happens when young men roused to anger go willingly to war, or when followers rally enthusiastically around their king, or mullah, or football team. Private social life may always have called for the management of feelings. They party guest summons up a gaiety owed to the host, the mourner summons up a proper sadness for the funeral. Each offers up a feeling as a momentary contribution to the collective good. What gives social patterns to our acts of emotion management? I believe that when we try to feel, we apply latent feeling rules. We say, “I should not feel so angry at what she did,” or “given our agreement, I have no right to feel jealous.” Act of emotion management are not simply private acts; they are used in exchanges under the guidance of feeling rules. Feeling rules are standards used in emotional conversation to determine what is rightly owed and owing in the currency of feeling. Through them, we tell what is due in each relation, each role. We may tribute to each other in the currency of the managing act. In interaction we pay, overpay, underpay, play with, acknowledge our dues, pretend to pay, or acknowledge what is emotionally due another person. In these ways, we make our try at sincere civility. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Because the distribution of power an authority is unequal in some of the relations of private life, the managing acts can also be unequal. The myriad momentary acts of management compose part of what we summarize in the terms relation and role. Like the tiny dots of Seurat painting, the microcates of emotion management compose, through repetition and change over time, a movement of form. Some forms express inequality, others equality. Now what happens when feeling rules, like rules of behavioral display, are established though private negotiation but by company manuals? What happens when social exchanges are not, as they are in private life, subject to change or termination but ritually sealed and almost inescapable? What happens when the emotional display that one person owes another reflects a certain inherent inequality? The airline passenger may choose not to smile, but the flight attendant is obliged not only to smile but to try to work up some warmth behind it. What happens, in other words, when there is a transmutation of the private ways we use feeling? One sometimes needs a grand word to point out a coherent pattern between occurrences that would otherwise seem totally unconnected. My word is “transmutation.” When I speak of the transmutation of an emotional system, I mean to point out a link between a private act, such as attempting to enjoy a party, and a public act, such as summoning up good feeling for a customer. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
What is it that we do privately, often unconsciously, to feelings that nowadays often fall under the sway of large organization, social engineering, and the profit motive. Trying to feel what one wants, expects, or thinks one ought to feel is probably no newer than emotion itself. Conforming to or deviating from feeling rules is also hardly new. In organized society, rules have probably never been applied only to observable behavior. “Crimes of the heart,” have long been recognized because proscriptions have long guarded the preactions of the heart; the Bible say not to covet your neighbor’s wife, not simply to avid acting on that feeling. What is new in our time is an increasingly prevalent instrumental stance toward out native capacity to play, wittingly and actively, upon a range of feelings for a private purpose and the way in which that stance is engineered and administered by large organizations. This transmutation of the private use of feeling affects the two genders and the various social classes in distinctly different ways. Emotion management has been better understood by professionals because they have to create the emotional tine of social encounters: expressing joy at the Christmas presents others open, creating the sense of surprise at birthdays, or displaying alarm at the car speeding down the road. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Now given the fact that others are likely to check up on the more controllable aspects of behavior by means of the less controllable aspects of behavior by means of the less controllable, one can expect that sometimes the individual will try to exploit this very possibility, guiding the impression one makes through behavior felt to be reliably informing. For example, in gaining admission to a tight social circle, the participant observer may not only wear an accepting look while listening to an informant, but may also be careful to wear the same look when observing the informant talking to others; observers of the observer will then not as easily discover where one actually stands. When a neighbor dropped in to have a cup of tea, he would ordinarily wear at least a hint f an expectant warm smile as he passed through the door into the Cresleigh home. Since lack of physical obstructions outside the home and beautiful trees around the home, it usually made it possible to observe the visitor unobserved as he approached the house, islanders sometimes took pleasure in watching the visitor drop whatever expression he was manifesting and replace it with a sociable one just before reaching the door. However, some visitors, in appreciating this examination was occurring, would blindly adopt a social face a long distance from the house, thus ensuring the projection of a constant image. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
This kind of control upon the part of the individual reinstates the symmetry of the communication process, and sets the stage for a kind of information game—a potentially infinite cycle of concealment, discovery, false revelation, and rediscovery. It should be added that since the others are likely to be relatively unsuspicious of the presumably unguided aspect of the individual’s conduct, he can gain much by controlling it. The others of course may sense that the individual is manipulating the presumably spontaneous aspects of his behavior, and seek in this very act of manipulation some shading of conduct that the individual has not managed to control. This again provides a check upon the individual’s behavior, this time his presumably uncalculated behavior, thus re-establishing the asymmetry of the communication process. Here I would like to add the suggestion that the arts of piercing an individual’s effort at calculated unintentionality seems better developed than our capacity to manipulate our own behavior, so that regardless of how many steps have occurred in the information game, the witness is likely to have the advantage over the actor, and the initial asymmetry of the communication process is likely to be retained. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
What is of great interest in this development is the intimate unity of patriarchal family ideology with that of kingship. The king represented the new fountainhead of spiritual power in which the subjects were nourished. In primitive society the entire group had created magical power by means of the jointly celebrated ritual. However, with the gradual development of specialized ritualists and priests, the power to create power often fell to a special class and was no longer the possession of the whole collectivity. Where this happened it helped to turn the average man into an impotent subject. In many agrarian societies the priests went on to develop astronomy, calendars, and rituals of power for the control of nature via magic, whereas previously each person had helped exercise such control via the communal rituals. Without the priests’ calendar, how would the farmer know the auspicious days for planting? With their astronomy the priests accrued the tremendous prestige of predicting eclipses; and then they exercised the fantastic power of brining back the Sun out of the clutches of darkness. Not only did they save the World from chaos in such ways, but in some places they possessed the secret ritual for the creation of the kind’s power. Often the kings and priests were solidly allied in a structure of domination that monopolized all sacred power; this completed the development for the tribal level where the shaman would sometimes ally with the chief. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
All the less affluent subject could do in these societies was to grovel to the king and bring food to the priests in order to get a mite of magical protective power. The fathers imitated the kings so as to reenact the divine plan in their own homes; in this way they got a reflection of the king’s powers. If the gentlemen and ladies observed proper ritual behavior, the kingdom would flourish. So long as everyone in the kingdom copied the king, fathered sons, married off daughters, kept order in the family, and observed the household rituals, the balance of nature would not be upset in the divine household. All this took place in the divine cities, which themselves were eternal, connected to Heaven (Babylon equals Gate of the Gods), and protected and regenerated by the priestly rituals. Each city with its pyramidal temples and towers rose like a spire to penetrate the sky, the dimensions of invisible power, and to bathe itself in it. We can still feel this Gothic cathedral which penetrated Heaven and was bathed in the light of powers of Heaven. Rome is called the eternal city not because today tourists can always go back and find her as she was when they first visited her a few decades ago, but because she was regenerated in ancient times by centennial rituals, and was thought to have so much power sustaining her that she would never falter. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
One of the strong impetuses to the triumph of Christianity was the increasing sackings of Rome by the barbarians, which showed everyone that something was wrong with the old powers and some new magical sources had to be tapped. The divine king in the sacred city bathing the holy empire—these were a power tool in which the fathers nourished themselves while they assured their own perpetuation in the person of their sons. We can see that this represents a new kind of unification experience, with a focal point of power, that in its own way tries to recapture the intense unity of primitive society, with its focus of power in the clan and the ancestral spirits. The emperors and kings who proclaimed themselves divine did not do so out of mere megalomania, but out of a real need for a unification of experience, a simplification of it, and a rooting of it in a secure source of power. The leader, like the people, senses a need for a strongly focused moral unity of the sprawling and now senseless diversity of the kingdom, and he tries to embody it in his own person: By proclaiming themselves gods of empire, Sargon and Rameses wished to realize in their own persons that mystic or religious unity which one constituted the strength of the clan, which still maintained the unity of the kingdom, and which could alone form the tie between all the peoples of an empire. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Alexander the Great, the Ptolemies, and the Caesars, will, in their turn, impose upon their subjects the worship of the sovereign, not so much out of vanity as to consolidate moral unity…And so through its mystic principle the clan has survived in the empire. I must also warn that many will seem to have disdain for you because they are beings of false light. Their connection to divinity has been served due to a strategic plan of enslavement. Therefore, the masses will likely shun and reject you. However, you will cyclically being to attract others who align with your perfectly through time. This is not a path of severe loneliness, but rather a means to realize just how badly the human race has been shackled. We must awaken to this in order to see the truth of the lie and perceive the lie of truth. Do not take it personally. People are naturally God fearing and will as a result feel threatened by your power. “And it came to pass that they did break forth, all as one, in singing, and praising their God for the great thing which we had done for them, in preserving them from falling into the hands of their enemies. Blessed be the name of the Lord God Almighty, the Most High God. And their hearts were swollen with joy, unto the gushing out of many tears, because of the great goodness of God in delivering them out of the hands of their enemies; and they knew it was because of their repentance and their humility and that they had been delivered from an everlasting destruction,” reports 3 Nephi 4.30-33. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Indeed, the Cosmic Vision, which revealed the Presence of Infinite Intelligence throughout life, throughout the Universe and throughout history, which explained so many of the Higher Laws to me, came incongruously enough while I was sitting in a Cresleigh Hub Apartments in Folsom, California. With this humbling insight, the need to go abroad disappeared. And I then saw that it was really an ancient complex—a kind of auto-suggestion—inherited from my own far, reincarnatory past. Indeed, I found out that if I had remained loyal to the inward direction I had originally travelled, I need never have gone overseas at all, nor to those other Asiatic countries where I sought for Truth. What I needed could be very well found within myself. However, I had accepted the suggestion our of my past as well as out of the lips and writings of other persons. And so I deviated from the inward way. The shortcut, which the journeys to Asia offered, turned out to be a long way, for I traveled beautiful roads, and, in the end, had to return, as well as all have, to my own road. Indeed, there was nowhere else to go, and my Quest ended there. As this change occurs within, the external corporeal reality also begins to reflect that change. This is how the shackles of limitation will be broken and humankind will be liberated. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
This great work forces the physical plane to conform to and align with the plane of unlimited possibility by destroying the imposed limits of the false egregores of social, political and religion control. Then human beings, even those in high places, will come to be conscious of exactly how immortal they are not. If you are a God, why would you need to steal $1,000,000.00 USD from a child? As the World elevates to a higher level of thinking, then humankind can take back their sovereign right to rule over their own life. These are the true Olympians, not the mythic beings of human creation. Not until the light one has received becomes stabilized as a permanent thing can one be regarded as a master, and not until it is also full and complete can one be regarded as a sage. Sage is someone who is not only wide and dispassionate but who is also ready to proffer counsel out of one’s superior wisdom. One may dwell apart from humanity, if one chooses, but one’s Olympian aloofness will not be such that you cannot get a word of guidance out of one’s shy shut lips. Somehow we feel, and rightly, that the anchorite who has lost compassion or grown wholly self-centered may be pure and peaceful—but one cannot be a sage. One is a true messenger who seeks to keep one’s ego out of one’s work, who tries to bring God and beings together without oneself getting in between them. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
One Who Knows Not the World-Order, Knows Not One’s Own Place therein!
There were the films of symphony performances, the full-scale operas, the unending virtuous concerts! I thought I would go mad with the beauty of it—witnessing in living color and mesmerizing detail the London Philharmonic play Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, or the great Itzhak Perlman racing through the Brahms Concerto with an orchestra surrounding me. One of the situations in which children of all social levels come together and compete for status in terms of the same set of middle-class criteria and in which working-class children are most likely to be found wanting is in the schooled. American educators ae enamored of the idea of “democracy” signifies the fullest realization of the individual’s potentialities, the development of skills to an optimal level, the development of character and the abilities which can be bound by others, preparation for effective participation in the adult vocational World. Despite reservations such as with due regard to individual differences, this conception of democratic education implies that a major function of the schools is to promote, encourage, motivate, stimulate, in brief, reward middle-class ambition and conformity to middle-class expectations. However sincerely one may desire to avoid odious comparisons and to avoid, thereby, injury to the self-esteem of those who do not conform to one’s expectations, it is extremely difficult to reward, however subtly, successful conformity without at the same time, by implication, condemning and punishing the non-conformist. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
That same teacher who prides oneself on one’s recognition and encouragement of deserving work-class children dramatizes, by that very show of pride, the superior merit of the college-boy or college-girls working-class child to one’s less gifted or [street] corner-boy and corner-girl working-classmates. There are three goof reasons why status in the school, insofar as it depends upon recognition by the teacher, should be measured by middle-class standards. First, the teacher is hired to foster the development of middle-class personalities. The middle-class board of education, the middle-class parents whom they represent and, it is to be presumed, many of the working-class parents as well expect the teacher to define one’s job as the indoctrination of middle-class aspirations, character, skills and manners. Second, the teacher oneself is almost certain to be a middle-class person, who personally values ambition and achievement and spontaneously recognizes and rewards these virtues in others. The third relates to the school itself as a social system with certain structural imperatives of its own. The teacher’s textbooks in education and one’s own supervisors may stress individualization and consideration for the needs, limitations and special problems of each student. Nonetheless, the teacher actually handles 20, 30, or 40 students at a time. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Regardless of what one conceives one’s proper function to be, the teacher necessarily looks with favor on the quiet, cooperative, well-behaved pupils who make one’s job easier and with disapproval and vexation on the lusty, irrepressible boisterous youngsters who are destructive of order, routine and predictability in the classroom. Furthermore, the teacher is like to be upwardly mobile or at least anxious about the security of one’s tenure in one’s present job. One is motivated, therefore, to conform to the criteria in terms of which one’s superiors evaluate one. Those superiors may themselves be progressive and in teacher meetings preach democracy in the classroom and individualization and indeed genuinely believe in those goals. However, the degree to which a teacher tries to achieve these goals or succeeds in doing so is not highly visible and readily determined. On the other hand, grades, performance and standardized examinations, the cleanliness and orderliness of the classroom and the frequency with which the children are sent to the front office are among the most easily determined and objective bases for the evaluation of teacher performance. A good rating, then, by one’s supervisors is possible only if the teacher sacrifices to some degree the very individualization and tolerance which those same supervisors may urge upon one. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
Research on the kinds of behavior which teachers regard as the most problematical among their pupils gives results consistent with our expectations. The most serious problems, from the standpoint of the teacher, are those children who are restless and unruly, who fidget and squirm, who annoy and distract, who create discipline problems. The good children are the studious, the obedient, the docile. It is precisely the working-class children who are most likely to be problems because of their relative lack of training in order and discipline, their lack of interest in intellectual achievement and their lack of reinforcement by the home in conformity to the requirements of the school. Both in terms of conduct and in terms of academic achievement, the failures in the classroom are drawn disproportionately from the lower social class levels. The child has little or no choice in selecting the group within which one shall compete for status and one is evaluated against the total range of the ability distribution. It is here that, day after day, most of the children in the lower fourth of the distribution have their sense of worth destroyed, develop feelings of insecurity, become frustrated and lose confidence in their ability to learn that which they are capable of learning. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
In dialogue, each experiences the other as a person, as the origin and source of one’s intentional acts. Each participant aims to show one’s being to the other as it is for the individual. Transparency, not mystification, is one of the goals. It matters little whether the dialogue is nonverbal or verbal; whether it occurs between a philosopher and one’s pupil, a therapist and one’s patient, a parent and child, or two friends. The aim is to show oneself in willful honesty before the other and to respond to the other with an expression of one’s experience as the other has affected it. Dialogue is like mutual unveiling, where each seeks to be the experienced and confirmed by the other as the one he or she is for oneself. Such dialogue is most likely to occur when the two people believe each is trustworthy and of goodwill. The threat that motivates people to conceal their intentions and experience in manipulative encounters is absent in dialogue. The aims that makes the action of each intelligible to other will be fully revealed. Now, I would like to examine the relationship between an experimenter and one’s subject in the light of those analyses of the two kinds of encounter. The usual encounter between a psychological researcher and one’s subject has more in common with the example of the young being on the make than it has with dialogue. The experimenter wants something from the subject, but one wants to keep the individual partly mystified as to what it is. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
Moreover, one does not want to frighten the subject away; so the psychological researcher often cloaks one’s intentions with camouflage. If one tips one’s hand, one may influence the subject and bias one’s findings. One tells the subject as little as one can when the latter appears in the laboratory. Actually, in some ways a research psychologist tries to impersonate a machine by depersonalizing oneself. One tries to be invisible or to be constant. One seldom tries to fin out from one’s subject just how that person experiences one, the researcher, either perceptually or in one’s fantasy. When an individual appears before others one’s actions will influence the definition of the situation which they come to have. Sometimes the individual will act in a thoroughly calculating manner, expressing oneself in a given way solely in order to give the kind of impression to others that is likely to evoke from them a specific response one is concerned to obtained. Sometimes the individual will be calculating in one’s activity but be relatively unaware that this is the case. Sometimes one will intentionally and consciously express oneself in a particular way, but chiefly because the tradition of one’s group or social status require this kind of expression and not because of any particular response (other than vague acceptance or approval) that is likely to be evoked from those impressed by the expression. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
Sometimes the traditions of an individual’s role will lead one to give a well-designed impression of a particular kind and yet one may be neither consciously nor unconsciously disposed to create such an impression. The others, in their turn. May be suitably impressed by the individual’s efforts to convey something, or may misunderstand the situation and come to conclusions that are warranted neither by the individual’s intent nor by the facts. In any case, in particular impressions, we may take a functional or pragmatic view and say that the individual has effectively projected a given definition of the situation and effectively fostered the understanding that given state of affairs obtains. There is one aspect of the others’ response that bear special comment here. Knowing that the individual is like to present oneself in a light that is favorable to one, the others may divide what they witness into two parts; a part that is relatively easy for the individual to manipulate at will, being chiefly one’s verbal assertions, and a part in regard to which one seems to have little concern or control, being chiefly derived from the expressions one gives off. The others may then use what are considered to be the ungovernable aspects of one’s expressive behavior as a check upon the validity of what is conveyed by the governable aspects. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
In this fundamental asymmetry is demonstrated in the communication process, the individual presumably being aware of only one stream of the individual’s communication, the witnesses of this stream and one other. For example, in Shetland Isle one crofter’s wife, in serving native dishes to a visitor from the mainland of Britain, would listen with a polite smile to his polite claims of liking what he was eating; at the same time she would take note of the rapidity with which the visitors lifted one’s fork or spoon to one’s mouth, the eagerness with which one passed food into one’s mouth, and the gusto expressed in chewing the food, using these signs as a check on the stated feelings of the eater. The same woman, in order to discover what one acquaintance (A) actually thought of another acquaintance (B), would wait until B was in the presence of A but engaged in conversation with C. No being in conversation with B, and not being directly observed by him, A would sometimes relax usual constraints and tactful deceptions, and freely express what one was actually feeling about B. This Shetlander, in short, would observe the unobserved observer. Those who discuss labor often comment that nowadays most jobs call for a capacity to deal with people rather than with things, for more interpersonal skills and fewer mechanical skills. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
The fact that individuals now talk to other individuals, rather than interact with a machine, is the fundamental fact about work in the post-industrial society. There is a continual subdivision of work in many branches of the economy. Complex tasks in which a craftsman used to take pride are divided into simpler, more repetitive segments, each more boring and less well paid than the original job. Work is deskilled and the worker belittled. However, celebrants and critics alike have not inspected at close hand or with a social-psychological eye what it is that people jobs actually require of workers. They have not inquired into the actual nature of this labor. Some do not know exactly what, in the case of emotional labor, becomes deskilled. A second discourse, closer to the person and more remote from the overall organization of work, concerns the display of feelings. There are many minor traffic rules of face-to-face interaction as they emerge at a card game, in an elevator, on the street, or at the dining table of an insane asylum. We cannot dismiss the small as trivial by show how small rules, transgression, and punishments add up to form the longer strips of experience we call work. At the same time, it is hard to explain, for example, why companies train flight attendants in smiling, or how emotion tone is supervised, or what profit is ultimately tied to emotional labor. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
It is hard, in other words, to draw on this discourse alone and see how display work fits into the larger scheme of things. The third discourse takes pace in a quiet side street of American social science; it deals with the timeless issues of what an emotion is and how we can manage it. To uncover the heart of emotional labor, to understand what it takes to do it and what it does to people, it is important to realize that certain events in economic history cannot be fully understood unless we pay attention to the filigreed patterns of feeling and their management because the details of these patterns are an important part of what may men and women do for a living. Because such different traditions are joined here, my inquiry will have a different relevance for those who do the work it describes—the flight attendants. However, most of us have jobs that require some handling of other people’s feelings and our own, and in this sense we are all partly flight attendants. One who has realized truth according to the Secret Doctrine may continue to follow the same vocation which one was practising before. That is, a king may remain a king and a carpenter may continue one’s carpentering. There is no law or rule which may be laid down as to the kind of work an illuminate may perform or abstain from performing. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Similarly, the illuminate is not to be judged by one’s practice of or one’s omission to practise asceticism. The secretary who creates a cheerful office that announces her company as friendly and dependable and her boss as up-and-coming, the waitress or the waiter who creates an atmosphere of pleasant dining, the tour guide or hotel receptionist who makes us feel welcome, the social worker whose look of solicitous concern makes the client feel cared for; the salesman who creates the sense of a hot commodity, the bill collector who inspires fear, the funeral parlor director who makes the bereaved feel understood, the minister who creates a sense of protective outreach but even-handed warmth—all of them must confront in some way or another the requirements of emotional labor. Emotional labor does not observe conventional distinctions between types of jobs. By my estimate roughly 33 percent of American workers today have jobs that subject them to substantial demands for emotional labor. Moreover, of all women working, roughly 50 percent have jobs that call for emotional labor. As traditionally more accomplished managers of feeling in private life, women more than men have put emotional labor on the market, and they know more about its personal costs. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
Any functioning society makes effective use of its members’ emotional labor. We do not think twice about the use of feeling in the theater, or in psychotherapy, or in forms of group life that we admire. It is when we come to speak of the exploitation of those at the lower level of the hierarchy by those at the higher levels in any society that we become morally concerned. In any system, exploitation depends o the actual distribution of many kinds of profits—many, authority, status, honor, well-being. It is not emotional labor itself, therefore, but the underlying system of recompense that raises the question of what the cost of it is. In the primitive World, we might say, the child had been the bearer of the collective immortality, since it was through him or her that the souls of the ancestors reentered the World. This is one reason why many primitives handled their children so gently: the child was actually in the process of giving birth to himself or herself with the help of the ancestral spirit; if one was mean to the child, the spirit might be upset and withdraw from the World. Under the ideology of the patriarchal family, the child becomes the individual successor to his father—actually, then, merely, the son of a father, and is no longer the independent mediator of the spirts from the ancestral World. However, this now the only spiritual lineage in which the on can perpetuate himself in turn. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
This is why, too, fathers could be despotic with their children: they were merely objects to whom one had oneself given life. Today we are shocked when we read of the ancient Greek who blinded his sons for disobeying him and going off to war—but their lives were literally his personal property, and he had this authority and used it. Considering that science is widely regarded as the highest value in contemporary industrial society, it is very difficult for the average person to believe that what science commands could be wrong or immortal. If the Lord had not told Abraham not to kill his son, Abraham would have done it, like millions of parents who practiced child sacrifice in history. For the believer neither God nor his modern equivalent, Science, can command anything that is wrong. For this reason, the high degree of obedience is not more surprising than that 35 percent of the group refused at some point to obey; in fact this disobedience of more than a third might well be considered more surprising—and encouraging. People remove the awareness of the conflict by renationalization, and the conflict manifests itself only unconsciously in increased stress, neurotic symptoms, or feeling guilty for the wrong reasons. Subjects are in a conflict situation because they are caught between obedience to authority and behavior patterns learned from childhood on: not to harm other people. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
However, is this really so? Have we learned not to harm other people? That may be what children are told in Sunday school. In the realistic school of life, however, they learn that they must seek their own advantage even if other people are harmed. It seems 65 percent of the subjects could be conditioned to behave cruelly, but a reaction of indignation or horror against this sadistic behavior was clearly present in most of them. Apparently they had little or no feeling of opposition to the cruel acts they were performing. Possibly this is because they enjoyed the suffering of others and felt no remorse when their behavior was sanctioned by authority. Another possibility is that they were such highly alienated or narcissistic people that they were insulted against what went on in other people: or they might be psychopaths, lacking in any kind of mortal reaction. As for those in whom the conflict manifested itself in various symptoms of stress and anxiety, it should be assumed that they are people who do not has a sadistic or destructive character. (If one had undertaken and even could have made an educated guess as to how people would behave.) However, we cannot forget in more people the presence of conscience, and their pain when obedience made them act against their conscience. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
Thus, while it may seem there is proof of the easy dehumanization of beings, the subjects’ reactions show rather the contrary—the presence of intense forces within them that find cruel behavior intolerable. We have to consider not only cruel behavior but the—often unconscious—guilty conscience of those who obey authority. (The Nazis had to use an elaborate system of camouflage of atrocities in order to cope with the conscience of the average being.) Another attitude in the striving for power is that of never giving in. Agreeing with an opinion or accepting advice, even if they are considered right, is felt as a weakness, and the mere idea of doing so provokes rebellion. Persons for whom this attitude is important are inclined to lean over backward and, out of sheer fear of giving in, compulsively take the opposition stand. The most general expression of this attitude is the neurotic’s secrete insistence that the World should adapt itself to one instead of adapting oneself to the World. One of the basic difficulties in psychoanalytic therapy comes from this source. The ultimate reason for a patient’s analysis is not the gaining of knowledge or insight, but the use of this insight in order to change one’s attitudes. In spite of recognizing that a change would be for one’s own good, a neurotic of this type abhors this prospect of changing because in implies for one a final giving in. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
The incapacity to do his has implications also for love relationship. Love, whatever else it may mean, always implies surrender, giving in to the lover as well as to one’s own feelings. The more a person, whether man or woman, is incapable of such giving in, the more unsatisfactory will be one’s love relationships. This same factor may have a bearing also on frigidity, inasmuch as having a climax presupposes just this capacity of completely letting go. The influence which we have seen that the striving for power has on love relations allows us to understand more completely many of the implications of the neurotic need for affection. Many of he attitudes involved in the striving for affection cannot be wholly understood without considering the part that is play in them by the striving for power. It is impossible to present the basic conflict by simply showing it in operation in a number of individuals. Because of its disruptive power the neurotic builds a defensive structure around it which serves not only to bolt it from view but so deeply imbeds it that it cannot be isolated in pure form. The result is that what appears on the surface is more the various attempts at solution than the conflict itself. A simple detailing of case histories, therefore, would not bring all its implications and nuances to full relief; the presentation would necessarily be too circumstantial and give too untransparent a picture. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
When we look at the complaint type of personality, it manifests all the traits that go with moving toward people. One shows marked need for affection and approval and an especial need for a partner—that is, a friend, lover, husband or wife who is to fulfill all expectations of life and take responsibility for good an evil, one’s successful manipulation becoming the predominant task. These needs have the characteristics common to all neurotic trends; that is, they are compulsive, indiscriminate, and generate anxiety or despondence when frustrated. They operate almost independently of the intrinsic worth of the others in question, as well as of the person’s real feelings toward them. However, these needs may vary in their expression, they all center around a desire for human intimacy, a desire for belonging. Because of the indiscriminate nature of one’s needs, the complaint type will be prone to overrate one’s congeniality and the interests one has in common wit those around one and disregard the separating factors. One’s misjudging of people this way is not due to ignorance, stupidity, or the inability to observe, but is determined by one’s compulsive needs. One feels-as illustrated by a patient’s drawing—like a baby surrounded by strange and threatening animals. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
There she stood, tiny and helpless, in the middle of the picture, around her a huge bee ready to sting her, a dog that could bite her, a cat that could jump at her, a bull that could gore her. Obviously, then, the real nature of other beings does not matter, expect in so far as the more aggressive ones, beings the more frightening, are the ones whose affection is the most necessary. In sum, this type needs to be liked, wanted, desired, loved; to feel accepted, welcomed, approved of, appreciated; to be needed, to be of importance to others, especially to one particular person; to be helped, protected, taken care of, guided. When in the course of analysis the compulsive character of these needs is pointed out to be a patient, one will be likely to assert that all these desires are quite natural. And, of course, here one is on defensible ground. Except for persons whose whole being has become so warped by sadistic trends that the desire for affection is choked beyond all possibility of functioning, it is safe to assume that everyone dos not to feel liked, to belong, to be helped, and so on. Where the patient errs is in claiming that all one’s frantic beating about for affection and approval is genuine, while in reality the genuine portion is heavily overshadowed by one’s insatiable urge to feel safe. Only when a being finds out one’s correct relation to the Universe and to one’s fellow creatures will one find one’s own well-being. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18